Mom writes about struggle with two preemies

Sam’s CO2 level is too high, which means that although the respirator is pumping oxygen into his lungs, his body is not extracting the oxygen and releasing the carbon dioxide.

The floor is silent. No one is visiting at this hour, and aside from the huddle around Sam, there are only incubators, occasional beeps coming from behind the glass wall. It is a scene from one of the science fiction movies Dan watches, miniature babies in plastic bubbles, hooked up to computer monitors, the life’s work of some mad scientist.

Dan wheels me back to the elevator, through the maze, to my room. I rest all my weight on my arms and push myself out of the chair and into my bed. I slide away the tray with its stack of unopened puddings. It is two weeks until Thanksgiving. The cribs I ordered haven’t even arrived, and now I don’t know if I will need two. I begin to cry uncontrollably.

Dan fits himself into the bed and puts his arms and legs over me like a blanket. He has been sleeping in his jeans on the pullout chair for the last five nights. While trying to comfort me, he accidentally sets off the nurse call button and she runs in, the first time she has ever responded so quickly.

“We’re okay, we’re okay,” Dan assures her.

I take a Percocet. I start to feel the pill taking hold and I try to relax and give in to it. I believe Sam will die. Over and over I keep thinking, terrible things happen, there is no protection from them. I am beyond anger, beyond the dread of having to go home from the hospital tomorrow leaving one of my babies here clinging to life and the other fading fast. Sam is falling away from me through a hole in the world. He should not be here yet. He has arrived and he will leave in a flash, without being hugged by his mother or father, without laughing or speaking, without our ever knowing who he really was.

I’ve had no more than a glimpse of Sam’s fair hair and remarkably symmetrical face and already my love for him is both particular and without specifications. He is the restless troublemaker, Baby B, who kicked a hole in his sac, atypically breaking his water ahead of Baby A and hurrying his brother out. He is a heartbreaker — full of promise — who struggled mightily merely to breathe until he collapsed. Am I grasping for clues? Encoded within Sam are thousands of genes not yet expressed and I can feel the elasticity of my tenderness toward him, how easily it could expand to cover any array of strengths and weaknesses. It is conditional only in that it is nontransferable. I love Gus equally and separately.

If Sam dies I will be left reaching out for a baby I never held.

Excerpted from “The Early Birds,” by Jenny Minton. Copyright © 2006 by Jenny Minton. Excerpted by permission of Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.

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