Innings

Batting practice:

Grandma Jackie just happened to be in town Friday to see Ava, so we talked her into spending Saturday with us so we could run errands and go out to dinner.

We drove up to Jason and Jen's condo late afternoon so I could install the car seat in their heated garage. I forgot what a sweaty job it was and probably would've been better off in the single-digit Minnesota psycho-weather. Then we all chatted for awhile and at some point Julie said, "I've had like 28 Braxton Hicks contractions since we've been here, but it's nothing."

Then, like hobbits, we ate first dinner. Julie's blue cheese and onion omelet with potatoes came out, and her eyes spun into gleaming moons at first taste.


I ate a sandwich out of politeness. It was 5:30. As Julie painstakingly scraped the last bits from her plate, she complained of more meaningless contractions.

Back home before our 7:45 dinner reservations, I packed the suitcase and threw it in the car, mainly as an appeal to Murphy's Law since we were so in the mood for tapas and conversation with a couple we haven't seen in way too long. Pack the suitcase, feel like a neurotic idiot later--that was the idea.

We never made it to dinner. Julie began gritting her teeth during contractions. When she said they were bad enough that she wouldn't enjoy her food anyway, it was an epiphany, like God got on his P.A. system and said, "Attention dumbshits. This is it."

The game:

Sitting in the same false-alarm prenatal room we sat in last time, we complained about our wasted night. Then the nurse reported the cervix door was more than slightly ajar at four centimeters, and suddenly we were transferred to a birthing suite and realized we were there to stay. We weren't prepared for that.

The nurse said, "Julie, do you have a birthing plan that you've thought about?"

Julie's immediate and cheerful response: "Drugs and more drugs."

One room transfer and one potassium IV bag later, the epidural went much better than last time. The anesthesiologist was quiet and quick, not the long-winded psych patient posing as an anesthesiologist that we had with the Lyla labor. We began to relax a little. Julie's eyes looked weird, like they were dilating differently. I mentioned it to the nurse, who couldn't see what I was talking about. I felt like a tool.

Then I held Julie's water bottle so she could sip from it, and, like the quintessential delivery room husband, I managed to dribble it all over her face and pillow.

The epidural didn't take care of all the pain, and Julie was working pretty hard to manage it. At some point I affected my best coach voice and said, "Wow, I guess there's a reason they call it labor, huh."

"Fuck off," she replied, labor-speak for "I love you."

The 9th inning:

After her water broke, Julie pushed for 20 minutes. The head was halfway out by the time the resident got her gloves on.

At 3:50 AM, Rowan burst onto the scene.






Extra innings:

The flurry of immediate postpartum activities: cutting the cord, quick exam (Rowan scored 9 out of 10, missing a point, I think, for not being able to walk and talk), photos, more photos. The weigh-in. The young man screamed at us for quite a while for various perceived infractions, such as, you know, evicting him from his mother's womb. Then Julie fed him like a champion and all was forgiven. At some point I drove home to fetch Julie's toiletries, somehow left out of the previous night's haphazard packing session.

While I was gone, Julie mentioned that her right arm and hand were a bit numb. Then in the bathroom she noticed what I noticed after the epidural: the different pupils. And now a sagging right eyelid. I had seen the eyelid during the last 20 minutes of pushing, but I didn't say anything ("Push, honey! Hey, why is your eye fucked up?"), and now I wasn't in the room.

The nurse called in the resident, who called the anesthesiologist. No answers. Then they called in the attending. More confusion. Eventually the attending left to call a neurologist.

I walked in, toiletry bag in hand. Moments later the attending returned, sat down, and said, "Enjoy the calm of the next 30 seconds. After that, things will not be calm in here." I remember him saying CAT scan, MRI, EKG, blood clots, facial droop, stroke, and small window. I heard a hallway intercom say Code 99 and our room number. Then the 30 seconds were up and all hell broke loose.

People poured into the room. I stayed as close as I could to Julie's bed. Stickers all over her with wires attached, neurological tests with flashlights, another I.V.-type tube in her other arm so they could draw blood or give injections at will. I held my emotions in check and so did she, but when they wheeled her bed out of the room, I sobbed harder than ever before in my life.

Endgame:

Birthing suites are already big rooms as far as hospitals go, but they feel gargantuan with the bed and mother gone. A nurse helped me bathe Rowan. Then he slept more and I sat in the rocker, wrapped myself in blankets, and shivered.

An hour passed. I ignored all texts and calls from family.

In she rolled. Her eye looked better and she looked normal, but she had endured a battery of tests including 45 minutes in a full-body MRI machine. They gave her headphones and asked what kind of music she wanted to drown out the sounds. "Rock." She avoided hitting the panic button by sheer grit: she never even opened her eyes.

We resumed normal parenting activities. Occasionally a doctor would come in and offer his or her theory. It was like an episode of House, only the patient got better right away instead of worse. As the hours passed, every single test revealed nothing interesting whatsoever. Long story short (too late, I know), the prevailing theory is that somehow the epidural caused a temporary condition called Horner's Syndrome. The big clue was the irregular pupil dilation that I noticed right after the epidural, a non-postpartum symptom. And the eyelid drooping during labor: non-postpartum. The numbness later could've been anything. But the pupil, eye, and arm on the same side of the body, without immediately connecting the dots about when the symptoms first appeared--that's why everyone freaked out.

So we're good!


Sorry you had to read all that scary stuff, but imagine how we felt. But yeah: game over, and despite all the drama, everyone's fine and we still got a free baby out of the deal. And he's a great baby, too. Handsome as hell and all that. And now we're home. It's quite a life, isn't it?