Juniper by Kelley French

Author:Kelley French
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Little, Brown and Company
Published: 2016-07-26T04:00:00+00:00

Tom

The honeymoon was such a distant memory that it no longer seemed real. Juniper’s bad days outnumbered her good ones. I would be working to understand one complication when two more setbacks would be announced at morning rounds. The doctors were still having trouble maintaining her blood pressure. Her bone marrow was not yet capable of producing enough red blood cells, so she was becoming anemic. She needed transfusions every few days.

One of her umbilical lines had been removed after it stopped working due to the size of her veins. The other umbilical line was failing, too. The team needed a central line that they could rely on, so they had inserted a catheter called a PICC into one of her arms. Every time another line or another needle went into her body, the risk of infection grew. The floor beneath our feet, the handles on the doors, the buttons on the elevator—every surface was swimming in germs that could kill her. All it would take was for one of us to step away for a minute and then forget to thoroughly scrub our hands again when we came back.

Tracy was almost psychic. One of her priorities was figuring out which of the IVs or other lines running into Junebug’s body was going to give out next. She would start planning how to get another line up and running before the current one became useless. If they couldn’t get meds inside the baby, the situation could turn catastrophic. When Tracy needed to put in a new IV, she asked us to step into the hall.

“I get nervous with you guys watching me,” she said.

We had believed that Tracy was unshakable. If inserting a new line gave her the jitters, it obviously wasn’t simple at all. I tried to see the task through Tracy’s eyes: the filament of Junebug’s vein, the catheter a thread of silk. The meds pulsing through that IV, headed for Junebug’s heart, the heart pumping the meds into the rest of her body. The flow suddenly halting when the catheter broke through the vein, sending the meds pouring into parts of her body where they weren’t meant to go.

Junebug was one of the smallest and most underdeveloped babies in the hospital. It was not an exaggeration to say that at that moment, she remained one of the smallest human beings in the world.

To Kelley and me, she had begun to look almost normal, even when we sanitized our wedding rings and slipped them over her foot and ankle. Whenever we saw full-term babies, we were stunned at their gargantuan proportions. One morning I looked up from my chair at Junebug’s incubator and saw one of these giants being wheeled in. I made a pretense of heading for the bathroom to get a closer look.

The mystery boy was pink and chubby. His ID card declared his weight to be 4.11 kilograms, almost seven times the size of Junebug. I pictured him stomping through the streets of Tokyo, towering over buildings, crushing buses under his big baby feet.

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