There are places in the world whose existence we prefer not to dwell upon — rooms and mental corridors we never wish to have reason to tread. One of those is the neonatal intensive care unit (NICU), about which David McGlynn has written recently.
What I most appreciate about McGlynn’s essay is the acknowledgment of the many happy, relieved moments as brilliant doctors and nurses bring the youngest of us from the precipice — medicine is an active miracle. But before the possibility of glad tidings, there are hours and days of dread — all following the herculean effort and elation of birth.
McGlynn writes:
When the nurse handed him to us, wrapped in a blanket, rosy and warm, he did seem fine. But when she opened the blanket on the warming table to measure his temperature, weight, and length, she saw that his chest had turned gray, his lips a dull lavender. His five-minute Apgar score, which assesses vital signs, was lower than his one-minute. His skin was pale; his arms and legs had gone floppy, unresponsive to stimulus; and his breathing was shallow. My mother-in-law, a veteran pediatric nurse in a major children’s hospital, stood over her grandson with her lips pursed. She cooed gently to him and reassured the delivery nurses that they were doing a good job, but her face gave away her concern.
You can read the rest here.
It’s heavy writing — ideologically and spiritually sensitive. As Man has expanded his ability to heal, so too has he had to take on the responsibility of death. McGlynn goes on to tell of sextuplets “conceived with the help of the fertility drug Follistim, which had caused the mother’s ovaries to release multiple eggs in one ovulation cycle. The couple’s doctors had urged them to ‘reduce’ the number of fetuses, but the parents, both deeply religious, had refused.”
Lives are maintained or surrendered in whispered euphemisms, and irreversible decisions are made in that sleepless eon, conceived so long ago on the jittery drive to the hospital.
McGlynn’s piece is a rebuke of death as a natural process. Reading through, I was reminded of Corinthians, where Paul writes, “The last enemy to be destroyed is death.” In the essay, I read Christ’s tears for his creation preceding the resurrection of Lazarus — there is a wrongness in death that makes the NICU’s necessity detestable.
For many of us, we’ll know what it’s like to enter that place, but through essays like this, we can better understand why parents who find themselves there deserve our charity and grace — whatever the result.