《新生儿》：内克尔医院里的六个月

The premature babies in the incubators weigh only around 900 grams, measure barely 50 centimeters, and their skin is so thin it is almost transparent.

Even applying a piece of tape can tear the skin off.

When French journalist Clémentine Goldszal first heard her son Lucien breathe, those sounds seemed sweet to her.

Only later did she learn that they were signs of acute respiratory distress.

From that moment on, what she wanted to understand was no longer whether the sounds were pleasant.

According to the book reviews, the goal she set for herself was to figure out what birth actually means for a newborn.

And in what way injections, intubation, and repeated examinations are experienced by these children.

To that end she spent six months stationed in the neonatal intensive care unit of Necker Hospital in Paris.

According to one independent book review, this is the busiest neonatal intensive care unit in France, and sick infants from all over the country are sent here.

The first thing she noticed in the ward was that everyone here called the children by their names.

When changing diapers, the nurses would cover the incubator with a blanket to shield the child from others' gaze.

And yet in that same incubator, these children were injected, intubated, and lay amid machines that never stopped humming, under harsh lights.

Not one person ever asked for their consent.

Whether these children could survive is partly answered by the numbers given in the book.

Of infants born between 27 and 31 weeks of pregnancy, 94 percent left the hospital alive.

For children born at 25 weeks, the survival rate was 59 percent.

Among the children who survived, 81 percent had no serious complications.

Goldszal turned her six months of observation into a book, titled simply Newborn; the English edition runs 272 pages.

The book was translated from French into English by Natasha Lehrer, and Pushkin Press published the hardcover edition.

The book quotes a line from the writer Ballard.

He said that in the first few seconds after his daughter was born, she looked extremely old, and then suddenly became very young.

What a newborn is actually experiencing, no one to this day can give a complete answer.

Goldszal writes in the book that new life appears where originally there was nothing at all.

And what medicine can do is try its utmost to keep it from returning to nothing.