i think that you are well within the parameters of benefiting from some basic counseling to process this trauma. i cannot even imagine. but i can sense that you could easily carry around a sense of foreboding - enough to write about it here. try not to compare your experiences with those of other parents. if it was tramuatic to YOU and it would help to work through it with someone, then i think that is a smart move for you in your life. and that is what is important.

so glad your baby is ok, and that you are on the processing end of this.

Even though your daughter is fine and everything turned out for the best, the idea that it was so close to "might not" is haunting.  My son was born 12 weeks early and in the NICU for 10 weeks.  I was so busy during that time trying to figure out how to be a mom under those circumstances, and holding myself up and being positive for my baby and my family that I didn't have a lot of time to think.  I also looked around the NICU and felt so lucky as the days passed and we were more and more assured that our baby would come home with us, and be healthy.

But when one of the doctors who gave me a post-natal checkup suggested I could have a mild case of PTSD, it didn't sound crazy to me.  I'd never thought of it, but it made a lot of sense.  As the doc explained, you don't have to actually experience the worst to have those feelings.  Getting close to the bad situation can be enough.  So don't minimize your feelings about what happened.  You can thank your lucky stars and move on, but still seek some guidance to get you through it.  I'm not sure what is scarier than getting even within a breath of the possibility of losing one of our children. It's definitely not to be taken lightly.

I don't know of any books, but a few sessions with a counselor really helped me.  Just to be able to tell the story to someone who wasn't involved, who I didn't have to be strong for, and who would support my progress in processing the experience was really helpful.

my dd had a febrile seizure last January, stopped breathing and (for all intents and purposes) died in my arms while I was shrieking at a 911 operator.  Luckily, I managed to do the rescue breathing thing and she came back just as the EMTs arrived.  She was fine, but I was a wreck and did a bit of couch time with a wonderful shrink in order to come to terms with it.  The thing that the shrink kept telling me was that any trauma is a lot like birth and the need to tell the story over and over (which may seem grim and ghoulish and just a bit masturbatory) is actually the same.  We make meaning of trauma and come to terms with it that way- and we need safe folks who can listen to us and love us through it, even if we have to pay them for the privilege.  It reminded me of my mom's need to tell the story of how I almost ended up with a trache tube in 1973, when she was all alone with me at the hospital and they thought I was going to die.  I'm way past 3 now, but she still needs to tell that story once in a while.  Be gentle with yourself and try to look with soft eyes at your needs right now- you'll be fragile for a lot longer than she was.

I have been wondering whether I have  parental PTSD myself. DS was severely jaundiced when he was born and doctors refused to treat him, so he ended up dehydrated in the ER. Not as bad as your situation, but we went though 4 days of hell trying to wake him and feed him, worrying that he would die or suffer irreversible organ damage.

DD's jaundice brought back all those feelings of fear and frustration and helplessness and anger, and I have been really, really on edge. It's partially the baby blues and lack of sleep, but I realized how much that anxious time affected both DH and I.

I think the only solution, for me, anyway, is talk-therapy and time.

DD's crying again, I want to write more, but I must run the feed the hungry angry baby!

I'll agree with the above and say that yeah, it does sound like you're still having some difficulty in processing what happened. Lord knows I would too.

I come from a family of social workers, psychiatrists and psychologists, so my family bias is that seeking professional help for mental health issues is totally, absolutely normal and healthy. If you feel like you could benefit from a debrief/a few sessions/someone to talk to, you probably would benefit from it. Why not try asking your GP if they have any recommendations? Better to seek the help, resolve the narrative in your head and be able to move on, IMHO.

Hugs to you - sounds like you, DH and DD are all tough survivors!

I think a few sessions of talk therapy would help you so much.  It sounds like you are already so in touch with your feelings on the whole thing, which is great, but I bet with just a few sessions you would really be on your way to a more full healing about the whole thing.

feel the way you do.  I agree that talking to someone about it is probably the best course of action.  Best of luck.

I have not been through anything so bad as far as family member health.  And I don't have any reaction like PSTD, but I have had a hard time processing the aftermath of some stuff that happened.  

While I was pregnant, our apartment building where we had lived was burned and we had to relocate, while I was working 12-hr days.  We had insurance, but we were without our stuff for 2 months, had to live in a hotel, etc.  The Red Cross was helpful for a few days, then dumped us because we had insurance.  I knew I needed to get some help, but since they wouldn't help us the prospect of searching through my insurance was too daunting at the time.

Then when DS was born there was the whole imbroglio with CPS, that was incredibly truamatic and I'm not over it all.  I would just be hit with flashes of sadness and guilt and fear that they would take him away again.  And when he was in the hospital to have surgery for his pyloric stenosis, I cried pretty much the whole time.  I couldn't handle the fact that these doctors and nurses were being nice to us when six weeks earlier the folks at the same hospital were lying to us and treating us like criminals.

Looking back I think there are some things that are really hard about difficult experiences, and others that were peculiar to the position we were in.  In any crisis, you get too busy just surviving, getting through each moment, to really deal with your feelings.  That's unavoidable, but I think it's imporant to take the time to grieve, debrief, etc.  And it may take a long time.  Certainly the experience will continue to affect you.

I think it can be easier to weather a crisis when you have a support system, but even if you have family and friends nearby, it seems to take effort just to figure out when and how to ask for help, what to ask for, etc.  And you often can't really open up about your feelings to people involved, so therapy is good for that.

Should parents like us just thank our lucky stars and move on, knowing that many parents suffer so much more than we have?

Yes. Thank your lucky stars, get some therapy, and move forward. I live with my son's chronic illness everyday so I will never get the P in the PTSD! I thank our lucky stars that he is a stable as he is because there are a lot of kids out there way worse than he. Yet, we live with the risk of sepsis killing him EVERY DAY. It's not a good way to live but its the only way we have so we deal with it. However, what I would give to be able to have your luxury of looking back and moving on.

That said, every family has a 'story' and each one is legitimate. From broken bones to heart defects (Anu, how's it going????), each is scary and devastating. So, get some help to 'get over it' and go hug your healthy child.

Oh, I heard a great quote on  NPR the other day from the woman who wrote Chocolat...she said that no one tells you that when you become a parent you will, from that moment on, be afraid. No one tells  you that fear is a huge part of parenting. (I'm paraphrasing - she said it way better and with a cool French accent). She is so right.

I really appreciate the support and suggestions and I think you all are probably right about therapy.  I've been before and am all for it in principle, but for some reason haven't taken that step yet this time.  But we'll explore it.  I read in an Anne Lamott book (sorry, I've long since forgotten which one) that being a parent is like living with a loaded gun pointed at your head at all times.  I could relate to that before my daughter's illness, but of course much more since.  The part of the story that I omitted is that while she seems healthy and back to normal for now, she's (we're) not 100% out of the woods.  Her illness took a toll on her body that she has healed from for now, but that could have long term implications.  She's being followed by several specialists, and will still have some tests now and then. But...nobody's kids are guaranteed, right?  We all have to figure out how to live with that.  I guess we're just in the process of moving from trauma to post-trauma and part of that is just convincing ourselves that there's not really an immediate threat (though it feels like there is).  

But, Gigi, I hear you.  And you are exactly the type of parent I'm thinking about when I berate myself for being a whiner!

In pure biological terms, our best understanding of what PTSD is is now that experiences don't get correctly processed into long term memory. When we experience something, it sits in the hippocampus while it's experienced, then gets filtered into long term memory. If something is still relevant - it needs to be accessed quickly because it's part of our current experiences - it doesn't migrate out, it just sits there for easy access. It's part of your fight or flight response - the more vivid and real the recent experience in your mind, the better able you'll be to use that experience to survive. At least if you're a hunter-gatherer. Eventually, though, when it's no longer immediately relevant, this experience gets processed into long term memory, and cleared out of the hyppocampus, and you move on with your life.
That's how it's supposed to work, anyway. With PTSD, an experience is so traumatic that the body is fooled into thinking it remains relevant. The experience never gets processed into long term memory. It was too fast, too extreme, too emotional, and the body didn't have the opportunity to fully analyse what was happening and understand it, so the experience just stays in the hyppocampus, vivid, real, current, always there for immediate access if your mind thinks something related to it is happening. And because it's in the hyppocampus, it's not experienced as a memory. It's experienced as current. Actually happening again, not as something previous but as something you're experiencing today.
So if something happens that causes your brain to relate that experience to now, that's when you get the hallmarks of PTSD - flashbacks are of course the best known aspect of this, but they're not the only one (nor even required for "true" PTSD). Other things to look for is your fight or flight response being set off - adrenaline jumps, your heart pounds in your chest, you sweat, your body feels ready to run or fight. Memory things can be another good indicator - do you smell the scents from the time, see the colors, feel the touch on your skin of an object from the time?
PTSD can be treated - the reason counseling works is that it allows those memories still stuck in the hyppocampus to be worked through slowly, at a pace where your brain can deal with them properly, and as you do that, they get processed into long term memory. The memories don't go, they're just filed away correctly. There are also some promising drug treatments currently being tested.
If the above sounds like it could be you, I'd urge you to seek counseling because this isn't just something you get over - it's a problem with a way your brain processed an experience, and you need professional help to fix that. Your experience could absolutely be enough to create this problem. Even if you don't have "true" PTSD, it can't hurt to talk to someone to check it out and deal with your feelings.