On Staring at Graphs

What's Apparent?

This week, my baby was born. I have learned a lot about changing diapers. Evolution clearly has my back: newborns produce waste in a way that gradually ramps up, plus their waste doesn’t smell that bad.

Newborns don’t do too much. Or, they do a lot. Arguably, they do more things than any other human, since the very concept of “things” hasn’t yet crystallized for them. Every moment is a prism of pure experience, so varied and numerous that their own limbs are mysterious.

For me, reality does seem to contain things. Some of those things are graphs.

Beeps

During early labor, my wife and I lay around and waited for things to get intense. There were several hours when we slept, or tried to. But there was a monitor capturing the baby’s heart rate, and beeping in time with it. Beeping loudly. So one of two things, at any given time, was happening:

• A machine was beeping loudly, making it difficult to sleep

• A machine stopped beeping for a few seconds, making it very difficult to sleep

Of course, the machine stopping didn’t mean anything. It meant the sensor was malfunctioning, or not connected quite right to its base, or the baby moved out of the way a little bit for a second, or something. It would have been rational to tune the beeps out, or ask a nurse to turn the volume of the beeping way down, if not off. But instead we lay there, trying to sleep, listening to a lossy proxy of her heart.

Purple

The heart rate machine actually had a few lines. One line for the baby’s heart rate. That’s the one that beeped. (During active labor, that beeping was, indeed, quieted down.) One line for my wife’s heart rate. And a third line for contractions.

The contraction line was particularly vague. Sometimes the sensors were wonky and it was just flatly all over the place. When it worked, it showed a flat line most of the time, then a hill for each contraction. Taller hills seemed a little stronger, all things equal, but the correlation wasn’t perfect.

Very early on, the purple hills on the graph were our only real indication that a contraction was happening. They were too subtle for my wife to clearly feel. So I’d look at the little hills, grateful for an indication that a thing was happening.

Later, my wife could very much feel the contractions. Then, the hills were… not even a pale imitation, I guess. Looking at them didn’t hurt. But it was a way for my sensory apparatus to try to make sense of what was happening, to map the physical processes that my wife felt directly to something on a page. There’s a big one. There’s a long one. There’s a long and big one. The machine was on a slight lag, so it wasn’t that useful to see when a contraction was about to start. More in the aftermath, hoping my wife wasn’t feeling too bad, to validate what had just taken place. Yes. There it is. It’s right there on the graph.

Chart

At your first pediatrician appointment, you get some growth charts. Your baby’s weight. Her height (they call it “length”, which is cute, somehow). Her weight, given her height. The pediatrician provides analysis on these things, but mostly in a very binary way: basically, they tell you if you’re within tolerances or not. If you are, you are meant not to worry. If they aren’t, it’s time for intervention. So far, we’re lucky enough to be within tolerances.

Still, part of me yearns to understand more, to wring out a little more value for my baby. Or maybe that’s self serving, and the desire is more just to be useful myself, to have something to do. My wife feels the contractions and feeds the baby. I study the graphs about these things. We’re not outside of tolerances, but how close are we? What complex relationships, between these metrics, are afoot? How can we use them, if at all, to inform what we actually do? When should we wake baby up to eat? When should we soothe her to sleep, when she can’t decide if she’s rooting or yawning?

Important

Humming lullabies to my baby feels important. Rocking her feels important. Learning to interpret her cries feels important. Learning to change her diaper feels important. There are many important things to do, already. There will be many more.

Interpreting graphs about my baby feels less important. It’s a stranger kind of task. Because all these representations, guidelines, parameters, are so flawed. When the heart monitor stopped beeping, it didn’t mean the baby’s heart had stopped beating. When the purple line was out of control, it didn’t mean my wife was having the most bizarre contraction of all time. And as for the growth charts, well, who knows? Every baby really is different. They say it over and over, and it’s true. Because every person is different. I’m different. You’re different.

And one way I’m different is, when there’s a graph about my baby, I want to look. Because who knows? Maybe there’s something there, less important than direct experience but more important than nothing. Maybe there’s an extra way to help.