A dad on gratitude, professionalism and a night he will never forget.
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I wasn’t supposed to be there for my daughter’s birth, I was supposed to be in my office an hour southwest of town. But a snowstorm the night before, one that turned the drive home into a five-hour-long ordeal, convinced me to take the next day off. It just so happened that this would be the day my wife felt that something about her seven month pregnancy was amiss, and called her doctor.
“Go to the hospital right now,” she was told. “Pack for an overnight stay.”
We did as ordered, but at least for my part, only as a precaution. The baby wasn’t due for two more months. I didn’t have to be a dad for two more months. Which was convenient for both me and my imminent child, because I wasn’t emotionally ready to be a dad.
The imminent child, however, was ready to be my daughter. One glance at the monitors measuring respiration and pulse, and the OB/GYN said, “That baby’s coming out right now.”
“Huh?” I said. “But—we have two more months!”
“You have ten more minutes,” he said.
“I haven’t even begun a college savings plan!”
“Are you coming, or not?”
“Coming—where?” I followed as he ran down the hall.
I’m a throwback to an earlier time. A golden era in our country’s history. An era during which it was right and proper for expectant fathers to wait in a bar down the street, while their wives gave birth, and drink hard liquor. To my way of thinking, that’s the only decent and moral way for a man to behave.
The doctor led me into a dressing room where nurses were already changing into surgery garb. Changing, as in stripping down to their underwear and donning loose-fitting blue outfits. Nurses. In their underwear. If I hadn’t been freaked out over becoming a dad two months ahead of schedule—a schedule, I might add, that not only had been agreed upon by all parties, but was traditional—I might have taken my time in the dressing room, waiting magnanimously for the nurses to finish their tasks.
As it was, the doctor shoved loose-fitting blue garments into my hands and said, “Change,” in a tone eerily similar to my drill sergeant’s, when, chancing upon a desire that I execute some push-ups for him, said, “Drop.”
The outfit included floppy-slipper-things that covered my shoes and extended six inches in front of my toes. I looked like Bozo. Yet more reason to favor the Hard Liquor Protocol.
My imminent child was lucky. We live in a spa town well known for its hospitals and clinics. I tell my American friends it’s like the Mayo Clinic of Germany. In particular, it’s where a lot of problem pregnancies end up.
Like ours. I was told later our daughter was strangling on her umbilical cord. She was eight weeks early, and had perhaps only minutes to live. If this pregnancy had occurred in my mother’s day I would probably not be a father.
As they say in Munchkin Land, “Oh, what happened then was rich.”
Specialists flooded the operating room and went to work. It seemed like there were dozens; probably there were five. One set something down, another immediately picked it up. Although the space was tight, they made room for one another, instinctively ducking and shifting, a well oiled machine. The Harlem Globetrotters of Obstetric Medicine.
I once witnessed a launch of the space shuttle. If you have any appreciation for human achievement, watching a rocket lift off and roar to the heavens, against gravity’s relentless pull, will make you weak in the knees. My experience in the surgery was no less: if people can confidently attempt what these doctors and nurses were about to, if they can work together selflessly, seamlessly; if, on ten minutes’ notice they can open an abdomen and free a helpless infant to enjoy a chance at life, there’s hope for humanity.
My wife lay on the operating table, naked, shivering. She hadn’t known ten minutes earlier, either, that she was about to become a mom. I tried to say something comforting: “Don’t worry, they’re going to take good care of you, they’re going to deliver the baby for you.” But things were happening too fast. The OB/GYN, who was also the surgeon, turned to me and said:
“Leave.”
“Leave?”
“Leave. Now.”
“But . . . I got all dressed up! I’m wearing floppy-slipper-things! I look like Bozo!”
“Out.”
“I saw the nurses in their underwear!”
“OUT.”
I went through a swinging door into an adjacent room. The door had a portal, an oval window, so I stood watching activity in the operating room until a pediatrician tapped me on the shoulder.
She had the biggest eyes I’d ever seen. Like a cartoon character. She was masked, so her eyes were all I ever saw. She had dressed and prepped in the same ten minutes as had everyone else, and she waited now, next to an incubator, with a nurse.
“In the corner,” she ordered me.
I went to the far side of the room and stood in the corner.
“In the corner,” she repeated. She crossed the room and pushed at my chest until I was pressed into the wedge-shaped intersection of the two walls. “Don’t move,” she said, and returned to the incubator.
A minute or two of uncomfortable silence passed. An interval tense enough that its static drowned out any words that might have comprised rational thought. Finally the pediatrician turned to me with her big eyes and made a brazen statement:
“Don’t worry. Your baby is going to be fine. Because I’m here.”
The swinging door flew open. The surgeon presented the baby to the pediatrician with both gloved hands, holding it chest high. She took it from him with scripted carefulness. He dashed back into the operating room.
Even in a state of freaking out I could appreciate their competence. They had a procedure for handing the baby over. They had a procedure for making sure the baby didn’t fall to the floor.
But the baby was blue. An attractive shade of blue, a lapis blue. No, even better than that: a cerulean blue. Nevertheless, blue. It hadn’t come out in time.
The pediatrician placed the baby in the incubator and she and the nurse went to work. Their backs were to me, blocking my view. They were bent over their tasks and their arms were moving. That’s all I could tell. They were doing stuff. They were trying.
While they worked I thought about the future. I was too numb to grieve. Would we try again? I tried to calm myself with platitudes. Shit happens. Win some, lose some. That’s the way the ol’ ball bounces.
“It’s a girl,” the pediatrician announced.
Had she suffered? Somehow I had to know. Please tell me the baby didn’t suffer. I blinked a couple of times, and the scene before me distorted into a liquid blur. I’d had decades to foolishly ignore sunrises and complain about summer rain. Couldn’t this baby have just one day?
Finally the pediatrician turned and said, “Don’t you want to see your daughter?”
I shrugged. Maybe they thought it was necessary that I view the remains. I couldn’t help remembering the end of Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms, in which the narrator is asked if he’s proud of his stillborn son.
I glanced into the incubator. The baby was flesh colored, normal looking, squirming. Alive.
Her name is Sarah.
I’m grateful to a surgeon who was committed to urgency and flawlessness, and a medical staff that acted as though all their schooling, all their training, all their lives had merely served to prepare them for this solitary event, the birth of my daughter.
That is the definition of professionalism. And I am thankful that it is.
Photo: Flickr/David Goodman
What a story, so glad it ended on a happy note! Congratulations to you both, and wishing you joy and happiness! 🙂