FIRST PERSON
could appear so happy at such a scary time, and how we managed to remain optimistic during our son’ s months in the NICU. To understand this, you have to understand that for us, this was the best possible outcome. As soon as the doctors weaned me off the magnesium and my contractions returned, I gave up on the notion of a full-term pregnancy and a“ normal” delivery. Because we had been told how slim the chances were of our baby surviving, and because we had chosen, in one of the most difficult decisions of our lives, not to take any extraordinary measures, we truly believed that our baby would not make it through the delivery.
So when he did survive, somehow managing to breathe on his own for forty-eight hours before needing to be intubated, it was all better than we could have imagined. The worst hadn’ t happened, so how could we be sad or depressed? The outcome was still far from certain, and we would have to take things one day at a time, but we found ourselves feeling positive most of the time, because we were lucky enough to have a baby who was either a miracle, a fighter, or a little bit of both.
The NICU attending for the month of June, who helped to guide us through our first full month in the NICU, was a doctor by the name of Juan Sánchez- Esteban. I remember him as a soft-spoken man with a gentle, reassuring presence. One of the nurses told me he spent most of his time in the hospital lab doing research when it was not his month to be on duty as the attending neonatologist. Back then, the NICU babies were housed together in large rooms called bays rather than in individual rooms, one per family, as they are now. For the sake of privacy, families had to leave the NICU twice a day when the doctors were doing rounds, so our daily interactions were mainly with the nurses rather than the doctors.
But in the brief conversations we did have with Dr. Sánchez-Esteban, I can remember him telling us that little William was so much on his mind that he had dreamed about him and about when the right time would be to remove his breathing tube( our feisty preemie kept trying to remove it himself before he
34 RHODE ISLAND MONTHLY I MAY 2026