A science story, huh?

Is NYU a scientist?

I felt it.

And I just thought, well.

It was that golden moment.

Because science was on my side.

Hi, Hi everyone, I'm Ben Lilley, and welcome to the Storick Letter, where we bring you true personal stories about science.

This week's stories from Kathleen Raven as part of Human Enhance, a collaboration with the New York Hall of Science to produce stories related to the Human Plus exhibit on how technology is changing who we are.

The story was recorded in April 2014 at Ibeam in New York City.

A group of nurses and doctors are gathered in a hospital room.

It's the early 1980s. Some rain is falling outside and there's a woman laboring in the bed.

Suddenly, the baby pops out two months earlier than it should, and you hear a scramble of metal

instruments clattering together, furniture moving to make way, and then silence.

In the back of the room someone says, Mary, the baby's not going to make it.

I heard this in an audio recording that my father decided I should listen to when I was 14 or 15.

This is an audio recording of your birth, he said.

Back in the delivery room, my skin was a nice color of dark denim blue jeans.

Several seconds had passed and still I had not taken a breath.

The neonatologist on staff at the time, without thinking, grabbed two sharpened oxygen tubes and just jammed them through

my skin, straight into my lungs, no surgery. Outflowed the water, and into my body flowed oxygen,

and I began crying. I also lost three pounds, going from six to three pounds.

So when the neonatologist left the room, he said to the nurse, give her a high dose of gentomycin.

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