Each year in the United States, 12 per cent of all births are premature, 5 per cent of all babies need breathing assistance at birth and 3 per cent of newborns are born with at least one major malformation. Many of these babies are hospitalised in the neonatal intensive care unit. Annie Janvier and her husband Keith Barrington are paediatricians who specialise in the care of sick children and are internationally renowned for their research in this field. In 2005, when their daughter Violette was born extremely prematurely, four months prematurely, as parents they were faced with a 'secondhand' situation. Despite knowing the scientific facts, they knew nothing about the sensation itself. " Knowing how a ventilator works did not help me to be the mother of a child connected to a ventilator," Annie writes. She did not know how to navigate the guilt, the uncertainty, the fears, the anticipation, the reactions of friends and family. In a society obsessed with goals, outcomes and performance, they discovered that the daily lack of control faced by parents of sick children changes their lives and, in the case of parents of doctors, changes the way they practice medicine. Most articles and books on preterm infants and neonatal intensive care units deal with the technological and medical aspects of neonatology. This book is written in the voice of
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parent doctor and tells the story of Violette and her parents, alongside the stories of other fragile children and their families.