Two Fridays back I drove my wife to the hospital so we could get our hands on that baby she\u2019d been cooking up. I expected that we\u2019d get there in the early afternoon and be home with the baby by the end of the night. This is maybe from my experience watching birthing on TV. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
I\u2019ve written about cinematic lockpicking before. In the movies, you never see the part where the operator is attempting to pick the lock; you only ever see the part where they are succeeding <\/em>in picking the lock. They cut out all the boring parts. Watching someone actually try to pick a lock in a movie would be terrible for the story\u2019s pacing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I\u2019ve recently learned that Hollywood is equally practical in its treatment of childbirth. They only show the interesting part, which comes at the very end. In actuality most of it is very boring. Hour one is essentially the same as hour two, hour three, and hour four. In our case, it remained the same until hour thirty<\/em>-four. But hour 35\u2014that one was a doozy.<\/p>\n\n\n\n That was the hour when the doctors decided that an emergency Cesarean section was required. Once they did, no time was wasted. For a bit of background, when my wife was a small child she had an eye surgery during which she was put under general anesthesia. Only it didn\u2019t work right. She was immobilized and felt no pain, but was fully conscious throughout the ordeal, listening and watching as the surgeon operated on her eyeball. Ever since then she has been deathly afraid of surgeries. So we tried very hard to avoid a C-section. <\/p>\n\n\n\n I assured her as they wheeled her into the operating room that she would feel no pain. Once we got there, the team very efficiently set everything up, which included a blue sheet hung between my wife\u2019s face and the butchery that was about to unfold on the other side of it. This was to block her view. The sheet had a little plastic window in it so that the moment they pulled the baby out they could hold it up to the window and my wife could see it. Two things here did not go as expected;<\/p>\n\n\n\n So then we had to spend a few days in a private room in the hospital as she recovered and fought off infections, and as a team of nurses coached us through keeping a newborn alive. On the second day my four visiting in-laws came to see us and celebrate the arrival of the new baby. They brought oversized balloons and cake and took many photos. They marveled at how large our half-white baby was. Our little one\u2019s baby cousin in Thailand had been almost exactly one month younger when she was removed by scheduled C-section on a numerologically fortuitous date.<\/p>\n\n\n\n At one point, I had to change one of those alien first-week diapers as my in-laws looked on in disapproval. Unaccustomed to temperatures lower than 98.6 degrees, the baby objected vociferously to the room-temperature wet wipes. To her they must have felt like an arctic blast delivered directly to her infant anus. She screamed bloody murder as I tried to coax the caked-on black blotches of meconium from her delicate skin the way a nurse had shown me. My mother-in-law and sister-in-law commentated\u2014criticized\u2014in Thai as I hurriedly tried to get my screaming daughter clean and warm. I turned to my wife to translate their solution to this problem. Unfortunately my wife, who is an angel, could only sputter some oxycodone-fueled nonsense about cleaning the baby at home. I looked at my mother-in-law who looked back at me as if to say, \u201cWhat now, hotshot?\u201d The baby continued to wail. I looked at my sister-in-law. She furrowed her brow. The baby screamed even louder and some more meconium came out. Then I gave up. I said, \u201cOkay, I\u2019m going to pick up lunch. You guys can handle this.\u201d I stalked out the door and left them to sort it out.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I walked around the hospital floor looking for a bathroom to wash my hands and be alone for a minute. It didn\u2019t take long to find a nice single-occupancy room, which I entered with a great sense of relief. Once inside I immediately heard people talking about how a guy had just gone into the bathroom. I cut my reprieve short and stepped out to find two women in scrubs watching the door from halfway down the hall. One of them said, \u201cYou shouldn\u2019t have gone in there. That bathroom is radioactive!\u201d They went on to say that it was a secure hallway and they didn\u2019t know how I got onto it. I hadn\u2019t performed any locksmith magic. I had just walked through an open set of doors that separated one hallway from the other. I looked at the wall and saw a sign that read, \u201cRadiology Lab.\u201d I shrugged and left irritated.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The following day I was granted an afternoon furlough from the hospital room when my mother-in-law came to help with the baby. I went out to do some locksmithing jobs. Never before had going to work felt so much like freedom.<\/p>\n\n\n\n After a fifth and final night in the hospital, we brought our baby home. The first thing I did was get showered and into my work clothes so I could get in my van and back to my routine. Once I was ready to go I came out into my living room to find my in-laws all sitting on the floor. The space heater they\u2019d purchased to combat our air conditioning was sitting in the middle of the living room. I felt like I was in a swamp. I groused at my wife, \u201cYou know this baby is only half Thai. The other half is European and she can\u2019t take this heat. You guys are going to kill her.\u201d I walked over to the thermostat and was perplexed to see that the temperature in the room was only 73 degrees. I went outside to cool off. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Outside I gradually stripped down to my undershorts and t-shirt as I got hotter and hotter in the cool breeze. I felt sick. The world was spinning. I lost my lunch in the grass. I\u2019d become so ill so quickly, and in a way I\u2019d never felt before, that I started to get worried. I supposed it was food poisoning from something I\u2019d eaten in the hospital. But I also thought back to that exchange I\u2019d had outside the bathroom in the radiology department at Swedish First Hill. In my feverish state I became very worried for the future of this new family I was supposed to support. My wife came outside and saw the condition I was in. Totally misreading the situation, she said, \u201cI know how stressful it is for you to have my family around. Can I get you a beer?\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n I choked back tears and asked her for some privacy so I could call my brother. On the phone I told him what was going on\u2014that I probably had food poisoning\u2014but that also this funny thing had happened at the hospital. I told him where in my house he needed to go to find all of the passwords for my various accounts. He listened and told me that the story was outlandish, that it was impossible that a major hospital in the United States could just have some publicly accessible room that was full of radiation. I agreed with him.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Then I stumbled into my house and up the stairs to scrawl some passwords onto a notepad. By the time I was done there were a half a dozen discarded pieces of paper on the floor. My handwriting had been too illegible to serve the purpose. Next I called my mother and asked for a ride to urgent care. By the time she arrived I was crumpled and shivering on the floor of my hallway, dryheaving into a plastic Safeway bag, and surrounded by my wife and in-laws kneeling around me. I could not get up. Anytime I opened my eyes the world would tilt on its access and start to spin. My mother called an ambulance.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Half an hour later I was en route to the ER. Despite the paramedics blasting the heat in the back of the ambulance, I heard them say my body temperature was 95.4 degrees. At the hospital I was hooked up to an IV and stabilized with Valium and anti-nauseants. They drew blood and gave me an EKG. I was put on a waiting list to get an MRI to check for indications of a stroke.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n After two days of lying in a hospital bed one of my doctors confided that if it were him he\u2019d go home and wait for an outpatient MRI. I politely told the next nurse who came into the room that I\u2019d like to be discharged. She immediately removed my IV, unhooked the heart monitor and pointed to the door. I hurried to put on my clothes and gather my personal effects before dizzily walking out in the bright waiting room lobby where people hacked and quietly moaned. I called home for a ride. When my mother rolled down the street I greeted her outside so she wouldn\u2019t need to park, doing everything I could to stand erect and project an air of haleness. I didn\u2019t want anyone in my circle finding a reason to tell me not to go back to work.<\/p>\n\n\n\n At home the baby was a little more mature than when I\u2019d last seen her and I had a frightening pile of neglected emails to process. I followed up with a primary care doctor. He didn\u2019t seem interested in arriving at a medical diagnosis, short of suggesting that it might have been stress-related. But I can\u2019t think of anything that would be causing me stress. He said to come back if it happened again. I rather hope it doesn\u2019t.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I honestly don\u2019t know how this story ends. Really it\u2019s the beginning of a story, which may be the longest and most important of my life. As always, I just hope to do a good job.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"\n
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