Without Sin

During the work-retreat this week, we did a series of interviews. One of them took us to a neonatal intensive care unit in a major medical center. Amid the beeping monitors and tubing and high-tech equipment were the plastic pods in which premature babies spend the first days - even months - of their lives. The pods were draped on top with white fleecy cloths, stenciled in a cheerful pattern of blue baby footprints, and they had round hand-holes on the sides through which a nurse or a mother could grasp the tiny finger of a child. There were babies in the pods: babies with feet hardly bigger than one joint of my thumb, some with IV lines somehow inserted into imperceptible veins. A window at the far side of the room looked out over white pine trees, and blue hills.

In spite of the intensity of care that was being delivered, we were welcomed in and our questions graciously answered. One of the babies had been born 30 hours earlier, in a remote rural location, and had just arrived by helicopter. The parents came into the unit not long after we did, looking very young, dazed, impoverished, and as lost as if they had landed in the middle of Manhattan. Just then a pilot in a green flight suit came up to the unit to say he was ready to go; there was another baby to pick up, and in a few minutes a bright-eyed nurse and the pilot were wheeling a transport pod down the hall, toward the elevators, toward the helicopter pad on the back side of the hospital.

We learned later that some of the babies are born early and with complications because of the parental drug use; the agitated, crying babies go through detox for a week or more. I tried without success to imagine anything more unfair: being born into starvation, I suppose. But that's the heartbreaking and ever-sharper contrast, isn't it, in this rich country with its blue hills and high-tech medicine, its fertile valleys and schools and towns and differing possibilities that sift some children into white coats and flight suits, articulateness and skill, and others into a spiral of hopelessness, despair and escape into addiction. In this nursery tiny fingers grasped hands that reached for them out of both worlds; I realized I was hoping for miracles even greater than the precarious preservation of new life.

Comments

[Maria]

Beth, there is something about that picture the bowl, its "blueness" and apparent lightness, and the way you take us through this neonatal unit to the conclusion in your post that strikes a deep chord, beyond words. It is there, in the silence beyond words, where we can truly start to think and see the differneces not just as they appear to us, but the ways in which they strike the souls whose realities these are.

[gulnaz]

my niece was born a lil before term, so she was kept in the nursery for a few days, it was heart-wrenching to see her with an iv drip, naked and hungry. there were other babies, far far more pre-mature, tiny and shrivelled and it was awful to see them so.

[Dave]

An arresting image, those inserts for the nurses' hands...

I was talking yesterday with some friends of mine who teach high school in a part of Pennsylvania known nation-wide as "Meth Valley" (Bradford County was even mentioned in a recent Newsweek cover story on Meth, yay). It's beyond depressing, it's downright dangerous. And don't expect protection from the cops or judges, 'cause they're in on it too. And yet, my friends said, just to drive through town, you'd never guess that anything's amiss - it looks pretty as a postcard.

[Natalie]

Beth, only the way you saw and felt and recorded this scene touches me to the quick.