Page 20 - WTP Vol. V #1

Erin Wood
Tissue: A Scar Story
I layer my daughter’s skin over my skin like translucent sheets of tissue paper, her scar story over my scar story. I hold the layers up against the light. Behind them, shadows move.
I think of her skin. Her skin of my skin. Her first skin, when she was born at 23 weeks gestation. How it began to slough, to slide from what should have been its hold against anything that touched it—her diaper, her hospital-issued newborn blan- kets, the foam cuffs securing her IVs, the ventila- tor’s breathing tube against her lower lip, the electrodes monitoring her vitals, her own skin where it met other skin, like in the creases of her ankles. When they come so early, this can hap- pen, the doctors had said. But the voices that had tried to give us answers were echoes in a strange, reverberating chamber.
There was no cooing, no holding—just a settling sense that we were powerless. When we nodded to her nurses, her still, red body was wheeled away to wherever it was in the hospital they would take her to do whatever it is they do to save the lives of babies like her. Were there any other babies like her?
~
Two days after her birth, I had yet to see her again, lying in a bed in a wing of the hospital separate from the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit.
I had memorized the statistics on the document hidden away in a zippered pocket of my purse: “Outcome Concerns in the Borderline Viable In- fant SVHSP 5798 (0310).” A document numbered so that it could be found easily among files in
For 17 weeks longer, for over four months more, she should have been floating freely, turning eas- ily inside the lightless goop of my body. Instead, she was born with skin fuchsia and furious, re- flectively taut, spotted in purple and black. Even the palms of her hands—the size of the tips of my thumbs—bruised. Her legs and arms were noth- ing more than bone and skin. Someone said she weighed 640 grams, which translates to 1 lb. 7 oz. when you round up. Her head was little larger than a misshapen racquet ball, one of the blue- and-pink-and-white striped hats that they put
an office, a bar code at the bottom so it could be scanned when given to parents, a liability check- mark that the parents had been warned. I was once a practicing lawyer. I knew this was the kind of thing that lawyers do.
on all the newborns, the size of a small blanket under her head.
or compassionate comfort care. For her, we had chosen resuscitation. For her twin brother, we had chosen compassionate comfort care. But in the end, the choice regarding her brother was made for us when his heart had stopped beating in utero.
How were we supposed to keep her alive? Before she was wheeled out of the room where I had pushed her from my body with dread, her father and I examined her for familiar parts and shapes and markings; we searched for something we could interpret. But we could not understand, this scene so unlike anything we’d ever imagined.
Now he was gone and her situation was utterly bleak. This document left no remaining choices, listing potential calamities from poor lung func- tion to ruptured intestines to blindness to brain death. I had folded and unfolded and refolded the sheet of paper until it was divided into quarters, the ink worn away at the creases. I needed to make sure that I understood. That I had the facts
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The form admonished me: “There does appear to be a threshold of gestational age below which there are not survivors. That threshold appears to be 23 completed weeks.” We knew the precise date because I had in vitro fertilization. Twenty- three weeks and six days. At less than 24 weeks, there was also a choice offered: resuscitation