Almost exactly fifteen years ago I walked into Marquette General Hospital and saw my first daughter for the first time. Really, it was the second or third time that I had seen her since I technically saw her first at St. Francis Hospital in Escanaba where she was born, but that was only for a few very brief moments. Since she was born ten weeks early she was almost immediately placed in an ambulance and driven to Marquette to spend the first months of her life in the neonatal intensive care unit. During a crisis situation like that the last thing on anyone’s mind was letting dad spend some quality time with his newborn daughter.
She had been born at midnight and was transferred an hour or two later. It had been a very long day so driving to Marquette at that time was out of the question. I spent the night in Escanaba and drove to Marquette after I had a few hours of sleep.
I remember finding my way to the NICU and telling the nurse at the station that I was Waye Braver and I was here to see my daughter. A few moments later I was staring at her through the plexiglass walls of what is called an isolet, which is essentially a climate controlled, sterile hospital crib.
For nearly three months the NICU was my daughter’s home and the time there was spent fighting for her life. The day she was released from the hospital was a moment that had been anxiously awaited.
During our time there I had seen many babies leave only to return. I asked a nurse how many babies return to the NICU. She told me that most of them do. With that in mind I always half expected something to go wrong and that we too would return.
But it never happened.
In spite of the odds my daughter has had very little trouble in the terms of overall health. That’s not to say that she doesn’t have her problems. She does have cerebral palsy as a result of her prematurity and this affects her gross motor skills. Most obviously is the way she walks. When she was born we weren’t sure if she would be able to walk at all, but with time and therapy she gets around pretty good. Her left leg turns a bit inward which gives her a bit of a goofy gait and it makes it hard for her to walk on uneven surfaces.
Today, as I am writing this, my daughter is once again in the hospital. Thankfully it is not the NICU. This time she is in the C.S. Mott Children’s Hospital at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. She is recovering from a surgery that involved cutting her left femur and turning her leg outward to a more natural position. Then a steel rod was inserted into her femur and she was stitched back up. It all sounds kind of gruesome but it was just five very small incisions.
Now on her road to recovery she is understandably in a lot of pain. I offered to feed her some orange sherbet since she couldn’t really feed herself. She gladly accepted my offer not because she was hungry but because it would be a distraction from the pain and a treat all at the same time.
She thought it was kind of funny that I was feeding her. I found it kind of funny that it seemed like only yesterday I had been feeding her as a baby. In fact I found myself digging out these tiny baby-sized portions of sherbet with the spoon, the same size I would have fed her years ago.
As I stood over her I couldn’t help but think of how thankful I was that in the intervening years we had not returned to the NICU or to any hospital for a serious issue at all.
Waye Braver can be contacted on Facebook or by e-mail at waye@braverinstitute.com
Visit the Braver Institute at www.braverinsitute.com
This piece first appeared in the May 15th, 2014 edition of the Pioneer Tribune, a weekly newspaper from Manistique, Michigan. Please visit their website: www.pioneertribune.com
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