A few days ago on February 1, UCSF Benioff Children’s Hospital moved from its original home on Parnassus Avenue to its new standalone children’s hospital in Mission Bay. The intensive care nursery, labor and delivery, and the fetal treatment center are no longer on the fifteenth floor of Parnassus, nestled so often in the thickest fog and boasting spectacular views of the city, the Golden Gate Bridge and the eucalyptus trees that are home to so many red tail hawks.
On February first, one of my second daughter Tikva’s two primary neonatologists during the 58 days of her life posted a picture on his Facebook page that gave me chills. In it, an endless row of ambulances was lined up in front of the hospital on Parnassus, departing every five minutes with a child who was moving from the old hospital to the new. Once they arrived at Mission Bay and the child had been moved to their new space, the ambulances returned to Parnassus to continue. Can you imagine what went into coordinating that effort? I hope you’ve never had a baby in the NICU, but if you have, you know how complex a baby’s space in the hospital can be, how many machines, wires, tubes, IV bags of medications and other wonders of science and medicine are necessary. Picturing those babies, each in their own ambulance for the ride across town, accompanied by nurses and EMTs and I imagine in some cases doctors, is what gave me those chills.
It’s been six and a half years since Tikva died. 40 times as long as she was alive. During the year after she died, when we still lived in San Francisco, that 15-story hospital on Parnassus was a haunting presence – the place where she lived, the place where she fought to breathe, the place where we loved her unconditionally, not knowing how much time we had, the place where we said goodbye and sent her spirit on its way. Sometimes I would drive by, from near or far, and the hospital would be buried in fog so thick you couldn’t see the top floors. Other times, as if honoring its namesake neighborhood, it would be showered in the glow of the sunset. Now when I visit the city of my heart, I feel a sense of peace and awe at this place that was the setting for a chapter in my story that changed me forever into who I am.
In Tikva’s nurses and doctors and social workers, I saw angels walking on earth. Something about people who choose to care for our tiniest and most fragile beings… I’ve never met anyone like them before or since. They loved my daughter as if she were their own. They celebrated good days with us and cried with us during the hard days. They ran to her bedside en masse during a code pink and did everything to help her. They held our hands, helped us hold her even when she was so fragile that leaving her little bed was dangerous. They took pictures of her, prints of her tiny hands and feet. They gave her sponge baths and changed her diapers and blankets, reinserted her feeding tube when she would pull it out, monitored her numbers, her x-rays. And on her last night, they helped us bring her outside to breathe fresh air for the first time.
For me Parnassus will always be a place where magic happened. Not just for the families of the babies who make it home, but for parents like me whose babies lived their entire lives there. I can’t say every parent feels like this, but I do. I am forever grateful to you, Tikva’s caregivers – Allyson, Elaine, Robin, Sue, Chrissy, Roberta, Tom, Stephanie and everyone else who loved our daughter and who held us through. Thank you for your wisdom and your big, big hearts. Thank you for all you are and for all you do each day. I know your work continues across town.
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