The Technological Womb

Some may call it stalking, but for three of the last four summers, I have spent six to eight hours a day following nurses around the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit at Bronson hospital. Wherever nurses went – patient rooms, the supply closet, the break room, or the bathroom (I waited outside) – I followed.

“Are you pre-med?” families would ask me.

Nope, just making money.

My stalking, paid by the hour, was actually part of a large study conducted by the Department of Industrial & Manufacturing Engineering at Western Michigan University.

My job, to quote a description from Stephanie Means, a doctoral student (and my boss), was “[to use] work sampling & time study techniques to investigate the relationship between patient acuity, productivity, and time standards within the [NICU], collecting daily nursing activities performed with and without the patient using Quetech Worksampling software, collected distance traveled data using pedometers.”

Basically, a solider in a complex research project.

As a “Student Research Investigator,” my task was to follow nurses and record their activity in a Palm Pilot. Every diaper change, every feeding, every lesson on breast-feeding.

I learned a lot.

The NICU is where premature babies go. Babies you could hold in one hand, wrinkled yet unripe, who don’t cry but screech.

I saw, families who spent every minute in the room and parents who showed up once or twice a week, patients who were sent home as well as to the morgue.

Nothing was certain in the NICU – one moment I would doze off and the next a group of nurses would be sprinting to a room where an alarm was sounded.

Over the last 50 years, technological advances in neonatology have allowed more premature newborns live.

These patients owe their life to the technology: continual monitoring, continuous positive airway pressure (CPAP), in room x-rays, new medicines – technology to, as one nurse told me my first year, simulate the womb.

These babies are born into a time where the headlines read “OBAMA- Racial barrier falls in decisive victory.” (New York Times, November 5, 2009) – yet the town they are born in has an anti-discrimination ordinance that continues to be challenged by petitions, where housing remains segregated largely by race and income.

Born in a time of financial collapse and religious fanaticism, moral ambiguity and melting ice caps: the end of the world seems to creep down many different avenues at once. Kind of like how death creeps up in the NICU – each infant has its own number of health problems, no one a “text-book” case.

Nothing in the world is perfect, no plan for positive change or destruction. It was as if the 4th floor of the North Pavilion was a vortex where the problems of the world stay on the other side of the window. Along the three hallways of the NICU there were all struggles for life, for relationships and family that 10,000 square feet could contain.

These infants have spent their last few days, weeks, months, fighting for a life they still have yet to live. Six, seven, eight months in their mother’s womb. Now they are in an Isolate womb, a womb under incandescent lights, a climate controlled womb, hooked up to IVs that act as umbilical cords, providing nourishment.

The role of “mother” transferred to a team of nurses, doctors, surgeons, and respiratory therapists.

But the whole idea of “saving” a life is different than anywhere else in the hospital – in the NICU they’re actually “starting” the life, continuing the process that began at conception.

During shift report, nurses always begin with the baby’s name and their birth date – one I heard the other day was on August 15.

What was I doing nine days ago? Partying, being anxious about whether I should make a move with a girl I have been crushing on for a few weeks, trying to decide if I really need an Apple Bluetooth keyboard and mouse, or debating on what brand of Greek yogurt I should buy at Meijer.

These tiniest of patients have not yet fallen into the pressures of society to conform.

They are trying to adapt to life, not a set of images and stereotypes. Technological advances in the last 50 years have increased the likelihood that a premature baby will make it out of the hospital alive, but technology has also brought new weapons for humans to kill each other as well as new technologies that entertain people to death.

In The Wisdom of the Heart, Henry Miller says that the “womb” is all around us.

“As the dictionary says,” Miller writes, “the womb is a place where anything is engendered or brought to life. As far as I can make out, there is never anything but womb. First and last there is womb of Nature; then there is the mother’s womb; and finally there is the womb in which we live out life and being which we call the world.”

There is constant creation and nurturing throughout life similar to that of the mother’s womb.

Death, pain and misery are really just a lack of it.

We think that once we have grown up, we must find everything we need, provide provisions ourselves.

Technologies like social networks and always on smart phones nourish the pixilated images we have created of ourselves.

These images, stillborn on web servers across the globe, nurture our egos while our heads are hunched over monitors and our fingers pluck away on our cell phones. We grow blinded by the lights and mute from our silence, thinking we must create a new and unique world to live in.

We just have to make a choice to what kind of life that will be.

Fritz Klug, the Western Herald news editor, is a senior majoring in Latin.

Short URL: http://www.westernherald.com/?p=7247

Posted by heraldstaff on Aug 25 2009. Filed under Blogs, Breaking. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback to this entry

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