The day almost three years ago I walked down the corridor of the hospital to have an emergency C-section, I knew it was the last time ever I'd go through the automatic frosted glass doors depicting a rising sun, and on into the labor area painted in golden yellow. I'd been wheeled there in full labor five times before. Twice I was wheeled out joyously holding my sons. Three times unconscious, following stillbirth and D&C (here).
An hour later, on that day almost three years ago, I was just able to get a fleeting look at my daughter as she was hurried off to the neonatal team waiting outside. By the time I was wheeled through the door with the rising sun on it, with a dripping ice bag - the "pain medication" - on my sore stomach, she'd been rushed by ambulance to a Neonatal Intensive Care Unit at a different hospital. Are you here to stay, daughter? were all the words I could think. 
~ December 2006, in NICU ~
I saw her two days later, lying in an incubator, black goggles covering almost her entire face, sensor pads attached to her chest and toes, a line into her umbilical stump, tubes running in her nose and down her throat. I opened the little door, and with my finger tips touched the hand of my daughter, immobile, sedated, breathing with a respirator. But breathing and alive.
~ December 2006, in NICU ~
In a room with seven other newborns and their parents there was no baby or human noise, ever, only the nearly-constant high pitched beeping of the alarms of the many machines going off. After which, in the silence, you could sense the anxious gaze of the parents of the child that had set off the beeping, their eyes glued to the screens, watching the vital signs. In NICU - where the future is so uncertain that you learn to think about the present, not about long-term medical issues - weary and courageous parents love their babies through the narrow doors of incubators, fussing with the sheets that shield them from the light, and from the blinking, beeping machines.
It was days before I held Rebecca the first time: the nurse delicately lifted her out of her incubator, careful not to pull out her tubes and wires, and placed her on my chest for "Kangaroo Care." I still hadn't heard her cry. I hadn't seen her move, or even open her eyes. But I was holding the baby that our whole family had waited five years to have with us.
~ June 2009, in France ~
Rebecca hasn't seen a hospital in the last year. She'll be turning three this weekend, cause for a big family celebration.
