Precious Life From the Lord
The Trials of Having a NICU Baby
“Two months early.” That’s what my wife and I keep saying during nearly every drive to and from the neonatal intensive care unit (NICU) in a hospital near downtown Cincinnati. Our second born, a son, is living there until he can eat well enough to come home.
If you’ve ever had a baby in the NICU, you know the strangeness of not having him present in your home—not being able to hear his cries and console him. Of seeing him wired to machines and hooked up to monitors, watching as a doctor and his team look him over, speaking in the jargon of modern medicine. Though the doctors and nurses have been wonderful, the whole experience is unnatural, a time that my wife and I want to pass as quickly as possible.
Andrew, my first son, was born in July 2023 and didn’t seem to want to leave his mother’s womb. He came at 41 weeks, after nine hours of induction failed and an emergency C-section was needed because his heart rate was dropping.
The story of how our second son came into the world, as you already know, is far different.
At 31 weeks pregnant, my wife said the dreaded words to me as I drove down the main street of a local town: “I think my water broke.” We then sped home, called a friend from church who came over to watch Andrew (now almost 15 months old) as he slept, and then made a mad dash to a hospital emergency room about 30 minutes away. A doctor quickly confirmed later that night that my wife’s water did in fact break.
Once the immediate emergency was cleared up—after some basic checking over by the doctor on call, we were informed that our baby was doing fine—another problem emerged: the prospects of my wife staying in the antepartum wing of the hospital for weeks, even over a month or more, due to the danger that our second son could come at any moment. Our lives, at least in the short-term, were going to be fundamentally altered. Fortunately, my mother-in-law drove down a couple of days later from Michigan to stay with me and Andrew and accompany us as I drove back and forth in our recently-bought minivan to visit my wife in the hospital each day.
Only a week later, our second son decided he didn’t want to have anything more to do with being in his mother’s womb and pooped (making his environment in the womb hazardous), thus making a C-section necessary.
On September 26, Nathanael Roger Sabo was born at 9:19 pm, weighing 4 lbs., 3 oz.
But instead of being able to hold him, Nathanael was quickly surrounded by a neonatal team and soon after was whisked away to the NICU. Shortly following his birth, I thought of Psalm 139, verses 13-14, which gave me comfort: “I will give thanks unto thee, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made; marvelous are thy works, and that my soul knoweth right well.” Though he wasn’t going to be immediately present in our lives in his first weeks, God presented us with another gift that he fashioned, to bring up “in the nurture and the admonition of the Lord,” as St. Paul wrote in his letter to the Ephesians.
We named him Nathanael, meaning God has given. In St. John’s Gospel, Nathanael was the friend whom Phillip brought to meet Jesus at the end of the first chapter—the man whom Jesus called the “Israelite in whom there is no deceit.”
Months ago, I was reading St. John’s description of the wedding at Cana (the text of the sermon preached at my wedding) and my eyes flitted up the column to Chapter 1, which recounted the story of how Nathanael, who in church tradition is generally thought to be the Apostle Bartholomew, believed Jesus was the Messiah after Jesus saw him under a fig tree. Here’s the rest of how that interaction went:
“Rabbi, you are the Son of God! You are the King of Israel!” Jesus answered him, “Because I said to you, ‘I saw you under the fig tree,’ do you believe? You will see greater things than these.” And he said to him, “Truly, truly, I say to you, you will see heaven opened, and the angels of God ascending and descending on the Son of Man.”
The Lord has been kind and gracious to my wife and me—and has given us a gift that we will always be thankful for.
We’re grateful for the many prayers of family, friends, and the members of our church and other churches who prayed for Nathanael’s safe passage, and for his strengthening so that he can come home as soon as possible. The church provides such comforts—from its head, Jesus Christ, the people he has installed to lead it, and those who fill its many congregations.
Another gift is the countless reminders in God’s holy and inspired Word of the blessings of children. Psalm 127, verses 3-4, remind us: “Lo, children and the fruit of the womb are an heritage and gift that cometh of the Lord. Like as arrows are in the hand of the giant; even so are children of the young children.” And as Matthew 19:14 recounts, “but Jesus said, ‘Suffer little children, and forbid them not to come unto Me, for of such is the Kingdom of Heaven.’”
I close with the collect from the Churching of Women from the 1662 Book of Common Prayer: International Edition:
O Almighty God, we give thee humble thanks, that thou hast vouchsafed to deliver this woman thy servant from the great pain and peril of childbirth: Grant, we beseech thee, most merciful Father, that she through thy help may both faithfully live and walk according to thy will in this life present, and also may be partaker of everlasting glory in the life to come, through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.
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