For days after surgery, the baby’s stomach needed to be completely empty. The nurses placed a tube in his mouth that snaked all the way down to the inner lining of his stomach, to suck up all the excess fluids. Once we began feeding him, we would have to make sure that no nasty green fluid came back up. Otherwise it would be back to the OR, and without any guarantee that things would turn out okay a second time.
There was also a CPAP device, a cumbersome series of nasal tubes that made it look like the baby had a snorkel pasted to his nose. The tubes ran to a pump that periodically blasted air into the baby’s lungs because, although his lungs were functional, he didn’t yet have the strength to take in enough oxygen on his own. The tubes had to be held in place with clear plastic tape, and I could see the tape pulling at my son’s cheeks, dragging them up with the tube and giving him a deranged Joker smile that I didn’t want him to have. There was an IV running from a prick in his heel that delivered vital nutrients straight into his bloodstream since he wasn’t allowed to take food orally yet, plus fentanyl to keep the pain away. The IV was held fast in place by surgical tape that wrapped around his foot again and again, like a little mummy foot. I could see his toes turning red from all the capillaries being squeezed together.
There were two hard plastic flaps on either side of the isolette that swung open so that we could touch the baby, like nuclear plant workers carefully handling plutonium. One night, I stared down through the top panel and I saw my own hand reaching in to gently pat his chest. Then I kissed the plastic roof of the isolette as if it were an outer layer of his own skin. I whispered to him, “This is the only time you get to break my heart.”
I cried and I could see the tears dripping down onto the plastic, obscuring my view. That’s all you can do when your baby is in the NICU. You cry and you cry and you don’t stop crying until the child is finally home. You don’t even realize you can cry that much. I would cry low and soft, just a little “Ohhhhhhh . . . ,” the tears soaking my collar. I cried as if I had just broken something that I’d never be able to fix. Eventually, the crying became a nuisance, a hindrance to my wife and me being fully functional and able to solve problems like grown adults. I just wanted him to be home. I knew he had to be in the NICU for a long time—weeks, months, perhaps even half a year. He would die otherwise. Still, I wanted him out of this horrible place. If I could just get him home to his crib, to his mother and brother and sister, then everything would be fine. I knew it.
The isolette itself was a remarkable piece of machinery. It had a retractable roof, like a new stadium. And it had little foot pedals so you could make the entire thing go up and down and up and down, which was good because sometimes I had to stoop to reach through the flaps and then my back would hurt and then I’d feel like an asshole for worrying about my back when my kid was in intensive care. A few days after the surgery, I visited the baby on my own late at night after work while my wife rested at home. I pressed a button on the isolette out of curiosity and the roof came off, sounding an alarm and causing a nurse to sprint over to close it back up.
“You can’t open it,” she said.
“Holy shit, I’m so sorry,” I said. “Did I kill him?”
“No, no, he’ll be fine. But the roof needs to stay closed so that we can control the temperature of the air around him.”
“So this thing has air-conditioning?”
“And heat. It’s the Mercedes of isolettes.”
I immediately wondered what the Mercedes of isolettes cost, and how that cost would then be passed on to me, Mr. Health Care Consumer. I tried to avoid thinking about money while the child was in the NICU, but it was difficult with new thick envelopes from the insurance company arriving every day, listing out very large numbers that scared the piss out of me. Part of me wanted to get my son home just so that the paperwork would stop piling up. I thought about what the final tally would be. Millions? Billions? Trillions? They could have presented me with any figure and I wouldn’t have been shocked.
“I’m going to need you to sign a consent form,” the nurse told me.
“For what?”
“Dr. Earvin says that your son needs a minor blood transfusion.”
“Is that normal?” That’s what I asked the nurse or doctor every time something insane happened with our new child. Oh, he needs intestinal surgery and a blood transfusion? That’s normal, right? I needed constant reassurance that all of this was routine, that somehow my son wasn’t the only one to suffer through this particular gauntlet of conditions.
“I mean, it’s not normal normal, but it’s perfectly safe.”
“He’s not gonna get the infected blood, is he?” I worried that I would sign the form and there would be no clean blood, and they would have to give my son the filthy, herpes-ridden backup blood instead.
“No, no. The blood we use in the NICU is the cleanest blood possible. It’s way cleaner than the blood we give adults.”
“Holy shit, don’t tell me that.” I pictured a bag of donated adult blood with eight used Band-Aids floating around inside it.
“Rest assured, the blood we give him is sterilized to the nth degree.”