Slipping into Madness

B2: Drowning in Tears

Create a blog entry (or static item) telling about the saddest event of your life. (<1000 words)

I have visited a NICU for three different newborns in my life.

The last was Laurel. She was so tiny, and every time we got an update it seemed that they had found something else that needed doing. She was a twin, my sister Rachel's seventh born, taken immediately from her mother's belly into the machines that would work to keep her alive long enough to go home. Rachel kept Lily with her, the skeletally complete twin, while her husband Eddy chased the doctor's responsible for Laurel.

But there was hope. For every problem Laurel had, swelling in the brain, a bladder with no way to empty, a spinal column bulging from her back, intestines with no exit—there was a surgery, a fix, a work around that could be taken in order. When she was born, it was mid October, and they were told she'd been in NICU for at least eighteen months, but she was home by Thanksgiving, only six weeks later.

She may never use her legs, but she can climb the stairs, and that was something we hoped but maybe didn't believe when she lay on the NICU cot. She is laughter, not tears.

The second was Abner, my brother's seventh, and while it was difficult, most of his issues lay in his birth, where he presented poorly and nearly killed his mother. A rupture. An image of a doctor reaching in and stopping the baby from moving so that an emergency Cesarean could be performed and two lives saved.

In the NICU, he didn't get a room of his own. Instead, he was behind closed doors in a separate nursery where we had to mask up and clean our hands to meet him so that we didn't disturb the other ten babies, all sicker than him, who shared the ward. We were more worried for his mother, once he was born, because he wasn't the one who lost so much blood.

He was only difficult for me because of the memory of Caleb.

The first was Caleb, and that was the hardest and saddest. As I write of him, my throat closes and my eyes mist so that it's hard to see.

He was my sister Rachel's third—so many years ago now that he would have been twelve this April if he'd lived longer than the five days we had him. So many blows. First, the news that a clot had crept into the umbilical cord, and that he was without oxygen for a while during delivery. He had no breath, no heartbeat at birth, but they resuscitated him.

At the hospital, he was on cooling therapy, trying to minimize the damage to his brain, but when the cooling therapy ended his brain was still. Another few days to see if he could live on by donation . . . it would have helped to know that because of our tragedy, some other family would have something. But organ donation for children is complicated, and there were no needs across the country that were the right size or whose recipients were healthy enough to take Caleb's. And that was another blow.

At five days, they stopped life support, and he died in his parent's arms. That was the only real time they ever got to hold him.

That was the most difficult. It still makes me cry to know that I won't see him grow.

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