The NICU Diaries

Normally, I keep my personal life out of this blog, but today I’m gonna break that rule.

I’ll often relate movies to what’s going on in the world as a part of talking about them but that’s just a part of analysis; my own perspective is a necessary piece. However, not being meaningfully trained in this regard, I worry about this casual blog being incapable of meeting the demands of a moment. That dissonance has been amplified over the last two months surrounding the birth of my daughter, which was a complex affair, and heightened my insecurities around my silly blog’s place in the world. If I feel complicated about addressing what’s going on Out There through writing about movies, how can I address what's going on In Here? Ultimately, I write to help myself understand and process the hard stuff in life, because movies help me do it, and because I like to do it.

I’ll mostly be talking about our journey through our daughter’s premature birth, month-long NICU stay and only talking a little about the movies I was watching through it all. They didn’t have much to do with what I was going through, since this was a time when I was looking to engage deeply with ANYTHING else. On a happy note: our daughter has been home with us for a few weeks now and we’re doing great if a bit tired. If you don’t want to engage in a difficult but ultimately happy story about this stuff or think what I’m doing is irresponsibly trivial, I really get it. Grace (our daughter) was never in as serious condition as some of the other babies in the NICU unit, but even I get envious of healthy pregnancy stories around me. Remembering that all isn’t as it seems and not letting others’ happiness upset me is for me to work on.

We were diagnosed with a complicated pregnancy early on, which likely saved the lives of both my wife and daughter but also cast a cloud over what had been a joyfully expectant time. We always felt comfortable with our doctors’ plans and were also blessed with fantastic care. We were told around 28 weeks that my wife would need to be checked into the hospital at 32 weeks for monitoring before a scheduled C-Section at 35 weeks; the nature of her complication meant that my wife wasn’t in imminent danger unless she went into labor, and this was the safest choice. This timeline meant we had to cancel our planned baby shower, cancel a few last trips to see family, and hunker down before spending the last three weeks of pregnancy living apart so I could take care of the house and dog.

Through all the complications and hard news, we managed to keep the gender of our baby as the last happy surprise; in the OR, it was a magical moment when we first heard her cry, and our OB announced we had a girl. Moments later, we were told she wasn’t breathing strongly enough on her own, and we would have a quick moment with her before she would be taken down the hall to the NICU. Staying with Caroline for a couple of hours to help her recover, I didn’t get to see Grace until she was all set up in the unit. She had leads attached to her chest, an IV in her tiny wrist, and the tiniest CPAP mask attached to her face. She was 4.5 pounds at birth, and there was something extra sad about the existence and application of preemie-sized medical equipment; it’s the kind of stuff that feels like it should only be used for adults. The NICU she was in, receiving amazing care, was bay style, meaning a lot of large, shared rooms, further meaning I had to walk past twenty tiny hospital beds with twenty tiny babies all using pieces of tiny equipment every time I went into the unit. It was something I became inured to rather fast, but it never felt like a happy place to be.

Fortunately, this style means every baby receives care from teams of nurses and doctors. For all its difficulty, there was beauty in watching a world-class team at work celebrating every little milestone. Progress was slow, and we had what the care team described as the normal experience – two steps forward, one step back. After two weeks in the most high-acuity room, taking opportunities to hold her and change diapers while maneuvering around cumbersome leads and wires and feeding tubes, while staring at monitors I learned how to read, we started seeing improvements. One day, we returned to find the CPAP mask removed; a few days later, the machine it connects to was gone. A few days after that, the IV was removed. Then she was moved into a lower acuity setting, and she began gaining weight and her jaundice faded. Throughout it all, we fretted constantly over how much of her feeding volume was taken by mouth, a key indicator of readiness for discharge. As the days crept by, it took both of us awhile to realize that the snacks on a shelf near the entrance offered to “the NICU families” at no charge meant us. Speaking of us, there is no one I would have rather done this with – no better teammate, partner, friend or support system than my wife. Since we had to be a “NICU family”, I’m glad it meant Caroline.

After Caroline was sent home from the hospital to continue a smooth recovery, we began structuring our days around spending a couple of hours in the NICU for a feed. Though I had to work during the three weeks of her antepartum stay, I was afforded generous and flexible parental leave, as well as helpful family support, that allowed me to make visiting Grace and taking care of Caroline my only responsibilities. We didn’t know initially that we were looking at a month-long process, but when that reality settled in taking care of ourselves to keep from burning out was key. Part of that was your standard exercise, decent nutrition (and plenty of comfort food, for the soul), getting fresh air, etc. but naturally a part of it for me was movies. Keeping up a steady diet of movies was important to me to keep a piece of my life normal, and while I mixed in plenty of my favorite re-watches for comfort, tackling films on my watchlist felt meaningful and productive.

I spent a lot of the time Caroline was in the hospital polishing off my watchlist for 2024, specifically the Oscar Nominees. I wrote plenty about them already, but what I didn’t mention was just how much throwing myself into the charade of Awards Season meant to me in terms of preserving normalcy. Furthermore, my wife and I decided to host our annual Oscars Watch Party, featuring a “picks pool” that includes our friends from out of town, and getting to do that during an exhausting and overwhelming month meant a lot.

The Awards Season mad dash didn’t leave a ton of time for other movies, but I squeezed a few in. Here's what I spent my time rewatching:

A Few Good Men is by no means a perfect movie, and maybe the weakest artistically that I saw in this stretch of time; it doesn’t matter. What matters is the excellent dialogue delivered by absolute stars that I can almost quote wall to wall, and justice being served.
All the President’s Men is a prime example of a movie I just love being inside. I like spending time in the WaPo newsroom; I like spending time with the pairing of Redford and Hoffman; I like the shadowy late-night meetings with “Deep Throat”; I like the D.C. paranoia; and I like every time Jason Robards shows up to steal the show.
The Godfather is maybe my favorite movie ever and maybe the best movie ever, but what drew me to it this time around was its length and familiarity. I’m at the point with this movie where I’m barely following the plot anymore because I’ve seen it so many times, I’m just waiting for my favorite moments and reveling in its top-to-bottom perfection.
The Day of the Jackal, on the other hand, is as is as tautly paced, gripping, and methodical as they get; it’s impossible to be outside of this movie when it's on.
Yes, some aspects of Rio Bravo haven’t aged well, but it’s hard to top spending time in it. John Wayne and Dean Martin contending with themselves, each other, and a band of criminals in the titular and prototypical Western town filled with saloons, stables and saddles is what it’s all about.

And these were new to me:

To Live and Die in L.A. is a stylish, thrilling, occasionally searing cop drama that is more than just a worthy successor to the inimitable French Connection in terms of its aesthetics and visceral thrills, but also adds a ton of psychological depth to its cops gone rogue.
Odd Man Out, the 1947 noir (probably my favorite genre) that Carol Reed made before 1949’s The Third Man, was on my watchlist for a long time and I was thrilled to check it off. What starts as an engaging Belfast-set heist film featuring the IRA surprisingly turns into a moral fable featuring an ensemble of eccentric characters debating what to do with the injured leader. It’s twisty, exciting, and deeply thought-provoking in a way that I wasn’t prepared for.
Blue Velvet was my foray into the filmography of David Lynch after his passing, and I figured this was a good place to start. He paints an idyllic American suburb with bizarre, violent, dread-laden, and sexually transgressive dark corners in a singular way; shamefully my first Lynch, but certainly not my last.
The Bad and the Beautiful wasn’t quite as strong as I was hoping, based on its reputation as one of the great sleazy, twisty Hollywood films, but it was still very strong. I loved the structure, juggling three co-leads who take turns telling their stories of Kirk Douglas’ excellently unscrupulous producer, and found the writing mostly sharp, but its melodramatic tendencies took the edge off.

After seeking some comfort and familiarity in my favorite movies, and finding a couple of new ones, the day finally came when we could bring her home. Naturally, movies have been a part of our time together ever since, and I know they’ll keep being a part of our family as we grow together.