Quantified Baby
Noah Koch was a man who had meticulously curated his life through the lens of spreadsheets. Now he was bouncing on the balls of his feet with a tremor of excitement as his wife held up a strip of life-altering plastic.
“Pregnant,” she confirmed, her voice full of wonder and a slight amusement, knowing exactly what was about to happen.
Noah, true to form, didn’t disappoint.
“Gabby, that’s amazing!”
Gabby sighed, but couldn’t help but smile.
“Here we go,” she murmured.
Within hours the apartment was transformed. Gabby was adorned with a sensor patch on her stomach. Noah had created color-coded charts projected onto the living room wall. Every data point was entered into his spreadsheets. He was eager to measure and optimize the pregnancy.
At first Gabby found it endearing. She came home to a foot massage one day to find Noah grinning beside a foot spa.
“Your pedal circulation showed a slight decrease. This should increase your lymphatic drainage to nominal levels.”
“Wow, thanks honey,” Gabby responded, feeling loved.
“Nonsense,” Noah dismissed. “Mitigating risk is my love language.”
Soon though, the charm wore thin. One morning Gabby woke up to find a new device on her bedside table: a smart scale connected to a hydration-tracking water bottle.
“Noah? What’s this?” She held up the bottle.
Noah, already halfway through his daily scheduled morning workout, paused.
“That’s the Klein Bottle 3-point-oh. It measures your fluid intake and cross-references it with your perspiration rate. We need to ensure you’re perfectly hydrated.”
Gabby stared at the bottle with a blank look.
“Or I could just, you know, drink when I’m thirsty?”
Noah gave her a look of confusion.
“But how will we know if you’re optimally hydrated. Thirst is a lagging indicator! We need to be proactive.”
“Noah, I appreciate you caring. I really do. But I’m a human being, not a perfectly calibrated machine. My body knows how to be pregnant.”
“But the data can help us identify potential issues before they become problems,” Noah frowned. “Early intervention is key.”
“I get that. But sometimes I just want to feel pregnant. Enjoy the weird cravings, the little kicks. There’s a magic to all of it. That’s something that cannot be quantified and charted.”
Noah ended his workout and sat down beside her. He took her hand.
“I understand,” he said. “I just want to make sure everything is right. I want to be the best possible father.”
“And you will be. But maybe that means trusting my body a little bit. And trust me.”
Noah looked at her, then at the colored charts projected to the wall. He took a deep breath.
“Okay. I guess I can dial it back a little. Just a little. Maybe just essential vitals.”
“We’ll find a balance, honey. We always do.”
Then, at 24 weeks and 3 days, disaster struck. Gabby woke up with sharp cramps.
Noah, instantly alerted by the sensors, went into emergency mode.
“Gabby! What’s wrong?” he asked.
“Cramps,” she gasped, her voice strained with pain. “Really bad ones. And I think my water just broke.”
“It’s too early.”
“Call the hospital.”
“Okay. Hang on.”
The drive to the hospital was a blur. The data had already been sent by Noah ahead of time, so they were ready to take her to a room immediately.
The next few hours rushed by. Doctors and nurses swarmed around Gabby, dealing with her premature labor. They managed to stabilize her condition, but couldn’t stop the delivery. Astra was born, a tiny being a fraction of her expected size.
Astra was immediately moved to the NICU, not giving the parents time to even hold her. Noah watched Astra’s incubator through the window.
“She’s a fighter,” a nurse remarked.
A middle-aged woman named Beth had come up beside him.
“We’re doing everything we can.”
Noah felt helpless. All his data meant nothing. He watched as Beth entered the NICU and adjusted Astra’s ventilator.
“How do you know what to do?” Noah stammered. “There’s so much data.”
Beth smiled at him gently.
“It’s more than data. It’s knowing what to look for. It takes years of experience. You learn to read their bodies, to understand what numbers mean in context. It is institutional knowledge, not just data that is collected in the abstract.”
She pointed to a dip in Astra’s heart rate tracing.
“That little dip? A new nurse might miss it or call it an outlier. But I know from experience it could indicate a problem. So, I check her color, I listen to her lungs… I use the data as a guide, not as the whole story.”
Noah stared at Maria, then down at his daughter.
The room was silent aside from the beeping of machines. He had a lot to learn.
Weeks later Noah finally held Astra, who was gaining weight and able to breathe on her own. He looked over at Gabby, fast asleep. He finally had a moment to reflect.
“I used to think data was everything,” he began, murmuring to himself. “I thought that if I could just quantify everything, measure enough, analyze enough, I could control outcomes and ensure perfection. But you, little one, really threw me for a loop. My spreadsheets couldn’t predict that.”
His hand gingerly stroked his daughter’s minuscule hand.
“Being in the NICU… the nurses had all this incredible technology, all kinds of sensors and monitors, collecting reams of data. But they weren’t beholden to it. They used it as a tool that was a single input alongside their experience and their intuition.”
He looked over at his sleeping wife.
“You were right, Gabby,” he admitted. “About trusting your body. About trusting the process. I was so focused on optimizing I forgot about the human factor. I treated you like a science project and Astra here like a data point.
“I won’t throw my spreadsheets away of course. Old habits die hard. But I need to focus more on the human context that makes the data meaningful. And mores, I need to trust other people more than the raw data itself.
“I’ve still got a lot to learn about being a father, but I think I’m finally starting to understand what it really means to care.”