What is a Christian? The Story of Baby Wanted

The Teddy of Baby Wanted (Photograph by Glynis Smy)

I was told a patient was arriving unattended into my unit, I prepared a room for a very sick dying child, I assumed the word unattended meant the parents were bringing the little one in themselves, it’s always wrong to assume. A porter arrived with a goldfish bowl (baby transporter) he brought a baby from the special care unit, I was on Paediatrics.

The child was ten days old; the condition was terminal, a dying little boy. He had one small teddy, that’s it, nothing else that is all he had in the world; I still have the teddy (special permission granted me this gift).

I saw his disabilities, too horrible to share on here; it was obvious he would not last many days. I went to the office to read his notes quietly and to find out the next of kin details. I attended church on a Sunday until seventeen, I then let life take over my faith, I still had faith but I was engaged to a non believer and adjusted my lifestyle to accommodate both important things in my life. The third important thing became my nursing career, it was here my faith was challenged, how could a God allow innocents to lose their lives, oh the sweet words of “he needs an angel” and “he only takes the best” helped at times, but by now I was nineteen and had seen more horrific and peaceful deaths than my friends of the same age, I was calling God to task, to justify to me what his reasons were and where was my place in his world, what did God want me to be or to do? For many years from the age of nineteen I followed this path of wondering, I tried to be the best person I could, I worked with Sunday church goers and often wondered what they considered a good Christian was, I never got the answer I was looking for. I bought my children up to be good, kind and generous with their love for others, they make me proud today as they learned their lessons from Mother well.

After reading the notes of Baby Wanted, I realised as he had a massive head and his nerve endings protruded through his spine, he needed special handling. The pain for him by one wrong movement was dreadful and to heavily sedate him was not an option because of other physical problems, we had a task on our hands, a real hard duty of care, something I decided was my responsibility and as others were shying away from his room it looked as if the vote had already been taken. I changed my duty rota and made special arrangements with senior management putting forward my opinion and plan of care, they agreed I would be having regular breaks over a long shift period, it would then be reviewed as to how I was coping, I had one team member who agreed to be my support and his carer when I was not around.

This reads very dramatic and fanciful but it was real, it happened, it is not an ‘I was a hero/heroine ‘statement just a fact of life on a ward that had to cope. You want to know more about the baby don’t you? Well Baby Wanted was under discussion with the team of doctors on their morning fly by, one doctor relayed that Baby Wanted was the child of a married couple who were shocked by his birth defects and was unwanted, (see where I got the name from?) anyway, they did not want to know anything about him until he was dead, then they would arrange the undertakers to take him directly to the chapel of rest in town and not to the hospital morgue.

My role of ‘special nurse’ (a real title in hospital not my invention) had begun, the care was constant and heartbreaking and for hours just very quiet, feeding him was a challenge and after a while he found a comfortable way of sucking on his bottle that did not cause pain. It had been decided that as he had a clear passage way and he had a strong suck he would have a little feed on a regular basis, this was a special time for me as I could see his eye, yes, eye, a little blue diamond. A pattern formed, his carer and I shared shifts for seven and a half days, we are still close friends today, something bonded us, this little boy left a legacy, a friendship.

I was on a coffee break when a midwife approached me and asked after baby x, I said oh you mean Baby Wanted and went on to explain his name, she told me his background. She had delivered him and his family went into shock, she said they made a decision in under five minutes that they wanted to go home without him, as soon as his mother was fit enough to leave, she had given birth naturally with light drug assistance, his head became swollen and misshaped after delivery. The midwife tried to reason with them and to get them psychological support before they were due to leave but they had made up their minds.