Feeding Tubes and Tiny Wins in the NICU

Our daughter weighed less than my laptop when she was born at 31 weeks. I remember being escorted into the NICU, scrubbing my hands raw, and seeing this impossibly small person inside a glass box, more wires than baby.

My wife was recovering from an emergency C-section a floor away. For the first day, I was the one who could be there, and I had never felt so useless and so necessary at the same time. I couldn't hold her. I couldn't feed her. All I could do was put one washed finger into the incubator and let her grip it.

The nurses taught me to read the monitors. I learned what her oxygen numbers meant, what the alarms meant, which beeps to fear and which to ignore. I learned the word "desaturation" and hated it. Her feeds came through a tube thinner than a noodle, a few millilitres of my wife's pumped milk at a time, every win measured in grams.

Men aren't really told how to do this part. Everyone asked about my wife, about the baby — rightly. But almost no one asked me how I was holding up, sleeping in the waiting room, learning to be a father through a sheet of plastic.

The day they let me do "kangaroo care" — our daughter, skin to skin on my bare chest, all 1.4 kilos of her — I sat frozen for an hour because I didn't want to disturb the only thing I'd been able to give her: warmth. She slept. Her numbers stayed steady. The nurse smiled and said, "She knows her dad."

She came home after 47 days. She is a loud, furious, healthy toddler now who refuses to sit still for anything.

To the dads pacing NICU corridors: your steadiness counts. Your finger in that incubator counts. You are already her father, wires and all.