baby hubie

In all my excitement about my startling pink pedicure, I forgot to tell you that Baby Hubie's family came to visit yesterday.

Shortly after my polish had dried and it was safe for me to wander around the wards again without smearing pink everywhere, I headed over to the office to pick up some papers I had printed. I saw Suey and stopped to say hello when I noticed the small family clustered around her. Mama, Papa, Pauline and their oldest child, a serious boy of six. The mama's face lit up when she saw me, and I went to give her a hug. As soon as I was within range, Pauline reached for me. I gathered her into my arms and her little hands threaded around my neck while she nestled her head into the corner of my shoulder. We gathered up all the nurses we could find who knew them and had a little reunion right there in the hallway. Mama's eyes were still a little shattered, but she leaned into our hugs and threw her arms around us and held on tight.

As I was getting ready to head back into the ward to finish my work for the shift, Hubie's papa grabbed my hand one last time. Through a translator he told us thank you. You are blessed, you people. You are blessed because you took care of my son. We will not forget what you did for our family. Thank you. I smiled to myself, realizing that it was the first time I had heard him refer to Hubert that way. My son, he had said. My son. A child unmarked by the scars that carve mirrored gashes in the cheeks of his other two children, but his son nonetheless.

And then we unwound Pauline from around our necks and she went willingly back into her mama's arms, snuggling in there just as comfortably as she ever had with us, and I knew that we had won. For all the days that I wondered whether or not we were making a difference for that family, yesterday I saw the truth.

So if the only reason this ship came to Benin this year was so that Hubie could come to us and die with us, I think it's enough. It's enough because a papa speaks of his son, not the boy. It's enough because there's a little girl who can rest her head on her mama's shoulder and know that she's going to be okay, a little girl who can climb into those arms and trust that she will find love there.

And love is enough.

A few of us nurses got together for a bit of a debrief today. We needed to sit and talk about and process everything that happened with Hubie, and since I was the one who was most involved, the one who helped him slip away, I got to head up the meeting.

It was informal. We sat around in an empty ward and we talked about what happened, all the medicine surrounding his death. And then we all cried about a little baby who we all loved. A little baby who had to go back.

After we'd been there for a while and the tissue box had been handed around more than once, I glanced towards the little window in the door of the ward. It's about four feet of the ground, that window, so I was more than a little surprised when I saw a tiny, brown baby with startled eyes dancing back and forth past the small pane of glass. I did a double take and when I looked back I realized that my friend Sarah was behind the action, holding the little one and waving him there for our amusement. I beckoned her in.

She deposited her charge on the lap of the first nurse she came to, disappeared and quickly returned with another little boy, this one slightly chubbier, but also sporting a little knit hat, just like the first.

Just like the tissues, we passed the babies around. We each took a turn, burying our faces in warm little necks, squeezing chubby thighs and feeling tiny fingers wrap around our own. And then, when we were done, we returned them to their mamas and we all went our separate ways, our hearts a little lighter.

Cheap therapy, that.

It happened at ten this morning. His papa had come in to visit, had listened while I explained that Hubert's small body was shutting down, organ by organ. His mama sat on the next bed over, in the same clothes she's worn for the last month, the silent tears tracking down her cheeks. And then, just like that, it was time.

We turned off the medications and disconnected the IV lines. We silenced the alarms and put him in a fresh diaper and I lifted him out of the bed and into his papa's arms. They sat there for a few endless minutes while the ventilator continued its relentless pulse and Hubert's heart slowed and his mama held his feet in her hands.

And then he slipped away. His heart stopped and we turned off the ventilator, took out the tube, removed all the wires and IV cannulas, covering the places with clean white gauze. His papa started to rock him back and forth, back and forth, speaking softly into his son's ears. I looked up at my translator who relayed his words. He is asking the baby to breathe. He says he should breathe now. He says he should try. And in my ear I heard the mother's cry, the same sound they all make when they know it's over. The high, keening wail that voices a grief that should never be felt.

They sat there, the small family, ensconced in their pain, while another translator rocked Hubert's sister to sleep on the other side of the ward. His papa finally looked up, asked us if we could bathe him and surrendered his son into my arms.

I had forgotten how heavy he was. He had been so small when he first came to us, but we had fed him and he had gotten fat and now the weight of him nestled against my chest was almost enough to stop my own breath. I laid him on the bed, and my eyes filled up and my translator chided me. Sis Alice, you must not cry. Don't cry now. I told him that I had done this before, I'd done this too many times before, and I always do it with tears in my eyes. His voice softened. Okay. You can cry. It's okay.

He looked like he was asleep and his curls were soft and fuzzy as I bathed him, removing all the traces of what we had done to him in our struggle to keep him alive. I gave him to his mama and she dressed him, looking startled when his little arms didn't reach through his sleeves like they used to.

One by one, the nurses who had cared for him came into the little sanctuary of his room, sat with his mama, poured out their love and their tears. And over and over I reassured them. It was quick. He went quietly. He was snuggled in with his papa, and he just slipped away. I signed forms and called the appropriate people and cleaned the ICU while my translator taught me how to sing in French, and I told everyone that I saw in the halls that I was fine.

But now I'm back in my cabin, and I can't stop thinking about what Hubie's papa said, right before they left. I want to say thank you, because I have seen the result of your efforts. I know why you are here. You have done well for us. And then they took their dead baby, strapped him to his mama's back so the taxi driver wouldn't charge them more, and they walked down the gangway.

I can see the tears in his papa's eyes, and that slight memory is enough to break me, to send me spinning across the floor in a thousand tiny pieces, my heart in splinters in my hands.

It's going to take some time to mend.

I should be asleep right now, not writing. I have to get up in a few hours, and the baby I'm going to be caring for is so sick. So very sick.

Oh Hubie.

I don't know if it'll ever get easier. Sitting with a family, explaining that the hope I told them to cling to is fading fast. Watching that single, silent tear track down a mama's cheek to hit the floor with a tiny splash. Pulling back blankets to let a papa touch his baby's foot before he rushes out into the evening, unwilling to sit vigil with his wife, his hard eyes suspiciously red.

It's so hard to pray for God's will to be done when I'm getting more and more convinced that His will isn't what I want.

So when I say Pray for Hubert, I mean so much more than that. I mean pray for his mama, because now, maybe so close to the end, she finally cares, and if he does go back to Jesus, it's going to hurt her. I mean pray for the doctors. We don't have a PICU doctor on the ship, so we've been pulling from the jumbled expertise of everyone around, doing the best we can. I mean pray for the nurses. We've been letting Hubie get a firm hold on our hearts for the past month, and now he's so sick, and we don't know what to do. It's so hard to look at a baby who was getting better, getting fat and happy, and see him pinned to the bed by tubes and wires, his little body shaking with each breath of the ventilator.

I keep praying for God to fill me back up, with love and strength and wisdom, so that I can go back into that room tomorrow and pour myself out again.

I'm starting to think I might be a little too broken to hold all that right now.

Today was horrible in so many ways. I'm drained, body and soul, and I just want to curl up under my covers and forget it ever happened.

Hubert took a turn for the worse this morning. He's now on a ventilator and still struggling to maintain the oxygenation in his blood. The pneumonia in his lungs is much worse, and we're not so sure there's a light at the end of the tunnel anymore.

Please keep praying. I know that's all I've been saying the last few days; pray, pray pray. But we're doing everything we can from the medical side of things, and so there's nothing else to be done.

There was so much more that happened, with another little baby who went back to Jesus, but I just can't talk about it right now because the weight of her body in my arms is still to fresh. I can still smell her on my skin and it's not fair that she was so small and so sick and that she never had a chance.

I'm going to go eat dinner and then I'll go check on Hubert and we'll all keep praying, right?

I'll be the first to admit that I maybe get a little too attached to my patients here. I don't know what it is, whether it's the brown skin so different from my own or the language separating us like a chasm. But there's something about this place and these people that challenges me to overcome those walls, something inside me that urges me closer than I've ever been.

It's no wonder that I was close to tears during my shift today.

I got a call in the morning asking if I'd be okay caring for the ICU patient instead of working as a charge nurse and I agreed and hung up before I remembered that it was Hubert in there and that I wasn't sure how he was doing. I showed up at two to find my little friend looking worse than I thought he would. His breath came in short gasps and in between crying he would cough a terrible little cough that made me want to pick him up and take all the pain away. His body was burning with fevers, his skin red and raw, and his mama sat helplessly beside him.

By dinner time, I was fairly sure that little Hubie was in a tailspin that would lead to him needing a breathing tube and a ventilator. I stood with the anesthetist and we wondered together how we would know when we were past the point of no return while Hubert laid in the bed, his heart racing so much faster than it should.

And then something happened. I'm not sure what, really. I don't know if it was the prayers that are going up all around the ship, all around the world really. Maybe the darkness was finally being pushed back enough that the light could shine through. But when Hubert's dad came to visit, the dad who wasn't sure whether or not he wanted to claim Hubert as his own, he asked to hold his son. He sat at the side of the bed, his little whimpering child in his arms, and he rocked ever so gently back and forth, back and forth, being careful not to dislodge the tubes and wires we've fastened to every part of Hubie's body.

Shortly before eight, when visiting hours are over, my translator called me over. I saw the question in the papa's eyes as the translator relayed the message. The dad would like to know if we could give the baby a bath before he has to leave.

Giving a bath to a baby who looks so bad isn't usually on my list of top priorities. Being able to breathe on his own seemed to be much more important right then, and I knew that having a bath might just send Hubert over the edge. But I looked again at his papa, who looked back at me with hope in his eyes and I knew that, no matter what happened, Hubert was getting a bath.

I gathered baby soap and towels and a basin of cool water, and mama and I worked together to wipe his sweaty body clean while papa hovered over the bed, holding tubes out of our way. We cleaned him from head to toe, applied fresh tape where it was needed, mixed up a new cream for his poor red bottom and snuggled him in with a clean diaper and fresh sheets. He fought us throughout the process, and I was fairly sure we had just sent him over the edge and that he wouldn't be able to stop his crying and coughing and struggling.

I watched in amazement as Hubert did precisely the opposite of what I expected. He opened his eyes, alert for the first time during my shift, and stared at his mama as she leaned over him, straightening the pillow behind his back. He fussed for a minute, and then I watched his mama do precisely the opposite of what I expected of her. Instead of sitting in stony silence by the edge of the bed, she reached into her bag and pulled out a little stuffed animal. She settled Hubie on his side, crooning to him in Fon, and the tucked the toy behind him to prop him up. She stroked his fuzzy head until he fell asleep, and then she took her other child, Pauline, for a bath. When they returned, she gathered sheets and pillows and settled all three of them into the big bed together, being careful not to disturb a still-sleeping Hubert.

Suey, who had been taking care of the family during the day shift, stopped by around nine to see how he was doing. I pointed to the bed and the three people sleeping together there, a mama and the two children that she had tucked in with love instead of harsh words, caresses instead of slaps.

You'll forgive us, I know, for coming so close to crying right there in that ICU.


Please keep praying. Hubert isn't healed yet, and we need to be storming the gates of heaven with our requests on his behalf. Thank you so much for standing with us in this fight.

Tonight at community meeting, we sang a song that nearly had me in tears.

You're the God of this City
You're the King of these people
You're the Lord of this nation
You are

You're the Light in this darkness
You're the Hope to the hopeless
You're the Peace to the restless
You are

There is no one like our God
There is no one like our God

It was when we got to the next part that my heart climbed up into my throat and my eyes misted over.

For greater things have yet to come
And greater things are still to be done in this City
Greater thing have yet to come
And greater things are still to be done in this City

Because there's a little baby lying in the ICU tonight who needs something great to happen in his life. He's not as sick as some we've had in there; he's still breathing on his own, but it's hard work for him and none of us is sure that we can see the light at the end of his tunnel quite yet. His name is Hubert. When his mama is feeling especially loving, she calls him Hubie, but that doesn't happen terribly often.

You see, little Hubie was born with a cleft lip and palate; he's had the surgery to repair his lip, but the roof of his mouth is still a gaping hole. When he was admitted, Hubie weighed less than eight pounds. He's nine months old.

Hubert's mama and four-year old sister sport matching scars on their cheeks, markings inflicted in infancy as part of the Voodoo religion. Hubert's cheeks are smooth and unblemished. When pressed, his mama revealed that she and her husband haven't had his face cut yet because they're not sure they want to claim him. And he lies in the bed, gasping and coughing as his mama sits by his side, her face an inscrutable mask.

I can't fathom it. I can't wrap my head around a system that tells you that your baby is cursed because of a birth defect. I can't come to terms with the fact that his mama cared so little about his life that he was probably just weeks away from starving to death when he came back to us. I just can't understand how you could look into the eyes of your tiny child and actually wrestle with whether or not you were going to take ownership over his life.

And now Hubie's sick. He's picked up a pneumonia, probably a virus that was going around the wards that attacked his already weak body, and he's covered in rashes, burning with fevers and gasping for breath.

But I firmly believe that greater things are still to be done here. We sang that song and I spoke the name of Jesus, because I know that in His name, there is no darkness that has power here, no evil that can cover Hubie's life.

Pray with us, will you? Pray that the darkness would be overcome, that Hubert's life would be saved and that he would be a testament to God's grace for his parents.

Pray for Hubert.