Sahar’s Reviews > Newborn: Inside the World of Neonatal Care > Status Update

The paradox, Taymme explains, is that the memory of the neonatal unit, for both the children and their families, persists regardless of the severity of their condition. "These significant experiences leave lifelong scars that don't go away. And the words we use are imprinted forever in the minds of the parents."

Light, sound and physical pain act on the baby's genetic expression, which explains why some particularly sensitive premature babies later present with behavioural or neurodevelopmental problems. But the study also showed that such mutations are reversible.

She tells me that at one point, when she was working full-time in intensive care, she sometimes found herself having to tell more than one set of parents in the same week that their children were not going to make it. She would leave the hospital "feeling like a zombie".
"I was so sad all the time. I'd look at people in the street and think to myself, 'How lucky you are not to have become a doctor!"

The way a newborn is treated is like a mirror held up to the humanity of society and its ethics

Once you have a child, you learn about aspiring to the ordinary. You wish only for the normal. You hope for an average weight curve, and that your "typical" baby will hit regular milestones. Parents of babies in the hospital can only dream of such ordinariness. They must acclimatize as best they can to the distorted new reality into which they have been thrust.

To me, fiction is all-powerful: it can spend a thousand pages on a single minute or condense two centuries into a single paragraph.

Fiction is essential for understanding not only other people but also my own self, the me that predates my memories, the me that I was before my consciousness became that of the person I am today. I'm thinking not only of literature but of other forms of representation too - photography, film, music even -that offer us a way of embracing lives other than our own.

Writers have given voice to trees, horses and kitchen utensils. But the newborn in literature remains plunged in a terrible silence. Looking for it is like coming face to face with a gaping emptiness: a small shelf with a handful of moderately persuasive titles, a few novels, lots of memoirs, and of course specialist literature for medical practitioners.

Statistics show that among premature babies there is a higher survival rate for girls than for boys, and for babies of African descent.