The Here and Now

In between posting my hospital journal, I feel like I should probably write a little about what is currently going on. Tomorrow, Alex will be three weeks old, or minus thirteen weeks, if you calculate from his original due date. He's doing pretty well, so we've been lead to believe. As one doctor puts it- no news is good news (and- you panic when we panic). No one at the NICU is ever in a panic, to the point where they totally ignore all the alarms going off, even when they seem to indicate a problem, like when I went in yesterday and saw that Alex could barely breath because he had spat up his lunch into his nose. I must admit- I panicked. This is a persistent problem that I've tried to point out to several nurses an doctors. They almost always patronize me with "I checked him a couple of hours ago and he was fine". Hmm... I was also fine a couple of hours ago. Now, I'm freaking out.

I find myself thinking in terms of one baby now. He was born.. he will be... I had a son... I had two sons, actually. They were identical twins. This leads to some uncomfortable conversations. For instance, I went to my first Phillies game since the twins were born last night. In the handful of games we attended previously,  we had become somewhat friendly with the couple in the seats in front of us (we all have partial season tickets and sit in the same seats every game). Last night, they asked how I was feeling, which lead into the unavoidable, "We had them three weeks ago" and then, "Oh? how are they doing?" which must be followed by, "One didn't make it. But, the other one is doing really well." And then, "Oh, I'm so sorry" punctuated by a sad silence. Mike and I have had this conversation several times now with people who don't know about the blogs and don't know what has happened. We've come to deliver the news with what must seem like a disarming flatness. How else can we answer the question? It happened. It's the past. Now, there's just one baby. But, he's doing fine... I think.