When the Bough Breaks

Life, a wise man once said, is a dance on the edge of time.

It ought to be done lightly and with grace, head thrown back, arms outstretched, spinning to a cosmic tempo.

Life is a celebration of self, a solo performance.

I think about this as I wander through a ward of damaged babies in Childrens Hospital of Los Angeles.

They lie in small beds like infants of technology, children of the cybernetics that measure and perpetuate their lives.

Green lines take uneven paths across dark screens above their cribs, red digits flash the numbers of their respiration into a muted half-light.

I see one baby who weighs less than a pound and a half lying motionless in a web of tubes and wires, a human so small he is barely perceivable.

The chance that he will survive is less than 30%. The odds aren’t good. It hardly ever rains when there’s a 30% chance.

You rarely win when the balance is tipped so heavily in favor of the house. So welcome to the world of infant junkies.

The babies in this ward are born to the pain of drug withdrawal. They tremble. They vomit. They stiffen. They can’t eat. They can’t sleep.

They are shaken and twisted by the terrible forces visited upon them in the womb, where their addiction is born before they are.

Cold turkey is hard when it’s the first thing you ever do.

This is life, you ask? This is a light-step on the edge of time? Well, yes, it’s life, by dry definition . . . but no one’s dancing here.

This is a column about drug-addicted mothers who pass their addiction on to the lives they’ve conceived.

It’s about the babies they bear.

You see these women down the streets where crack is dealt. They’re wired or sleep walking, selling what they’ve got for what they can get.

You see them snorting coke in middle-class homes, at parties and sometimes at work.

What you don’t see are the babies they bear. They come into the world aching for a fix, in anguish without it.

This is no faint drive, my friend, but a craving that dwarfs the most towering needs.

A doctor tells of addicted monkeys offered the choice of pulling levers for food and water, or for cocaine. They’ll go for the coke almost exclusively until they die.

These are human babies we’re talking about, not monkeys, and the problem of infant addiction is growing in quantum proportions.

In 1981, there were a little over a hundred drug babies born in L.A. Now there are 3,000 a year.

I keep thinking about these babies, the ones who survive at Childrens Hospital by the genius of electronics, and I wonder what survival will mean for them down the long, hard years of their lives.

No one really knows, but a lot of people are concerned. The sins of the mothers are apt to become the burden of society for generations to come.

One drug baby, now 12, just recently offered a chilling example of the time-bomb effect of infant addiction.

Pushed only slightly, he turned on his foster mother and said someday he was going to kill her.

Not much to dance about there.

Victoria Easley got me started on this. She’s a reporter for radio station KFWB who did a series on babies born to drug-addicted mothers.

She called it “When the Bough Breaks.”

What intrigued me about it was not the series itself, but the fact that she got involved.

After it was over, she saw at least one need she could fill. She could cuddle the damaged babies.

Victoria formalized a program at Childrens Hospital called the cuddlers program. I heard about it through a colleague.

“This is rare,” he said. “How many reporters who you know follow up by becoming a part of their own story?”

Now Victoria and seven other women spend whatever time they can spare holding the babies and talking to them, and hoping by emotional osmosis to provide a will the newborns might not otherwise have.

“We’ve seen babies with catheters in their hearts improve because they were snuggled,” a nurse says. “We don’t know why. But we do know that without human contact, babies die.”

I walk through the ward of babies. I see the green lifelines and the bright red numbers flicking through the even light.

I smell the hospital smells and hear the hushed footfalls of medical personnel.

These things will stay with me for a long, long time.

Good for Victoria. Good for the women who cuddle babies. And tears for the dances that will never be danced.