At Least They're Committed

Once the thought is there, as much as your mind would like to push it away, it’s there and there’s no way of stopping it from growing. Something’s wrong. Something’s wrong with the baby. It began creeping into my head 15 years and a few weeks ago, the feisty pushing, scrambling and moving inside me suddenly splaying out, as if falling, then going silent, silent, silent. Me shoving my bloated belly to wake him up. Shifting and waiting until slight movements began again. I know, I know, I know they sleep. But that wasn’t a baby rolling inside me after the ultra sound or reaching for the needle during the amnio then playing himself to sleep. It was panick. It was a loss of consciousness.

My last day of work at the Rocky before my leave, the monitor in front of me went blank — green and then black — and instead of the sports article I’d been working on, an image emerged. It was me, from above, in a roughly hewn casket, eyes closed, wearing a white cotton night-gown. My hair was long and darker, but I knew it was me. In the crook of my left arm I held a child, also dressed in white, eyes closed, huge mop of ebony hair someone had attempted to be parted on the left. People stood around the coffin looking down at us in death . . . and then the vision, the image started to pull away, smaller and smaller as I ‘rose’ until it was black again and the article reappeared on the screen.

Already I had told the nurse there was something wrong. She wasn’t really my nurse, she was bound to a doctor they’d sent me to after my OBGyn was flown to New York for cancer treatment. They didn’t know me so well, but they took an ultrasound to allay my fears. Yes, there was something wrong. But it wasn’t any big deal, they said. “A kink in the cord is all, simply lean to your left when you’re relaxing,” they said. “It will be fine . . . but we will have to schedule a C-section . . . for Monday.”

He decided to come Sunday. Patti had flown in Saturday afternoon and D and I tried to focus on the DVD of Twister, the first time we’d seen it, and act normal for the other two children. But it was hard, and not because Patti was analyzing the movie for us (“she’s looking at that family and it’s reminiscent of her own . . . “), but because we were afraid the baby was going to die. When labor started before 3 a.m., we navigated the snowy roads and got to the hospital by 6 a.m. The nursing staff hooked me up to the monitors and then quickly shot me with all sorts of drugs to stop labor as his heartbeat dropped from 146 to 32 beats per minute during the first monitored contraction.

My upper body was strapped to a table, crucifixion style —  my lower body numb with the spinal — as my entire self was wheeled into the operating room. I prayed, “save the baby, save the baby!” and I remember the vague, misty, but colorful faces of my two grandfathers and grandmother hovering above me, as if peeking through misted glass from another world. years before, my baby brother hadn’t made it. He’d had a cord problem and he died, born on Christmas. Not again. Please God, not this time.

“Oh my God!” not exactly what you want to hear the nurse say as you’re sliced open and your intestines are laying on the table next to you. The doctor seemed equally appalled by her comment and by what was happening. “It’s going to be fine, everything’s OK,” he said coarsely. I held my breath and terror. I didn’t care what the baby looked like. I didn’t care if there would be brain damage, just save the baby!

Feet, hair, feet, hair: above the blanket they’d put up so as I didn’t freak at seeing my insides (not sure I would have), I saw his perfect feet and the thick blanketed mop top — the dead baby in my vision. The cord was around his neck twice, under his left arm, over his should then hog-tied him at his ankles. But his feet were pink and the villainous cord cut and discarded, and he was alive.

They couldn’t guarantee us he hadn’t suffered brain damage all the times he’d nearly played himself out of existence. They said it was the longest cord they’d ever seen, he was so active it had developed that way. They said the only reason he survived was because we’d established a communication, he’d push, I’d shift. They called him the miracle baby.

As D held him, as I lay there broken, but recovering, I talked to them and he turned and stared at me. We knew each other pretty well. D put his fingers near the baby’s hands, and the infant grabbed them, pulling up and ‘splaying’ this time out of primal instinct instead of danger.

Day 1 after taking him home, I peered into the bassinet, just happy to have him there resting. His eyes are open. “Hiiiii!” I smile and say. Without missing a beat, he says “hiiiii” back to me, more clearly than most 3-year-olds. A couple days later I hear him fussing and check on him: he’s asleep, his skinny neck stretching, his tiny hand curling and uncurling, clawing at his throat. “It’s OK now!” I touch him gently and rock him as he breathes deep and relaxes. “Shshshshshhhh, it’s OK.” And I cry to think of what he went through and I thank God for what we didn’t.

DSII is 15.