My experience pales in comparison to the ones I'm reading here, including your's, Scotty, but one of my twins (the second to emerge) wasn't breathing. I guess sometimes, the shock of going from womb to room for the 2nd twin can be overwhelming and in this case, he was unable to breathe on his own.
While I was holding his brother, I looked around the room at a team of doctors and nurses who were mostly silent and looking at each other. Meanwhile, my wife was terrified and asking what was going on. It was not a moment in time I'd like to relive, trying to calm her, keep focus on holding the other twin and keeping it together myself while the medical professionals forced air into my other son's lungs. They wheeled a TV screen into the room where the NICU doctor from the Children's Hospital supervised the situation and advised that we transport the baby to the NICU there immediately and sent a team of specialized amberlamps drivers to fetch and bring him back across the river (a relatively short drive, perhaps 2 miles total, any guesses on that bill?).
I left the breathing son with my wife and drove to the Children's hospital, not knowing where to go, where to park, what to do or what to expect when I got there. NICU is a different world than anything I've ever experienced - it's like a high-end nightclub hospital with a bouncer who isn't letting you in without thorough examination and proper credentials. Merely exclaiming "MY SON ISN'T BREATHING AND I NEED TO BE THERE FOR HIM" doesn't get you through the door because there's a whole floor of babies who are struggling for survival and THAT my friends, is an eye opener.
Short story long, they were able to stabilize my son by the time I arrived and the amazing team of doctors and nurses explained to me what happened, what was going to happen, what to expect, what was needed from me all in pragmatic fashion. In our case (and I'm guessing this is the case in all NICUs), there was a giant white-board on one of the walls. It was there that the doctor wrote down all the information we would need, what the possibilities were for the cause of distress, what to look out for, what we could rule out, etc. To me it looked like the white-board from Good Will Hunting, with myriad symbols and codes and words I never heard before. By the time my wife and my other son arrived by amberlamps (another 2 mile trip that cost a staggering amount of money) and got settled in a different floor, we realized that our small crisis wasn't too uncommon and that while scary for us, it was child's play to the doctors and nurses who deal with far more complicated and dangerous health matters.
All in, our son stayed 5 days in the NICU. It was tough trying to get the other son settled at home and make the commute to and fro, but we consider ourselves very fortunate. For while our white-board was daunting, I would peek into other rooms and see white-boards that had no white left on them and those circumstances were far more serious and scary than ours. Those parents weren't going home in 5 days and the faces you'd see inside the rooms were heartbreaking in some cases. Perspective is birthed in situations like the one we went through and so I really feel for parents that are in this position and hope 'Lil Scotty Bo is home soon and life returns to normal.
