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At one point, my parents came to visit the baby. I put on a brave face, telling them that their new grandson would get out of the NICU any day now, when I didn’t really have any clue. One afternoon, I was in the kitchen and couldn’t keep up the facade. I broke down in tears with my father in the next room over. I think I wanted him to hear me. I didn’t bother trying to hide my distress. He took his cue, walked into the kitchen, and, without saying anything, wrapped me up in his arms. He was wearing this big leather jacket and I burrowed into it like a three-year-old. For a minute, it was nice to be more of a son than a father.
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The baby still wasn’t eating enough. We kept trying to feed him orally but he’d swiftly throw it all back up. They ran a feeding tube up his nose and down to his stomach to help supplement the oral feedings. Sometimes there was blood in his spit-up because the feeding tube would irritate his digestive lining. We would try to feed him again a day later—trying out bigger nipples and crosscut nipples to see if that helped—and still get the same result. Every text my wife and I exchanged became a simple inventory of how many cubic centimeters of fluid the child had taken by mouth that day. Five. Ten. Zero. The number he needed to hit to get out of the NICU was fifty. It seemed eons away.
To supplement both the feeding tube and the attempted oral feedings, he was still getting some nutrients intravenously: lipids and proteins and sugars. But now the nurses were struggling to find usable veins to tap. Like a heroin addict, a baby in a NICU soon runs out of suitable entry points for a needle. Our son had now exhausted virtually every spot on his arms, hands, legs, and feet. I was in the hospital one night when the final viable tapping point came loose.
“Oops,” said the nurse. “His IV came out again.”
“Can you find another?” I asked.
“I can try, but you might want to leave the room for it.”
“No. No, I’ll stay here with him.”
I deeply regretted it. I took his hand as the nurse swabbed his tiny little foot and dug the needle in, trying to break through an all-important vein wall. He shrieked for help, confused as to why all this was happening, why he had to endure the lights and the beeps and the needles. I felt as if I were the one stabbing him, as if I were the one inflicting that horrible, unexplained pain upon him. I held his hand but didn’t feel like I had earned the right. I had betrayed him. I had made him suffer through this. Eventually, the nurse backed off.
“What now?” I asked.
“We may have to go through his scalp.”
She brought in one of the neonatologists on call and I overheard them deliberating. They were going to shave a portion of his scalp and tap a line there: a PICC line—a special, long-term IV with a catheter that runs all the way down the vein to the entrance of the infant’s beating heart. I heard them deliberating and pictured the baby being held down and sheared like a lamb. NONONONONONO. I walked up to the nurse and the doctor, knowing full well that I had little chance of overruling them.
“Can I just talk to both of you before we go ahead with this, before I sign my consent?”
The doctor raised her eyes. “Okay.”
“Please don’t do this,” I begged. “Please. I can’t let this happen to him. I can’t let you shave his head and poke holes in it. Give him a chance to eat his way out of this. He can do it. I know he can.”
“You understand that with preemies, it’s not so cut-and-dried, right?”
“I know that. All I’m asking is that you give him a chance.”
She sighed. “Okay, he’s got twenty-four hours. If he can’t hold his food down by then, we’ll have to reevaluate.”
“Thank you. Thank you so, so much. You won’t regret this.”
I watched as the nurse took away the nasty IV equipment that had remained by his bedside at all times. One wire was gone. I wasn’t going to let him regress. I was well aware that he could regress, and I warned myself to be emotionally prepared for it. But fuck that. He was gonna eat. He was gonna eat like a fucking champ.
I sat down in the vinyl recliner as the nurse laid him in my lap and I took the hospital-issued bottle with twenty CCs of formula and began to feed him. The nurse stepped away and I turned into a deranged cheerleader.
“Come on, son. COME ON. You can do this.”
The baby sucked and sucked and the progress was painstaking. I paused to burp him every few minutes and it seemed as if he had barely made a dent.
“Don’t stop now, boy. If you wanna get out of here, you gotta eat.”
After a few minutes, he got into a rhythm, slurping down more and more.