The Mom Salon | December 2021

The NICU is Not For Mothers

By Alyssa Nutile A low hum, punctuated by the shuffling of nurse clogs and occasional louds beeps from the O2 monitor, reverberates through the room.

I whisper a lullaby to my daughter Gemma as she sleeps on my chest.

Another baby cries — the noise is shrill and piercing. If I were to make a soundtrack titled “Neonatal Intensive Care Unit,” this would be it. After three weeks, this soundtrack is embedded in my brain, playing even when I’m not in this room.

The nursery pod across the hall gets some ambient sunlight through glazed windows, so they can have the grounding effect of daylight shifts.

But not our pod. Our windows have the shades pulled, and they only face out into a sterile white hallway anyway. Still, no amount of earthly treasure could convince me to trade.

In that brighter pod with windows and sunlight are two babies who might never go home. They’ve lived in this NICU for almost a year now. At least once a week, one of them suffers a respiratory or cardiac episode, and alarms sound. Nurses and doctors rush to their bedside to help the in whatever way they can. They suction and push rescue meds and massage and reposition and reintubate. But there are limits to modern medicine, even in this state-of-the-art, world-renowned hospital. At least in our pod, we still feel some measure of calm. **** They tried to move us across the hall once. My mother and I came back from a walk and lunch, an increasingly rare luxury for a parent who spends their waking hours in the orange medical glow of the NICU. We started toward our pod, and our favorite nurse stopped us.

“They moved her.” She says this with a disapproving look. “You can ask for her to be moved back.”

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