For the least of these

She smiled up at me as I rocked her and sang, an empty smile. The weight in my arms was all cloth and casts, and almost no baby. Little Abbie had been born a premature twin, the cord wrapped around her neck. "She wasn't breathing for a long time, maybe 5 minutes"mama told us, stolidly accepting that her baby might never be normal. Both little feet turned in, clubfeet slowly but steadily being corrected by progressive casting. Both she and her twin weighed in at a whopping 1.8 kilos that morning, all of 10 days old.

"The King will reply, 'I tell you the truth, whatever you did for one of the least of these my brothers of mine, you did for me." Matthew 25:40

The infant feeding program aboard is full of these stories - tiny children with cleft lip or palate who fail to gain weight, who cannot suck on a bottle, who inhale their milk like little Ana and die, or who stay alive through only sheer force of a mama's love and persistent prayer. We've sent one home now, dimples in the rolls on his knees, and sutures through the broken lip once he had gained enough weight for surgery. Two others on the ward this week are in stark contrast to each other, one now a chubby baby cheerfully waiting for a lip repair, the other on all of our hearts as he deteriorated slowly before our eyes...

Every muscle in his little chest and face pulled in, then out, working harder and harder to supply the tiny body with enough oxygen. Breathing 50, 60, 70, 80 times a minute, I wondered how long it would take before he suddenly...stopped. We prayed as we cobbled together an infant CPAP mask from anything we found in the pediatric drawer of the code cart, prayed as we held it to his face, thanked God as he started to kick and fight and struggle again. At 4 months old, Brian (not his real name) weighs barely over 6 pounds. Mama lovingly feeds him every two hours, a small syringe of milk down the feeding tube in his nose, somehow curled around and through the split lip and palate, down into the stomach. I was told he had been having some trouble over the last few days; now, only an hour into my shift, I had the sinking feeling that we were losing this little boy, losing another baby during the already heartrending Easter week.

We transferred Brian a half hour later to the Intensive Care Unit - to a ventilator that had miraculously arrived a week before and could provide continuous mask ventilation support to the tired lungs. I went with him, now suddenly turned into a pediatric ICU nurse, praying for all I was worth. He was an island in the huge ICU bed, tubes and monitoring wires in every direction. Only an hour later he peeked out around the coban that held the mask to his face, interacting with mom, breathing slowed to only 40 times per minute.

We call him the miracle baby. Not because of that long afternoon shift, and not because of anything that we have done. They told me that later in the night he again started having breathing difficulty despite the machine support. As the nurses prepared for intubation and the doctors discussed whether he would ever come off of machine support, the surgeon simply laid on hands and prayed. And seconds from intubation, suddenly Brian was fine. Breathing slowed, eased; oxygen saturation came back up to 100% with only a little blown by his face. No breathing tube, no mask, no problem. Things like that don't just happen. Babies don't go from acute respiratory distress to a sudden...calm.

I started this post a few days ago, planning to ask for prayer for little Brian, for our tiny feeding program babies. I am still asking for, pleading for prayer for this little one and a thousand others. But I do so with a full heart, knowing that our prayers are already being answered in incredible ways. He still cares, even for the least of these his children.