“Yes.”
“This is Dr. Holman from the OR. Dr. Staffen has had a chance to examine the bowels and they are one hundred percent healthy. Your son is going to be just fine.”
I responded loudly so that my wife could overhear. “He’s going to be okay?”
“Yes, the doctor will be out to talk with you once the procedure is finished.”
“Oh, thank you. Thank you very much. So he’s not gonna die, right? I just want to make double sure.”
“He’s going to be all right.”
I gave the phone back to the receptionist, and my wife and I collapsed into each other, heaving long sobs. Before this, I never knew that joy and misery could merge into a single emotion, that you could cry for ten-minute stretches while feeling simultaneously overjoyed and horrified. But now I knew it firsthand: a whole new dimension to the human condition. Call it joyful sadness. Call it sad joyfulness. Call it jadness. Who knows. All I know is that I had a hard time differentiating between THANK GOD MY SON IS ALIVE and HOLY SHIT MY SON JUST HAD HIS INTESTINES TOSSED. There was no clear division in that moment. There was just the overwhelming happening of it all. Kathy the NICU nurse brought us back to another private room where we sat, dazed from emotional overload.
“We may have to go to church now,” my wife said to me.
“Yeah, maybe.”
“I mean, you know. He’s gonna live.”
“I know. I do like having Sunday mornings free, though.”
“It would teach the other two a bit of gratitude.”
“That it would. I’m still not sure I believe any of that God stuff, but yeah. I want to be more grateful. If not to God, then to . . . I dunno . . . life, I suppose.”
Half an hour later, the surgeon came in and told us that the baby was hunky-dory and already back up in the NICU. All that was left was to bust him out of there and bring him home. I was certain it would be a cinch. We were already past the hard part. Getting a baby out of the NICU would be nothing. It’s EASY, isn’t it?
? ? ?
No matter how fortunate you are in life, if you have a child in the NICU, you will feel like God ripped you off. Every day, you walk into the NICU praying that your child will finally be healthy enough to go home. And as you make that walk, you pass by dozens of new parents strolling out of the postpartum unit with healthy, happy, full-term babies. I walked to the NICU every day to see our baby and I would see new fathers pushing their wives out of the elevators, holding flower bouquets and IT’S A BOY balloons, and I would fight with all my strength to not feel as if I had been cheated. I already had two perfectly healthy, wonderful children. I had already been treated to two moments when I was just like the ecstatic families strolling out of the hospital. And our third child had survived being gutted and cleaned like a fish. There was no reason for me to be bitter. At all.
But the feeling was there, no matter how hard I fought against it. The shift between the maternity ward waiting room—with boisterous families either waiting or celebrating—and the entrance to the NICU was too jarring not to affect me. The NICU entrance lay past the third-floor lobby, through a set of double doors and down a silent white hall to a modest reception area, with a tiny waiting room of its own that was perpetually empty. I would check in by showing the receptionist my wristband (which was growing more faded and crackled by the day; I worried constantly about it falling off) and then wash my hands thoroughly at one of the two sinks to the left of the receptionist’s desk. You were allowed to bring covered drinks into the NICU but I never did because I was the exact kind of person that would trip and fall and spill a forty-two-ounce Coke Zero directly into a newborn’s respirator.