I’m standing, holding the door open looking, I suspect, a bit deranged. If I’m asked about this, I’ll have to put it down to a new experimental technique and hope no one thinks I’m having a nervous breakdown.
“I don’t want to,” Melissa finally says.
“And why don’t you want to go and get your son?” Silence. Happy to fill it. “Because then your son will almost certainly die. So really, we haven’t kidnapped him, have we? You must want him to be here as much as I do.”
Melissa nods, rubs her nose and starts crying, silently. I’m breathing heavily and as the adrenaline ebbs away I realize how insane this is. I’m standing in a room with a woman who had major surgery yesterday, whose child is in grave danger and who has had her entire life turned upside down by the Plague. What am I doing?
“Please know that the focus of everyone in this building is to get you and your son safely out of here as soon as we can after a vaccine is available, in the best mental and physical shape possible. I’m sorry, for— I’m sorry.”
Melissa nods. “No, it’s actually helpful. To know that I do want him here.” She looks at the bad floral print on the wall for a minute. “You wouldn’t have actually let me go in and take him, would you?”
“No, I wouldn’t.”
“Good. It’s good that people like you are keeping him safe.”
“We keep calling him ‘him.’ Any ideas for names?”
“I’ve always liked Ivan but I don’t know if it’s too weird.”
“Ivan is a lovely name. You should call him whatever you like best.”
Melissa gives me a wobbly smile.
I finish the session—if it can be called that—under the guise of Melissa meeting one of the nurses who will help her with the hazmat suit, but the truth is we’ve made the breakthrough we needed to. Melissa now understands that we’re not keeping her son here. She wants him to be here, desperately, because she wants him to live. Ivan. She wants Ivan to live.
The more I think about it, the more I think, though, that keeping the program secret from the mothers involved in it has been a mistake. It’s such a seductive lie: “To ensure the safety of your child, in these challenging times, we want to do an elective cesarean.” The reasons for the secrecy were practical. What if a mother disagreed with the proposed plan, and, in a highly vulnerable and potentially irrational emotional state, kept her child, infected him with the virus and then, once it was too late, changed her mind? The optics are so bad though, and the emotional ramifications are intense. For a lot of families in this building we—those working for the program—are the enemy. They understand why we’re doing what we’re doing, but they don’t trust us because we didn’t trust them. We lie to them. Tell them they need cesareans because of preeclampsia and then as they’re being stitched up whisk their sons away in a sterile incubator. I can’t blame them for looking at me like I’m the Antichrist.
As awful as it is to imagine that this facility will be needed for months and, potentially, years to come, soon there will be hardly any newborns. Babies are still being born having been conceived before the outbreak. That’s going to come to an end soon. And then, I can focus on the main part of my job: maintaining normalcy in abnormal circumstances. Parents are allowed limitless contact with the child and are encouraged to sleep at the nursery in their hazmat gear. Routine will be key although access to other children has to be limited due to practicalities. It’s harder to keep sterility when there are multiple people in a room. However, we’re planning to use video links to ensure that the babies have some knowledge of what a fellow child looks like.
I have to trust that we’re doing the right thing. Children aren’t meant to be raised in quarantine away from the outside world and their siblings, but the Plague was never meant to happen either. There are 8,054 boys in the program across a range of facilities and another three thousand or so will be brought in once they’re born. Eleven thousand lives saved. That can’t be a bad thing.