A month after her birth, to everyone’s infinite relief, Ava was released from the hospital. Despite her sickliness, Ava was an adorable baby, and soon she was starting to smile back at us. Even in the face of all that worry, I loved being an auntie even more than I’d imagined I would. The smell of her head, the warmth of her delicate little body, brought out a primal love in me. One afternoon, my mom and I babysat while Penny ran some errands. Ava fell asleep on my chest and my mom snapped a photo of her there. I lay still, marveling at her, a deep joy coursing through me.

When my parents were with her, I saw a cautious happiness seeping through. The road had been long, Penny’s pregnancy had been difficult, and the NICU had been hellish, but she was home now. She was safe.

But “failure to thrive” encompassed a great many small, interwoven evils: she wasn’t gaining weight, her eyes weren’t tracking properly, she wasn’t able to absorb nutrients, so they’d had to attach a feeding tube, a fixture that remained on her even when they weren’t using it. Penny told us she had to cut back to quarter time at work so that she could take her back and forth to all of her various doctor’s appointments. She obsessed over her care, ceased to talk or, seemingly, think of anything else. Penny’s Facebook page was a steady stream of updates about Ava’s condition; the comments below were a tidal wave of support and sympathy from both friends and family and a great many people I’d never heard of from Penny’s ballooning list of friends.

I hoped that Ava would be on the mend by the time I went back to Park City in the fall, but it felt like medical Whac-A-Mole. New, unrelated issues kept popping up: ear infections, for which she needed tubes, a surgery to implant a different kind of feeding tube. Penny explained that her compromised immune system just exacerbated everything. Everyone told her how strong she was to stay so calm for Ava.