Adam wheeled Sophie down the hall to the NICU, cautiously
avoiding bumps over thresholds and slowly maneuvering the
wheelchair around corners.
“It’s okay, Adam, I won’t break,” Sophie teased. “You can go
a little faster.”
Outside the NICU, the electronic doors were closed with no
door handles and no apparent way to get in.
“I wonder how we’re supposed to get i—”
Before Adam finished, the doors swung open, startling them
both.
A nurse came through the door. “Hi. Can I help you?” she
said, walking over to check the ID band on Sophie’s wrist. “Oh,
you’re the Youngs! So nice to meet you,” she said in a cheery
voice, extending her hand. “I’m Kim.” She wore silver-and-tur
quoise earrings that dangled low, below her earlobes. Subtle
streaks of blue ran through her long dark hair. “I’m Danny’s pri
mary nurse. I’ll be taking care of him until he goes home.”
Sophie smiled back, liking her instantly.
Wheeling through the NICU, Sophie took in the expansive
ness of the unit. It was filled with babies in incubators. There
were machines and pieces of equipment that Sophie couldn’t
even guess what they were for. Staff dressed in scrubs buzzed
around like worker bees. The sound of so many alarms going off
at once and the racket of staff and parents and secretaries all
talking at once overloaded Sophie’s senses. The noises merged
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JULIE HATCH
to create one loud, dissonant din. Her head ached, her stomach
hurt, and she cupped a shaking hand to her mouth to keep the
burning bile from erupting.
Overwhelm swept over her as the world turned surreal. She
felt disconnected from her body, like she was watching a movie
of herself. Everything around her moved in slow motion as Adam
wheeled her through the unit. She watched the doctors and nurses
walk by her in an exaggerated slow manner, their mouths mov
ing, but she couldn’t hear their voices. The cacophony of noises
melded into one dull, distant roar. She looked up at Adam. His
lips were moving, but she couldn’t understand him. He sounded
like a vinyl record meant to be played at forty-five slowed down
to thirty-three—long, drawn-out sentences. The twenty seconds
it took to wheel through the NICU felt like an hour.
She snapped back to reality when Kim leaned over to tell her
that it wasn’t always like this. The beginning of the day shift was
always the busiest and loudest.
As Sophie worked to get over her initial shock, she noticed
more. Most of the babies were tiny, fit-in-the-palm-of-your-hand
sized infants in incubators. They all were attached to machines
with wires and tubes, blinking lights, and high-pitched electronic
beeps. Four people dressed in scrubs rushed past her and Adam as
the intercom boomed, “Delivery team to room ten for a thirty
two-weeker, stat!” Everything felt like an emergency.
Sophie closed her eyes, trying to block out the clamor. But
the worst was the high-pitched blare of the heart monitor alarms.
The sudden ear-splitting sound was enough to make her nerves
scream.
Kim led them through the NICU and into Pod C, where
the volume of noise was lower, but the place was still busy. She
explained that the unit was divided up into pods, with each pod
holding four babies and four sets of parents. Each set of par
ents had a small chest of drawers for personal belongings and a
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THE VERY BEST OF CARE
reclining chair next to their baby’s incubator. The recliner dou
bled as a place to sleep if needed. There was also a parents’ lounge
with cots and couches if a parent wanted to stay overnight.
Sophie held tight to Adam’s hand as she stood up out of the
wheelchair, still dressed in her johnny and nonskid hospital slip
pers. They walked together over to Danny’s incubator. She felt
like she’d been whisked away to a foreign land, an over-the-rain
bow feeling. But this place was no Oz. There, in the middle of the
chaos of the NICU, she saw not a wizard but her precious little
two-pound baby boy. He was lying in an incubator, just as he’d
been the night before. But now, with all the lights on, she could
see how scrawny and vulnerable he looked. Monitor wires were
stuck to his tiny chest, and a tube protruded from his mouth and
attached to a machine that was breathing for him. He had an IV
in each hand, and a third came out of his umbilical cord and fed
into a pump. The pump clicked every few seconds as it slowly
pumped fluid into the IV tubing. Her little baby didn’t move; he
didn’t cry. He just lay there, attached to all these contraptions.
The whole scene terrified her.
“Adam, he looks like a little baby bird who fell out of its nest.”
“Yeah, he does.” He placed a hand over hers and squeezed.
In the next moment, Sophie felt a rush of love for this beauti
ful little life, and awe that he was here at all. She was blown away
by how quickly her world had turned upside down. She looked up
at Adam, who had tears in his eyes.
“He’s so small I’m afraid to touch him. I’m afraid I’ll hurt
him,” said Adam.
“I know. Me too,” Sophie replied.
Kim stood beside them and explained all the pieces of equip
ment. “The tube in his mouth is to help him breathe. It’s attached
to that machine there, the ventilator. My guess is he’ll be off the
vent in a day or two.”
She pointed to the monitor that displayed his heart rate,
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JULIE HATCH
blood pressure, respiratory rate, and oxygenation levels. There
were IV pumps that calibrated the amount of IV fluid he received
and other pumps for delivering neonatal doses of medications.
Kim encouraged them to touch him and talk to him.
“He’s still too little and fragile for you to hold. But you can
still let him know you’re here. He’ll recognize your voices.”
Sophie and Adam put their hands in the incubator and felt
the warm air circulating around inside. They marveled at their
son, this little being they had created together. Sophie blocked
out everything around her as she focused only on Danny—his
tiny hands, his soft little lips, his cap of fine silky hair. He had a
doll-size diaper on and nothing else.
Then that blare of monitor alarms sounding off at once jarred
her raw nerves, making her entire body tense.
She took Adam’s arm. “Adam, what are we doing here?” She
looked upward. “God, what have I done?”
“You didn’t do anything, babe. Danny just wanted to be born
early.” He wrapped his arm around her waist and held her close.
Sophie wasn’t sure if it was a miracle or a curse that they were
here in the NICU.
The alarms stopped as suddenly as they had started, and
Sophie’s tension began to ease. She felt the heavy discomfort
from standing for too long and sat back down in the wheelchair.
Kim was busying herself with another baby in the incubator next
to Danny.
“How many babies are in the whole NICU?” Sophie asked
Kim.
“Our average number is forty babies, give or take.”
“Wow, I would never have thought that there could be that
many premature babies in one NICU.” Sophie watched Kim
working, then turned to gaze at Danny. Her attention bounced
back and forth between the two. Adam still had his hand inside
the incubator, touching one of Danny’s feet.
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THE VERY BEST OF CARE
“Kim, what does idiopathic mean?”
“It means that doctors don’t know the answer, without say
ing that they don’t know. Anything they can’t explain is called
idiopathic.”
“Dr. Wagner said my preterm delivery was idiopathic.” His
baritone voice still echoed in Sophie’s head. “They don’t know
why it happened?”
“If you didn’t have any medical reason to go into labor so
early, like hypertension or an infection, then, yes, it would be
called idiopathic.
