The Language of Kindness by Christie Watson
Author:Christie Watson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Crown/Archetype
Published: 2018-05-08T04:00:00+00:00
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I’m in the Special-Care Baby Unit on my own today, as it’s so busy, and with four babies to care for. I like it in here most of the time. The babies are almost universally adorable and are getting better, likely to go home. There is a calm from the parents, a belief and hope that their child is moving from the edge of life to solid ground. The entire unit can, however, face bed crises, and it’s not unusual in busy winters when there is an increase in the number of patients throughout the hospital, due to infectious diseases—respiratory infections mainly—to have an extra baby in a basin, in what we call the “sink space” underneath the sink. We half-open the taps at those times, to prevent the baby getting splashed. There are strict protective guidelines on the architectural structure of neonatal units, and on the amount of space for chairs around each bed, to facilitate bonding between baby and parents, though hospitals have times when they’re bursting at the seams and some days it is simply a case of needs must.
But today it’s warm and quiet, and the babies are not as sick as the intensive-care babies next door. There are no mums here at the moment, which is unusual. The nurses do everything they can to keep mother and baby as one unit. It is quite different in private hospitals. In maternity units in some private hospitals, babies are taken from the mum shortly after birth to be cared for in the nursery, by a very capable stranger. But still a stranger. There’s a postcard on the lockers in the staff changing room in the hospital here that says: “Show me the child at seven, and I’ll show you the man,” and one of the nurses has written underneath it: “Show me the baby and the mother at twelve hours, and I’ll show you the man.”
David’s mum, Mandy, is a sex worker from Lambeth, who has had nine children already, all taken into care. David is the quietest baby in SCBU. He doesn’t move much. He is quite different from the demographic of other babies I’ve cared for who are born to drug-addicted mothers, who can be twitching or suffering seizures. He is wearing a knitted blue hat and has a machine called CPAP delivering air via two tiny prongs sitting just inside his nostrils. His diaper, although the smallest diaper in production, still swamps him, and his twig-like legs triangle out of the sides; his skin is the skin of old people, loose and wrinkly, hanging off his bones like an ill-fitting outfit. He has long feet and long fingers—the kind of thing we comment on to parents, in a bid to normalize the situation, move Mandy’s eyes away from the medical equipment puncturing his skin. “Look at his fingers—piano-player fingers.”
David’s face, although partially hidden by the prongs and by a nasogastric tube in his nostril and taped to his cheek and around his ear, is quite beautiful, his eyes are open wide and framed by long, curled eyelashes.
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