Twice a week Dave Whitlow walks the figure-eight halls of the neonatal intensive care unit at the Children’s Hospital of Richmond at VCU, gowned and gloved, looking for a nurse who can spare a pair of arms. He is seventy-three, a retired city manager, a grandfather, and not a clinician. For eight years his shift has been the same: hold the babies who cannot go home yet, watch the monitors, and give them the ordinary weight of a human chest.
On an ordinary visit he may take five or six infants, some of them two pounds, and rock until the numbers on the screen settle. On a heavy day the count climbs toward eight. Before each child goes back into the crib he leans in and says the sentence he has used for years: Grow strong, grow smart, grow kind. The hospital estimates the total in the hundreds. At a reunion he has seen seven- and eight-year-olds who once fit in the crook of that same arm.
Nothing in the work replaces a ventilator or a feeding tube. What it offers is time that medicine does not bill for, warmth that does not come from an incubator, and a voice that asks nothing of a patient too small to answer. One man, two mornings, a line of six words, and a unit that has learned to use him.
Performance de Madonna, Britney e Christina Aguilera no #VMAs e recriada no quadro “Lip Sync Battle" do #Domingão com Carmo Dalla Vecchia, Diego Martins e Amaury Lorenzo.
FLASHBACK: 22 years ago today on 9/11/01, Donald Trump called into a LIVE TV broadcast to give his thoughts on the terrorist attack.
“How could it (a plane) possibly go through the steel? I happen to think they had not only a plane, but they had bombs that exploded almost simultaneously.” — Donald Trump, lifelong New Yorker.
what good’s a lighthouse when the light is burning out… “lighthouse” out Friday on my new album #chemistry. Stay tuned for a surprise tomorrow! https://t.co/Mvh9OCrOZT