The Nursery I Moved Into Her Room

Thirty One Days

I need to tell you about the thirty one days, or none of the rest of it will land right.

Ava came at thirty two weeks. I was standing at the kitchen sink here in this house washing a skillet when my water went, eight weeks early, and I remember thinking the floor was wet and then understanding why. Cody was already at the plant on nights. Mama drove me the forty minutes to the hospital in Harrison in her nightgown with a coat over it.

They stopped the labor for two days and then they could not stop it anymore. Ava weighed three pounds eleven ounces when she was born. She did not cry. They held her up for one second over the drape and then a whole wall of people in gowns took her to the warmer and I could not see her for the backs of them.

She was in the neonatal unit thirty one days. I learned a new language in there. I learned what a desat was, when her oxygen number would drop and the monitor would sing out and a nurse would come lay two fingers on her back until she remembered to breathe. I learned the word apnea. I learned to read the number on the pulse oximeter the way I used to read Cody’s face.

For the first week she was in an isolette, a clear box, and I could only put my hands through two round holes and cup her without picking her up. I sang to her through the holes. I ran out of songs and started singing the radio.

She was on a machine that breathed for her for five days, then a tube in her nose that pushed air, then just the little cannula. Every step down was a holiday. The day they let me hold her against my skin I shook so hard a nurse had to steady my elbow.

They told me she had what they called chronic lung changes, that her lungs were born before they finished, and that she would need a little oxygen at home for a while, maybe a few months, until she grew into them. An eighth of a liter, they said. A whiff. But a whiff she could not do without yet.

They made me pass a test before they would let her come home. I had to show I could change the cannula tape, read the oximeter, work the concentrator and the portable tanks, and do infant CPR on a doll. I passed it on the first try because I had done nothing for thirty one days but learn it.

I drove the forty minutes each way every day of those thirty one days. Cody could only make the weekends around his nights at the plant, so most of it was me alone in the car with a cooler of milk on the seat, pumping in a closet off the unit every three hours so there would be something for her when she was strong enough to take it. I wore a path in the linoleum between the parking garage and her isolette. The nurses learned my coffee order. I learned which chair in the corner reclined the farthest without tipping.

There was a rule in the unit that broke my heart and saved my sanity both. Two visitors at the crib side, no more, and no one sick, not even a sniffle. So when I had a cold the second week I had to stand behind the glass and watch Deborah hold my daughter for me, and I learned early what it cost to be kept out of a room where your baby was.

The morning we left, the nurse who had been there the most, a heavy kind woman named Deborah, walked us to the doors. She put her hand flat on Ava’s blanket and she said, “This one fought for every ounce. You keep her warm and keep her quiet and feed her every three hours and she is going to be somebody’s grandma one day.” I have held onto that sentence more times than I can count.

Quiet, she said. Keep her quiet. I drove home to a room with a weight bench in it.