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into the corridor for Mum to pick up.’
‘Really? That’s funny.’
‘I know.’
‘I snack all day,’ said Debbie, taking a slice of apple and
a wedge of cheese. She showed me how to sign up to the
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website, and each Monday morning I hungrily checked my
emails and discussed current symptoms with her.
At eighteen weeks, Benny came into the hospital with me
for a routine scan. We giggled and joked as the radiographer
pointed out heartbeats, faces and tiny arms and legs on the
screen. Then she went quiet.
‘What?’ I asked. ‘Is something wrong?’
‘Umm . . .’
She leant in closer to the screen, and I tried to read her
face: ‘What is it?’
She stared at the screen and said nothing. Then finally:
‘I’m sorry . . . but it looks to me like your cervix is shortening.
You may not have long.’
I resigned from work, lit the tea lights, and moved back
onto the couch.
Lying down, day in and day out, to keep the pressure
off my cervix, was gruelling.
For one thing, I was nervous the whole time. If I stood
to walk to the toilet or have a shower, I was aware of the
downward pressure, and paranoid that I was jeopardising
my pregnancy. Every twinge was a threat.
Also, it was hot. Most days that November hovered
around the mid-thirties, and in our house there was pretty
much a no-aircon policy. (Why did I go along with that?
What an idiot!) My temperature was already high, but lying
on the couch with pillows made me hotter.
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My labia remained swollen with fluid for weeks, which
was uncomfortable as well as freaky. My stomach also
remained swollen and sore, and I was nauseous from being
pregnant. My back ached, and the lack of exercise made
me sluggish and headachy.
Mum came back, and I was dependent on her and Benny
for everything. Having to ask for things might be okay for
a couple of days, but for weeks it’s the pits. Benny likes to
do things in his own time. I could tell it irritated him to
be asked for things.
Mum might not believe I found it hard to ask. When
I woke each morning I was famished, without fail, and
hollered in her direction: ‘PORRIDGE! I’M STARVING!’
Through the night, Mum would get up with me to give my
back a rub and bring me snacks. One night she brought in
a plate of peanut butter toast and proclaimed: ‘I don’t even
need to turn the lights on any more!’ In the dim lamplight
I took a bite of toast, but it included a substantial lump of
butter. ‘Aah! You do need to turn the lights on! I just ate
a mountain of butter!’ We laughed out loud; then hushed
each other so as not to wake Benny—he’s a monster when
he’s sleep-deprived and he had a work day to get through.
I got up only to go to the toilet or for a quick shower in
the morning. When I was upright, I worried that I might
go into labour at any time.
At the end of each long day, at five o’clock, there was
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the ceremonial drawing of a red line through the date
on the calendar and a glass of white for Mum. Grace, the
acupuncturist, gave me some inscrutable Chinese medicine
that looked like black ball bearings, with instructions to
take twenty a day. I swallowed five and pulled a face; then
I swallowed another five and pulled a face, etcetera. She
said they were good for holding on.
‘Whatever you say, Grace,’ I said. ‘Whatever. You. Say.’
‘Another day! Hang in there, boys!’ I lay stitching dolls’
limbs onto bodies and miniature clothes onto dolls, watching
DVDs, staring at the calendar and the walls, day in, day out.
‘I can’t stand it, Mum.’ At three o’clock on another long,
hot afternoon, I raised myself onto an elbow. ‘I have to get
out of the house! I have to get off the couch. I’m coming
with you to the video shop.’
‘Really, darling? Are you sure?’
‘I have to get out of here!’
I made my way cautiously to the car and lay down along
the back seat to stare out the window: ‘Slowly, Mum . . . easy
on the bumps. I can see the clouds! This was a great idea!’
Mum laughed. ‘Ah, the sky!’ I sang out. ‘The sky!’
Every day was a countdown: ‘Twenty-one weeks and
three days!’ ‘Twenty-one weeks and four days!’ ‘Twenty-
one weeks and five days!’
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‘What will we call them, Benny?’ I lay on my side, with
pillows under my tummy and between my legs, pinning
a pocket onto the front of a tiny pair of yellow overalls. ‘I
like “Leo” and “Jordan”.’
Benny sat with his ankles crossed on the coffee table,
eating toasted slices of the gourmet fruit loaf his mum Josie
had sent.
‘Let’s not get ahead of ourselves, darlin’ . . . We’re not
there yet.’ He sipped from a steaming cup. ‘Is it twenty-
three weeks today?’
‘Yeah.’
‘We want to get to forty! We’ve still got a long way to go.’
That night, during dinner, I went into labour.
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Part Two
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10
I knew there was bad news ahead when a NICU midwife
called to invite Benny and me to a meeting with David,
the neonatologist, later that afternoon. I sat down on the
bench beside our Adelaide front door, hugging my knees
close to my chest as I tried to guess what he would say. Ben
was busy with work, and I wished I had a friend to talk to.
I missed our Alice friends, and I felt remorseful that I had
been so focused on getting pregnant for so much of our
time in Alice. I made a mental note: You can wish for things
as much as you like, but you can’t know what’s around the corner,
so don’t wait till later to know you had it good. That afternoon,
we followed David into a small, windowless room where
a sign on the door read: ‘Quiet Room’ . We sat together
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on the couch, and I wondered whether the woman in the
framed photo on the wall behind David had died or donated
money to be on display.
‘Leo’s stomach has been bloated for some time . . . as
you know. And his platelet count has been low,’ he said.
His glasses sat low on his nose and he peered over them
as he spoke. My grip on Ben’s hand tightened and stayed
tight. ‘He’s now been diagnosed with a rare gastrointestinal
disease—necrotising enterocolitis . . . or NEC.’ David paused
and the room suddenly felt airless. Why aren’t there any fucking
windows in here? ‘Less than five per cent of premature babies
contract the disease. It can be life-thr
eatening.’ Adrenalin
made its way into my veins and my heart began to doof. ‘It’s
likely that he will need surgery, down the track, to remove
part of his bowel.’
‘Oh my god,’ I said.
‘We will watch him for a while. If the surgery goes
ahead, he will have a temporary colostomy bag. We have an
excellent specialist surgeon . . . internationally well respected
in his field.’
The famous surgeon was no taller than me (pretty short)
and didn’t say much. When he came into NICU each
morning to feel Leo’s swollen stomach, I would stand by,
eagerly awaiting his diagnosis.
‘The bowel has formed a lump,’ the professor said.
‘Right . . . What does that mean? Is that bad?’
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‘It’s too early to tell—the bowel disintegration may be
staying localised.’
I moved in closer. ‘That sounds good . . . yes? Hopeful?’
‘We will wait and see. It could be good.’
‘Right . . . right. I’m hoping and hoping.’
He turned and left, followed by his troop of awkward
students.
For a while the lump was resolving. ‘Oh my god, Benny,
isn’t that fantastic!’
‘So far so good,’ said Benny in his measured tone.
One of the professor’s students came in late one morning
and approached Leo’s cot. I stood up. ‘Hi . . . what are you
doing?’ I asked, blocking access to Leo.
‘I have to feel his stomach,’ he said.
‘But the professor has already done that this morning.
Is it really necessary to do it again?’
‘Okay . . . I guess not.’
He walked away and I vowed again not to leave NICU
unless I really, really had to.
We spent Christmas Day in NICU; Jordan and Leo were
seventeen days old, but it felt more like six months, as when
you travel somewhere so culturally new and shocking that
time slows down and a day feels like a week. We were living
in a whole new world now. We arrived at the boys’ cots to
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find red Christmas stockings full of presents—stuffed toys,
bubble bath and baby oil. There were tacky fridge magnets
with photos of each baby wearing red Christmas hats that
someone must have taken overnight. I wasn’t sad to be
spending Christmas Day in NICU. I didn’t even see it like
that. I was content to be spending the day with my babies,
and I sure didn’t want to be anywhere else. Benny seemed
okay too. Cheery staff wore Christmas earrings and hats,
and we brought in a box of chocolates and placed it on the
counter, along with other open chocolate and lolly boxes,
for all to share. ‘Help yourself!’ said a passing midwife,
popping a truffle into her mouth.
Ben’s dad, Frank, had sent us cups with prints of each
boy’s feet on them. I sat with Leo, and Benny sat with
Jordan. I leant down to the cot’s porthole: ‘It’s your first
Christmas, Leo!’ I said. ‘Happy Christmas, my boy.’
Four days later, when he was three weeks old, Jordan had
surgery to close a duct to his heart. Afterwards, he lay
unconscious and paralysed, with a swollen stomach and a
small piece of white tape stuck over each eye. He was pale
and bruised, and my heart swelled thick against my rib
cage. He was in one hundred per cent oxygen with high
ventilation pressures, and hooked up to a rusty, green nitric
oxide tank that looked as if it had come off the side of a ship.
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‘Any surgery is hard on these babies,’ said the registrar.
‘They don’t have any immunity; they can’t afford to lose
any weight because there’s practically no fat on their bodies;
and they’re susceptible to infection, especially with needles
in their arms for the antibiotics and insulin.’
I slowly stroked Jordan’s eyebrow all the way out to his
temple with my thumb. I took his limp hand between my
thumb and forefinger, tears bowling down my cheeks. ‘Can
he have another blanket?’
Animated talking and a gutsy laugh billowed up from
behind the admin counter, and anger rose from the pit of
my stomach. I turned crossly towards the nurses behind
the desk: ‘Can they keep it down?! The noise in here isn’t
right! It’s too much!’
The registrar bit the corner of her lip and held out a
tissue box. ‘I’ll see what I can do,’ she said.
It took Jordan a gruelling two weeks to recover, one tiny step
at a time. I sat by his side and waited and watched, scowling
at noisy talkers or loud laughers; I cursed monitor alarms,
banging doors and the visiting siblings of other babies. I
shifted to sit with Leo when he was unsettled, then back to
Jordan when Leo was calm again. I skipped to the waiting
room to text Benny with exclamation marks when Jordan’s
oxygen requirement came down by the smallest amount.
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The staff roster was of increasingly vital significance
to me. I got along well with most of the midwives, and I
trusted and respected the way they worked. Sometimes our
chatter was light—about living in Adelaide or about the
weekend. At other times I let it all hang out and cried on
uniformed shoulders—about how I wished we could take
the boys out of the hospital, how scared I was, and how
sick of not knowing what each day would bring.
At the start of a new shift, when the midwife assigned to
Jordan or Leo was one I knew and loved, I would greet her
with enthusiasm, gasping, ‘Have you got Jordy and Leo?’
‘Yes.’
‘Yay!!’
If it was the beginning of a night shift, I was so relieved.
I slept so much better knowing that someone I knew and
trusted was looking after my boys.
I had no say over who handled my babies or how, though
I drove people mad trying. If a midwife didn’t respond
quickly to alarms, or laughed too loudly and woke them up,
or disappeared for long periods and wasn’t there to watch
the monitor, I was reluctant to leave the room. Instead, I
stayed and resentfully watched her work, cringing at any
rough handling or insensitive comments.
I got to know the midwives’ jobs. ‘That oximeter’s too
tight around his foot,’ I would say. Or: ‘What do you mean
he has to have a heel prick? He had one this morning.’ Or:
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‘I know his notes say he’s getting an average of seventy per
cent oxygen, but that reading kept cutting out. I’ve been
watching it—those machines are crap. You need to do the
test again before you turn it up.’
As they walked in to start work, they must have groaned
when they saw me sitting between the babies’ cots, but there
was no way I was going to keep my mouth shut. There
were so many staff and so many shifts that
one baby could
be looked after by a lot of different midwives in one week.
Sometimes the same staff were rostered on for several shifts
in a row but, for the most part, I was the most continuity
those babies had. ‘Don’t you think he’s had enough handling
for a bit? I think we can take his temperature a bit later,
no one will mind.’
One of the midwives was coarse. ‘They look like skinned
rabbits when they’re born,’ she squawked. I clenched my jaw,
desperate to put in a complaint or tell her off, but unwilling
to risk becoming unpopular with any of the midwives,
because I depended on them to take care of my babies.
One morning I peered into Leo’s cot to find a shaved
patch on the side of his head. It was bruised and cut.
I gasped.
‘What’s happened to Leo?’
‘Oh,’ his midwife chuckled. ‘He looks funny, doesn’t
he? His first haircut! We had to shave his head to try to
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find a vein to put an IV line in . . . We couldn’t find one
in his arms.’
‘Funny?! Oh my god, that’s awful—an IV line in his
head?’
‘Well, it has to go in somewhere! Anyway, they didn’t
have any luck. They’re going to try again later. Whoops!
It’s half past . . . I have to do his obs . . .’
‘Can’t he just have a break from IV lines? I mean, just
for a day?’ I was crying again—I no longer wore mascara.
Usually the IV line was inserted into an arm, with a small
piece of wood taped to the arm to keep it straight. I could
not imagine the discomfort.
‘No, he has to have one all the time at this stage.’
Although I knew no different, not being able to pick
up my babies and hold them in my arms made me ache.
Benny struggled too. We had to scrub and sterilise our
hands before we could touch them, and then it was mostly
with our fingers, nervously. We could not nuzzle into their
necks, or bite their toes to make them gurgle. We couldn’t
get close enough to smell their skin or feel the weight of
their bodies, or pick them up on a whim and walk out into
the sunlight. And as long as they were on ventilators, we
could not hear their voices.
Leaving them at nights made me feel guilty, even though
there was nothing I could do about it. If I didn’t like the