I Miss the Smell of the NICU
Sharp and sweet. A mix of rubbing alcohol, baby powder, and immeasurable parental love. That’s what the NICU smells like.
When I look at this picture of my little girl, Hermione, at Duke Hospital on October 5, 2011, I instantly get a whiff of tape and oxygen tanks and breastmilk. Her soft skin as I lay close to her and rub my nose against her shoulder lives in me as though I could walk through the doors of her room in the NICU and ease my head against the baby blankets in her crib.
The immediacy of that experience hasn’t faded in the least in the last decade. For that, I’m thankful. I don’t want to let it go because I don’t want to let her go.
The new baby smell is intoxicating. There’s a magic about the scent of a tiny person’s head that melts many of us. It definitely melts me. The NICU doesn’t have that same baby smell. There are hints of it, but it’s layered among the aroma of cleaning products and plastic gloves.
The NICU is full of barriers
The overwhelming physical contact of having a new baby is a hallmark of the parenting experience. The little one comes home and you can’t escape from their constant needs — nursing, washing bottles, changing diapers, load after load of laundry. While it’s infinitely wonderful to hold that little person, it’s also frustratingly overstimulating at times. So many times as a new parent of my other children, I craved a couple of hours, even a couple of minutes of not having another person touching me.
When you’re the parent of a child in the NICU, all of that immediacy is gone. Instead of constant contact, there are constant barriers between you and them.
To hold Hermione when she was in the NICU at Duke, I had to step out of the Ronald McDonald House a couple of blocks away. Then I’d either walk, take a shuttle, or drive to the parking deck. Across the building, I’d walk through the bright lobby and past the gift shop to a bank of elevators. Then I’d scamper up to the fourth floor where I’d have to check in to get buzzed through the sliding doors. Once admitted, I’d scrub my hands and put a hospital gown on over my clothes. Then it was a walk down the hall to a bay of four cribs behind another door. Hermione was at the front right of her unit. Barrier after barrier kept me from this tiny person who’d lived inside of me for more than nine months.
There were many days that I couldn’t hold her because she was too fragile. The Pierre Robin Sequence that she was born with included a cleft palate and a recessed jaw that blocked her airway if you didn’t hold her at just the right angle. It was safer for her to stay on her right side in her crib than for her mama to pick her up.
After her jaw extension by the tremendous Dr. Jeffrey Marcus when she was two and a half months old, Hermione could, at last, be held by the people who loved her. There were a cascade of other complications, such as the first of many seizures, that would keep her in that NICU crib for weeks after we could hold her within the hospital walls.
The smell of the NICU is a comfort for me because it’s an echo of my connection with her during those difficult times. I couldn’t pick her up, but I could lean down and feel close to her. It’s a way through the barriers of the NICU.
I may not be able to hold you, but we can get close enough to breathe in each other’s presence, and that will have to carry us through.
Comfort in the uncomfortable
Hospitals naturally make us uncomfortable because they are so clearly tied to bad things. If you have to go to the hospital, it must mean there is something wrong. That’s at direct odds with birth and new babies, which are hallmarks of life’s most optimistic peaks. When a family is spun into the NICU, it represents a deep valley, even as there is such fervent hope in these places.
A decade later and I’d go back again in a heartbeat to listen to her little heartbeat on the monitors.
Babies in the NICU are often impossibly small and almost always impossibly fragile. Even past full term, Hermione was tiny compared to her older brothers when they were born. I feel the weight of her in my arms still, wires carefully threaded over the arm of the chair and up to machines that beeped angrily if I tilted her at all to one side or the other.
The staff at both Mission and Duke were remarkable for my little girl. Nurses were close to her when I was nudged out of her unit every night. The smell of their perfume and the ease of their touch as they put in IVs or reattached feeding tubes linger with me. Those are things that a parent doesn't forget.
Hermione’s NICU stay started on July 19, 2011, when she emerged hollering on a hot summer night at Mission Hospital in Asheville, North Carolina. It ended on October 28th when I finally carried her out into the crisp fall mountain sunshine. A centerpiece of her journey were the weeks spent at Duke University Children’s Hospital in Durham. I passed through seasons without spending a night next to my brand new daughter, her without spending a night next to her mom.
For me, the NICU smell is forever equated with holding my little girl, and that’s something that won’t ever happen again.
Maybe part of the reason that I miss that hospital smell is because Hermione would spend more than three years in and out of the PICU after she left the NICU as she battled epilepsy. She eventually lost her battle not long before her fourth birthday.
I still smile whenever I get a nose full of hand sanitizer.
