《新生儿》：内克尔医院里的六个月

A newborn baby weighs only 900 grams.

He lies in a warm box; the box is called an incubator.

His skin is almost transparent, like a thin sheet of paper.

The nurse must be very careful when applying tape; the tape will tear his skin.

There is a French journalist; her name is Goldszal.

When her son Lucien was born, she heard some very pleasant sounds.

She thought it was the child gently calling.

Later she learned that it was a sign that the child was having difficulty breathing.

The child was immediately sent to the ward.

She wanted to know what a child feels when he is born.

She also wanted to know what he experiences when doctors give him injections and insert tubes.

Intubation means putting a tube into his mouth to help him breathe.

To answer this question, she went to a hospital in Paris.

This hospital is called Necker Hospital; it is the busiest neonatal ward in France.

Newborns are newly born babies.

Sick children from all over the country are sent here.

She stayed here for six months, standing by the incubators every day watching these children.

The nurses in the ward all call the children by their names.

When changing diapers, they cover the incubator with a cloth.

This way, others cannot see him.

But the same child still has to be injected and intubated.

Around him are constantly beeping machines and very bright lights.

No one has asked him whether he agrees to these things.

Many of these children can survive.

Some children stayed in their mother's womb for only twenty-seven weeks.

The later ones stayed only until thirty-one weeks.

Of these children, ninety-four percent went home alive.

Those born even earlier stayed in their mother's womb for only twenty-five weeks.

Of these children, fifty-nine percent survived.

Of the surviving children, eighty-one percent had no serious problems.

She wrote what she saw into a book; the book is called Newborn.

Someone translated it from French into English, and the publisher printed it as a hardcover.

The book also quotes a sentence from the writer Ballard.

He said that his newborn daughter looked very old in the first few seconds.

Then she suddenly became very small.

The book says that new life appears where there was nothing before.

Doctors do their best to keep it from returning to that place.