Between contractions I peered at the faces leaning over me. "We have a Mobile Intensive Care team ready to transport the baby to Morristown," whispered the midwife.
"Baby?!" I gasped. Only six months pregnant, I expected either a dose of medicine or a miscarriage. Instead, at 2:20 a.m. on December 5, 1996 I was wheeled into the operating room for a C-section. An hour later, the MICU team rolled my baby Victoria away in a an insulated plastic box. At first, I couldn't bear to look at her, for fear it would make it harder to forget her if she didn't "make it." "Look at her!" the medical staff ordered. "You'll always wish you had." All I could see was a swirl of dark hair, and swaddling cloths.
Five days later I was released from the hospital, and painfully hobbled to the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit, where tiny 2-lb. Victoria clung to life. My husband Gilbert had been visiting her several times a day, and he led me through the now-familiar procedures: scrubbing with antiseptic soap, tying sterile gowns, and signing the visitor log.
Behind the nurses' station lay another world. Dim lights eerily enhanced the warming stations, open plastic trays under heat lamps, containing tiny specimens of humanity. My first thought was, It looks like a biology lab!
Searching for my baby's name, I found a tray with the tiniest person imaginable, perfectly formed, hooked up to medicine's most fantastic technology. I wept uncontrollably as I stood by her little helpless form. A new baby, I shouted silently to myself, should be in a bassinet, not a tray! She should have soft toys, pretty clothes, and musical mobiles, not IVs, probes, and pulse cuffs! She should smell like sweet milk and powder, not antibiotic lather!
The grief went on for several weeks, through the Christmas season, as I spent many hours by the little plastic box, listening to the beeps and buzzers of the vital signs of my baby's life.
Then, one day into my heartbreak came the words of a beloved Christmas carol. Peace settled over me as I lifted the tiny bundle of blankets and wires and began to sing: "Away in a manger, no crib for a bed - the little Lord Jesus lay down His sweet head..."
My Christmas-gift baby is 8 years old now, and I still sometimes sing that beautiful song to her, and remind her that Jesus sympathizes with us in every trial. He has known them all (Hebrews 4:15).
Jesus, too, had "no crib for a bed."
Updated Christmas 2004
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