teat and putting the runt to it, trying to get it to suck, but it just couldn’t get the idea. Two days later, it died.
When I saw that picture on my phone, I was even more convinced that by the time I joined Pete at St. Alexander’s, our baby would be dead. The doctor’s words kept spinning around my brain. He’s very poorly.
I was still looking at the picture when Pete called. “I’ve stepped outside—they don’t allow phone conversations in the NICU,” he said breathlessly. “I just wanted to check you got the photo.”
“I got it.”
“Are you okay?”
“He’s going to die, isn’t he?” I said numbly. It felt surreal to be saying those words out loud. Twenty-four hours before, we’d been helping our friends celebrate their marriage, with three months to go before my due date, and now here I was, the mother of a child on its deathbed.
Pete’s voice was calm, but I could tell what an effort it was costing him. “Not necessarily. Mads, there are babies here even smaller than he is. They say the next three days are critical. If he gets through that, there’s a good chance.” A long silence. “Do you want me to come back?”
“No. Stay with him. One of us should be there.”
“Okay. They want me to get some colostrum from you, though. I’ll be over in a couple of hours with a breast pump.”
“Oh God.” I hadn’t even begun to think about the mechanics of breastfeeding when me and my dying baby were in two separate hospitals. But Pete was ahead of me.
“They’ll freeze your milk for now—he’s got a tube in his umbilical stump, with a drip hooked up to it.” Another pause. “They’re asking what we want to call him.”
A name to go on his grave. The thought slipped into my brain, unbidden. Suddenly all the names we’d thought of—quirky, fun names like Jack and Sam and Ed, names that were snappy and bouncy and full of vigor—felt wrong. I couldn’t picture them carved on a headstone with his dates underneath. “What about Theo?”
“I thought you didn’t like Theo.”
“I thought you did.”
“Well, I do.”
“Let’s go with Theo, then.” Because I don’t want to give a name I like to a child who’s going to die.
* * *
—
I WAS IN SHOCK, of course. And as it turned out, Theo didn’t die. As each day went by, and the syringe pumps were taken off him one by one, we allowed ourselves to hope a little more. And finally, after five days, the doctors did a brain scan and announced they were now cautiously optimistic.
Which isn’t to say that from then on it was plain sailing. Pete’s updates from the NICU, when he came over to sit with me, were full of references to desats and apneas and braddies—the weird terminology of the baby unit, now becoming all too familiar. Desaturation, low oxygen in the blood, because a premature baby’s lungs don’t work properly on their own. Apnea, absence of breathing, because sometimes, despite the machine that blew air up his nose, Theo would simply forget to inhale. Bradycardia, a dangerously slow heartbeat, because every so often his heart would just stop for no reason, and then the nurses would gently scratch his foot or rub his shoulders to get him started again. It was like magic, Pete said wide-eyed, seeing them bring him back to life like that.
Prolonging the inevitable, I’d thought at the time.
It was a whole week before I was able to join them. My C-section hadn’t healed well and I’d had a virus—even if I’d been able to move, they wouldn’t have let me into a ward full of premature babies until it had cleared up. But eventually I was put in a wheelchair and sent by taxi to St. Alexander’s, the expensive private hospital off-loading me onto the NHS as casually as if it were scraping a piece of dogshit off its shoe.
I’d thought I was prepared for the NICU. After all, Pete had described it, and I’d seen pictures on my phone. But nothing could have prepared me for the reality. Instead of beds, there were pram-sized electronic pods. It made me think of those science-fiction movies where people are transported through space—but while those movies tried to make their incubators look sleek and futuristic, here each pod was surrounded by a chaotic jumble of wires and equipment. It was warm and humid, too, like a swimming pool changing room. There was no natural