“How's the Baby Doing?” Struggling with Narratives of Progress in a Neonatal Intensive Care Unit

Abstract

In this at once biographical and autobiographical piece (cf. Shapiro 1988), I describe the processes of "knowledge-making" of one neonatal intensive care parent. In particular, I investigate the ways that narratives of linear progress informed my efforts to understand my son's condition and future prospects, that is, to engage in lay prognostication. In examining and comparing the three metaphors most commonly used to describe my son's changing condition-roller coaster, graduation, and course-I explore how the discrepancy between narratives of linear progress and the complex and volatile condition of many premature and/or critically ill babies is discursively managed in a neonatal intensive care unit.

Guest Editorial

“…This form has roots in successful engagement by STS feminist scholars and medical anthropologists and sociologists in particular, notably Linda Layne (1996), Rayna Rapp (1995), and Adele Clarke and Virginia Olesen (1999), as well as Shulamit Reinharz (1992), Gail Landsman (1998), andMarianne Paget (2004). This pioneering work helped to demonstrate that such an innovative rhetorical approach, while centered on the experiences of the writer, still allows scholars to promote both intellectual rigor and a strong grounding in current theory.…”

Relating Simply?

“…10. For an ethnographic description of the experience of having a child in neonatal intensive care, see Layne (1996). 11.…”

“Is There Life on Dialysis?”: Time and Aging in a Clinically Sustained Existence

“…He ponders, in this regard, the mingling of life and death and how we might consider the status of the living body that "seems no longer to belong to the world of the 6 It is striking that such a temporally oblique clinical site as the dialysis unit-one not guided by the imperative, as Kaufman (2005) writes of the hospital, to "move things along" but, rather, by the attempt to find and maintain a "stable," still state for patients-should be spoken about by patients in primarily temporal idioms. On these issues of time, its perceptible movement and "progress," see also Linda Layne's (1996) analysis of her family's experience in the neonatal intensive care unit, where their expectations-shaped by cultural narratives of linear progress that are so pervasive in clinical and technological settings, yet simultaneously negated by what actually happens therewere constantly challenged by the "cyclical" and roller-coaster" nature of their stay in the hospital. Caroline Bledsoe (2002) also discusses how Western notions of fertility and aging are framed in terms of linear chronicity, whereby time is understood in part as "nature in the body."…”