Barriers to Entry

The term barriers to entry entered the lexicon some years back, and most often it's used in a business sense. People refer to industries in which companies need a lot of capital to get started as having a high barrier to entry. The same can be said of professions, such as law or medicine, that require a rigorous advanced degree. But as parents of a child in the NICU, the barriers to entry that Stephanie and I face every day are physical not metaphorical. Let me explain. When we arrive at the unit, we come to a locked security door. We can see through a window into the unit, but we can't get inside until we press a button and get buzzed in. Often the receptionist is away from her desk, meaning there's no one around to let us in. So we wait until the receptionist returns, or until a nurse or doctor walks by, presumes that we're parents eager to see our baby and swipes his or her ID to unlock the door.

Once inside the NICU, we encounter more barriers. We hang up our coats, stash our shoulder bags in a locker and begin the process of scrubbing up. We wash our hands, scrape the dirt out from under our nails, dry our hands and apply disinfectant. Then we pull on a gown, often struggling to squeeze our arms through the narrow ribbed cuffs. And then, finally, we go into Room 2, where Eli has resided since he was born nearly four weeks ago. There we encounter more barriers: a nurse who may be busy administering to him, the plexiglass walls of his incubator, or Isolette, as it's called, and, finally, after we reach in through the portholes to touch him or change his diaper, the tangle of wires and tubes to which Eli is tethered.

Mind you, I'm not complaining about any of this—the nurses, as Steph has said, are angels, and the state-of-the-art medicine is a godsend. I'm just trying to describe what we go through. Today, however, with the help of Liberty, a wonderful nurse, and Nori, the nurse supervisor, we were able to penetrate every last one of these barriers: Stephanie got to hold Eli against her bare chest for the first time, mother to child, skin to skin. The nurses wrapped a blanket around Eli and Stephanie to form a kind of pouch. This is called kangaroo care, and studies suggest that it offers great benefits to both child and parent. Judging from the expressions on Eli's and Stephanie's faces today—pure, unbridled love—I have no doubt that's the case.