Stories for When You’re Older

The Architecture of Arrival

I only remembered the doctor watching Star Wars because my brother brought up the story over the weekend, and I started telling my ten-year-old son about it. He laughed at the idea of a doctor being at the movies while his patient was about to give birth. But as I told him the story, the rest of that night came back to me. The memory hadn’t faded over a decade; it had simply waited until the kid at the center of it was old enough to hear his own origin story.

It was late December. Outside, the city was getting ready for Christmas and New Year’s, glowing with holiday lights. Inside our apartment, everything was turning into a clinical emergency. What we didn’t know then was that it was pre-eclampsia, and that shortly afterward, at the hospital, we would discover it had progressed to HELLP syndrome. Both Connie and the baby were entering critical territory, nearly two months before the due date.

A couple of days earlier, we had tried massage and acupuncture to soothe what felt like a discomfort that wouldn’t go away, but neither helped. Our obstetrician had also prescribed a corticosteroid injection to help accelerate the baby’s lung development in case the delivery came early.

That Saturday, at 8:00 p.m., I checked Connie’s blood pressure. The reading was normal: 120 over 80. Soon after, a sharp headache set in, along with abdominal pain. I checked her pressure again. The numbers kept climbing, hour by hour.

When the top number hit 160, I called our primary obstetrician. He was out of town at a wedding and reminded me that Connie was scheduled to see a high-risk specialist on Monday. Monday felt impossibly far away. The numbers kept rising. When they reached 180, I asked for the specialist’s contact details. Dr. Wells wasn’t officially our doctor yet, but luckily, she picked up. She left no room for doubt: she told me to take Connie to the hospital immediately.

As we drove toward the hospital, a garbage truck was blocking the narrow street. I yelled that my wife was about to have a baby and begged them to move, but they kept working at their own steady pace, slowly hoisting the bins onto the truck. There was no room to get around it, so we could do nothing but sit there and wait.

At the hospital where we were registered, we checked in, handed over our coverage information, and explained that it was an emergency—Connie was barely thirty weeks along. The receptionist made a few calls and told us they couldn’t admit us. To this day, I don’t know why. Nobody explained anything; they simply refused us until we gave up and drove to the nearest hospital, three blocks away.

At the second hospital, we encountered a doctor who seemed to be in no hurry at all. With a patience that felt unbearable to me at the time, he took all the time in the world to listen as we explained what was happening all over again. While he tried to get in touch with the obstetrician on call that night, I started calling and texting him myself, over and over. For an hour and a half, we got no response.

Finally, his messages started coming through. He later explained that he had been at the movies watching Star Wars. He was already on his way and told me to go back to the first hospital, where he would assemble the team needed for the delivery.

When we returned, Connie was admitted immediately. A while later, the doctor stepped out to the waiting room and told me that Connie was stable, but the baby was coming. Now.

Relief and fear hit all at once.

They handed me scrubs. I put them on and sat on a bench outside the delivery room. For the first time that night, the noise stopped, and everything was quiet enough for me to think. That was when I remembered Matercell—the stem cell collection service we had arranged months earlier. Desperate to feel useful, I pulled out my phone and started calling and texting the service. I asked the on-call doctor if he could perform the collection if the courier didn’t show up, but the answer was a flat no. No one answered my calls or messages, and nobody came. Months of meticulous planning dissolved against the reality of an emergency in the early hours of Sunday morning.

Then someone from the delivery room came to get me.

I stood beside Connie in the delivery room. Our son was born at 3:20 a.m., slightly bluish, with a weak cry. When the doctor lifted him, Connie and I both broke down sobbing.

“Don’t cry,” the doctor said. I never understood why he said it. The nurse immediately bundled our son and carried him away.

As soon as our son was taken from the room, Connie began to tremble uncontrollably. Her whole body shook on the table with an intensity that terrified me far more than the blood pressure monitors had.

The doctor signaled to me that she was trembling because she was scared.

“Please,” I told him, “give her something for that.”

He nodded and gave her medication. Within moments, the trembling stopped, her breathing slowed, and the room finally went quiet.

Once Connie had relaxed, a nurse came to get me to see our baby. In the next room, my son was wrapped in plastic to help keep his body temperature stable. The nurse explained why and told me they were taking him to the NICU, where I could see him later. Then they wheeled him away in an incubator, told me I couldn’t stay, and sent me back to the waiting room. The heavy doors clicked shut. All the activity, alarms, and monitors disappeared behind them.

Just like that, I was left behind.

Connie never got to hold our baby. There were no photos, no quiet moments together, no celebratory messages from family and friends. Connie was wheeled into intensive care, where a rotating team of hematologists, physiotherapists, and nurses would monitor her. They were all coordinated by Dr. Wells, the high-risk specialist who had answered my call hours earlier.

I stood alone in the waiting room, under a harsh light, looking at a list of names. The grandparents, aunts, uncles, and close friends on that list had no idea that everything had changed. Outside, the city was completely quiet. Quiet would no longer be an option.

The Arithmetic of Grams

For the first three days, Connie remained in intensive care, undergoing constant tests and treatments to counteract HELLP syndrome. During that time, I had to call our families and tell them that our son had arrived early. Everything had happened so suddenly.

Connie was only allowed to see her son through photographs on her phone because she was not allowed to leave her room. Meanwhile, her own recovery was being measured through a series of strict numbers. The doctors monitored her platelet count, liver enzymes, various blood markers, blood pressure, and kidney function. Every test showed whether her body was beginning to recover or whether there was still cause for concern. During those first three days in intensive care, I learned that those numbers could be just as important as the ones I was following in the NICU.

Meanwhile, my life in the NICU began to shrink into a collection of parameters. I made it my mission to learn everything I could about our baby’s condition. Thanks to a corticosteroid injection our obstetrician had prescribed a week earlier, his lungs had matured enough that he needed CPAP for only about half a day. It was the first piece of good news I heard in the NICU.

To reach his new temporary home—a stay that would last two long months—I had to follow a strict cleaning ritual. Hygiene was crucial to keeping the room spotless, as sterile as possible. At first, I felt like a surgeon about to enter an operating room: I carefully washed my arms up to my elbows with special soap, put on surgical scrubs and a cap, and covered my shoes with protective gear.

That daily journey involved a double trip. In a strange contrast, one of the few ways to find a moment of relief or a smile amid all the tension was to deal with the hospital’s labyrinth: trying to figure out the different routes from the intensive care room in the adult wing to the NICU at the other end of the building. Getting from point A to point B became a small mental game, an absurd and oddly endearing detour that lightened the weight of uncertainty for a few minutes.

When I finally crossed the doors of the unit and saw him inside his incubator, the scene felt surreal. He was incredibly tiny—he had been born weighing 950 grams, roughly the size of my open hand—and was connected to all kinds of tubes, wires, and sensors monitoring him around the clock. Even the little stuffed giraffe we were allowed to put inside the incubator—about twenty centimeters tall—was bigger than he was.

It was there, standing in front of that tiny presence struggling to make its way into the world, that the need to give him a name arose. The nurses needed one for their charts and records; until then, all they had to identify him were his mother’s details. Somewhere amid all those trips back and forth, Connie and I talked about it. Something essential was missing, and suddenly we had it: our son was going to be called Matt.

Despite everything, fear never completely overwhelmed me. I knew I was incredibly fortunate to be in one of the country’s best medical centers, under the care of first-rate specialists. I soon began to discover how quantification can become a survival mechanism. When the usual parameters of parenthood—the months, the weeks, baby clothes, photo albums—lose their usefulness, you cling to arithmetic: the precision of washing your hands and arms; the translation of parenthood into monitor readings, CPAP pressures, and milk measured in exact milliliters.

At first, Matt didn’t take milk from a bottle. He received tiny amounts through a syringe, delivered through a tube. As the days passed, we began giving him that same milk with the syringe directly into his mouth. He was still connected to wires and sensors that reminded us that every small step forward could be measured. Every time I entered the NICU, I looked at his chart: how much he weighed, how much he had eaten, how many times he had urinated, and what his oxygen saturation was. Everything was recorded. Every number could mean progress, stagnation, or sometimes a reason for concern.

The NICU was divided into five rooms. Room one housed the most critical cases. I learned later that Matt had been there only briefly; as soon as he began breathing without external assistance, they moved him to room two. All the parents longed for their children to move toward rooms four or five, which meant they were out of danger and getting closer to going home. We still had a long way to go, though, and many more weeks ahead of us.

In that shared space, we learned to live alongside other people’s stories. Matt’s incubator neighbors were all different: some very quiet and stable, progressing steadily one step at a time; others were critically ill. Among the families going through the same ordeal, a quiet, intimate support network began to form, a way of holding each other up. Sometimes, life in the unit took on a strange kind of normality, where the extraordinary became routine.

To counter the dull roar of the city’s fireworks and firecrackers during the holiday celebrations, I managed to get permission to play Mozart from my phone in the NICU. Matt particularly liked one piece whose exact name took me a while to discover, but that melody became our little refuge, a bridge of calm between the chaos outside and the fragility of the incubator.

As Connie began to recover, she left intensive care and was finally able to visit Matt in person. Soon afterward, she also began producing milk. The room set aside for expressing milk spontaneously became a small social space: there Connie met other mothers going through the same ordeal. Matt’s incubator “neighbors” were no longer just distant clinical cases; they became families with names and faces who, like us, were living through the same daily routine of uncertainty.

And so the weeks passed, until Matt reached his first month in the NICU. One night, the nurses prepared a small sign, decorated with a photo of Matt, and hung it in our section. When we arrived, we found that little tribute waiting for us. It was his first month birthday: thirty days of life that had passed entirely inside an incubator.

The Weight of Waiting

After several weeks, we started receiving good news. Matt had moved up to room 3, which meant he was doing better. We could take him out of the incubator for longer periods, and we were starting to give him a tiny bottle. He had fewer and fewer tubes around him. The only thing he was still connected to was the pulse oximeter, which monitored his oxygen level.

Room 3 also had something that felt like a luxury to us: a window. After so many days in a world of incubators, monitors, and artificial lights, that window meant Matt was a little closer to the outside world.

After a few days there, our family members and some friends were finally allowed to visit him, although only from outside. It was strange and exciting to show them our son after spending so much time seeing him ourselves through the plastic walls of the incubator.

During those first few days in room 3, there was another change that caught our attention. One of the nurses decided to move Matt’s feeding along much faster than anything we had seen up to that point. From one day to the next, she took him out of the incubator and started giving him a full bottle. Nobody had told us about the change or explained that it was going to happen that way.

At the time, we saw it as another sign that Matt was progressing. He could spend more time outside the incubator, and now he could also feed in a different way. It seemed that everything was finally beginning to fall into place.

That same day, Matt started feeling unwell. During a visit from some relatives, he began crying and wouldn’t stop. As the hours passed, it became clear that it wasn’t simply hunger, sleep, or discomfort. Something was wrong.

They brought in a portable ultrasound machine and called a doctor who specialized in intestinal problems in newborns. After examining him, they explained that they had found air in his intestine and that it could be necrotizing enterocolitis, or NEC, as everyone in the NICU called it.

We never knew whether the change in feeding had anything to do with what happened afterward. The doctors never told us there was a connection either. But the timing was so immediate that we couldn’t help keeping it in mind.

The situation led me to speak with the head of nursing. I explained that although I couldn’t say that the decision had caused the problem, I didn’t want that nurse to care for Matt again. The head of nursing respected our decision, and from then on, she was no longer assigned to our son.

After so many weeks of progress, the worry was overwhelming. Everything we had celebrated as signs of progress suddenly seemed to be on hold. Now we had to go backward.

He was transferred back to room 2. Suddenly, the progress we had celebrated seemed to have stopped.

We had a meeting with the director of the NICU, Dr. Gold, who explained that the situation might require surgery. First, they would give his intestine a chance to recover on its own. They would stop his feedings, and Matt would receive the nutrients and medications he needed through other routes. They also started treatment with microdoses. If his intestine didn’t respond, he would need surgery.

It was no longer about Matt growing. It was about giving his intestine time to recover, with the help of medicine and rest.

The days that followed were filled with anxiety and uncertainty. The specialist continued to visit Matt, and every new test could bring us closer to recovery or to surgery.

During those days, we learned another way of waiting. Every morning, we arrived at the NICU without knowing what we would find. We looked for the specialist, tried to read the doctors’ expressions before they spoke, and watched the monitors as if they might give us some answers. There were days when a small improvement was enough to lift our spirits; the next day, any change could put everything back into question.

The treatment continued, and his intestine had to do its part. There was practically nothing we could do except be there, listen, and wait. Surgery remained a possibility that nobody wanted to talk about too much, but that couldn’t disappear from our conversations either.

It was two weeks of intense anxiety, not knowing whether the treatment would be enough or whether surgery would ultimately be necessary.

Then came another meeting with Dr. Gold. This time, the news was different. She explained that Matt had managed to overcome the episode on his own, with the help of the treatment, and that surgery would ultimately not be necessary.

We had spent days imagining the worst possible outcome. Hearing that Matt had pulled through without an operation was an enormous relief.

And we happily returned to room 3, to our little routine with Matt, as if the previous two weeks were finally behind us.

The Return Home

After overcoming that crisis, things began to fall into place again. Matt continued to grow at his own pace and, step by step, shortened the distance to the moment we had dreamed of for so long: finally taking him home.

As discharge approached, the days in the NICU began to take on a different feel. There were more room changes, moving toward the areas where babies were prepared to leave, and feeding gradually stopped being a medical matter and became something closer to everyday life. We learned to read every gram gained on the scale as a small victory and, at last, we could hold him for longer periods, both of us together, feeling his actual weight without the barrier of the plastic walls.

Now we could do all the things we had imagined during the pregnancy, things that had been put on hold when everything suddenly became complicated.

While Matt spent his final days in the hospital, we were doing our part at home. I had taken care of setting up his room, getting everything ready in the nursery, while Connie kept expressing and storing milk at home, making sure he had a supply ready for the big day.

Two months after that unexpected admission, the moment we had been waiting for finally arrived. For the first time, we could put Matt in his car seat and leave the hospital with him.

It seemed like such a simple, ordinary gesture, but for us it carried enormous weight. It meant leaving behind the incubators, the monitors, and the routine of the NICU. It meant being able to take him home, take him out in his stroller, and finally begin the family life we had imagined so long ago.

But the arithmetic we had used to measure his life until then still had one final chapter. As part of his discharge, we were told to bring him back for a weight check three days later.

We had to return to the NICU, although this time we didn’t enter the inpatient area. The Neonatology department had an outpatient room where they examined babies, weighed them, and performed other follow-up tests. It felt strange but reassuring to walk through the hospital again and see the doctors and nurses who had cared for him so much during those two months, greeting them now from a different place in our lives.

But the scale brought a complication. For months, we had grown accustomed to celebrating every gram he gained; now we needed to make sure that moving home hadn’t affected his progress.

To our surprise, he had lost a little weight.

It wasn’t a new medical emergency, but it was a setback that needed attention. We were told to supplement his feeding with Nutrilon to help him regain the grams he had lost. Connie continued giving him her milk, and for a while we kept a close eye on his weight, watching every gram as if the NICU had left a mark on us that couldn’t simply disappear overnight.

Matt was still going to need special care. For a while, we also had visits at home from early-intervention specialists provided by the hospital. They monitored his progress and guided us on how to support his development and make sure he had everything he needed.

Follow-up with his pediatricians and Neonatology specialists continued for several years. By the age of two, Matt had practically caught up with the growth rate of children born at full term, something that often happens with premature babies. But we continued with regular checkups until he was five, when we were finally told that he could leave behind the more intensive follow-up and the greater concerns associated with his premature birth.

For us, that was another kind of discharge. The first had been from the hospital. This one, five years later, was from a chapter of our lives that we could finally leave behind.

Today, Matt is ten. He swims with ease, competes in robotics competitions, has a huge group of friends, and is healthy. Looking at him now, it’s almost impossible to believe he’s the same child whose first two months of life were marked by grams, milliliters, monitors, and days.

He remembers none of it. We do.

And maybe that’s why I still think about that night whenever someone mentions Star Wars.