I sit at the keyboard in the pre-dawn hours, clacking away as I do most mornings at this time. There are, however, two major differences between today and any other weekday in the past six months. The first is that I’ve already been up for over an hour. The second is that my infant son, not quite a week old, is sleeping beside me.
—
We went in on Tuesday night to start the induction process. “You’re not dilated at all,” the doctor told my wife. “I won’t be surprised if we’re still here tomorrow night, waiting.”
Wednesday morning, they had her on the hard stuff and the contractions were starting. Not the real contractions — the kind that kick a baby across the room — but the softer, less painful, training-wheel contractions. We read. We napped. We waited.
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The cats aren’t sure what to think of the littlest intruder on their domain. The small one seems suspicious and jealous — but she has that reaction everything new in the house, like bags of groceries. The big one is just curious.
The girls know exactly what to think. They adore their baby brother: holding him, feeding him, dressing him — it’s like having a doll that will sleep on you.
—
Around noon on Wednesday, the doctor came into attach an internal monitor to the baby. She reached up inside to find his head (“I’m sorry, this is going to be very uncomfortable!”). Instead, she found the umbilical cord.
“We have a prolapsed cord.” she said, calmly yet urgently. There was no shouting, no panic, but a definite sense of urgency. “The cord’s come down. I’m holding his head off of it. We’ll need to do a C-section right now.”
In moments, the room was full of blue-clad medical professionals. Some I recognized: a couple nurses, the anesthesiologist who did the epidural — but the others were strangers. One of them traded places with with the doctor; she climbed onto my wife’s bed and held the baby off the cord while others wheeled the bed off to the operating room.
—
I’m on the early morning feeding shift. “I’m usually up between 4:00 and 5:00 anyway, so it’s no big deal,” I said.
Except the boy was up and starving at 3:00 this morning. It was 2:00 yesterday morning. Maybe I can get him trained to sleep until 4:00.
—
A “prolapsed cord” is pretty serious. The baby’s head is literally squeezing the umbilical cord shut, cutting off his oxygen. Too long like this and he can suffer brain damage, or even death. Thus the urgency. Thus the surgery.
The C-section went well. My wife received many compliments on her bravery. Both she and the baby came out fine, but had some recovering to do. Our little boy spent the next three days in the NICU, but on Sunday we were able to bring him and his mother home.
If felt good to be a family again, like nothing had changed. Even though everything has changed.
—
He’s snorting and squawking in his bed now, threatening to wake up. He’s probably hungry again; if he’s awake, he’s hungry. Such is the nature of the beast.
This is the point where I should say something profound, something about how lives change in ways we never expect, and how babies teach us the secrets of the universe or something. But the only thing profound here is my gratitude that in the end, my family is safe and healthy.
And that is enough.
