I See You.

In your mind you know how things will go. You can see clearly because the world does not intrude; everything is possible and bright. What actually happens will always be different and you must find a way to live between this possible brightness and the world you made in your head. 

Her chest is heaving, sucking in on itself past the point that it seems possible to do so. They put a tiny oxygen mask over her nose and mouth, but she keeps sucking as if she can't draw a breathe.

Out of the corner of my eye across the room I can see my wife. There is bright red blood around her. 

The room feels impossibly bright and clear, so bright and clear it's hard to believe there is anything so ordinary as air allowed inside it. She is sucking at the bright, clear air so hard her ribcage is outlined, her stomach nearly collapsed. This will be the first of many things that create a divide between the world you made and the one where everything is possible. 

There are people in green scrubs everywhere, dozens of them. One of them takes her, takes me with her to another room, down a hallway of less clear air, less bright light, a dimmer world. And then other people arrive, tubes of clear plastic are unfurled. Heat lamps. Oxygen. Heartrates. Breathing rates. You feel helpless because you are. This takes a long time to sink in how really helpless you actually are. It's not until it nearly has that you realize it's probably best not to let it sink in all the way because there's a good chance you might not ever get that helplessness back out.

And then it gets much worse.

A man in a white coat tells you not to touch your daughter. This is not a wise thing to say. It's the sort of thing that produces rage. I am not the sort of person that deals well with rage; my gut instinct is to release it. 

But you have to ignore it for now, do what any sensible new father would do, just ignore this voice. It continues to drone on about things that are unimportant, which is to say everything but this little girl lying on her back with tubes criss-crossing her tiny body. Your hand is resting softly on her head, her hair is still wet, sticky against your palm. 

Everything is disconnected; information arrives -- I'm aware that I am staring at the teeth, that the teeth are allowing words out and that my daughter's heart rate in increasing every time I take my hand off her head -- but my brain is unable to process it. I just watch it drift by. It's not disconnected really, it's just all happening so slowly that you can take your time with each bit of it, turn it over in your hands and examine it before you do anything with it. If this were a movie the room would be in zero gravity, everything would float.

The voice is again saying something about not touching and suddenly I have a flashing fantasy of picking those teeth out my knuckle bones with a pair of tweezers. There would I think be something deeply satisfying about smashing this face until it is gone. You don't do these things because in the world where everything is possible this is not a good possibility, it is not bright and everything, it is dark and unnecessary, but the thoughts are still there, no use denying that. So I ignore the voice. I will learn to ignore so many voices. I turn back to my daughter and keep touching her. Her heartrate comes back down. You may be helpless, but you are not stupid.

Instead you close your eyes and breath. That's all you're ever really doing. Breathing. Just close your eyes and feel the breath passing through the tips of your nostrils. Breathe. It's what she is trying so hard to do. And like you each day she does it a little better until one day reality becomes so unreal it might never have happened and the world is more like the way you made it in your head, everything is possible and bright. 

And now that 



















You notice these things even as you notice yourself responding to the man talking, the face talking near you. Nothing about him really registers save some white teeth that are occasionally parting to allow out sounds, the rest is a murky haze, muddy background familiar you'll hardly recognize him the next time you see him. 

On July 11th my wife gave birth to our babies girls, twins we named Olivia and Lilah. To hospital where they were born they remain Baby A and Baby B. Olivia was born without any problems, her sister, who arrived a few moments later had some breathing troubles and was sent to NICU, the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit. Lilah's mother went with Olivia to a recover room, I went with Lilah to the ICU.


I held Lilah's tiny hand while the nurses inserted an IV, hooked oxygen and other equipment for monitoring vitals like heart rate, breathing rate and percent of blood oxygen, all little squiggly lines that said, in themost clinical of terms how my baby was doing. Meanwhile Lilah's chest heaved as she tried to draw breaths.

My first encounter with Dr. Atul Khurana was not a positive one, but then, neither were any of my subsequent meetings. The truth is the first time I met the doctor I thought he was some sort of customer satisfaction survey person of the the hostpital. He came up out of the blue and started asking me questions without so much as an introduction. Since then I've realized that, he naturally assumed that I would know who he is because he's the sort of man that assumes everyone knows who he is. He also probably thought he white lab coat helped. I'm from Los Angeles, props are just props to me. 

He's also I realized later, regrettably, the sort of man that assumes everyone will know that the only man in the room is, obviously, the doctor.

As he spoke I slowly wrapped my head around the the disconcerting fact that this man was not some annoying hospital beurocrat I could safely ignore, but the person in charge of looking after my newborn daughter. 







I won't lie to you I hold modern medicine in a very low regard. 


He also at several points simply made medical statistics, like "95 percent of doctors don't do frenulectamies, so I have to ask myself what it is that they know..." As it turns out, not only is that not true, the proceedure is endorsed and recommend by the American pediatric association (and was subsequently performed by one of three doctors at the hostpital who routinely perform the surgery and who simply chuckled and said, probably best to let it go when I asked about Dr Karana's blatant lie.

I'm grateful for the help he gave Lilah, but I'd sooner chew my arm off than have another conversation wtih him.