Sometimes it doesn't matter how high the odds are stacked against you.... |
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. |