Rambling Rhodes

The Others

Since Zoey was moved out of her private NICU corner real estate all those couple days ago and was placed in a far more open area, I've become acutely aware of all the other babies in the room.

Technically--for the purposes of privacy and patient confidentiality and such--we're not supposed to take too much of an interest in the other babies unless we've taken time to engage with the parents. Because we've only really been exposed to the wider NICU world for a couple days, however, I've come to realize I don't really know any of the other parents.

So, when I'm standing over Zoey's incubator and she's gripping my finger, I exist kind of in this weird nether-world where I'm literally surrounded by babies that I'm not supposed to be looking at, but it's IMPOSSIBLE not to look, so I find myself doing this furtive glance thing where I quickly scan the room and then look back down at Zoey.

The whole experience reminds me of a nude beach on Maui called "Little Makena" that I visited several times when my family met for Christmas on the island for many years. It was the same idea, in that there were naked people EVERYWHERE, but it was considered impolite to stare, but they were NAKED PEOPLE, and some of them were playing VOLLEYBALL, so I simply had to at least look around.

So, yeah, our new NICU location is like that, except with babies.

You know what? Scratch that analogy. It sounds entirely too creepy.

Anyway, my primary reason for wanting to look around at the other babies is to see how much size difference there is between Zoey and the others. So far, it's no contest as Zoey is hands down the smallest baby in the room. There are other small babies, to be sure, but I'm fairly certain they could all take Zoey in a fight, if it were to come down to that, although I can't possibly imagine that happening.

If that did happen, however, my Flip video camera had sure as hell better be working.

Posted by Ryan at February 22, 2011 04:46 PM | TrackBack