The little Sam boy...

 I was just letting out a deep sigh of relief after a rather stressful birth on Saturday, when I was called outside to check a patient. He was laying in the arms of his mother...and I almost had to dig around in the blankets to find him. A tiny, itsy-bitsy, face peered out at me. His name was Samuel.

 After gently laying him on the exam table, I unwrapped him and just stood and stared a minute. His legs were so tiny and so wrinkled they looked like they could break as easy as a pretzel stick. Not only that, but I saw he was totally club-footed. He had no strength, and only mewed out little cries like a baby kitten. His limbs flopped flaccidly against the blanket. He weighed 3 lbs. 12 oz. His little nose was so tiny it looked like he almost forgot to grow one. :)

 Then started the hours of trying to get that tiny little mouth to suck. I dribbled milk into his mouth with a medicine dropper, until he had the strength to suck from a preemie bottle nipple. What a JOY to see him finally latch onto that bottle nipple and suck away as if his life depended on it.  "That's life and health, little Sam boy," I whispered. Overnight, his sunken cheeks started filling out, his little limbs started flailing around, and he started nosing around hungrily for milk.

 ...Our little head boy came in for rebandaging today. He looked very doubtfully at me when I removed his bandage, and a few huge tears squeezed out when I cleaned his wounds. No doubt he's still traumatized from the stitch job the other night. After his screams of, " I'm going to give you all shots and beat you ALL!" while we were stitching him, Ro and I are trying to make him believe we're his friends.