Miracles Both Ordinary and Not So Ordinary

In my current rotation in the neonatal unit, I'm spending a considerable amount of time observing premature babies and babies with Neonatal Abstinence Syndrome as well as, for the purpose of perspective,  with newborns not presenting any particular health challenges. The birth of any baby seems nothing short of miraculous to me. When a newborn is healthy, it's a cause for wonderment.

So many things can [and too often do] go wrong between a baby's conception and birth.  When everything goes as it should, which happens, auspiciously, far more often than not, it's a cause for celebration. It's sort of an unspoken acknowledgement with every birth of a healthy child, in the face of everything that might possibly have gone wrong for this new little creation, that once again all the worst-case scenarios have failed to come to fruition and the way life should be has triumphed once again over all the more problematic possibilities. It's the sort of thing that gives a person the faith to continue with such work in the face of what, all too often, feels like sheer futility. 

Seeing the preemies in their respective states of struggle gives me empathy for my own parents, who lost preemie twins a couple of years before the births of my brother and me, and who dealt with uncertainty concerning my own outlook. A newborn girl was delivered yesterday at my precise birth size of two pounds, two ounces and fifteen and-one-half inches in length. Though the outcome cannot be guaranteed to be perfect for any baby, now is a  great time to be born in terms of all that can be done for premature babies. While the child faces increased risks for all sort of complications ranging from but not limited to breathing problems, cardiac issues, gastrointestinal problems, brain and developmental problems, and far too many potential hazards to list here, odds are that she will bypass all the potentially disabling conditions and will emerge as a healthy child. The child's prognosis is, because of this time in which she was born, if anything, brighter than mine was.

I told a neonatologist standing nearby, who served his residency here at this facility while my dad was serving an oncology residency at the same time here and is a friend of my dad, that the tiny girl I observed was the precise size I was at birth. This is the hospital where I was born. The neonatologist was actually on duty during the interval in which I was treated at the NICU here. He carefully took the baby from her incubator and handed her to me. I was as sterile as I'll ever be, as I had scrubbed and gowned but hadn't yet handled any of the babies in the unit. We don't touch any babies, much less the preemies, without being freshly and thoroughly scrubbed. As I held her, I tried to compare her weight and mass to objects I have held. The closest approximation I could reach was that she felt to me about like a dense loaf of homemade whole wheat bread. How do medical personnel go about the act of reassuring parents of a baby who weighs roughly as much as a denser-than-average loaf of bread that the child's future looks anything but bleak?

About two minutes after handing me the baby, the neonatalogist took her from me and placed her back into her incubator. He then put his arm around me and steered me, crutches and all,  down a corridor, through two set of double doors, and into the room of a patient. The neonatologist introduced me to the patient and to her husband, who was seated in a recliner next to his wife's bed. I shook their hands. The neonatologist then told the new parents that less than twenty-three years ago, when he was completing his residency at this hospital, I was born here weighing two pounds, two ounces and measuring fifteen-and-one-half inches in length -- exactly the weight and length of their own newborn daughter. He told the new parents that I would graduate from medical school in the spring at the age of twenty-three. 

The young couple's new baby may someday attend medical school as I am doing, or perhaps will not. We cannot know what direction her abilities and interests will lead her. It  was, nevertheless,  gratifying to see the countenances of the young parents  transform from worried expressions to ones that looked perhaps calmer and more filled with hope.  I was most honored to have been even small a part of it.

I don't own this video. I hope the owner doesn't object to my use of it.