NICU

Jericho was born silently, with an initial APGAR score of one, but he was resuscitated and did well; however, he did need oxygen.  Eric and Katrina kept their laptop close and their camera closer as they navigated the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit of Orion Hospital.

The first few hours, Katrina was unable to get up, as her legs were still numb.  The doctors and nurses had come back and forth with good reports about Jericho.  It was just a hard birth and he was just a smidge early, they thought.  Either way, he was going to be fine.  At the five hour marker, she raised the courage to ask the nurse, "Can I try, yet?"

"Well," a girl in colorful scrubs said, "You can try as soon as you feel ready so yeah," and she guided Katrina to a standing position and then to the door.

Eric came bounding down the hall, "Wait!" he spoke loudly, "They're doing shift change for an hour and we can't go in yet," he grabbed a wheelchair and pushed it to Katrina's shaking arms, guiding her wobbly legs around to be seated.  "I just left the NICU, hon.  There are a couple of hours every day where nobody can go in.  If I walk you all the way down there, you'll just have to wait an hour."

Katrina looked up at her husband: her lover; her partner, and her best friend.  She wanted to ask if they knew yet, but she knew better.  She just raised her eyebrows inquisitively and said, "Maybe, you could just push me around a bit?  I'm going nuts in that room."

Eric nodded the nice young nurse in the cheery scrubs off and pushed his wife down the hall.

After a long, heavy silence, Katrina asked, "Anything, yet?"

"Nope.  Nothing yet," was his response.  "They had me sign paperwork to admit him and he's doing great still.  They said it may only be a few days and we'll take him home.  Sometimes, this happens..." he trailed off, "Sometimes."

"Well, I need to talk with Pastor Bobby," Katrina's voice was matter of fact and on point for the complicated road ahead, "I need to know when they run the check and who knows what.  Keep your eyes and ears open for anything unusual.  Remember the safety rules: Don't put your real social security number down on his birth certificate.  Put the last four flip flopped for mine, too.  Put our birthdays off by one day and you've got the other spellings down for our names, right?"

Eric nodded, "Shh!  Just rest.  I'll take care of it.  They haven't asked me anything yet.  You need to just act normal.  It's strange enough that we tried a home birth.  Only Truthers do that nowadays," he came to the front of her wheelchair and kissed her forehead tenderly as he looked her squarely in the eye, "Just blend in and act like nothing's wrong.  No worries, okay?"

His big green eyes felt like home to Katrina.  She sighed and feigned a smile, "Yeah.  Blend."

The NICU was hot.  The nurses barely paid attention to monitors blaring as if there was a code blue every thirty seconds.  This was their life: a constant emergency.  Katrina had gotten so used to the monitors that her milk let down whenever a close monitor went off.  This did make for an excellent milk supply.

Most parents did not spend more than three hours a day in the NICU, but Eric and Katrina spent all but two hours a day there: shift change.  They snuck in their food and drinks, took turns holding Jericho and sleeping while the other watched out and listened to the NICU social worker as she stalked from isolette to isolette, searching for any reason to place children into more of the hospital's government funded programs.  It was, after all, her job to match patients and their families to these programs in an effort to obtain more funding for the hospital.

The nurses made the parents feel comfortable with leaving their newborn infants alone in the NICU and made a show of how attentive they were whenever a parent or family member visited any of the infants.  However, they let the babies cry it out most of the time.  Sure, they got the emergency medical care they needed, but they usually just sat at the counter, reading their novels instead of holding the babies.

There were "cuddlers" who volunteered to come and hold the infants for a few hours a day, but they couldn't stay all day.  After the nurses got a few, "No, we've got nothing better to do than be with him right now," from Eric and Katrina, they dropped the act and went about their days as if they weren't even there.

It simply floored Katrina and Eric that the other parents visited so rarely.  Didn't they wonder about their children?  By Jericho's second day of life outside of the womb, he lived most of his life in his parent's arms.  They just couldn't leave him there alone.