Not My First Ride on the NICU Roller Coaster

Saturday, February 6, 2010 10:49 PM, EST

DAY 38

MG is doing well again. She met my brother and sister-in-l

aw today. This was important to me as it was their experience in the NICU that prepared me for my own. That was almost 8 years ago. (My niece is a healthy, happy 7.5 year old now.) I was between my first and second year in seminary and dealing with my own crisis of faith. Around my niece's original due date, I had to write an essay about my faith journey. I am including an excerpt here as my niece and my brother taught me something invaluable about hope then, that I still feel today.

From "Imagining Faith"

In July of 2002, my sister-in-law, Ashley came down with toxemia and had an emergency cesarean. At twenty-eight weeks, she delivered a one pound, three ounce girl. Mary Harriet was put in the NICU, where we hoped she would remain for another three months until her original due date. She barely fit between my brother’s two hands. The nurses in the NICU said she was the smallest one they’d seen. When I was allowed to see Mary Harriet a week later, she had not grown. In fact, she had dropped a few ounces due to the extra strain of being outside the womb and because of digestion and liver difficulties. Her jaundiced skin was see-through; there was no fat to disguise her veins and organs. She looked like a baby bird.

My brother talked to her and introduced me through the small, circular door in her incubator. He showed me how to put my arm through it and cup my hand around her head, not quite touching her, to give her the comfort of embrace without the trauma of touch to her underdeveloped skin. When she heard her father or mother’s voice, she’d turn red and try to cry. She wanted to be near them, to be held, but her skin couldn’t take the sensation. It would take minutes for her breathing to recover once she was upset. Everyday, her small lungs fought for enough oxygen to keep living and growing. She seemed determined to get out of that box and into her mother’s arms. Even though at that point still recovering from what I’d witnessed firsthand on 9/11, I only saw a world full of suffering, Mary Harriet seemed to think there was something on the other side of her box worth the struggle.

One day, I met my brother during his lunch break in the NICU, I asked him what he thought she was thinking in that box all-day. Did she wonder what the point was to life in a box? He chuckled a bit at my suggestion that his daughter was a philosopher and answered that he’s pretty sure her mind is just concentrating on how to take the next breath or get the milk from the feeding tube through that stubborn stomach. Then, he sat down next to her incubator and put his face up to the door and began singing her songs and telling her about all the activities he would do with her when she grew up. I watched speechless as my brother was able to do something I could not do, for I like Mary Harriet, was more concentrated on if she’d ever digest enough milk to help her grow out of the baby bird stage and into a human being. My brother could see past this; he could see her as a young girl he’d take to Tennessee Titans games and that he could teach to dance. He even included me in her life, promising her I’d teach her to read Shakespeare and not take crap from men.

My last visit to the NICU before I left to return to seminary, I was able to hold her. She weighed two and a half pounds, almost as much as the equipment attached to her. My brother sat in the rocking chair beside me, telling me about her progress, about how she’s practically gulping down two bottles a day on top of her feeding tube, and how she will try breast-feeding in the next day or two. He also told me what he expected the next few months of her life to be like, and then described what she’d be like months and years down the road when I’d come back for visits from New York. From the moment she was born, he’d been imagining her life. As I looked down at the life cradled in my hands and saw a fleshy resemblance to him, not just translucent skin wrapped around bone, I believed that each story he told added another ounce and another day to her life. I suppose I want to believe that God provides the hope for imagining…

I returned to seminary ready to learn the stories of the early Church, those they constructed and those they affirmed from people before them, and to discover the stories of people of faith today. I hoped that somewhere in the imagining of these, there was a desire to value life over death. In the figure of Christ, in the act of worship, in the creation of texts and liturgy, Christians, ancient and modern, liberal and evangelical, along with other people of faith try to imagine another world where over the cracks and fissures of this one, everyone belongs. Sure, it’s never absolute, but there is enough power in the hope for it, that some, like my niece, are willing to fight to get out of their box to see what could be imagined.