NICU Baby
Elio turns 1.
At 11:16 a.m., it’ll be one year since Elio was born. An easier way of saying this is that, in a few hours, our third child will officially turn 1. And the first impossible choice I had to make after the doctors wheeled him away from us in the operating room at UT Medical Center was whether to follow them or stay with Haley.
The people in scrubs and masks kept saying he just needed a little help opening up his lungs. But he was in an incubator, with tubes coming out of every part of his little 7-pound body, so I didn’t believe them. Even though that’s exactly what I told Haley when I got back to the recovery room, where she was spilling her maternal rage out on the helpless male nurse. “Maybe we can get him back in a few hours, once his breathing gets better,” I said. And she responded, matter-of-factly, “They’re admitting him, Brian. We’re not getting him back.”
Even though barely an hour had passed from Dr. Buckingham sewing Haley’s entrails back inside her torso, the visceral demand to be reunited with Elio suspended logic, and I understood why she needed so badly to be wheeled to him. Or, better yet, to take him back with us to Mother-Baby. But every nurse we spoke to was stoic in the face of our appeals. They merely listened as we pleaded and cried, trying to come to terms with why our son’s birth wasn’t as we’d imagined it.
Elio came a month early, with a day’s notice. We already knew he’d be a C-section. But Dr. Buckingham was worried Haley’s uterus might burst, so she gave us 24 hours to send the big kids off with my in-laws, pack our bags, and meet her at the hospital. It happened so fast that I never thought of how losing five weeks of gestation might affect whether my boy’s lungs were ready for the world outside his mother’s womb.
The name of the condition Elio was born with is written on a page in a journal from last September, though I can only remember what Nurse Amber called it. Wimpy white boy syndrome. And because Amber was a hillbilly from Morristown, and my wife is a hillbilly too, she replied, “But he ain’t all white!” And we laughed for a second amid the heartache. In those brief pauses from grief and stress, I tried to be grateful, reassuring myself that it wasn’t so bad when Amber said his lungs just needed to pop like kernels in the microwave. And that the surfactant, the CPAP, and all the other indecipherable terms for medicines and machines I didn’t understand would help him do that. He just needed some time.
At various points during those 10 days that Elio wasn’t home, I thought of my friend’s daughter who lives with a tube in her throat. Of the new friend we’d made in the NICU whose wife had birthed a stillborn child a year before. And of all the women in far-off places holding babies with bad lungs in hospitals that have no power. Or the ones whose children had been blown to smithereens by men firing missiles using video game controllers. Halfway through our stay, Haley and I were sitting with Elio asleep in his plastic basket when the room across the hall filled with doctors and nurses. The machines screeched, and the speakers relayed codes we weren’t meant to understand. I can still hear the panicked screams of the Mexican mother, thinking her baby was dead. And because I was the only one in the entire wing who spoke Spanish, only I could make out the words. Haley and I cried, instinctively looking at Elio covered up in cables but breathing and alive.
Through all this, I kept hearing the words of the Regina Spektor song from The Leftovers in my head.
No one laughs at God in a hospital
No one laughs at God in a war
No one’s laughing at God
When they’re starving or freezing or so very poor…
I’m writing this story stream of consciousness because I always said I’d write a detailed account of our NICU stay but never did because it was too hard to replay each image that made me want to keep scrolling to the ones today of Elio with his wild tousle of light brown hair flapping in the wind, squinty-eyed, smiling big and babbling Dadadadada while grabbing for a paci or a remote control to shove between his lips. But no matter how hard I try to erase the pictures, they remain so vivid.
I can still see Elio being taken and stuck with needles. The specialist saying to the nurses to keep Dad out of the room. I see, a few hours later, Haley imploring Nurse Amy in Mother-Baby to get her a damn wheelchair because she’d regained the feeling in her legs and was going to see her baby, then hanging the urine bag from the chair and floating like ghosts through the doors and hallways. God, I made that walk so many times in just the first two days that I could repeat it today with my eyes closed. Or half-asleep, as I was in the middle of the night when Haley filled syringes with colostrum and woke me to bring them over because Elio needed to eat food that wasn’t coming from a medical bag.
The first time I held him, the wires got in the way and the machine squealed. By the third day, the constant buzzing and ringing became background noise as we begged God to let our baby’s oxygen levels stay in the green, above 80-something (or whatever the marker I can’t remember was). But then it’d drop, and the machine would yell, and we’d plead, “Come on Elio, breathe, son,” knowing that the machines would determine whether or not he could come home.
But, in the end, Elio was okay.
After 10 very hard days—which seemed interminable to us, but, I know, is a very short time compared to others who’ve suffered with sick or premature babies—we bundled him up, put him in a car seat, and brought him to meet his brother and sister.
Before we signed out of the NICU, I wrote a list on my phone of all the things I grieved. A few months later, I shared it with a friend when his son was taken to the same wing. I know it didn’t help—it couldn’t have helped. But I’m sharing the chronicle with you regardless.
Terrible Things about the NICU
Your baby is taken from you.
You must ask permission to hold your baby.
Your baby is wrapped in cables, a feeding tube, an IV.
Everyone speaks to you in a language you can’t understand without Google.
You cannot take announcement pictures of your baby for Instagram.
You cannot dress your baby in the clothes you meticulously picked out beforehand.
Your other children cannot meet or hold your baby. They cannot understand why he isn’t with you, and you must find language they understand to describe what you’re going through without scaring them.
You don’t know what to text back to people who ask what’s going on.
You have to put your baby on your insurance, find out about the NICU stay, imagine the cost of saving babies in America because, in this country, even kindness comes with a price tag.
You cannot read the books you brought to the hospital.
Your sleep will be worse because you will worry about what happened or if he got worse at night while you were away.
You will need to constantly confirm you are this baby’s father and the room number, wipe off your phone, and wash your hands each time you see him.
A young male nurse tech with a ponytail will walk into Mother-Baby, not reading the paperwork that says your child is in the NICU and not to bother Mom about it, and ask her where the baby went.
Going home without your baby.
The beeping never stops. It makes its way inside your brain and follows you out the door. And even when it’s muted and you are miles away in your own bed in the middle of the night, it wakes you and you remember you’re alone because your wife and the baby are in the room.
Traveling back and forth between home and the hospital.
Not spending enough time with your big kids because you’re worried about the baby.
Disconnecting from each other because you’re so tired and busy.
The last thing I wrote out in that note was an excerpt from Prayers for a Weary World, which Haley and I brought with us to the hospital not knowing our boy would need the prayer we read over and over to console ourselves.
O God, creator and sustainer of life, we come to you with all our worries and what-ifs…
We thank you for the gift of modern medicine, of skilled doctors and nurses…
Yet too, we grieve for the steps forward and then back, the tubes and machines, the sterile rooms and fluorescent lights…for the dreams to put on hold…
Help us remember that you love our baby…more than we could ever imagine…
We wish we could take their suffering and make it our own…
We pray for your presence in these hospital walls…We pray for patience when healing takes time…We pray for bonds to form and scars to heal….
Give us the imagination to picture life together without scrubbing in.
Help us trust you.
Help this newborn grow.
That feels like a fitting note to end on. Because grow he did. Elio is a happy, chubby baby who pulls to stand, eats beach sand, fills up diapers like the best of them, and can nod off about anywhere a third baby has to because routines go out the window when you’ve got this many babies to manage.
On Friday, we held a small party at our house to celebrate his first birthday. And I can’t shake the feeling of gratitude.
See you next week.
I love your writing and I'm so glad he's fine in the end!