Anguish By The Numbers

Seven pounds of baby girl
swathed in not blankets
but ropes of tubing.
Three times too many red blood cells:
Zero blood sugar leaves
fair haired child colored blueblack.
Four separate monitors beep
in four different octaves.

Distant doctor monotone--
five percent chance of her living,
one quarter of a percent chance of her being
anything but a vegetable.
I needed to prepare myself-
she is going to die.

My blood pressure soars to 210 over 120.
Hers measures less than a fifth of that.

Only girl child in a neonatal intensive care unit
surrounded by four males, all smaller than she.
She sleeps blissfully unaware of
the quartet of screaming infants.

I am not allowed near her.
I haven't even held her yet.

I will not allow her to die
if die she must
without my holding her,
without my calling her by name,
without my looking in her eyes.

Takes four interns to convince me bodily
to go to my room.
Next bed over a whale with watermelon breasts
refuses to suckle her nine pound twin sons
who cry in tandem for their mother who is able to hold them,
yet who lets them cry in their single bassinet.

No.

I card a locked smoking room door.
Sit in the dark for uncounted hours
smoking two packs of cigarettes
until the night nurse insists I leave.
I refuse, ranting and raving,
railing at fate, the gods,
crying, screaming for my daughter.
That one nurse listens with head and heart
and disappears
to reappear,
the avenging angel,
who grabs my hand
and says--
First off, you are going to see and hold
your daughter.

Three different showers ensured we are as clean
as I've ever been.
Surgical gown, two sets of gloves on my hands,
three types of masks covering all but my eyes.

Latex and rubber, plastic and tubing seem
to disappear into thin air
as I hold my daughter
for the first time
and
she looks at me
while wrapping her five impossibly tiny fingers
around my little finger.

Fear drains--
puddling on the floor
like so many numbers tipped from a tin.
I take my first full breath in nine hours,
my blood pressure falls even as hers rises to normal numbers.
My mother's heart knows
she will
be fine.
And she was, is.
We got our five percent of our five percent.
She is one hundered percent okay.