Antemama

A tragedy the size of a pandemic does something to your memory — though it could also be my shrinking postpartum brain — because it’s hard now to recall with any amount of clarity what things were like before COVID. I know I walked to work every weekday, tracing the same route over and over, trying to find something that changed overnight along the way. I know I laughed with my coworkers, worked alongside them, had office meetings. In my mind, my pre-pandemic pregnancy is awash with sunlight, it’s warm and breezy. But I know that this is wrong: winter pregnancy in Massachusetts is frozen breath and numb fingers, heavy coats suddenly too small for your growing belly, boots too snug for swollen feet.

My memory comes back into focus again, sharply, on April 21st, to an argument on the phone in my bedroom. The fight: stupid. Political, but not in the way that matters. The aftermath: swift, lightning back spasms, knees buckling as I yell out to Sam in shock. Two days later I am at the clinic with a cartoonishly swollen face and worryingly high blood pressure readings. I am given a plastic jug to take home and pee in, then deprived of it as plans change mid-sentence and I am rushed to the hospital for overnight observation instead. From the hospital bed, I throw increasingly worried looks at Sam over my N95 mask (originally used while painting a dresser, as I am too keen to tell anyone that might hear it). A midwife instructs us to go immediately to a different hospital — a larger one, a hospital that can handle babies born at thirty weeks. “They might need to keep you”, she says. “They have an excellent NICU,” we are told. NIC-U, the syllables reverberate in my head.

At home, in a daze, I throw random clothes into a suitcase and scarf down two-day old chili while Sam gathers enough chargers and back-up chargers to stock a small-sized electronics retailer. As we rush out to leave, the sight of dirty dishes on the table makes me inexplicably sad.

My diagnosis is preeclampsia — a mysterious illness that kills a lot of people. Its mystery is encoded in the name: eclampsia is Latin for “sudden development”, reasons unknown. I am lucky to have “pre- sudden development” but the suddenness of eclampsia, I am assured, can develop at any moment. And so, hospitalization and round the clock monitoring is best.

Sufficiently frightened, I suddenly find myself alone in Room 620 in the antepartum ward of Big Hospital.

--

I am to stay in my room at all times and not open the door, not even to look out into the darkened hallway, I am instructed sternly by the admitting nurse. For a claustrophobic person, being moored in a hospital during a hundred-year pandemic is a mean cosmic joke. The window is, like in many global hotel chains and every hospital, bolted shut. Air is still. It is quiet.

Room 620 contains a round table and two chairs, a wheely foldout green sleeper sofa with broken breaks, a surprisingly soft hospital bed, and a window looking out onto two buildings, one beige and one blue-gray, meeting at an angle under the cloudy sky. “Today is / 23 / Thursday / April” reads a tearaway calendar on the wall.

I climb on the bed and flip open the glossy food menu forgetting my circumstances for a brief moment, but I am interrupted by a soft knock on the door.
Nurse Jean wheels in the mobile station to check my vitals. Nurse Jean is in her sixties and has a warm affect — she is easy to smile (or at least I think she is — I am still learning to read faces by just the top half). “I’ve seen a lot of things in my job but nothing like this,” she says while putting the blood pressure cuff on my arm, a device I have recently learned to fear. I brace myself for the test and fail immediately, the numbers shockingly high on the display. “You have ‘white coat syndrome’, like me,” Nurse Jean says knowingly, “Every time I’m at the doctor’s, my blood pressure spikes”. Good thing I am stuck in a hospital. Nurse Jean instructs me to close my eyes and think of the ocean. “Think of the waves crashing, walking barefoot in the sand. Think of the breeze. Breathe in... and breathe out.” She speaks softly while quietly pressing the ON button on the blood pressure monitor. “See?” She shows me the results. “All better.”

The warm edges of sleep are finally taking hold of me a few hours later when I am jolted awake for another vitals check. I learn the schedule: every four hours, my oxygen levels, temperature, and blood pressure are measured. Between 6 and 7am, The Doctors visit to update me on my results and warn me against leaving. At 8:30am I am hooked up to a monitor that magnifies the

sound in my belly — the baby’s heartbeat sounds like a galloping little horse, or is it a train? Every twelve hours, I get medication and a round of painful, arm-bruising Heparin shots to prevent blood clots from the imposed immobility of my circumstances. “Oh, I hate giving those,” says Nurse Jean pityingly, before gently sticking me with a needle.

At nine in the morning, disoriented from a mostly sleepless night, I am on a video conference call with Sam and a NICU doctor. We dutifully watch our computer screens at our respective corners of the city as the doctor flips remotely through slides of pictures of vanishingly small babies with tubes in their noses and mouths. We learn our markers: 30, 32, 34, 36 weeks. Each two-week advancement — a sigh of relief. By week 32 the risk of brain bleed diminishes. By 34, the baby will only need to be on a CPAP machine to help with breathing. At 36, we might even be able to skip the NICU.

Every day makes a difference for the baby’s development, and every week is a celebration, the doctor says.

At the 12am vitals check I am unable to relax, images of premature babies obstructing my tranquil ocean walk. “I have to notify The Doctors,” Nurse Jean says apologetically.
My room is suddenly flooded with people in white coats. My blood pressure is terrible. A special nurse is called to insert an IV, in case administering emergency medication becomes necessary. Everyone stops to admire the IV in my arm. “That’s a beautifully done job,” and “great work!”, they commend the nurse. I fail the test again. “Your diagnosis is preeclampsia with severe symptoms. Your due date is now 34 weeks,” The Doctors announce and file out of the room. Fifteen minutes later, Nurse Jean comes to talk about the ocean again, and my blood pressure stabilizes.

The next day I start asking about leaving. “It’s just that I think I’m making my blood pressure worse here, I’m too stressed out.” I try out this message on everyone that enters my room: the night and day nurses, the cleaner that comes in once a day. Their collective understanding buoys me and I start to feel confident in the message. “You are not a prisoner here” Day Nurse Kathy says later, surprising me with the stark comparison. Of course I’m not a prisoner, this is nothing like a prison. I stay.

Early Monday morning The Doctors file into my room, a huddle of white coats, surgeon’s masks behind plastic shields, clipboards in nitrile gloved hands. They gather around my hospital bed, gazing down disapprovingly. “We hear that you are thinking of leaving”, they say in unison.
I squeak through some excuses. “I don’t feel well here, I can’t sleep, I need to sleep. I am stressed all the time, and it’s causing my blood pressure to shoot up.”

“That is impossible”, The Doctors intone. “Blood pressure is a thing that does not change with stress, it is a thing no human being can control...” their eyes shift to the blue sky out the window. I flail. “But what about the white coat syndrome? What about my blood pressure before and after Sam left? What about how it stabilized when Nurse Jean talked to me?”
“There are grave risks if you leave,” say The Doctors, impervious to my pleading. They recite the risks, each more horrifying than the last. “Stroke.”“Stillbirth.” Crying, , I tell them I can’t stay. “You are not a prisoner,” The Doctors conclude.

A few hours later, Nurse Kathy leads me down to the lobby and out of the hospital. As the cool air hits my face, I realize that this, in the patient drop-off roundabout, is without a doubt the freshest air in the world. Sam jumps out of the car to give me a quick hug and throw my suitcase in the trunk. I get in quickly, feeling like a runaway, certain that at any moment the hospital guards will pull me back in. “Freedom,” I text my family, and we drive off.

In the car unease creeps in along with a million questions. What if The Doctors are right? What if I don’t know my body well enough to know when it starts to fail? What if my instincts are the wrong thing to trust? What if the stress of the hospital is better for the baby than whatever might go wrong while outside? As Sam drives on, we talk in circles. “We’ll take it one day at a time,” he says. “I’ll go back as soon as something feels wrong,” I say. “The hospital is just a fifteen-minute drive away,” he says. “We will be extra careful,” we agree.

Home is the sun, the grass, the trees. At home are our cats, Lila and Lena, sisters that dislike one another but like us. That night we go on a family walk, Lila and Lena trailing behind us, hiding in the bushes, running along fences to catch up. I’m slow to walk now, out of breath easily, cognizant of a newly formed headache that doesn’t go away, not even with medication.

A headache that’s not responsive to Tylenol is one of the worrying symptoms I know by heart because it was repeated to me every four hours in Room 620. “Have you had changes in vision? Nausea? Pain in your right side below your breast? A headache?” “Maybe it will go away with sleep,” Sam suggests, looking worried.

“I hate it there,” I tell him in bed later, crying quietly. “But it’s safer for you there. And what if something happens to you...?”

In the morning the dreaded headache is still there, and we decide that I should check back in. The last stroll around our neighborhood is bittersweet, a goodbye. I notice the flowers, the grass, the trees. I realize I’ll miss the spring.

I pack with purpose. Books, a sketchbook and pencils, a bedside lamp, an electric teapot, a palm-sized knitted dinosaur toy — a gift from my sister that suffered the wrath of the cats — and a heart leaf philodendron plant in a blue ceramic pot because Big Hospital is devoid of the color green. Sam adds a screwdriver to the growing pile of stuff. “What’s that for?” I ask him. “For some fresh air,” he grins.

Dragging two large suitcases behind us, we arrive at Big Hospital’s Labor and Delivery to check in, again. In the waiting room, holding Sam’s hand, I drown in a flood of anxiety. This is the last bit of human touch I’ll feel, I think, spiraling, body shaking. From here on, gloved hands, needles, masked faces, testing, testing, testing. The consequences of a failed test to last a lifetime — an innocent, new person’s lifetime. “Breathe with me,” says Sam, rubbing my hands in his.

I’m alone in a new room now, Room 611. Everything is familiar but the room is smaller, and the bathroom is twice as big for some reason. The window looks over a street and the hospital driveway. In the distance a school yard is visible — green grass, and some small trees even, for which I am grateful. I pull out the screwdriver, excited to let some secret fresh air in, only to find that the window’s locking mechanism is different in this room, requiring a key. Maybe I should learn to lockpick? The plant goes on the windowsill, as well my friends, Screwdriver and Dinosaur.

Nurse Ann peeks in with a sunny “hello!” and wheels in the vitals machine. “Beautiful day out,” she informs me, as nurses seem particularly fond of doing. As I consider the weather in the still-aired room, Nurse Ann has already moved on, reciting the familiar poem entitled “Have You Had Any Changes in Symptoms?” I interrupt, knowingly: “yes, I have, that’s why I’ve checked myself in again. I wanted to be very safe for the baby. I have this headache that won’t go away, I have tried sleeping it off and taking meds, but nothing works.” “Oh,” Nurse Ann says breezily, “that’s most likely a side effect of your blood pressure medication.”

I am reeling. I checked myself back in for this?! Why did The Doctors not tell me about this potentiality? Why was I misled to believe this was an emergency? In my mind, I am flipping over furniture and sending Sam a flurry of furious, self-righteous texts.

Instead I politely inquire about a yoga mat. “There’s a whole stash of them in our old yoga room!” Nurse Ann chirps, reappearing back in the room with a purple mat and matching yoga bolsters under each armpit. The pre-pandemic antepartum was a very different place, with weekly yoga classes, group therapy sessions, and visits from loved ones. Patients wandered the halls to say hello to patient friends and favorite nurses. It’s hard to fathom now, but there was even a therapy dog that sometimes came by. The COVID-era antepartum is a ten by ten-foot closed room with a locked window, where refilling a plastic cup of water requires an intervention from a nurse. But at least I can exercise, I think, determined to do what I can to lower my blood pressure.

As my stay stretches into the double digits, the music I listen to starts to resemble the daily rhythm, monotonous tunes set to a minor key played on repeat.
The tune sounds like this:

first thing it’s —
vitals and shots then shower then breakfast then monitoring then yoga then rest then vitals then reading then lunch then yoga then rest then
vitals then phone call then tea then yoga then rest then
vitals and shots then sleep (?) then

vitals then sleep (?) then
vitals then sleep (?) then
(here is where the song begins over again and repeats forever)

Back in the human world and on two coasts, Sam, a CS researcher, and my mom, a cell biologist, get to work reading NIH papers debating new research with one another, exchanging terminology in secret like elicit paraphernalia. I learn of this when Sam starts cutting our talks short in favor of catching up on research papers sent over by my mom. I don’t hear the worst of it, like how likely we are to die from the myriad complications and comorbidities that are now on the table. And I try my best to abstain from reading anything about my situation, having once failed a BP reading horribly after searching “preemie baby” online. But I am armed with semi-informed questions for The Doctors now, and slowly I start to feel bolstered, no longer quite so helpless in my waiting room, where I am ticking down the minutes to the inevitable dangerous early birth.

One night, I refuse the Heparin shots. This is a discovery: no one in the hospital informed me “no” was an option. My first “no” is uncertain, containing a question at the end, to which the nurse dutifully responds “of course, you’re not a prisoner.”

In the hospital, time doesn’t follow a strict pattern; it shifts and bends and stretches out. Days blend together but minutes drag on. Sometimes I get lost in my room and come back to reality at the window, unsure how much time has passed. I watch small groups of masked hospital workers pass by six stories below.

Sometimes I wake up with a flat sense of the unburdened. Since my diagnosis, my normally active, politically engaged life has been placed on indefinite hiatus. My world has become the size of a peanut — I have taken it with me into my hospital room. Before I was busy doing mutual aid work in my city. Now I am in a bubble that I hate but depend on for safety, for the baby and from the world. Nothing exists here but yoga, rest, testing, rest.

Sometimes the kind and unhelpful hospital social worker calls me and I ugly cry despite myself, exhausting my supply of woefully nonabsorbent hospital tissues. The social worker says this is

the process of grieving for what could have been, and maybe she’s right, because I spend so much of my time bargaining with Sam, my sister, the hospital staff, and myself about what could have happened if I’d stepped away from the phone and not had the fight. “Everything would be better, right? We would be safe?” “No,” they all say, and I resolve to ask them again later.

I hear stories of a legendary woman that lived in this ward in the Before Times, a new immigrant to this country that knew no one and so had no visitors. She stayed for one-hundred and one days. “But she could walk around and say hi to people, right? And the dog. She met the dog?” I ask indignantly. “She made a lot of new friends here, yes,” Nurse Janet answers. “So it’s much harder now”, I think, pleased.

One day a tall blond woman in a yellow surgical mask enters my room. “We’re going on a trip,” she informs me after introducing herself. Heart fluttering, I quickly grab my mask. We pass by other waiting rooms. I see faces and pregnant bellies, try to make eye contact. “Everyone loves Ultrasound Day now,” my guide says. In the ultrasound room, my belly wet with warm jelly, I see the baby on a monitor, the sound of his heartbeat magnified through the speakers. He’s got the hiccups again, making the ultrasound lady laugh. “He’s been doing well?” she asks. “Really well,” I am proud of him. “He’s great, it’s my body that’s failing all around him.”

Secrets to Passing a Blood Pressure Test The Doctors Don’t Want You to Know About:

Eat as many bananas as you can. Every meal — bananas. Dessert? Bananas. Think about how much you love bananas. Consider the banana: what a perfect pandemic fruit, each in its own wrapper. You love bananas. Your loved ones start eating bananas, they’re sending you photos of themselves with solidarity bananas. Come to think of it, you don’t know where you learned that bananas lower blood pressure and it’s too late to start changing your routine. No matter —

Get rest. Not too much, because then your blood pressure can spike for some reason. But if you move before the nurse comes in to check your vitals, even if it’s just to go to the bathroom, you better hope there are at least ten minutes to spare to get into bed, lie still, breathe, and whatever you do, DO NOT THINK ABOUT FAILING A TEST.

Learn to haggle. Is the blood pressure reading bad? Ask for a redo, you weren’t ready. Can you redo now? What about thirty minutes from now? Can the nurse write down only the good reading? Find out later the nurse wrote down all the readings and lied to you about it.

Do yoga. Become convinced in the magic power of yoga. Do so much yoga you are somehow in the best shape of your life, though you are likely forty pounds heavier than ever before. Are you remembering to rest?

Learn which arm is your good blood pressure arm. There is a difference! I was three quarters into my stay before I learned of my Judas right arm.

Visualize a beach. Realize that each time you think about the beach there are new details. Sometimes you find seashells. Sometimes you hear seagulls. Is that a banana peel in the sand? Go back to step 1.

We’ve made it to week 32. I have a yoga routine and my blood pressure is holding steady for the most part. Baby is happily spending his days playing soccer with my ribs, hiccuping. I feel strong and trapped and anxious. Sam and I are starting to scheme about a second escape, reasoning that it’s better to take a break now, while things are good. We talk over the details of the argument I will present to The Doctors in our video calls, in text messages. I call the insurance company again to verify that I am not burying us in debt. The insurance rep recognizes me, “I was thinking about you the other day! How are you?” I am aware, painfully aware, of how lucky I am to be in Massachusetts and have this golden-ticket insurance from my employer. Memories of my ex-boss’s $30k baby delivery in California (with none of the complications) are still echoing in my head. I can do this, I’m assured. This won’t affect the costs.

In the morning The Doctors file in en masse. Long awake, I am jittery, ready. I turn the laptop where Sam’s floating head is displayed on video. “We’ve decided. I am leaving,” I tell them firmly. A ripple is visible as they recalibrate. I dive into explanation, once more trying to impress on them the link between stress and blood pressure that is so plain to me. The Doctors are unimpressed. “We don’t want to say something bad will happen if you leave before you come back, we can’t know that. But you are putting your lives in grave danger.” I feel that I am doing that here, too, I retort, flailing. Sam switches gears, tries to appeal to reason. The Doctors shake

their head, “The only cure for preeclampsia is giving birth. Until then it’s a waiting game, and you need to wait here.”

I leave in the afternoon. Back home, I am once more overwhelmed by the intensity of colors and smells, as spring has blossomed in my absence. Once more I am weighed down by feelings of guilt. My cat Lila sleeps by my belly at night. But I can see the growing worry on Sam’s face. Two days later, I ask to be brought back in.

Back in the hospital, I feel determined. One, two weeks, but more if we’re lucky — I can do this, even brazenly inquiring about switching rooms after getting a window facing a brick wall. I win the sixth floor lottery, finding myself in a tiny corner room, with not one but two windows, awash in light. I have mastered the system.

My love for my little hospital nook is unexpected, almost boundless. I spend time cleaning daily and arranging things just so, finding delight in my small stack of colorful books, my plant and my friends on the windowsill. Surging hormones and circumstance make strange bedfellows as I find myself “nesting” in Room 653.

I am standing by the larger window sipping herbal tea in the morning as a nurse enters carrying a mason jar bouquet of yellow daffodils. “Happy Mothers day,” she says, dissonantly. The strange scene I have been watching unfold in the parking lot six stories below suddenly clicks into place. Two families, each having unfurled their own handmade banner (on which I can only make out some words like “LOVE” and “FELIZ”), stand pointing the handmade creations up toward the building next to mine. I see some patients at their windows. “Is that the COVID ward?” I ask the nurse. She shrugs. “Have a lovely Mother’s Day, Mama!”

In the early hours of another morning I slowly make my way out of bed and take the two laborious steps required to reach the wall calendar. I tear the old page, exposing the day's date: May 18th. Week 34; we’ve made it, baby. I close my eyes and have a private little celebration in my head. Week 34 couldn’t come soon enough. Everything is getting harder, my weight gain is accelerating — a sign of increasingly worsening symptoms. I have taken leave from work, and

no longer need to collect cheery digital backgrounds to hide my circumstances during remote office meetings. I spend an entire day in bed, sleeping, unable to summon the will to get up. Worse, there is a new sense of loss of control that has nothing to do with being quarantined in a hospital. The nurses have joined forces with The Doctors, levying a coordinated attack, taking every opportunity they can to ask if I am ready to induce, treating me to daily stories about patients that made the deadly choice of prolonging their pregnancies. Just a few days until week 35, I think, and then immediately — even whole days until week 35.

At midnight on May 20th, my blood pressure has spiked in my sleep, for the first time without warning. This is it, isn’t it. I am looking at the failed reading displayed on the BP monitor in the dark room. The night nurse nods. The room is lit up as two nurses wheel in an EKG monitor. Too tired to be scared, I call Sam to come to the hospital. The nurses are clipping clear liquid bags to the IV pole. “Is this the magnesium thing?” I ask. They nod. “Can we wait until Sam gets here?” They shake their heads.

My bed springs to life and I am wheeled down the dark, empty antepartum hallway, into an elevator, through the bustling Labor and Delivery floor, and into Room 1014, a large room that looks to be half under construction, with a broken, flickering top light, and a big window overlooking the lit-up city. A concerningly young and cheerful nurse greets me and asks all the usual questions. I am hooked up to more monitors. The flickering light is switched off.

Lying alone in the darkened room I wait for Sam. The heat is rising. Magnesium sulfate is used to reduce the risk of seizures, but it also causes the body to feel like it’s burning up from the inside. The nurse comes into the room every so often to replace a wet rag on my forehead, a feeble attempt at staving off the worst of the heat. Sam arrives, wild-eyed above his mask, and is soon asleep on a creaky cot next to the big window. I watch the sun rise over city and Sam from my bed.

Time is passing too slowly but also in a blur. I am comprehending my circumstances as fact — not fighting against them nor questioning anymore — merely an observer to the goings on in Room 1014. I am saying “yes” to The Doctors a lot. Fact. They are inserting an epidural into my spine as Sam helps hold me up to steady the severe vertigo. Fact. They are messing up the

insertion and attempting a second time as I start to feel ill. Fact. I am hearing things that are wrong, that are not happening in the room, loud popping sounds coming from nowhere. That, too, is fact. I politely ask The Doctors to repeat themselves over the noise. Contractions, vertigo, auditory hallucinations, pain. Thirty-eight hours pass.
“Good news,” say The Doctors, smiling, I think. “You’re going to have a baby.” I try to focus my eyes but everything is blurry. “Please can I just have some time to wake up?” I plead, eyes failing to keep open, lids too heavy, room spinning. “No, it’s happening now.”
“Sam, slap me. Slap me really hard across the face,” I demand. Sam slaps me too gently, too kindly. I am angry with him, but it’s too late, everyone is suddenly in my room, standing on three sides of my bed, swallowing up Sam in a white coated haze. The phantom noises are loud and I can’t hear most of what is being said, so I do my best filling in the blanks. I need to push when they tell me to push. I push. The NICU team arrives, it’s looking like it’ll be over at any moment, “must be all that yoga” I think I hear The Doctors joke. I focus my anger at them. I push.
And then —
something breaks, water rushes out, “FUCK!” I yell, and a baby is born. There’s no crying. He’s whisked away quickly to the NICU huddle to my right. Sam and I wait. Then someone is shoving the baby into my arms. He is small, four pounds and fourteen ounces. I have never been in the presence of a human this small. “Kiss your baby.” — a directive from The Doctors. And then, my arms are empty, the NICU team files out, baby in incubator, Sam in tow.

My room is quiet, my body is empty. I am still strapped down to the bed as night sets in, unable, again, to sleep. I text my family, I look at funny pictures on my phone. The emptiness is overwhelming, and the phantom sounds are still popping in my ears, recochetting. I close my eyes and see things, monsters dancing. I keep my eyes open and wait. Four hours pass. I text Sam a nonchalant “when do you think you’ll be back?” like I am fine. I am a void occupying space.

As I plunge deeper into despair, Sam bursts into the room, beaming. “He’s so small! He’s so lovely, tiny, real!” I smile back. “Hey, you didn’t pick up. You were gone for so long.” “Oh, was I? I’m sorry! There was so much happening!”

I am released from some restraints and helped into a wheelchair. This is a bad idea, I think, staring at my swollen feet to ease the vertigo as the wheelchair rolls forward, wanting more than anything to climb back into the hospital bed. Sam is buzzing about the little one, preparing me for what I am about to see. I don’t want to see him; I want to sleep. My feet make their way down the hallway, to the elevator, down another hallway full of other feet clad in fun-colored nursing clogs. A right turn, a hard stop. We’re awash in phototherapy ultraviolet. Soft alarms are going off somewhere above my head, lights are blinking. The baby is lying inside an incubator, his curled up tiny figure softly breathing, chords and tubes coming out of everywhere, snaking around his body. I feel sick, the room is vibrating, spinning. “Can we please go back?” We turn around and I hate myself. You absolute coward, you horrible loser. What kind of person can’t even look at their own child?
We’re back on the tenth floor and everything feels bad. The room is hideous, the nurse is mean. We argue to be released, moved back to the safety of my sixth floor nook. The nurse shows no signs of giving in, but then arrives with plastic bags and says: “OK what do we need to pack?” My small, beautiful room. It’s late, we’re exhausted, but I’m showing Sam around the little place from my bed, “See? See? I told you it's wonderful.”

Sunshine flows through the two windows, illuminating the room and Sam. He’s still asleep in the cot next to me, but I’ve already had a couple visits today, and I’m lying in bed with nowhere to go and nothing to do. Thoughts of the preceding days are bouncing in my head, unable to find solid ground. But the pain, emptiness, and wires serve as physical proof — everything today unlike anything before.

A nurse comes in and doesn’t bother keeping her voice down: “Good morning parents! When are you planning to visit your little one?” Sam stretches awake as I consider the question. “How do we arrange a visit?”
“Oh you can just go whenever you want, you don’t need to ask!” She laughs.

We leave my room, Sam leading my wheelchair confidently into the forbidden hallway, an act that leaves me feeling profoundly untethered. We’re stopped by familiar nurses who congratulate

us, commending me on a job well done, and I introduce Sam to them, as if I’m bringing my new boyfriend to meet old friends.

The NICU is humming with activity and monotonous alarms, but the baby’s nook is quieter, the purple lights switched off. He is swaddled like a burrito, a button nose and tuft of brown hair just visible above the blanket. Sam pushes the wheelchair to a stop near the incubator and shows me how to open the latch and I extend my hand into the enclosure, touch the baby’s cheek. How strange.

By the afternoon, we have decided on a name — Zevy (zeh-vee). As much as the little person looks like an old man that contains multitudes, he also looks like a Zevy, a tiny, wild creature. Zevy’s nurse comes in to change his doll-sized diapers and put formula into his feeding tube. “Would you like to hold him?” she asks, and with one swift motion lifts him out of his bed and gently slips him into my shirt. The myriad of NICU alarms sound faint overhead as Zevy’s miniature body rises and falls against my chest.

---

“Mama”, says Zevy with a toothy grin a year later. Lila the cat is quietly watching us from the top of a dresser, but Zevy hasn’t noticed yet. “Mama”, insisting, holding out a board book that’s hard to flip. Our corner of the world is quickly opening back up — politicians have declared the pandemic over. A tragedy the size of a pandemic does nothing to stop the world from moving on.“Ma-mah!”, says my baby again, so I put him on my lap and begin to read.