At least, that’s what I’ve always told myself. Along with You’re a terrible mother and There’s something wrong with you. But now, despite what I’ve just said to Pete, I can’t help wondering—had I known something else was wrong, all along?
* * *
—
MY FIRST IMAGE OF my baby was a grainy shot taken on Pete’s phone that he sent while I was still in the recovery room. Blurry, taken over the shoulder of a nurse or doctor, it showed a small pale shape in an incubator, a Christmas tree of tubes and valves attached to a tiny body. There was what looked like bubble wrap encasing his chest, with more tubes coming out of it—I found out later that the doctors had been freezing him, deliberately causing hypothermia to reduce any swelling in his brain. Yet more tubes were taped to his nose. He looked scrawny and sick and barely human.
When I was nine, my parents had a litter from the family Labrador, Maya. Five were born alive and well, but then there was a long gap, so long we’d have thought she was finished if she hadn’t so obviously been in distress. Finally, one last puppy popped out—a tiny, hairless fledgling of a thing. It soon became clear it wasn’t strong enough to haul itself through the scrum of other puppies for one of Maya’s teats, and for her part she never seemed to nudge it into position as she did the others. I kept pulling other puppies off the best teat and putting the runt to it, trying to get it to suck, but it just couldn’t get the idea. Two days later, it died.
When I saw that picture on my phone, I was even more convinced that by the time I joined Pete at St. Alexander’s, our baby would be dead. The doctor’s words kept spinning around my brain. He’s very poorly.
I was still looking at the picture when Pete called. “I’ve stepped outside—they don’t allow phone conversations in the NICU,” he said breathlessly. “I just wanted to check you got the photo.”
“I got it.”
“Are you okay?”
“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.