My junior year of high school I had chemistry with Mr. Baker. Behind his head was a large clock with a black hour hand and minute hand. It had a red second hand that, as you already know, made its complete rotation every 60 seconds. It had big black numbers to measure every five minute interval. The fact that I had no way of ignoring the clock made that third period class just before lunch the longest class of the day. I remember one particular morning seeing the minute hand on the seven, twenty-five minutes till twelve. I was hungry and ready for a break and time stood still.
All of modern science flows back to Albert Einstein's Special Theory of Relativity and his General Theory of Relatively. In that theory, time became a part of his equations. He called the phenomena of time and relativity, spacetime. He postulated that for an object traveling near the speed of light, time would virtually stand still. Albert Einstein must have reached this conclusion in the NICU of a hospital.
In the NICU time stands still. There are clocks everywhere. Big clocks, small clocks, wall clocks, digital clocks. Every wall and surface hosts a clock of some sort. The reason for this is that the charting of any particular baby includes the time. This might be the time the baby eats. The time the baby poops. The time a particular medical devise is put on or taken off. There are any number of reasons the nurse needs to know the time. Also for hygiene and safety reasons, the nurses don't wear watches.
The room where I cuddled a baby girl this morning had three clocks. There was a clock on the wall beside me about the size of a clock radio. It had an hour hand, a minute hand and a second hand. But I couldn't see that clock if I didn't turn and look over my right shoulder. And then northwest of my field of vision was a digital clock on a monitor. Besides constantly displaying the heart rate, respiratory rate and other bodily functions, there was this digital clock. The display, about three quarters of on inch tall, ticked off the hour, minutes and seconds one by one. Under the clock, in smaller letters was the digital date. The digital hours didn't seem to be moving any faster than the digital date. I could see this clock while I rocked my little girl. But the clock that was the problem was the one right in front of me. This was the old-fashioned large wall clock, exactly like the one in Mr. Baker's chemistry class.
I want to make something clear. I very much enjoy holding these babies. That's why I'm in the NICU. And I never have anywhere else I need to be or would rather be. The love I feel for and from these tiny infants is beyond description.I look forward to the experience week after week. But when you are surrounded by three clocks all ticking at one second intervals and you're in a room by yourself (and a sleeping baby), two hours can get to be a long time. This phenomenon has given me much respect and empathy for nursing mothers. Although "society" has relaxed somewhat about mothers nursing their babies in public, in many places it is still taboo. Or the nursing mother is modest and has no desire to nurse in public, In either case, this mother is segregated from other people for several hours a day. And I can tell you from experience that this sort of time is a long time.
In a science fiction movie such as Interstellar, when a person gets back from a deep sleep in deep space, his family and friends may have aged 60 or 70 years, and yet the space traveler has only aged a few years. This is not just science fiction; it's science fact. It's a theoretical phenomenon that has been proven by science in many ways. Einstein's theories are the law. But add to spacetime, NICU time. It is as equally bizarre and real.
That twenty five minutes in chemistry class must have eventually ticked by because that was forty seven years ago. In some ways the forty seven years have gone by as fast as that twenty five minutes. The trip home from the NICU takes me about twenty-five minutes. Although I was traveling well below the speed of light, it took no time at all.
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