Weighing something

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 The other night, I started writing about one of the things I hate about the NICU, which is that no one there talks about death. I didn’t finish it, so I didn’t post it, thinking I’d get to [...]

What makes you worth loving

These days, I snicker a little when I hear doctors say it’s a privilege to take care of people. If it’s a privilege to submit to this shitty schedule, that crazy attending, and those revolting bagels, I sneer, I don’t want to know about the punishment. But in clinic the other day, I actually understood what they [...]

The story of ignorance

Today, I admitted a week-old baby whose mother didn’t know she was pregnant until she gave birth to him.
Let me repeat that.
Today, I admitted a week-old baby whose mother didn’t know she was pregnant until she gave birth to him.
When her contractions started last Friday afternoon, the 13th of October, she ran a hot bath [...]

Isolette

It is 1 a.m. on a Thursday night, and the only light in my apartment is coming from the laptop that sits in front of me in my bed. In four hours, I’ll begin my third day of a monthlong rotation through the neonatal intensive care unit (the NICU). I normally do not have trouble [...]

Hung up on the cuteness

When I started medical school, I was not into kids. It was partly a matter of principle—I didn’t want to do what everyone else was doing, and everyone else was loving kids, so it became my business to not like kids. Another part of my distaste was the spectacular humorlessness of so many people in [...]