Heal Thyself?

The baby wasn't as lucky as my own infant son. Both were born in 1995 more than two months prematurely. After gazing at Roy in his incubator in the neonatal intensive-care unit of Peking Union Medical College Hospital in Beijing, I strolled past a row of bassinets containing other newborns. At the end lay a child with seaweed-colored skin stretched tight over his skull. I motioned to the young attending doctor, figuring she hadn't yet noticed his death. She had. The child's lungs were underdeveloped, she explained, and lack of oxygen at birth meant...

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