Chapter 2

Twelve Hours

A shift begins at a quarter to seven with something that looks like nothing: you listen.

Fourteen minutes of handover, standing, in the corridor, pen in the breast pocket and the paper folded into quarters. The night team speaks fast and in abbreviations. You do not tell a story: you hand over.

Room 4, twenty-nine weeks, day 12, 1,340 grams, cannula at three litres, fine.

Room 6, thirty-two weeks, day 3, in the incubator, tube feeding, ten millilitres every three hours, tolerating.

Room 2, the Mercier baby.

Judith looked up at that one.

— What's she at?

— Eight hundred and ninety.

— She was eight hundred and twenty on Monday.

— She's gaining. She takes the breast two feeds out of three.

Judith wrote 890 on her paper folded into quarters, and did what she always does when a figure goes up: she said nothing.

Somebody asked her once, at a dinner, how you bear this job.

The woman asking was kind and sincere, and Judith gave an answer that was false and pleasant, because at a dinner you cannot give the true one.

The truth is that you do not bear anything at all. You measure.

You measure weight, twice a day, to within five grams. You measure oxygen saturation, continuously, and when it drops below 88 per cent an alarm sounds, and you look up before you have even heard the alarm because you have learnt to see the trace move out of the corner of your eye. You measure flow rates, gastric residuals, head circumference on Tuesdays, bilirubin.

And while you are measuring, there is no room for anything else. That is exactly what you came for.

Judith is good. That is not a boast, it is a professional fact known to the unit: she has the touch for cannulas, she does not lose her head, and she can talk to parents without lying to them or flattening them.

Sofiane Bouzid, who is the ward manager and is allowed to say things other people do not, sums it up in a way that makes her uncomfortable:

— You're wonderful with people as long as they're in an incubator.

At eleven the parents in room 2 arrived.

They have come every day for twenty-six days. The father always asks the same question on the way in — did she have a good night? — and the mother never asks any question at all, which means she is afraid of the answers.

Judith set up the skin-to-skin. It is a manoeuvre that takes eleven minutes and two people: you take eight hundred and ninety grams out of an incubator with three cables and a feeding tube, and you lay them against the skin of a woman sitting in a chair, and you close the gown over them.

The mother looked at the ceiling for the first forty seconds. They all do that.

Judith checked the tube, put a cable back in place, set the saturation alarm, and went out.

In the corridor she wrote skin-to-skin 11.14 — 40 min — well tolerated, and moved on to room 6.

At twenty to one there was an alarm in room 6.

A desaturation to 79, which is not nothing and is not serious, and the difference between the two lies entirely in what you do in the following twenty seconds.

Judith went in without running — you do not run, running frightens the parents and gains nothing — looked at the baby before looking at the screen, saw that the cannula had slipped out of one nostril, put it back, and the trace climbed to 94 in eighteen seconds.

She logged the episode. She replaced the tape that was not holding properly, with a fresh piece cut with scissors, because the night team's had been cut too short.

She said nothing to the night team. She simply left a new roll of tape in the trolley folder, well in view.

That has been her way of making a reproach for fourteen years, and the whole unit understands it.

At two, during the half-hour break, she ate a salad out of a plastic tray and took out her phone again.

€217.43

She did what she had already done four times since the morning: she looked at the line and waited for something to happen in her head.

Sofiane sat down opposite her with a coffee.

— All right?

— All right.

— You've looked at your phone six times in ten minutes. You never look at your phone.

Judith turned the handset face down on the table, screen against the Formica.

— It's my son.

It was not true, and she heard herself say it, and noted in passing how easily it had come out.

Sofiane drank his coffee.

— Right, he said. Whenever you want.

The afternoon was quiet, which in this unit means that only the expected things happened.

A disclosure appointment at four, in the small office at the end: a couple being told that their son, born at twenty-six weeks, will probably have lasting damage, and that nobody knows which, or how much, or when they will know. It is the paediatrician who speaks. The nurse is there for what comes afterwards, when people step out into the corridor and have to go somewhere.

Judith took them to the small room, made two coffees, and waited, standing.

The mother eventually said:

— We don't know what to do, now, right now.

— There's nothing to do now, said Judith. You're going to go home, you're going to sleep very badly, and tomorrow you'll come back at ten as usual.

The woman nodded. It was exactly what needed saying and Judith knew it, and she said it with real gentleness.

What she did not do, and what somebody else would have done, was sit down.

The shift ended at five past seven.

The Mercier baby had gained eleven grams. In neonatology, eleven grams in twelve hours is a good day; it is even, if you like, excellent news, and nobody in the unit put it any other way than as a figure written in a column.

Judith went home. She put a wash on. She ate pasta standing at the kitchen window, which she does four evenings out of five and no longer even hides.

Then she fetched her laptop, sat down at the table, and opened her bank's website on the big screen instead of the phone.

She clicked on the savings account.

It was the first time in eleven years that she had opened the detail of it.