Table 2:

Quotes illustrating parental experience of trauma infant shivering and loss of normalcy

Theme	Quote
Trauma	“For me, I had a cesarean and I was kind of like out of it when he was born and it was so like traumatic but he pretty much knew what was going on. For me, the experience of like regaining consciousness; some kind of state of mind and saying, well you can’t see your son for x amount of hours because they’re hooking him up right now for a 72 hour process that’s going to cool him you know and keep him cold and I guess that for me was kind of like traumatic.” “I was traumatized by the experience for a long time after” “That would have been a great time to have some kind of professional resource to say you know you’re going through this trauma, you know I can help, can we just sit down and chat for a minute.” “the doctor is pulling and the nurse is on my stomach, I’m pushing; finally the baby’s out and just a flood of people came in and took her away and I’m looking at him and we just had no idea what was going on. So in the process of her being born, her arm was broken and she had low Apgar score” ““[baby name] was not responsive; he was resuscitated with chest compressions”.
Shivering	“She was shivering and she was crying.” “That’s a lot to go through in that amount of time watching him shiver and shake.” “I mean it was awful to see him shiver and feel him cold.” “We saw her shiver; she was shivering and she was crying, she was whining a little bit.” “Your 3 day old child is being ….. frozen to death.”
Loss of Normalcy	“We went in thinking everything was okay.” “She went into labor and we thought we were going to have the perfect baby.” “I really wanted to do breast feeding but they said to get him out of there sooner, they’d like to know how much he was eating and he had to take like 210 milliliters a day.” “you’re grieving not having that natural connection” “I tried not to put myself into it and be attached at first. Even though it was my own child.” “And I just kept, towards the end I just kept asking, can I hold him, can I hold him.” “Because at the time when they talked to me, all I could think about was, am I going to be able to hold him; what’s going on; when am I going to see him? Because they did, all I was told is the doctor came in, said, I said, am I allowed to hold him; can I go see him?… And then she was gone and that was it” “And when we finally got to hold him, he still had so many things attached…” “And you know we would sit there all day and hold his hand and I feel like we, sometimes I think that they [RN’s] got kind of annoyed” “So it was hard. I mean we knew it was going to be 72 hours on the cooling mat but we didn’t realize at first that we really couldn’t; we just didn’t realize we couldn’t hold him or touch him.”