Playing Nice

“He’s going to die, isn’t he?” I said numbly. It felt surreal to be saying those words out loud. Twenty-four hours before, we’d been helping our friends celebrate their marriage, with three months to go before my due date, and now here I was, the mother of a child on its deathbed.

Pete’s voice was calm, but I could tell what an effort it was costing him. “Not necessarily. Mads, there are babies here even smaller than he is. They say the next three days are critical. If he gets through that, there’s a good chance.” A long silence. “Do you want me to come back?”

“No. Stay with him. One of us should be there.”

“Okay. They want me to get some colostrum from you, though. I’ll be over in a couple of hours with a breast pump.”

“Oh God.” I hadn’t even begun to think about the mechanics of breastfeeding when me and my dying baby were in two separate hospitals. But Pete was ahead of me.

“They’ll freeze your milk for now—he’s got a tube in his umbilical stump, with a drip hooked up to it.” Another pause. “They’re asking what we want to call him.”

A name to go on his grave. The thought slipped into my brain, unbidden. Suddenly all the names we’d thought of—quirky, fun names like Jack and Sam and Ed, names that were snappy and bouncy and full of vigor—felt wrong. I couldn’t picture them carved on a headstone with his dates underneath. “What about Theo?”

“I thought you didn’t like Theo.”

“I thought you did.”

“Well, I do.”

“Let’s go with Theo, then.” Because I don’t want to give a name I like to a child who’s going to die.

* * *

—

I WAS IN SHOCK, of course. And as it turned out, Theo didn’t die. As each day went by, and the syringe pumps were taken off him one by one, we allowed ourselves to hope a little more. And finally, after five days, the doctors did a brain scan and announced they were now cautiously optimistic.

Which isn’t to say that from then on it was plain sailing. Pete’s updates from the NICU, when he came over to sit with me, were full of references to desats and apneas and braddies—the weird terminology of the baby unit, now becoming all too familiar. Desaturation, low oxygen in the blood, because a premature baby’s lungs don’t work properly on their own. Apnea, absence of breathing, because sometimes, despite the machine that blew air up his nose, Theo would simply forget to inhale. Bradycardia, a dangerously slow heartbeat, because every so often his heart would just stop for no reason, and then the nurses would gently scratch his foot or rub his shoulders to get him started again. It was like magic, Pete said wide-eyed, seeing them bring him back to life like that.

Prolonging the inevitable, I’d thought at the time.

It was a whole week before I was able to join them. My C-section hadn’t healed well and I’d had a virus—even if I’d been able to move, they wouldn’t have let me into a ward full of premature babies until it had cleared up. But eventually I was put in a wheelchair and sent by taxi to St. Alexander’s, the expensive private hospital off-loading me onto the NHS as casually as if it were scraping a piece of dogshit off its shoe.

I’d thought I was prepared for the NICU. After all, Pete had described it, and I’d seen pictures on my phone. But nothing could have prepared me for the reality. Instead of beds, there were pram-sized electronic pods. It made me think of those science-fiction movies where people are transported through space—but while those movies tried to make their incubators look sleek and futuristic, here each pod was surrounded by a chaotic jumble of wires and equipment. It was warm and humid, too, like a swimming pool changing room. There was no natural light, and some of the pods were bathed in ultraviolet. Those babies were being treated for jaundice, Pete explained later. But it was the noise that hit me the hardest. There was no crying—little lungs couldn’t, only mew, and in any case, most of the babies had tubes that went up their noses and down their throats, preventing them from making any sound. Instead, the NICU was a cacophony of electronic bleeps and chimes and bongs. Later I’d come to realize that many weren’t even alarms, just machines making their everything-normal-here noises, and that each was different for a reason. Like ewes recognizing the bleat of their particular lamb across a noisy field, the nurses could recognize their patients’ sounds and respond to any change.

I had no idea which incubator contained my baby. But then I saw Pete, over in one corner. Most of the pods had see-through covers with holes in the sides, like machines for handling hazardous material, but he was standing next to one that had the top removed. He was attaching a syringe of what looked like breast milk to one end of a tube.

“Over there,” I said to the porter who was wheeling me.

Pete looked up and gave me a tender smile, but didn’t stop what he was doing. “Mummy’s here,” he said to the incubator. I got there, peered in, and saw Theo.

It should have been a big moment. The way everyone talks about the maternal bond, that bottomless pit of gushy love people go on about, if for some reason you don’t feel an immediate, overwhelming connection to your baby there must be something wrong with you. But I didn’t. I simply recoiled. I’d somehow expected from Pete’s positive updates that Theo would look like a real baby now. But this stranger’s wizened face seemed a hundred years old rather than newborn. Dark, downy hair covered his shoulders, like a little monkey. He was wearing the tiniest nappy I’d ever seen, and he was tucked into a kind of ramshackle nest of comforters and bedding. Electrical pads were stuck to his chest, and a cuff around his left foot glowed red—that was the oxygen sensor, I learned later. His arms and legs were stick-thin, the limbs of a famine victim.

A clear plastic tube went up one tiny nostril—the same tube Pete was gently squeezing breast milk into the other end of. “Shouldn’t a nurse be doing that?” I said anxiously.

“They’re busy. Besides, I like doing it for him. It makes me feel useful.”

“Did you check the pH, Pete?” an Irish voice called. I looked up. A nurse, dark and pretty, was speaking to him from across a nearby incubator.

“Two point five.”

“Good man,” she said approvingly. Then, to me, “Are you Mum?”

I’ve always found the way medical staff call every mother Mum and every infant Baby, instead of the mum and the baby, slightly grating, but I know that’s pedantic of me. “Yes. Maddie.”

“Welcome to the NICU, Maddie. I know it must seem overwhelming at first, but little Theo’s doing really well.” With her Irish accent, his name came out as Teo. “And Pete’s been a total star. If only all husbands were that handy with the NG tube.”

“We’re not actually married,” I said automatically.

“Sorry, my bad—all partners. Don’t let him get away, though. He’s a catch, that one.”

It was just the friendly banter of someone trying to put me at my ease, I knew. But something about it irritated me, perhaps because I still felt a failure for not being able to carry Theo to term. Plus, there was the realization that, while I’d been lying in a cushy private room, Pete had been quietly coping—no, more than coping, excelling—here in the brutal environment of the NICU. Generally, I’d have said Pete isn’t brilliant in an emergency. But put him in a situation like that, a situation that requires steadfastness and determination, and he comes into his own. It should have made me feel proud and grateful. But actually, it just made me feel even more guilty.

Pete saw me looking at the monitors. “They start to make sense eventually,” he said.

It hadn’t even occurred to me to try to make sense of them. “What do you mean?”

He indicated the nearest one. “The wavy line is his heartbeat, and the big number is beats per minute. Anything less than a hundred is a braddie—if that happens, try to get his heart going again with a stroke or pat. The one that goes off most often is oxygen desat. If you see that number starting to fall, check the prongs up his nose before you call the nurse—sometimes they work their way loose.”

I couldn’t imagine doing any of those things. “Have you held him yet?” I asked.

Pete nodded. “Just once, this morning—his temperature was too unstable before. It’s an amazing feeling, Mads. You have to be careful because of all the tubes and wires, obviously. But when he stretched out on my bare chest and opened his eyes at me, I choked up.”

“I think we all did.” That was the Irish nurse again. She looked up, smiling, from the other incubator. “That’s one of the best parts of doing this job—seeing a baby get skin-to-skin for the first time.”

Once again, I felt a small, unworthy flicker of irritation at the thought of a bare-chested weeping Pete, with this pretty dark-haired nurse kneeling next to him, crying too. I was careful not to let it show, though. Getting on with the staff here was clearly going to be important. So all I said was, “I can’t wait.”

8

PETE