...of very little brain

She looks like Maggie from The Simpsons - bug-eyed with an oversized head, bundled up and lying quietly (thanks to a large dose of chloral hydrate) on the CT table, all 2 kilograms of her. *Amina was born at 24 weeks (a gestational age at which an abortion would be legal - just). She had necrotising enterocolitis resulting in bowel perforation - she had to have a large amount of gut removed and a stoma fashioned. Then she had a bleed into her brain (something preterm babies are prone to), and following that developed hydrocephalus. The bones of her skull (these are not yet fused in babies) are splayed and her eyelids cannot fully close. She also has a port wine stain over her face, like that seen in Sturge Weber syndrome. Today she is having a brain scan. I take her down to CT in the transport incubator, with the help of a nurse. We get lost in the hospital basement. We get a lot of stares. At first, there are 'awww's as people realise it is a baby in the incubator, but their coos soon turn to speechless horror when they see her. Nearly half an hour later, she is finally on the table. We retreat to the control room. She lays remarkably still (she had hiccups on the way), and the pictures show, well, very little brain. The ventricles are huge and the brain is squashed into a tiny rim around the edges. The skull itself is very deformed - although her face is parallel to the table, the scan is almost entirely assymmetrical. It seems almost surprising now that when awake she does pretty much what the other babies do - stretch, kick, suck and cry, and she has (like all of them) her own little personality. What will become of Amina? The statistics do not bode well. She will most likely be severely disabled, and require a series of shunts inserted to drain the fluid from her brain. The only conversation I have had with her parents revolved around them trying to wrangle a letter from the consultant to support their application for a bigger council flat. "we all sleep in the same bedroom", the mother complained, "me, like this (she gesticulates), him, like this, and the three children (two of whom are in the pushchair they have brought) like this." So how (and why) did they conceive again, one inevitably thinks. They never touch Amina or change her nappy. In fact, they appear to share the revulsion of the onlookers in the hospital corridor. I wonder what I would be like in their situation?