The following is from columnist and blogger Rachel Turiel:

Today is Prematurity Awareness Day. Hundreds of bloggers have dedicated their cyber-platforms to the topic of prematurity today. This is our story:

I used to be scared of flying. The mysterious creaks and clatters of take-off unleashed a surge of adrenaline and the thought “that’s the airplane wing, detaching.” I learned to watch the flight attendants; surely if something was amiss, their faces would reveal it.

It was like this too in the NICU (Neonatal Intensive Care Unit), where my son Col (rhymes with soul) spent his first 101 days. The nurses were my barometer of safety. They knew Col better than I, and for much of Col’s time incarcerated in an incubator, it seemed he belonged partially to them and partially to some otherworldly force, like he was still tethered to the invisible weave of the entire universe. (My mom used to say to Col when he was a just a wide-eyed crumb of a human, “You’re so wise now. Soon you’ll be forget everything and become very silly”).

Col was born in the dark night of a new moon under florescent lights in a room containing no less than 14 people. Dan snipped his umbilical cord in a brief moment of normalcy before Col was whisked to the neonatologists table, where 6 angels in green scrubs performed modern magic on Col’s tiny body. After my clinging placenta was torn from my uterus by a resident who looked like she’d just graduated high school, I fell into a quick, dreamless sleep. It wasn’t until the next morning that I saw my firstborn; the child who—born at 25 weeks gestation—should still have been back-flipping through the salty water of my womb. This doll-sized baby, my son, had a ventilator plunged down his impossibly narrow trachea and an IV threaded into his bead of a bellybutton. Another IV was sunk into his arm, which was barely 5 inches long and the width of my ring finger. His head was covered in slick hair of indeterminate color, and his eyes were not yet opened. Lanugo—that embryonic fur of the womb—covered his body. He was 13 inches long and 1 pound, 12 ounces. Read more.