Coming home?

October 27. October We are lucky. How to be happy? I'm not sure. I don't know what happiness is any longer except the next moment.

The past two weeks have gone quickly, and the news has shifted rapidly. All good news, all the stuff of life, of persistence, of what is to come. The piece of me that was on the floor remains, and I feel scarred, but I'm still breathing, and the girls are all right. More than all right.

In brief, Estella is coming home, in just two short days, if all goes well with this next and final phase of their stay in the NICU. Tonight Jenny is "rooming in" with the twins, at the hospital, in a small hotel-like room down the hall from the NICU. Every few hours, she'll wake up and nurse Estella, and possibly Luna. If Estella does well, she'll come home Thursday.

While Jenny is with Estella, the nurses will be able to monitor Estella from the NICU. Estella will still be hooked up to her leads that keep track of her vitals. If there is a problem, the nurse jogs down the hall to see what's happening. The monitor is a tether, a lifeline.

Really we have been tethered, in so many places (heart, guts, mind) to the NICU itself, for ten long weeks. Amazingly, that's how long this has been going-on. Ten weeks as of tonight. The twins are ten weeks old, which makes them 37 weeks into gestation -- if they'd gone full term.

Estella is almost five pounds. She has been sleeping in the "open crib," and they've removed her feeding tube. No more sinuous orange line tucked into her left nostril, no more giant syringe flowing pumping breast milk from atop the unit. She has been feeding strictly from a bottle for over a week. For five straight nights, I held her in my lap, with her head resting on my knee, and I gave her a bottle. Down the hatch, all of it, every time. "You don't know how lucky you are," a nurse remarked last night. "I don't want to even think about the horrors I've seen," she said, and she shook her head. "I work here," she said. "You come like you guys do, you don't see it all. But I see it all, and it's not pretty." She wasn't articulate enough to describe what she meant. I could only guess. "Most kids born at 27 weeks, coming through here, have severe problems. You don't know how lucky you are."

Is she right? Are the problems -- like Luna's brain bleed -- looming? Will there be one tonight? Or is this something the nurses say to you, to make you feel special, to make you feel as if you've triumphed, either to make you feel as if what you have been through was not ordinary, when in fact it is, or to make you feel extraordinary, because it truly is that type of experience. I'm not sure. I don't want to guess or wager an answer. What is it the writer Gardner said? Revel in the questions themselves, not in the answers.

Stella looks, stunningly, like a small, full term child. Our child.

As for Luna, she is doing very well, too. I don't know what will happen tonight with her. She weighs three and half pounds, much less than Estella. Her body seems smaller (although they look more and more identical), and she may still require some tube feeding. But here is the thing -- the girl is a fighter. "She has come a long way, and she may need more time," the nurse said. "Babies like her rarely go home this soon, but she is doing very well...." When Jenny & I went to the hospital at lunch today, we discovered Luna & Estella in the same "double wide" open crib, decked out in the Halloween costumes that their grandmother from St. Louis had shipped. The adorable factor was thick in the air, almost overwhelming. Trick or treat? The nurse said, "I want her to go home with Stella." So there could be that happening, too, which is both wonderful and frightening.

At some point, in the last few weeks, we have inched from one anxiety and into another. Now that the twins look as though they'll survive, we worry now about our ability to handle them at home. I told a nurse about Jenny's fears, one evening, and she laughed. "We like a paranoid mom," she said. "It's good that she's nervous. That means she'll be a good mother."

I have no doubt of that. And I feel good about my ability to handle what may come, although confidence has nothing to do with the fear I feel.

I wish we could bring a monitor with us, and we may be required to do so. But if we don't, we will just have to be vigilant.