Failure To Thrive

The funniest thing we have seen happened during Monday night clinic at the babies' hospice, and tragically we could not capture it on camera. The babies' hospice is where the sickest, dying infants and toddlers live out their lives, provided for by two caretakers who spend all their time making bottles and changing diapers (in only a few regimented time slots per day, regardless of need, because they're unionized). The hospice is just a small room with about 6 lead-painted cribs, 10 children, and a baby gate at the doorway. The kids range in age from newborn to 3 years old, but none of them have any real verbal skills and only one or two can walk or even stand. The others who are old enough just have not had the strength or time spent with adults needed to acquire these developmental milestones.

They are ravenous for attention and human contact, though, down to the smallest and most feeble among them. Every time someone walks by the doorway, the ones well enough to be playing on the floor (though I've only seen one toy) will rush over to the gate, crowding it and begging with their hands and eyes to be picked up and held. Some can say "ma" and repeat it over and over plaintively. If you give so much as brief eye contact to one baby, who lights up immediately, the others will hit or scratch the lucky one and attempt to push him out of the way. The acoustics in a dome are amplifying, so that if they are all crying simultaneously, the chorus of lonely unanswered misery is deafening. It is a mad, mad world.

Yet when you play or hold one of them, you discover that they can play peekaboo, or imitate words, or feed themselves with a spoon. They are loving and adorable and easily entertained. Of course, regardless of age, they will put on a heartrending stare of disbelief and bewilderment when you finally have to put them down and wave goodbye. If they are sated, they will blow you kisses in return, but more often than not you leave the overwhelmed caretakers with one more wailing baby.

ANYway, the babies' hospice is in an adjoining dome to the adults' hospice, some of whom have children (who may or may not be sick). One of the women living in the hospice has a friendly, fat little toddler named Dorris. On this particular evening, Dorris was leaning over the baby gate of the hospice, watching all the action, when she suddenly figured out how to open the gate. She gleefully swung it wide open, and instantly the gaggle of mobile babies started spilling out the door. They looked for all the world like they were sprinting for freedom, in any way they knew how - one toddling, one sitting and scooting impressively fast on her diaper, and one crawling strangely on her knees and elbows like an inchworm. Within a minute at least four of them had escaped and were headed towards the living room dome. They were easy to catch up with and collect, and seemed to enjoy their brief respite from their monotonous lives.

Here is a slideshow of that night's clinic: