Page 21 - WTP Vol. V #1

straight. That I was prepared to make the argu- ment. I tried to think like a lawyer.
***
She had been inside my body, but I could not
But there in that bed I was no longer a lawyer and not much of a mother. I had never been a statistician, but I knew statistics were utterly subjective, prone to manipulation. If the sta- tistics happened to be correct, perhaps it was better not to go to her until it was determined whether or not she would survive. But when would they know? Days? Weeks? Months? Jesus Christ, years? What would I find in her room at the end of the hallways that twisted and turned through the NICU? It was a mystery no document could divine.
keep her there. And now, she was in her sur- rogate womb, a womb that was supposed to do what my body had failed to do. Her isolette. The iterations of that word were not lost on me. I had gone to her side and yet I did not dare, in those first days, to place my hands through the port- holes that would have connected our worlds. I was not allowed to hold her close. I could have touched her palm with my gloved finger, but I chose not to. I had no way of knowing her, and I wasn’t sure that it was safe even to search for a way to.
After what must have been a hopeful reading, I
somehow grew brave enough to search for her.
My husband pushed my wheelchair to her room. corridors of that enormous hospital, so tiny in
I recall my pause at that door, that sliding-glass door behind which a curtain drew down be- tween us, that door that I can see if I close my eyes even now. I marked that moment of stand- ing in that doorway as one of those moments that can divert you from disaster: What if you went left instead of right? If you stopped a breath beat sooner? That door extended to me an offer to turn back.
small, electric box deep within the winding
But I entered. At the center of the room, she was sealed in a plastic box under an otherworldly blue light, her limbs stretched out in four direc- tions like a pinned specimen. Weren’t babies supposed to curl up? She wore a mask over
comparison to the immense building, it seemed she could be misplaced. And who was making sure that she wouldn’t go missing? Once I got my bearings, I became suspicious of the only people who knew how to keep her alive. Where did they go to college, to nursing school, to grad school, to med school? What were the credentials of her nutritionist, her respiratory therapist?
She was so separate from our life, living in that
“Idid not know how to love her. I did not understand
what she needed from me, nor what I could give her.”
her eyes, which we would come to know as her “Biliglasses,” protecting her eyes from the Biliru- bin lights that were helping to prevent jaundice. Kidney failure which often leads to no urine production.
But my suspicions did not yet give me a voice. I did not yet know how to be her advocate, her champion. I only raged inside when nurses laughed as if something—anything—was worth laughing about. I learned that if she grew cold, even by a degree, she would utilize all her en- ergy to raise her body temperature rather than
to heal. The womb and the isolette do this for babies so that they can dedicate their resources
to other things. When some therapist left her portholes open too long, causing the cool air of 12
I knew this was not what a baby should look like—unmoving, mouth propped permanently open by a ventilator tube, tethered to twenty machines that were reading and assessing and pumping and beeping—but I knew that she was our baby. At least the facts pointed to her being our baby, and the sign outside her door read “BG Wood.” She was a baby girl with our last name, and the first name we had chosen for her months before. My mother’s name.