The Early Birds: A Mother's Story for Our Times - Hardcover

Minton, Jenny

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1400043832 ISBN 13: 9781400043835

Publisher: Knopf, 2006

Synopsis

In the winter of 2002, Jenny Minton delivered twin boys. She was thirty-one weeks pregnant, and her boys, conceived through in vitro fertilization, were more than two months early. Both boys were placed on immediate life support, and for sixty-four days they hovered, critically ill, in the neonatal intensive care unit of a New York City hospital. The Early Birds is a record of their time there and the story of Minton's harrowing, triumphant quest to bring her sons home.

With impeccable restraint, in sharp, unforgettable scenes, Minton takes readers into the heart of an experience that is both singular and with a significant increase in twin births over the last twenty years, and a commensurate rise in premature births increasingly common. She reflects with piercing candor on her persistent, often heartbreaking reckoning with her own guilt, and the inadequacy she feels for not having carried her boys to term. She examines how little she knew, and how little information doctors provided, as she entered the largely unregulated realm of assisted reproduction. She confronts her decision not to go back to work, and the overwhelming sensation that life has swept her away. She offers moving interrogations of science and fate, and the role of providence in conception. And she describes the glorious triumphs of ordinary life, even as she wrestles with the unanswerable questions that remain.

A fiercely intelligent, closely observed, powerfully gripping narrative about conception and childbirth, and a poignant and provocative journey into motherhood in an age of modern medicine, told with precision and indelible grace.

About this title

About the Author

Jenny Minton is a former book editor. She lives outside Hartford, CT, with her husband and three sons and is a freelance book-reviewer for the Hartford Courant.

From the Back Cover

"This is a book about real trouble and real courage, written with keen intelligence and great love. Jenny Minton is as honest about herself as she is about all the harrowing details of the birth of her boys. The writing of this book is a triumph on all directions."--Kent Haruf, author of Plainsong and Eventide

"The Early Birds is a powerful and moving narrative about a life-changing experience. Jenny Minton is a woman of courage, insight, humor, and generosity--all the qualities of a great writer and a great mom."--Sean Wilsey, author of Oh The Glory of It All

"Jenny Minton's passionate account of her struggle to become a mother, and then to keep her tiny babies alive, will resonate with every woman who has experienced the shocking alchemy of parenthood -- we give birth and are ourselves irrevocably changed. In this intimate memoir, Jenny meticulously records her own dramatic, and unexpected transformation from an ambitious young publishing executive into a desperate pilgrim in the unchartered territory of reproductive technology. We cannot help but share her despair as her sons fight for life, and then cheer as this brave new family finally makes its way home safely."--Katrina Kenison, author of Mitten Strings for God: Reflections for Mothers in a Hurry

Reviews

Minton, a former senior editor at Knopf, was 30 and unable to conceive. She and her husband tried various infertility protocols before finding success with in vitro fertilization. Minton's twin boys were born dangerously premature, at 31 weeks; they went immediately into neonatal intensive care, where they stayed for two months. Even after going home, they were medicated and monitored because they tended to stop breathing when feeding. Eventually their health stabilized and, 21 months later, Minton and her husband decided to unfreeze another of their fertilized eggs, producing a third son. While there are many infertility memoirs on the market, Minton's advantages set her work apart. She was young and healthy enough to undergo infertility treatment. Her employers were flexible. Her husband was able to support her with his generous paycheck, and her insurance company was willing to pay the $1 million she estimated the twins cost. Although the book's first half is riveting, Minton's comfortable situation turns the second half—when the twins are out of danger—into a sentimental monologue. Infertility memoirs are variations on a single plot: the struggle to give birth to viable babies. Once the mission is accomplished, mom's better off sharing the routine child-rearing stories with immediate family only. (Apr.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

At 30 years old, after nine months of trying to conceive, Minton and her husband turned to a fertility clinic. After in vitro fertilization, Minton gave birth prematurely to twin boys--Gus and Sam--each weighing only three and a half pounds. The boys spent 64 days in neonatal intensive care before their parents took them home to a lifetime of uncertainty about the effect of prematurity on their development. As they grew and began to catch up with other children, Minton's worries lessened but her concern remained for the implications of so many multiple and premature births to women impregnated via IVF. She offers a gripping account of the time from birth to release from the hospital to comfort and joy in parenthood. Minton laments that many fertility clinics separate the pregnancy from the actual babies. In this very personal, heartfelt look at her own pregnancy, Minton offers an enthralling perspective on fertility treatment and a generation of parents--and children--engaged in changes in the virtually unregulated arena of reproductive medicine. Vanessa Bush
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Prologue

Sam is breathing like a frog. I show my mother. I tell her, “I gave birth to a frog.”

She says, “They are going to be beautiful boys.” And she adds, “But it’s good you can say how you feel.”

I tell the nurse that Sam appears to be heaving more than Gus. I peek at someone else’s baby in a neighboring isolette. His chest is not going from cream puff to concave each time he breathes.

“They push the preemies here to see what they can handle,” she says. “He’s working hard, but we’ll see what the doctor decides to do during rounds. He might want to put Sam back on the respirator. They have to keep testing the babies to see if they are ready to come off.”

My mother wheels me back to my room, and when she and Dan go down later to check on the twins they learn that Sam is indeed back on the respirator. One of his lungs has collapsed.

“I knew it,” I say. “I knew it. How could those nurses not have seen that something was wrong with him? Why did the doctors wait so long? They were pushing him too hard.”

Dan paces around my hospital room, playing with the remote. “Dr.Vanderbilt said you have to start walking,” he says. I don’t even try. I do not want to recover.

Later that night, I am lying in my hospital bed sipping ginger ale; Dan is flipping through TV channels, when Alex, the nurse-practitioner, knocks on our door. With his gray beard and aquamarine scrubs, he resembles an elf. He says that Sam has taken a turn for the worse and we need to sign a release for a blood transfusion. Sam is in bad shape; his system has shut down. His oxygen levels are low. Alex tells us that we probably want to come downstairs.

I have to keep reminding myself that Alex is not a doctor, although people make that mistake since he is the only male nurse-practitioner working in the neonatal intensive care unit.

Partly because I am disoriented from painkillers, I still have no idea which turns we make to get to the patients’ elevator despite having made this trip several times. Dan wheels me through the glass doors.

A doctor in a white coat and several nurses hover around Sam’s warming bed. They will not let us into the room.

The head night nurse-practitioner steps out of the unit and steers us toward the nursing station. She has long, dark curly hair like Debra Winger in the eighties. She sits down on a desk and says, “Sam is very sick. He is not responding to our treatments. Of the forty-eight babies in the NICU tonight, I’m afraid Sam is in the worst shape.We are going to try him on an oscillator. It may be our last resort.”

Yesterday our nurse said we should be thankful that Sam was moved into Gus’s room because it is overseen by nurse-practitioners, called NPs. Sam’s old room was apparently run by residents, who were often making decisions based on a week’s experience in neonatology. In contrast, most of the NPs have been working in the NICU for several years. But is the head night NP’s knowledge of sick babies and last resorts even helpful? Is she employing a time-honored technique that gently forces parents to contemplate death as a possibility?

Sam’s CO2 level is too high, which means that although the respirator is pumping oxygen into his lungs, his body is not extracting the oxygen and releasing the carbon dioxide.

The floor is silent.No one is visiting at this hour, and aside from the huddle around Sam, there are only incubators, occasional beeps coming from behind the glass wall. It is a scene from one of the science fiction movies Dan watches, miniature babies in plastic bubbles, hooked up to computer monitors, the life’s work of some mad scientist.

Dan wheels me back to the elevator, through the maze, to my room. I rest all my weight on my arms and push myself out of the chair and into my bed. I slide away the tray with its stack of unopened puddings. It is two weeks until Thanksgiving. The cribs I ordered haven’t even arrived, and now I don’t know if I will need two. I begin to cry uncontrollably.

Dan fits himself into the bed and puts his arms and legs over me like a blanket. He has been sleeping in his jeans on the pullout chair for the last five nights.While trying to comfort me, he accidentally sets off the nurse call button and she runs in, the first time she has ever responded so quickly.

“We’re okay, we’re okay,” Dan assures her.

I take a Percocet. I start to feel the pill taking hold and I try to relax and give in to it. I believe Sam will die. Over and over I keep thinking terrible things happen, there is no protection from them. I am beyond anger, beyond the dread of having to go home from the hospital tomorrow leaving one of my babies here clinging to life and the other fading fast. Sam is falling away from me through a hole in the world. He should not be here yet. He has arrived and he will leave in a flash, without being hugged by his mother or father, without laughing or speaking, without our ever knowing who he really was.

I’ve had no more than a glimpse of Sam’s fair hair and remarkably symmetrical face and already my love for him is both particular and without specifications. He is the restless troublemaker, Baby B, who kicked a hole in his sac, atypically breaking his water ahead of Baby A and hurrying his brother out.He is a heartbreaker—full of promise—who struggled mightily merely to breathe until he collapsed. Am I grasping for clues? Encoded within Sam are thousands of genes not yet expressed and I can feel the elasticity of my tenderness toward him, how easily it could expand to cover any array of strengths and weaknesses. It is conditional only in that it is nontransferable. I love Gus equally and separately.

If Sam dies I will be left reaching out for a baby I never held.

Edition details

• Publisher: Knopf
• Publication date: 2006
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1400043832
• ISBN 13: 9781400043835
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 272