My Discharge

For some reason I assumed that I would stay in the hospital for the length of time that my baby was admitted. At least I thought this would be the case while being in a different city than my hometown. But later in the evening, the same day as going through the trauma of the unexpected premature delivery of my baby, I was told I would likely be discharged the following day. I didn't know whether to panic or cry as I quietly responded that I had nowhere to stay. The nurse suggested that I could return to my hometown and wait for my baby to be transferred back which completely blew my mind. I would curl up and sleep in the lobby of the hospital, or on a park bench outside in the rain, before I would go home and leave my baby in another city. So they called the social worker.

The woman was very nice and told us that she would look into possible housing options for the duration that our baby was at their hospital. Unfortunately she returned not long after to say that there was nothing available and was not sure what other options there were. She told me that she did have a chat with the doctor though who was willing to delay my discharge an extra day.

I called home and told my parents what was going on. Thankfully they are extremely resourceful and immediately started making phone calls to people they knew, once knew, or had a brief encounter with at one time, in the city where we were. It resulted in at least a couple of options and we picked the one that was the closest. Even that resulted in us having to pay for a room we couldn't afford at a place that was a 25 minute drive away. But we made it work, and we paid for a lot of taxis to take us the same route back and forth several times a day. I rented a pump and had it set up in our little rented room and we bought some groceries that could keep in the little fridge we luckily had. And so we lived in our makeshift home until our baby boy could be transferred back.