INDELIBLE | Jennifer Peterson
I miss your baby. I don’t know if that’s ok with you, but I do. Not in a vague, he was a beautiful baby and it’s inconceivable babies die kind of a way. You and I are exquisitely aware that babies do die. Every day. Despite everyone’s best efforts and all your love.
I miss your baby. And not because I’m picturing the loss of my own and trying to ward against this every happening. I miss your baby. His face. The surprising strength of his little fingers and the way he’d wrinkle his right eyebrow, not his left. His whole tiny self.
I know him.
Knew him.
Spent every day of his first week of life with him as he’d been born and admitted to NICU on day one of my intensive care block. Seven days on, two off and seven days back on again. Back with him. Asking to be assigned to his room. There’s always affection for the infants we treat. But for me it’s heightened when I’ve been at their birth. The intimacy of being present at someone’s arrival makes you inherently more attached. I’d seen him emerge from you despite every beat of your heart trying to keep him inside and safe. Too soon into a world too harsh. Twenty-three-week gestation. 504grams. 03:04 in the morning. Born within his amniotic sac. Floating calmly. Unaware he’d been born. Impossibly perfect in his tininess.
He’d attempted to cry for a moment when we had to pop the sac. Angry seemingly about this disturbance to his environment, he’d scrunched his tiny facial features, creases forming on his miniature red brow, his mouth opening to cry out his displeasure. The effort was too much to maintain though and he quickly showed us how his immature lungs required our help. Within minutes he quietly accepted the breathing tube and the ventilator with no fight.
I’d held him seconds after delivery, lifting him out of the sac on your hospital bed. I’d carried his diminutive frame rapidly to the resuscitaire. I intubated him. I ensured you had a brief, safe cuddle with him before we had to take him to the neonatal unit, where I inserted his umbilical lines, vital for life-sustaining medications and nutrition. My eyes took in the dynamic movement of his chest, altering the settings on the ventilator to find his sweet-spot, enough movement to aerate and provide vital oxygen to his body but not too much to cause unnecessary damage to his fragile lung tissues.
We’ve chatted about him and his turbulent progress by the side of his incubator over the two weeks that he lived. I want you to know I always spoke to him whenever I was doing any checks or procedures on him too, even when you weren’t right at his side. Which you were so much of time. As much as anyone would be able to be.
He’s your baby and I do not suppose to recognize the depth of your grief. He was your son and you have suffered a loss no mother should have to experience.
But I so want you to know that we miss him. That he’s remembered frequently and fondly. That I visit him in my mind whenever I pass his bed space. That the primal shock, edged with resentment, I felt when the next baby was admitted into his bed space after he died was real. That I wanted him to still be with us, in that incubator, sticking his small toes out of his nest determinedly.
I haven’t forgotten his name or his face. The Superman vest you showed me. You were hoping to take him home in that outfit. Praying he’d live and grow large enough to fit into it one day. I see him in every little boy running through the park, cycling along on their bikes, pretending to fly, playing in their own Superman t-shirts. Active limbs moving smoothly. Healthy lungs easily taking in oxygen with carefree breaths calling out to their mothers, ‘Look at me Mummy, I’m flying.’ I miss your baby and I hope that’s ok by you.
Jennifer Peterson is a Neonatal Subspeciality Doctor and Research Fellow. She works in the North West of England, having previously trained in Oxfordshire and Bristol. She has an interest in narrative medicine and neonatal ethics and has undertaken a Churchill Fellowship in Narrative Medicine and completed her Masters in Healthcare Ethics and Law. @jennlhpeterson