Playing Nice

by Delaney, JP

  I came around in the recovery room to silence. No crying baby, no Pete, just the bleep of a machine. And a doctor looking down at me.

  “Your baby’s alive,” he said. “A baby boy.”

  Thank God. “Can I see him?” I managed to say.

  The doctor—I think he was a doctor; he was just a pair of anonymous eyes over a surgical mask—shook his head. “He’s gone straight to the NICU in a specialist ambulance. He’s very small and very poorly.”

  NICU, pronounced nick-you. It meant nothing to me at the time, but I was soon to become all too familiar with the different levels of emergency infant care. A neonatal intensive care unit was the very highest.

  “Poorly? What with?”

  “Babies who are that premature struggle to breathe unaided. He’ll probably be put on a ventilator to help his lungs.” He paused. “It’s possible he might have hypoxia.”

  “What’s that? Is it fatal? Is he going to live?”

  All I can remember about this man, who I’d never seen before and would never see again, is his kind brown eyes, even though he politely pulled down his surgical mask before he said gently, “It’s when the baby’s brain is starved of oxygen. But the NICU at St. Alexander’s is the best place for him, and it’s very close. If anyone can help him, they can.”

  I stared at him, horrified. I was just realizing that, far from being a great place to have a baby, this smart hotel-like clinic was actually completely ill equipped to deal with an emergency like mine.

  Everything had gone wrong. I had an overwhelming feeling of having failed my baby. I was meant to be keeping him safe inside me for another thirteen weeks, for God’s sake. I was his life-support system. And instead, my body had rejected him, spat him out into a world he wasn’t ready for.

  “Where’s Pete?” I croaked.

  “Your husband will have gone with the baby. I’m sorry—there was no time for goodbyes.”

  I don’t need to say goodbye to Pete, I wanted to say, and anyway we’re not married. But then I realized. The doctor meant goodbye to the baby. The first time I saw my son, he’d be dead and cold.

  I began to weep, tears running down my face even as the doctor checked my womb at the other end; tears of rage and regret and loss for the tiny person who’d been inside me and who was going to die before his own mother had even held him.

  7

  MADDIE

  I COME OUT OF the Underground at Willesden Green with a million questions churning around my head, so I call Pete again as I walk the last quarter mile to our house.

  “The thing is, I just don’t believe two babies could get mixed up like that in the NICU,” I tell him. “Theo was in an incubator the whole time, attached to all those lines. And he had an electronic tag on his leg. It just couldn’t have happened.”

  “Miles said something about it not being St. Alexander’s he’s suing, it’s the private hospital where his wife gave birth. So maybe that could explain it.”

  That seems more possible. If two very premature babies arrived at St. Alexander’s at the same time, perhaps they got mixed up before the tags were even put on. This might be real, after all.

  “But weren’t you with him the whole time? Hang on, I’m at the front door.”

  Pete opens the door, lowering his phone as he does so. “Not all the time. There were so many people working on him—getting the tubes in, taking blood…And later, they found me a room to sleep in. I didn’t even notice when the tag appeared on his leg.”

  He gnaws his lip, his eyes haunted. I know what he’s thinking. “You had to sleep sometimes, Pete. We were there for weeks.”

  “I keep wondering though—how come I didn’t notice? How could our baby have been switched with a different one and I didn’t spot it?”

  “Because the truth is, none of them looked like babies to begin with,” I say flatly.

  Pete glances at me. He still doesn’t like to talk about my reaction to the NICU. “But you sensed it, Mads,” he says quietly. “You felt no maternal attachment to Theo. You even wondered out loud if he was really our baby. On some level, you knew.”

  I hesitate, then shake my head. “I didn’t have trouble bonding with him because he wasn’t ours. It was because he was nothing like the baby I’d always imagined having. They all were. I’d have felt the same about any baby in that place. They—they disgusted me, somehow.”

  At least, that’s what I’ve always told myself. Along with You’re a terrible mother and There’s something wrong with you. But now, despite what I’ve just said to Pete, I can’t help wondering—had I known something else was wrong, all along?

  * * *

  —

  MY FIRST IMAGE OF my baby was a grainy shot taken on Pete’s phone that he sent while I was still in the recovery room. Blurry, taken over the shoulder of a nurse or doctor, it showed a small pale shape in an incubator, a Christmas tree of tubes and valves attached to a tiny body. There was what looked like bubble wrap encasing his chest, with more tubes coming out of it—I found out later that the doctors had been freezing him, deliberately causing hypothermia to reduce any swelling in his brain. Yet more tubes were taped to his nose. He looked scrawny and sick and barely human.

  When I was nine, my parents had a litter from the family Labrador, Maya. Five were born alive and well, but then there was a long gap, so long we’d have thought she was finished if she hadn’t so obviously been in distress. Finally, one last puppy popped out—a tiny, hairless fledgling of a thing. It soon became clear it wasn’t strong enough to haul itself through the scrum of other puppies for one of Maya’s teats, and for her part she never seemed to nudge it into position as she did the others. I kept pulling other puppies off the best teat and putting the runt to it, trying to get it to suck, but it just couldn’t get the idea. Two days later, it died.

  When I saw that picture on my phone, I was even more convinced that by the time I joined Pete at St. Alexander’s, our baby would be dead. The doctor’s words kept spinning around my brain. He’s very poorly.

  I was still looking at the picture when Pete called. “I’ve stepped outside—they don’t allow phone conversations in the NICU,” he said breathlessly. “I just wanted to check you got the photo.”

  “I got it.”

  “Are you okay?”

  “He’s going to die, isn’t he?” I said numbly. It felt surreal to be saying those words out loud. Twenty-four hours before, we’d been helping our friends celebrate their marriage, with three months to go before my due date, and now here I was, the mother of a child on its deathbed.

  Pete’s voice was calm, but I could tell what an effort it was costing him. “Not necessarily. Mads, there are babies here even smaller than he is. They say the next three days are critical. If he gets through that, there’s a good chance.” A long silence. “Do you want me to come back?”

  “No. Stay with him. One of us should be there.”

  “Okay. They want me to get some colostrum from you, though. I’ll be over in a couple of hours with a breast pump.”

  “Oh God.” I hadn’t even begun to think about the mechanics of breastfeeding when me and my dying baby were in two separate hospitals. But Pete was ahead of me.

  “They’ll freeze your milk for now—he’s got a tube in his umbilical stump, with a drip hooked up to it.” Another pause. “They’re asking what we want to call him.”

  A name to go on his grave. The thought slipped into my brain, unbidden. Suddenly all the names we’d thought of—quirky, fun names like Jack and Sam and Ed, names that were snappy and bouncy and full of vigor—felt wrong. I couldn’t picture them carved on a headstone with his dates underneath. “What about Theo?”

  “I thought you didn’t like Theo.”

  “I thought you did.”

  “Well, I do.”

  “Let’s go with Theo, then.” Because I don
’t want to give a name I like to a child who’s going to die.

  * * *

  —

  I WAS IN SHOCK, of course. And as it turned out, Theo didn’t die. As each day went by, and the syringe pumps were taken off him one by one, we allowed ourselves to hope a little more. And finally, after five days, the doctors did a brain scan and announced they were now cautiously optimistic.

  Which isn’t to say that from then on it was plain sailing. Pete’s updates from the NICU, when he came over to sit with me, were full of references to desats and apneas and braddies—the weird terminology of the baby unit, now becoming all too familiar. Desaturation, low oxygen in the blood, because a premature baby’s lungs don’t work properly on their own. Apnea, absence of breathing, because sometimes, despite the machine that blew air up his nose, Theo would simply forget to inhale. Bradycardia, a dangerously slow heartbeat, because every so often his heart would just stop for no reason, and then the nurses would gently scratch his foot or rub his shoulders to get him started again. It was like magic, Pete said wide-eyed, seeing them bring him back to life like that.

  Prolonging the inevitable, I’d thought at the time.

  It was a whole week before I was able to join them. My C-section hadn’t healed well and I’d had a virus—even if I’d been able to move, they wouldn’t have let me into a ward full of premature babies until it had cleared up. But eventually I was put in a wheelchair and sent by taxi to St. Alexander’s, the expensive private hospital off-loading me onto the NHS as casually as if it were scraping a piece of dogshit off its shoe.

  I’d thought I was prepared for the NICU. After all, Pete had described it, and I’d seen pictures on my phone. But nothing could have prepared me for the reality. Instead of beds, there were pram-sized electronic pods. It made me think of those science-fiction movies where people are transported through space—but while those movies tried to make their incubators look sleek and futuristic, here each pod was surrounded by a chaotic jumble of wires and equipment. It was warm and humid, too, like a swimming pool changing room. There was no natural light, and some of the pods were bathed in ultraviolet. Those babies were being treated for jaundice, Pete explained later. But it was the noise that hit me the hardest. There was no crying—little lungs couldn’t, only mew, and in any case, most of the babies had tubes that went up their noses and down their throats, preventing them from making any sound. Instead, the NICU was a cacophony of electronic bleeps and chimes and bongs. Later I’d come to realize that many weren’t even alarms, just machines making their everything-normal-here noises, and that each was different for a reason. Like ewes recognizing the bleat of their particular lamb across a noisy field, the nurses could recognize their patients’ sounds and respond to any change.

  I had no idea which incubator contained my baby. But then I saw Pete, over in one corner. Most of the pods had see-through covers with holes in the sides, like machines for handling hazardous material, but he was standing next to one that had the top removed. He was attaching a syringe of what looked like breast milk to one end of a tube.

  “Over there,” I said to the porter who was wheeling me.

  Pete looked up and gave me a tender smile, but didn’t stop what he was doing. “Mummy’s here,” he said to the incubator. I got there, peered in, and saw Theo.

  It should have been a big moment. The way everyone talks about the maternal bond, that bottomless pit of gushy love people go on about, if for some reason you don’t feel an immediate, overwhelming connection to your baby there must be something wrong with you. But I didn’t. I simply recoiled. I’d somehow expected from Pete’s positive updates that Theo would look like a real baby now. But this stranger’s wizened face seemed a hundred years old rather than newborn. Dark, downy hair covered his shoulders, like a little monkey. He was wearing the tiniest nappy I’d ever seen, and he was tucked into a kind of ramshackle nest of comforters and bedding. Electrical pads were stuck to his chest, and a cuff around his left foot glowed red—that was the oxygen sensor, I learned later. His arms and legs were stick-thin, the limbs of a famine victim.

  A clear plastic tube went up one tiny nostril—the same tube Pete was gently squeezing breast milk into the other end of. “Shouldn’t a nurse be doing that?” I said anxiously.

  “They’re busy. Besides, I like doing it for him. It makes me feel useful.”

  “Did you check the pH, Pete?” an Irish voice called. I looked up. A nurse, dark and pretty, was speaking to him from across a nearby incubator.

  “Two point five.”

  “Good man,” she said approvingly. Then, to me, “Are you Mum?”

  I’ve always found the way medical staff call every mother Mum and every infant Baby, instead of the mum and the baby, slightly grating, but I know that’s pedantic of me. “Yes. Maddie.”

  “Welcome to the NICU, Maddie. I know it must seem overwhelming at first, but little Theo’s doing really well.” With her Irish accent, his name came out as Teo. “And Pete’s been a total star. If only all husbands were that handy with the NG tube.”

  “We’re not actually married,” I said automatically.

  “Sorry, my bad—all partners. Don’t let him get away, though. He’s a catch, that one.”

  It was just the friendly banter of someone trying to put me at my ease, I knew. But something about it irritated me, perhaps because I still felt a failure for not being able to carry Theo to term. Plus, there was the realization that, while I’d been lying in a cushy private room, Pete had been quietly coping—no, more than coping, excelling—here in the brutal environment of the NICU. Generally, I’d have said Pete isn’t brilliant in an emergency. But put him in a situation like that, a situation that requires steadfastness and determination, and he comes into his own. It should have made me feel proud and grateful. But actually, it just made me feel even more guilty.

  Pete saw me looking at the monitors. “They start to make sense eventually,” he said.

  It hadn’t even occurred to me to try to make sense of them. “What do you mean?”

  He indicated the nearest one. “The wavy line is his heartbeat, and the big number is beats per minute. Anything less than a hundred is a braddie—if that happens, try to get his heart going again with a stroke or pat. The one that goes off most often is oxygen desat. If you see that number starting to fall, check the prongs up his nose before you call the nurse—sometimes they work their way loose.”

  I couldn’t imagine doing any of those things. “Have you held him yet?” I asked.

  Pete nodded. “Just once, this morning—his temperature was too unstable before. It’s an amazing feeling, Mads. You have to be careful because of all the tubes and wires, obviously. But when he stretched out on my bare chest and opened his eyes at me, I choked up.”

  “I think we all did.” That was the Irish nurse again. She looked up, smiling, from the other incubator. “That’s one of the best parts of doing this job—seeing a baby get skin-to-skin for the first time.”

  Once again, I felt a small, unworthy flicker of irritation at the thought of a bare-chested weeping Pete, with this pretty dark-haired nurse kneeling next to him, crying too. I was careful not to let it show, though. Getting on with the staff here was clearly going to be important. So all I said was, “I can’t wait.”

  8

  PETE

  WHILE MADDIE WAS ON the Tube, I’d done some quick research on my laptop. I briefly considered posting on DadStuff, which was my usual way of researching things, but thought better of it. Instead, still reeling, I googled Miles Lambert + Burton Investments. Miles’s LinkedIn page came up, although it didn’t tell me much except that he was three years older than me, he’d been to Durham University, his office was located in Berkeley Square, and his professional skills had been recommended as “excellent” by sixteen people. But at least it confirmed this wasn’t some kind of terrible prank. The DNA test, when I look
ed at it, seemed authentic, too—rows of numbers and technical language culminating in the words: Probability of paternity: 98%.

  Next I searched swapped babies. It was clearly very rare—or at least, it was very rare for a swap to come to light. The switching of identical twins was discovered most often, presumably because the resemblance between two apparent strangers was more likely to be noticed. In 1992 a Canadian, Brent Tremblay, bumped into his identical twin, now called George Holmes, at university. In 2001 a similar thing happened to identical twins in the Canary Islands, and in 2015 two sets of identical twins were reunited in Bogotá. From these and other cases, combined with the incidence of twins in the general population, someone had calculated that mix-ups of less discoverable infants—that is, non-twins—could be as many as one in a thousand births, about the same as Down syndrome.

  Other switches were discovered as a result of paternity testing when parents separated, as happened in Charlottesville, Virginia. The children involved in that case were three years old; the ensuing custody battle went on for years.

  In 2006 two newborn girls were accidentally switched in the Czech Republic, with the mix-up discovered a year later. The girls were gradually reintroduced to their original families, by agreement of all four parents.

  The son of a UK citizen was switched in a hospital in El Salvador in 2015. He, too, was reunited with his parents after a year.

  In countries where switches were discovered there was often a public outcry leading to more stringent precautions, such as double tagging. That wasn’t the case in the UK, but there had been some similar problems with attempted baby abductions, and, as a result, security on NHS wards was considered above average.