Every morning I would wake up and call the NICU to check on the baby’s progress during the night. Was he alive? Did he have any bradys? Was he able to eat? Did he shit? How big of a shit was it? TELL ME, TELL ME, TELL ME. The nurses changed shifts at seven thirty in the morning and I would always ask who the new nurse on duty was, praying the baby would get one we liked. When the baby had a nurse we liked, we would hold out hope that the nurse would decide to work a 128-hour shift. We hit for the cycle with the NICU ward nurses. We managed to get every single one of them. Most of them we liked; some of them we didn’t. All of them admirably performed a job that I myself couldn’t possibly stomach. Sometimes I wondered how many babies died on a nurse’s watch each week. What happens when you have to stagger home after witnessing that, after watching devastated parents wail their souls out?
I came in one night to visit the baby (I often went to the hospital alone after work; my wife would stay with the other two kids after being at the hospital all day). They had placed the suction tube back in his mouth, so I checked in the receptacle under the isolette that was used to collect anything that had been sucked out of the baby’s stomach. I saw greenish fluid in the container and immediately began to freak out. I checked the baby’s nose and there was dried snot caked all over the CPAP. He had been drooling and little crystals had formed around his mouth near the tube. It made him look neglected and I became silently pissed at the nurses for neglecting him, which was actually a cheap way of covering up my own guilt for not being at the baby’s side every waking second—for leaving him here in this place, so alone and helpless.
There was no nurse nearby and I grew white with anxiety. The fluid is green and now he has to be split open again and maybe he’ll die this time and we’ve come too far for this to end this way now please. The curtain to the alcove was open and there was no giraffe blanket covering the isolette. I felt like my son had been left naked out in the open to rot under the fluorescent lights. I pulled the curtain and put the blanket back over him, trying to close the space between the flaps so that the lights couldn’t get to him—the horrible, horrible lights. I dabbled at his face with a wet cloth to clean the snot and drool away. I scoured the unit with my eyes, desperate to find a nurse to make stern eye contact with. I heard strange voices coming from the isolette next door and I realized that the baby in that isolette was a new arrival. I could hear a nurse talking to the mother . . .
“Are you going to pump while you’re in rehab?”
Holy shit.
“We have to keep her on methadone for now, to wean her off the heroin because that was still in her bloodstream.”
HOLY FUCKITY FUCK.
I peered around the curtain to get a look and saw a sixteen-year-old girl in a hospital gown. It wasn’t her first child. The nurse sensed my presence and gave me a firm “I’ll be right with you.” But she wasn’t. Minutes passed and I grew pissed off at the white trash heroin addict next door who was siphoning away precious nursing time from my own child. Meanwhile, I could hear the poor heroin baby screaming, and I felt a keen sense of dread for the life that awaited her. Outside of this NICU, things would get no better.
I reached into the isolette and rubbed my son’s tummy. Every second that I spent waiting for the nurse grew more pronounced. When she had given her final warning to the mom next door to stop using heroin, she came to see me and I poured out all my worries.
“There’s green stuff in his container and his face was dirty and the CPAP doesn’t look right on him.”
“Sir, sir. It’s okay. That greenish fluid is just residue from prior to the surgery. If it were greener, we’d be alarmed. But this older kind of residue is completely expected.”
“So he’s not going to need another surgery?”
“No. He’s actually had a great night so far. You can try to feed him again.”
I started to cry. “I’m just so scared, I just saw that green stuff and, God, I just want him to be okay, you know?” Then she put her arm around me and I didn’t feel so alone. I had a blanket from the baby’s isolette that I had nicked from the ward to bring home so that I could catch his scent whenever I slept at night, whenever he wasn’t close by. But the blanket had begun to lose his scent, so I swapped it out for another one in his isolette that had more of him embedded in its fabric. The nurse pulled the baby out and checked his weight and his vitals while I dutifully texted his progress to my wife and my mother and my sister and brother.
They took him off the CPAP respirator and gave him a cannula, one of those little plastic nostril tubes you see on old folks who wheel around oxygen tanks. The night had turned. His lungs were getting stronger. I texted the news to my wife excitedly, as if the baby had struck oil. I got home that night and debriefed my wife on what I’d seen.
“The mom next to us is a heroin addict.”
She sat straight up in bed. “WHAT?!”
“Calm down, calm down. I mean, it’s not like the mom is gonna stab our child with a used needle.” Though now that I mentioned it, I couldn’t stop picturing it happening.
“Is the baby addicted to heroin too?”
“Yes.”
She began to cry. “That’s so sad. It’s just a little baby.”
“I know.” I put my arm around her and she cried some more.