Someone Could Get Hurt: A Memoir of Twenty-First-Century Parenthood (18 page)

To supplement both the feeding tube and the attempted oral feedings, he was still getting some nutrients intravenously: lipids and proteins and sugars. But now the nurses were struggling to find usable veins to tap. Like a heroin addict, a baby in a NICU soon runs out of suitable entry points for a needle. Our son had now exhausted virtually every spot on his arms, hands, legs, and feet. I was in the hospital one night when the final viable tapping point came loose.

“Oops,” said the nurse. “His IV came out again.”

“Can you find another?” I asked.

“I can try, but you might want to leave the room for it.”

“No. No, I’ll stay here with him.”

I deeply regretted it. I took his hand as the nurse swabbed his tiny little foot and dug the needle in, trying to break through an all-important vein wall. He shrieked for help, confused as to why all this was happening, why he had to endure the lights and the beeps and the needles. I felt as if I were the one stabbing him, as if I were the one inflicting that horrible, unexplained pain upon him. I held his hand but didn’t feel like I had earned the right. I had betrayed him. I had made him suffer through this. Eventually, the nurse backed off.

“What now?” I asked.

“We may have to go through his scalp.”

She brought in one of the neonatologists on call and I overheard them deliberating. They were going to shave a portion of his scalp and tap a line there: a PICC line—a special, long-term IV with a catheter that runs all the way down the vein to the entrance of the infant’s beating heart. I heard them deliberating and pictured the baby being held down and sheared like a lamb.
NONONONONONO
. I walked up to the nurse and the doctor, knowing full well that I had little chance of overruling them.

“Can I just talk to both of you before we go ahead with this, before I sign my consent?”

The doctor raised her eyes. “Okay.”

“Please don’t do this,” I begged. “Please. I can’t let this happen to him. I can’t let you shave his head and poke holes in it. Give him a chance to eat his way out of this. He can do it. I know he can.”

“You understand that with preemies, it’s not so cut-and-dried, right?”

“I know that. All I’m asking is that you give him a chance.”

She sighed. “Okay, he’s got twenty-four hours. If he can’t hold his food down by then, we’ll have to reevaluate.”

“Thank you. Thank you so, so much. You won’t regret this.”

I watched as the nurse took away the nasty IV equipment that had remained by his bedside at all times. One wire was gone. I wasn’t going to let him regress. I was well aware that he
could
regress, and I warned myself to be emotionally prepared for it. But fuck that. He was gonna eat. He was gonna eat like a fucking champ.

I sat down in the vinyl recliner as the nurse laid him in my lap and I took the hospital-issued bottle with twenty CCs of formula and began to feed him. The nurse stepped away and I turned into a deranged cheerleader.

“Come on, son. COME ON. You can do this.”

The baby sucked and sucked and the progress was painstaking. I paused to burp him every few minutes and it seemed as if he had barely made a dent.

“Don’t stop now, boy. If you wanna get out of here, you gotta eat.”

After a few minutes, he got into a rhythm, slurping down more and more.

“That’s it! You’re doing it!”

By the end, he had sucked down a mighty eighteen CCs. I stared at the bottle and thought about what to do with the two CCs remaining.
Maybe I should drink it.
I stood up with the baby and he spit up all over the hospital floor, but no one apart from me had noticed. Quick as I could, I set him back in the isolette, mopped up the mess, and washed out the bottle. By the time the nurse came back, my tracks were covered.

“How’d he do?” she asked.

“Twenty CCs. No barf!”

“That’s great!”

I texted my wife that I managed to get the IV out and she texted back, “SHUT UP. HOW’D YOU DO THAT?” I exalted in working my magic. I had never won an argument with a doctor before in my life. It made me feel like a goddamn superhero.

Over the next few days, the barfing went down. The baby began to take all his bottles for real, without me doctoring the evidence. Twenty CCs became thirty. Thirty became forty. Forty became forty-two, then forty-three, then
holy shit, get to fifty already, kid
. Every time he hit a new feeding plateau, I walked out of the NICU pumping my fist, screaming out “FUCK YEAH!” at the top of my lungs if no one was around. They removed the cannula from his nose, leaving him free to breathe on his own. Outside the NICU, in the lonely white hall leading back to the reception area, there was a series of photographs of the hospital’s annual NICU reunions: hundreds of happy parents with now-healthy babies waving gaily to the camera, having forgotten all about their time inside the hospital walls. I wanted to go there. I wanted to get to THAT. Now we were close.
You’re doing it, boy. Don’t stop fighting.

•   •   •

W
e came in one morning and they had moved the baby over to a lower-risk part of the NICU, a section for babies who would be going home sooner rather than later. He was out of the isolette now, lying in a simple plastic tub bassinet. The night nurse had written our son’s name out on a green index card and taped it to the side of the tub and when I saw it I started to cry. I remembered the moment he was born in the operating room, hearing him cry and knowing he wasn’t going to be stillborn. The attending nurse that day asked me his name, and when I said the name out loud his name became a promise—a blood oath to dedicate the rest of my life to keeping him alive and happy. Now he was here, on the verge of being discharged. Alive. Happy.

My wife sat with him in the recliner and fed him fifty CCs straight, no chaser. The feeding tube was gone. A day later, we watched the nurse unhook him from the heart rate monitor and now he was free, 100 percent wireless. No more IVs. No more heel pricks. No more nurses. He was just a baby now, not unlike any other.

For his discharge day, we brought along our other two kids, who had visited the NICU on occasion only to end up pushing all the buttons and demanding to go to the cafeteria for chicken fingers. I pictured our walk out of the NICU as something wonderfully poignant. I had the final movie reel playing in my head. Everyone would get along for the baby’s sake and we would stroll out of the hospital as a loving family unit.

But then the two older kids fought over who got to strap the baby in.

“I WANNA DO IT!” my daughter screamed.

“NO, I WANNOO!” said the boy.

“Listen,” I said. “There are other babies here and they’re trying to sleep because this place sucks. Besides, this baby is very delicate and I don’t want either of you killing him by accident. I will let you screw up everything else today, including the pizza.”

“NO!” they replied in unison.

“Oh god dammit.”

My wife pulled out a camera. “Let’s try to get a picture.”

I held the camera out and snapped an attempted Christmas card photo while we crowded around the baby carrier and the two older children jockeyed for a position closest to the baby’s head.

“Will you two get away from his head? It’s got soft spots!” I said.

“Drew,” my wife said, “keep it down.”

“I’m sorry, I’m sorry. This isn’t how I pictured this moment.”

“It’s never gonna be perfect. Let’s just go home.”

So we did. After twenty-seven days in the hospital, our son finally came home.

•   •   •

A
few weeks later, I was drinking wine after dinner (no driving!) and walking around with the baby strapped to my body in a Björn. I loved having the baby in the Björn because I could pretend there was an alien popping out of my stomach. The girl and I had discovered that the baby liked really loud music. At least, I think the baby liked it. If he didn’t like it, at least the music drowned out his protests. She ran up to my computer and demanded I put on the loudest shit possible.

“The baby wants to hear the music!” she screamed.

So I cranked it up and started dancing around, the baby’s arms and legs swinging freely in the air. The boy came into the room and started hopping around.

“Is that your pee-pee dance?” I asked him.

“No, I’m just dancing, Deddy!”

“Are you sure?”

“Wes! I wannoo dance too!”

“That music’s a little loud, isn’t it?” my wife asked.

“Nonsense,” I said. “Look at the baby. He loves it.”

“I can’t see his face because it’s buried in your chest.”

“You’re just gonna have to take my word for it. RAWK!”

My daughter ran up to the boy and hugged him.

“Whoa, hey, that’s not one of those evil hugs, is it?” I asked.

“No! I’m just hugging him. See?”

“Oh. Oh, carry on, then.”

We all started to rock, and I leaned into the baby and whispered in his ear, “I’m glad you’re here, son. I’m so glad you’re here.”

I wish I could tell you that everything that came after this little scene was blissful, but of course it wasn’t. There were still arguments and brothers shoving sisters and sisters shoving brothers, and more heartache and more worry and more everything. All the bullshit you sign up for when you start out doesn’t just go away. It goes on and on and on until you stop running away from it and start embracing it, until you realize that all the trips to the grocery store, all the nervous fretting at the playground, all the terrifying trips to the doctor are what truly
matter
. It becomes your reason for living, the thing that means more to your life than your life itself. It’s never gonna be perfect—no, it’s not. You’re gonna keep fucking up, and fucking up badly. But you can’t give up. You have to keep fighting to make things right. Because that’s what love is. Love means you never stop trying to be better.

T
here’s a certain deliberate thoughtlessness that goes into writing about your family. You have to be willing to expose things they may or may not want exposed, to potentially mortify them all for the sake of entertaining a bunch of strangers. This is especially true in the case of my children, who are still far too young to grab me by the shirt collar and be like, “Hey, Dad, IX-NAY ON THE PEEING IN THE OTTUB-HAY.” So I’d like to thank my family for their unending love and patience. You kids get an extra hour of TV as reparations. Pretty sweet deal, if you ask me.

I’m also indebted to my parents and my wife’s parents for their love and support and for all their free babysitting, because babysitting rates these days are complete bullshit. Seriously, fifteen bucks an hour? I didn’t see you build me a coffee table while we were out to dinner.

Professionally, I am again forever indebted to Byrd Leavell of the Waxman Leavell Agency for helping me see this project through. There are so many agents out there who don’t give a shit, but Byrd has never had a problem making time to answer my pointless emails and help me work through any sort of structural problem I have writing a book, making sure that book represents one clean, simple idea. If you’re a young writer and you have the fortune of getting a call from Byrd, hire that man. Hire that man and extract all the free drinks out of him that you can. He’s the bestest.

I’m also grateful to Patrick Mulligan and Lauren Marino at Gotham for their judicious editing, along with production editor Erica Ferguson, copy editor Mary Beth Constant, proofreaders Rick Ball and Anne Heausler, designer Spring Hoteling, production supervisor Bob Wojciechowski, publicity manager Anne Kosmoski, editorial assistant Emily Wunderlich, and the art team of Monica Benalcazar and Stephen Brayda, who created a brilliant cover. It was incumbent upon me to write something that lived up to that cover, and I hope I did.

There were a handful of friends and colleagues who gave me advice and/or support during the writing of this book, and I’d like to thank them all, including my wife, Howard Spector, Jesse Johnston, Spencer Hall, Justin Halpern, Will Leitch, Matt Ufford, Jack Kogod, Peter de Saint Phalle, and more. I owe a big thanks to Tommy Craggs and AJ Daulerio for championing me to the powers that be at Gawker, and to Scott Kidder and Nick Denton for bringing me on board full time. I’m also grateful to Jim Nelson and Devin Gordon at
GQ
for taking me in and giving me access to their secret vault of man-scarves and steampunk apparel.

Finally, my youngest son would not be alive today without the care of all the doctors and nurses at Shady Grove Adventist Hospital in Gaithersburg, Maryland. I will never stop being grateful to them. I feel like a smaller man when I consider the amount of skill and mental fortitude they need to do their jobs every day. I couldn’t do that. That’s real work. I remain forever in awe of all of you. Thank you for saving our boy.

Drew Magary is a correspondent for
GQ
and a columnist for
Deadspin
and
Gawker
. He’s also the author of
The Postmortal
, a novel, and
Men with Balls: The Professional Athlete’s Handbook
. Drew has written for
Maxim
,
New York
, NPR, NBC,
Slate
,
The Atlantic
,
Bon Appétit
,
The Huffington Post
,
The Awl
, Yahoo!, ESPN,
Rolling Stone
, Comedy Central, and more. He lives in Maryland with his wife and children.

You can find more of Drew’s writing at drewmagary .com, or follow Drew on Twitter @drewmagary.