November 20

Dear Elizabeth,

None of what has unfolded seemed possible as we were driving to the hospital eight nights ago. Your father had been out of town for the weekend, visiting your grandparents in Arizona. I spent a quiet Sunday afternoon in the office on the book I was editing, then headed to the airport to pick up Daddy.

I remember mentioning to him that I wasn’t feeling well, but when we went home, I got busy with other things. I laid out the fabric for your crib bedding and curtains and started a pot of pasta sauce.

I had been in some discomfort all weekend, but attributed this to normal, mid-pregnancy strain. On Friday night, I had noticed a mild discharge which I wrote off as an infection, and I made a mental note to call the doctor on Monday morning.

These irritations were laid over the symptoms of a persistent cold, and I was more conscious of the ache in my head than the pain in my lower back.

As I stirred the sauce, though, the pains grew more regular. Paced by the kitchen clock, the pains were coming in rhythmic waves: 6:47, 6:52, 6:57, 7:01. Stretching didn’t relieve them. I went upstairs and the discharge was still there, more copious and slightly pink. I pulled out the brochures I was given on my first visit to the obstetrician and thumbed through my pregnancy books. Nothing seemed relevant to what I was experiencing, especially at this stage, the beginning of the sixth month. You weren’t due until March 4. It was only November 12.

So I set the table and dithered over whether to call the doctor. As you will learn, my sense of decorum can sometimes get in my way. I hate to inconvenience anyone and was reluctant to bother the doctor on a Sunday night when this could probably wait until the next day. Finally, at your father’s urging, I made the call.

When the call ended, I hung up the phone and sat very still for a moment. Reflexively, I walked into the bathroom and combed my hair and brushed my teeth in an effort to push down the anxiety brought on by the doctor’s words. Then I went downstairs and said, “The doctor says we need to go to the hospital.”

The hospital. I was concerned, but not panicked. Surely, the doctor would check me over and resolve whatever was going on. I turned off the sauce, certain we’d be back in time for a late dinner. I didn’t pack a suitcase. We put on our coats and headed out the door.

The emergency room was absolute chaos. Hutzel is an inner-city Detroit hospital, situated in a medical complex which sees everything from crack cocaine babies to street war shootings in the course of a weekend. We chose the hospital because of its affiliation with the city’s first-rate medical school. Many people are at Hutzel because they have no choice.

The admitting nurse took my blood pressure and some routine information. I wasn’t wearing maternity clothes, just a Rehoboth Beach sweatshirt from last summer’s vacation and a pair of gray sweatpants that accommodated the eleven pounds I had gained during pregnancy.

After about a half hour’s wait, they called me into an examining room and asked Daddy to wait in the lobby. I lay on a gurney, separated by hanging sheets from a woman bellowing in pain on the other side. She sounded much worse than I felt. I scanned a decorating magazine and waited for the doctor. Finally, the shift resident and a nurse came in, bearing a tray with a speculum and the related accessories of gynecology. The plan was that the hospital staff would do the initial examination and that my doctor, Dr. Bottoms, would be called if it were serious. (Yes, that is his real name – Sidney Bottoms – and, yes, he has heard it all before.)

The resident had just begun the pelvic examination and spoke as though she was confirming what I already knew. I don’t think she realized the impact of her words: “The amniotic sac has ruptured and you are in active labor. We will do what we can to delay things, but I don’t think it will be possible.”

Twenty minutes later, Dr. Bottoms walked in, bringing your father with him. It was clear that Daddy had already gotten the news and was trying to take in what seemed to both of us incomprehensible. In one look, he projected his shock, his grief, his concern for me, and his struggle to gather his strength.

The next few hours were a frenzy of diagnostic procedures, decisions, and bad news. A nurse inserted an IV line to infuse a drug designed to slow or halt the contractions. She took blood, inserted a catheter, strapped on a fetal monitor. I signed a stack of consent forms, and they moved me upstairs into a hospital room.

Dr. Bottoms didn’t hold out much hope of slowing the course of labor. It turned out that my water had probably broken on Friday night, but it had been a small tear in the sac and a slow leak. By now, it was likely that an infection had set in, and that this infection could be life-threatening to you. You needed to be born now if you were to have any chance of survival, no matter how remote.

The odds for survival increase with each week in the womb. A full-term pregnancy lasts 40 weeks. Based on the date of my last period, I was exactly 24 weeks pregnant.

Dr. Bottoms and a resident stood in my room peering at an ultrasound screen, trying to get a fix on your fetal development and viability. They were spinning that cardboard due date wheel and saying, yes, 24 weeks. I told them I thought I had gotten pregnant early in my cycle, and they took this as a good sign. At this stage in your gestation, they said that even 3 or 4 additional days in the womb could make a difference.

Three or four days aside though, you were still coming 16 weeks ahead of schedule. Dr. Bottoms turned to us and gave us the hard facts about prematurity. Of babies born at 24 weeks, generally only 10% survive. Of those who do, more than two-thirds have a serious disability, such as brain damage, blindness, cerebral palsy, or a combination of many disabilities. Dr. Bottoms told us that if you survived, you would be in the hospital at least until your due date next March, probably beyond. He indicated that the emotional, physical, and financial toll could be enormous, not to mention the strain on our marriage. He was factual. He was not optimistic.

He went on to talk about the process of delivery. He said that, despite the fact that you were in a breech position, it was possible to deliver vaginally. This would be best for my health, but because you were so small and your skull so fragile, the pressure in the birth canal could cause further problems. A cesarean delivery would be harder on me and would require a longer recovery, but would cause you less trauma. Because my abdomen was still relatively small, the surgery would also require a long, vertical incision rather than the shorter, horizontal kind done at full-term, and I would be unable to deliver any future babies vaginally.

Dr. Bottoms was in favor of the vaginal birth. He was discreet and he was kind, but it was clear that he thought that you would not survive regardless of how you were delivered. He wanted me to avoid the physical stress of surgery, now and with subsequent pregnancies. On the logic of this, your father agreed with him.

I did not. There was no gray area, no hard decision. It seemed clear to me that if you had any chance at all to come into the world alive, you should be given that chance. Period. As for the issue of my health, I would always get well again. As for the issues of how long you would live and how serious your health issues would be, we would deal with that when we had to. Looking back, it may have been naive, but it felt right. It is a decision I would make again.

Once the decision was made, we had to act on it quickly. At this point, the contractions were about 2 ½ minutes apart, and I had definitely figured out what labor felt like. I hadn’t taken one childbirth class, but the trauma of the evening proved a pretty effective distraction from the pain.

It was nearly midnight. We made a few phone calls: to my parents, to Pam, Daddy’s daughter, to my sister Carol. They prepped me for surgery. Your father went to scrub and put on sterile garb, and they wheeled me down the hall.

The surgery got underway quickly. Your father was holding my hand. I asked him to tell me about his trip to Arizona to help keep my mind off what was happening behind the sheet that hung above my chest. He had only gotten a few sentences out when the doctor said, “It’s a girl, a baby girl.”

That sentence hit me like a bolt from the blue. Through this whole anxious evening, you had been an abstraction, referred to in terms of fetal weight, fetal age, and development. Now you were a girl, a baby girl. And you were ours.

You gave three faint cries as you were lifted up, surprising everyone. Then they whisked you away to be placed on a ventilator and all of the other support and monitoring systems. Because the ventilator splits your vocal chords and leaves you mute, that was the first and the last we’ve heard from you.

The first 24 hours of your life were pretty terrible. Your father ran between you in the neonatal intensive care unit (NICU) and me in the recovery room, fitting in calls to family. I lay alone for long stretches, watching the hands of the clock stagger forward, counting the minutes while waiting for the pain medication I had been promised. Sometime before dawn, I was moved into a room on the maternity floor. Dr. Bottoms had requested a private room for me amid the other rooms filled with babies and mothers and, for this, I will always be grateful.

Your father wheeled me up to see you on Monday morning, but I was too sick to register much. I spent most of the morning churning between sleep and consciousness, startling to the noise of a nursing cart or the phone.

On Monday afternoon, your primary nurse came to my room and introduced herself as Margie. She was the first person to give me news of you; all the rest of the staff had been coming in to check on me. She came to inform me that you had just blown a hole in one of your lungs. She called it a pneumothorax. The pressure of the ventilator had ruptured the lung wall, leaking air into the chest cavity and collapsing the lung. Immediate surgery is required to drain air and blood from the lung and permit it to reinflate.

Margie spoke very carefully as though she were trying to explain quantum physics to a ten year old. I could tell she had given this speech a thousand times before. She stopped just short of being brutal, but she made it clear how very sick you were. She wanted me to understand that you were dying, and that it was just a matter of time.

Later that day, you blew a second hole in your lung and had your second chest tube surgery, the news of which Margie delivered grimly. You were hanging on, but barely. I told her that if you died, I needed to be there in your final moments, not after. I wanted to hold you; and if I couldn’t prevent this terrible thing from happening to you, I wanted to rail against it with the fierce, physical force of my love.

That evening, one of the nurses called and said it was time to come up. That was when we baptized you.

The hours following your baptism were excruciating, especially for you. You were spiraling down fast, sounding monitors and alarms as you went. The doctors told us that you would not survive the night.

Most babies born as prematurely as you die within the first 72 hours. We sat up most of that night, marking the hours of your life: 24, 26, 29. I felt if we could just stay awake, you would not die – as though we could keep you here through sheer force of will. When I finally fell asleep on Tuesday morning, you were still alive.

For awhile, every time the phone in my room rang, we froze, and the phone rang off the hook those first few days. Family, friends, neighbors, coworkers, clients, members of our church: it seemed that everyone had heard about you and wanted to know what they could do. Every time I replaced the receiver the phone rang again. On Wednesday morning, the phone rang for the seventh time in twenty minutes, and I burst into tears. My mother took the receiver off the hook. As much as I appreciated everyone’s concern and support, I just couldn’t do it anymore.

By the middle of the week, your hour-by-hour progress was so consuming that I half expected to turn on the TV and see Tom Brokaw reporting on your condition. My world had been reduced to the four walls of my hospital room, a place where I was constantly surrounded by news of you, calls for you, gifts for you. It was a world light years away from the one I had known just a week earlier.

Your father has been wonderful through all of this, as tender as I have ever seen him and yet an absolute rock. He spent the first three nights in a chair by my bed until the doctor made him go home to get some rest. Every night, at 12:17 a.m., the moment of your birth, he slips upstairs to check on you and wish you a happy birthday. He has spent much more time with you in these early days than I have, sitting by your side and learning how to touch and comfort you.

Daddy is a decisive, get-it-done kind of guy, and he sprang into action following your arrival. He immediately got a beeper so I could reach him no matter where he is, and he posted all of his phone numbers (office, car, beeper, home) on the wall of my hospital room and upstairs in your medical records. One of the greatest things that he did was to set three main goals, and he put these on a calendar on the wall of my room, too.

The first goal was getting you safely through the first three days -what a milestone when we reached that point!

Our next goal is getting you to the point where we know you will survive. Our hope is that soon the doctors can tell us about your long-term chances.

And, finally, our third goal is to get a target date for bringing you home. Every day, Daddy crosses off another day on the calendar: another day, another little victory.

And, in the midst of all this craziness, he presented me with a lovely pearl bracelet to commemorate your birth. Although you did not come into the world in the way that we had hoped you would, Daddy and I are both determined to celebrate what has happened, not to mourn what has not.

During the sweeping ups and downs of the past week, we were introduced to the NICU’s favorite metaphor: the roller coaster. Delivered by the staff in response to our questions about outlook and prognosis, it is a shopworn, but fitting description for the breath-holding highs and heart-stopping lows we have already experienced.

This is what the ride has been like this past week:

Up, up, up: Nearly all babies at your birthweight suffer intracranial hemorrhage (bleeding within the brain) within a few days following birth. The degree of bleeding varies from Grade I to Grade IV, with Grade IV being the most severe and most damaging in terms of long-term neurological problems.

The doctors anticipated that you would have a serious hemorrhage and ordered ultrasounds of your head to detect the degree of damage. The first ultrasound showed nothing, no bleeding at all, and Margie told us it simply had not happened yet. When a second ultrasound showed no bleeding a few days later, the doctors said it was “phenomenal.” They could offer no explanation as to how you had sidestepped this serious complication.

Down, down, down: On Thursday, three days after your first two surgeries, you blew a third hole in your lung. You lay quietly, recovering, another tube rooted in your chest, draining off to the side of the isolette.

Deep plunge: On Friday, you developed patent ductus arteriosus, a condition where the tube which connects the pulmonary artery with the aorta fails to close at birth, resulting in excessive blood flow to the lungs and creating strain on the heart and lungs. There is a drug that can be used to close this, but because your ductus was so wide, the doctors felt the drug would not be effective. They scheduled surgery to close the valve on Monday.

Hairpin turn: They began the medication on Saturday and, to everyone’s surprise, the valve closed on Sunday. Surgery has been postponed and, if the valve stays closed, it will not be necessary.

Did I mention that I hate the roller coaster?

Saturday was my hardest day, Elizabeth. I had to leave the hospital without you. I had a sense of connection when I was there with you, only the length of a hallway and one floor away.

I poured my grief out all the way home. As we pulled up in the driveway, a florist’s van pulled up behind us. The driver hopped out and offered me the pale-pink bouquet as I emerged from the car, all hot tears and wadded tissue. Daddy gently mentioned that we had had to leave the baby at the hospital, took the flowers, and shepherded me into the house.

The house was pretty much as I had left it, and it felt as though nothing had changed, as though you had never been part of our lives. Mail was stacked on the counter, as though waiting for us to come back from a long weekend. We have no nursery, no baby clothes, no bottles drying by the sink.

Nothing of you. The hospital felt more like home than this place does.

That same day, the rest of my family arrived. My mother and grandmother, who had driven up from Columbus the morning of your birth, were still here and staying with my sister Carol. My sister Cheryl, and her family drove up from Atlanta to Columbus all through the night on Friday. They picked up Grandpa in Columbus and arrived at the hospital Saturday afternoon. My sister Jamie, who’d been in New York, flew in Saturday, joined by her boyfriend Jeff who also drove up from Columbus.

By Saturday night, we had four generations of LeComptes together: your cousins, aunts and uncles, grandparents, and great grandmother. They took turns over the weekend coming to see you and to marvel at this tiny and perfect addition to our family.

Their witness somehow makes you more real for me. As they gather around your isolette, it feels like a laying-on of hands, a forging of a bone-deep connection to something bigger than both of us. It confirms your place, your permanent place, in our family circle.

Everyone left for their homes last night, with promises to return to you soon. I am so glad they had this chance to know you from the very beginning. And now, as of early this morning, you are one week old. Happy birthday, Elizabeth!

Daddy and I sang to you at the hospital and raised a toast in your honor at dinner. Today is a real triumph for all of us. We began by counting your time with us in breaths, then in hours, in days, and now in one full week. At this point, I have lost track of how many hours old you are, and that is real progress.

Tuesday, November 21

Dear Elizabeth,

Welcome to the alternate universe of the NICU. Every day, your father and I drive to the hospital and take the elevator to the fourth floor, where I do the C-section shuffle into the unit.

We say our hellos to the desk clerks and nurses milling about, hang up our coats, and move to the large stainless steel sinks to scrub. We wash and we wash and we wash, chapping our hands with antiseptic soap and hot water. The doctors have told us that one of the greatest dangers to you right now is infection, and this is always on my mind. I removed my nail polish, trimmed my nails, and took off my jewelry last week.

We each take a yellow gown from one of the hampers and put it on, tying it in back so that it covers our clothes. (These gowns are one-size-fits-all, which your father, at 6’4″, and I, at 5’1″, can tell you is a fiction.)

The unit is divided into four different rooms, like stepping stones, with the fourth room reserved for the healthiest babies and the first for those most critically ill. You are in Room 1 at the end of the hall.

There is one nurse for every two babies in here. There are six pairs of incubators in the room. We go in, and you are in your usual place, the third incubator from the door.

Within the incubator is a Plexiglas box covered by a thick plastic wrap; nested within this is you. You need the close walls of the box and the insulation of the wrap to help maintain your temperature. The green digital display on the side of the isolette flashes at us: Incubator temperature: 37.6° Centigrade. Your temperature: 37.2° Centigrade.

Inside the box, you are a tangle of tubes, wires, and tape. An IV line springs from your navel, a second coils away from your arm. A pair of syringes rests next to you, slowly seeping medication and nutrients into the lines. Three leads make silver circles on your chest, two to track and record your heart rate, the third for your respiration rate. The tube for the ventilator is taped across your cheeks, pulling your mouth into an open grimace. A temperature probe is stuck to your abdomen. Chest tubes emerge from both sides of your body, draining blood and fluid into containers at your side. And on your big toe is the red glow of an oximeter monitor, constantly recording the level of oxygen saturation in your blood.

You are so tiny, Elizabeth –680 grams at birth –about one pound, eight ounces, like six sticks of butter. You are smaller than a ruler. Your head is the size of a peach. Your arms and legs are not much thicker than a pencil, and you have faint, nearly invisible fingernails.

A fine whitish fetal hair called lanugo covers most of your body and your forehead. Your eyes are still fused shut, and your skin is very red – almost translucent. Yet, you are all there, a tiny hatchling, a fragile bird of a baby, born far too soon.

One of the doctors, Dr. Mishefske, says you have great skin, meaning it doesn’t tear easily. She says there is a high correlation between good skin and survival. I can see why.

We can open the side of the box and lift the plastic wrap to stroke your back, but just for a minute. Otherwise, your temperature falls and the alarms sound. With all of the monitors for all of the sick babies in this room, the alarms sound a steady cry.

Wednesday, November 22

Dear Elizabeth,

We have learned much about prematurity in the time that you’ve been with us, more than we ever wanted to know. We’ve learned, among other things, about hyaline membrane disease, patent ductus arteriosus, necrotizing enterocolitis, and retinopathy of prematurity. Much of what we’ve learned about has already happened or may happen to you. Hopefully, some of it won’t.

I have already told you about some of the dramatic ups and downs of your early days. I forgot to mention that you were severely jaundiced. Although many newborns are jaundiced after birth, it’s much more dangerous in premature babies. The premature liver has difficulty breaking down the potentially toxic waste products in the bloodstream known as bilirubin and, in sick babies, the bilirubin can seep into body tissues. If concentrations of bilirubin in the blood become high, it can cause brain and central nervous system damage. The doctors treated your jaundice to reduce the bilirubin, and now your liver seems to have taken over.

The fact that your liver is now doing its job is especially good news because the medication you’re on to close the valve can increase the toxicity of bilirubin. Treatment of your various complications is such a careful balancing act.

The doctors can no longer hear the heart murmur associated with the open valve so the drug seems to be working. It looks as though we have cleared two hurdles, Elizabeth.

The doctors continue to perform extensive tests to determine where we stand with other problems of prematurity. During your brief life, you have undergone a virtual assault of blood tests, transfusions, line insertions, surgeries, ultrasounds, EKGs, EEGs, X-ray exposure, and painful handling.

You have been through more in nine days than I have in 33 years.

Thursday, November 23

Dear Elizabeth,

Your first Thanksgiving. I do have to say that this is one of the weirdest Thanksgivings I have ever spent.

We scuttled our plans to go to Columbus; I don’t think we’ll go that far until you can come with us. We traveled instead 30 miles north to the home of Daddy’s great aunt and uncle. Just as we got off the highway and were slowing for a red light, our front tire went sideways, the tie rod broke, and the steering went out. The car came to a sudden, heavy stop. Although it put a real strain on my incision, there was no serious damage. Had it happened on the expressway sixty seconds earlier, we might have ended up in a hospital far away from you.

We spent the morning and the evening at your bedside. The nurses have taped little paper turkeys to each isolette. Today was a good day for you. You had a third cranial ultrasound; again, it showed no bleeding around the brain. We sang “We Praise Thee, O God, Our Redeemer, Creator” in low voices by your bed. And, in the spirit of the holiday, in the spirit of every day we have with you, we gave thanks.

Friday, November 24

My dear Elizabeth,

Although I take comfort in sitting for hours by your side, I have to be very careful not to overstimulate you. Babies born at your gestation have very immature neurological systems, and too much sensory input – even someone’s presence – can be physically stressful. I have read that, with some premature babies, you may do one of three things: look, talk, or touch, but never more than one thing at a time. If you are stroking a baby, adding eye contact can be overwhelming.

We are learning what works for you. One of your nurses showed me how to stroke your head to comfort you, and you seem to like this.

My sister Carol gave me a small heartsounds box which she took from one of her infant daughter’s stuffed animals. When we turn it on, it simulates the sound of a mother’s heartbeat in the womb. We have placed it in your incubator and asked the nurses to turn it on every time they complete a stressful procedures (which means every few hours). It calms you right down. I imagine you thinking, “Well, it’s about time they put me back where I belong.”

Saturday, November 25

Dear Elizabeth,

Your weight has dropped since you were born. The doctors say that this is fairly typical and you may lose more before you stabilize and slowly start to regain. You are down to 580 grams, about one pound, four ounces.

On Monday, you began receiving breast milk through a feeding tube, and you seem to be tolerating it well. This is your first true nourishment beyond the nutrients provided by the IV.

Because you cannot nurse, I have been pumping my milk and storing it for you. You receive three cc. of milk, about half a teaspoon, every three hours through the tube in your nose.

The staff has added soybean oil to your IV to boost your calorie intake; however, the doctors say that weight is not their major concern right now. Their goal is to get you stable and keep you stable. Then they say we’ll worry about your weight.

Because you are on a ventilator, the medical team pays a lot of attention to what they call your “rates”: the number of mechanical breaths each minute and the percentage of oxygen in the air you receive. They test your blood regularly to assess, among other things, how well oxygen and carbon dioxide gases are exchanged between your lungs and your bloodstream. It is critical that these blood gases be kept in balance so the team takes blood from you frequently, sometimes hourly, and they adjust your ventilator rates based on each result. Right now, your vent rate (breaths per minute) is 22; your oxygen rate is 24%. Room air has an oxygen content of 21%.

At some point, they hope that you will begin to breathe on your own, at first breathing above the ventilator and eventually breathing without it. They will wean you from the vent slowly, lowering your rates as you can tolerate it. This process may take several months, and they tell me that it likely won’t be a straight line. If they graphed it, it would probably look like a roller coaster. (What else?)

The oxygen saturation levels in your blood are important, too. To monitor these, the staff uses a non-invasive procedure, thankfully: the oximeter probe taped to your big toe, which provides a steady numerical reading. I don’t know how it works, but I’m glad it does. Right now, yours reads 98%, which I’m told is good.

Sunday, November 26

My Elizabeth,

Looking back, you have had a pretty good week medically-speaking. Earlier in the week, they removed two of your chest tubes and yesterday, they took the third chest tube out. Hooray! The less tubes and wires in you, the better.

This has been a much more stable week than your first week – maybe the roller coaster is leveling out? I keep wondering what waits around the corner. When I asked the doctor yesterday what to expect next, she said that, barring the risk of infection, we are pretty much on “cruise.” Cruise. I like the sound of that.

Monday, November 27

Dearest Elizabeth,

Your two-week birthday! A milestone in more ways than one. Today, as I sat by your side, one of the nurses asked me if I would like to hold you. Pardon me? Would I like to hold you? What do you think?

This was something we hadn’t even discussed with the doctors; it seemed like such a luxury. But the nurse said you were stable enough; if we were careful and quick it would be fine; it would probably do us both a lot of good.

It took a good five minutes to get you out. The nurse lifted you and all your apparatus very carefully from the incubator, rearranging tubes and wires and swiftly detaching and reattaching the ventilator line once you were out.

And then you were in my arms. I was holding my baby. I felt like a mother.

It only lasted three or four minutes before you became exhausted. You were tense in my arms, wired stiffly to the machinery that keeps you alive. Your temperature dropped, and the alarms began to ring, and we had to rush to put you back in. But we had our moment, mother and child, my skin against yours.

Your grandparents from Arizona, Nanny and Papa, who arrived Friday night, captured the moment on film. I look as though I am drowning in happiness.

Thursday, November 30

Dear Elizabeth,

It has been several days since I’ve had a chance to write in this journal – in part, because spending time with you is my first priority, in part, because of all the other activities that need attention – such as getting a five-month rental on the breast pump – and, in part, because of sheer fatigue.

I’m going through the crazy, postpartum, post-surgical ups and downs. It feels so strange and abrupt not to be pregnant anymore. I miss carrying you. My closet is full of maternity clothes I never had a chance to wear. Suddenly, I’ve lost all my baby weight and am back in my regular clothes.

I feel hollowed out, left with nothing to hold. Holding you Monday just fed this feeling. I crave the physical part of being a mother. Parenting through Plexiglas is simply not what I had pictured.

I’m also riding all the ups and downs with you. You’ve had a few bad days lately, but I think we’re stable for now. Your oxygen saturation levels have been plummeting for no apparent reason. Some fluctuation is normal, but you’re being a bit extreme about it, so it bears checking.

The level needs to stay in the high 90s. While I’ve been writing this, it’s gone from 97 to 69. I stand there, tapping my foot, and you slowly bring it back to the 80s. And now it’s in the 70s. Would you please knock it off?

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