Emma has surgery on Friday. The goal is to close the half-dollar sized hole in her belly. She refused to sleep last night. She's now 8 days old and starting to act more like a fussy little baby than someone who is in great pain. I held her pacifier for nearly 2 hours last night trying to help her go to sleep. She's too strong willed for that. She's had a go at pulling out virtually all of her wires and succeeded. That's our girl. I left around 230 am and Ashley took over at 4.

I feel like I've been awake for 8 days. Sunrise and sunset are suggestions of the passing time, but the moment since induction is continuous. The ward is filled with tiny lives, barely begun, having to fight for a world that most take for granted. Outside the hospital, the streets are busy. Drivers cut off pedestrians to futilely capture a few more hurried seconds that are lost in their memory once they arrive at their destinations. This is a life, unrealized by its victim, that is governed by a checklist: eat dinner, read email, and watch television. The seduction to do without thought is omnipresent in our culture. It is a sedative for the peripheral fears that reside within its host. Inside the hospital, the children in the ward did not ask for their burden, but they assume it with the courage and determination that sleeps in us all.

A baby in the corner of Emma's room won't make it. The doctor said she is, "waiting to die". She weighs barely a pound. She is never visited. She carries with her the corporeal limits of a body and mind unable to escape the boundaries of human existence. I need to apologize to her. I am sorry baby girl, on behalf of all of the hours wasted in this world that deserve a better home in your hands. I hope that in your rest you dream of the love that is and not of a love that will never come to be. Today is your day. For everyone else, they call it Wednesday - just another day.