Bringing in Finn (39 page)

“You know something?” my mother said, slapping her palm on the mattress. “This baby is incredible! The only reason I was induced was for low fluid. I think he really took those
Harry Potter
books to heart.” She looked at the three of us to see if we were following her. “He performed an illusion—by hiding the water at the ultrasound.” I nodded, with her completely.

Bill and my father looked pale and disturbed. My father wiped the sides of his face and his forehead with a handkerchief. He let out a low sigh and then sank into the chair, shaking his head at my mother.

“This is what we get for letting the two of them hang out every day,” he said to Bill.

Once he was sure my mother was fine, Bill went into the hallway to “get some air,” he announced, “and probably have a nervous breakdown.”

On his way back to the room, he overheard Annie describing the bag-breaking incident to the some of the nurses at the station.

“You should have seen it in there when the water broke.”

“Big one?” one of the nurses asked.

“It was like Lake Michigan,” Annie said.

 

Dr. Socol returned
at seven in the morning. My mother had still not dilated past four centimeters and had now been in labor for sixteen hours. We were hoping for another doctor from the practice, thinking someone new might offer alternatives. Dr. Gerber stuck her head through the door to say good morning and that she would be back at the hospital again around 6:00 PM. “But you'll probably have had the baby by then,” she said, giving my mother a wink.

“I certainly hope so,” I said, looking at the clock on the wall.

My mother brought up the issue of a C-section.

“We're still very optimistic for a vaginal birth,” Dr. Gerber said, as if this were an athletic event and she and Dr. Socol were sports commentators.

“We do whatever we can to avoid unnecessary surgery,” Dr. Socol said, giving the boilerplate answer we'd already heard from the staff.

The baby's heart rate was strong, and my mother's blood pressure and vitals were steady. She continued to be free from contraction pain, thanks to the epidural, but was starting to show signs of fatigue. Her hands shook now when she reached for the ice pitcher. She'd mostly stopped drinking water. I worried about her energy; she hadn't eaten in twenty-four hours.

“When does surgery become necessary?” I asked.

“When the life of the mother or baby is endangered, or there are no other alternatives. We see people go eighteen, even twenty-four, hours and then kick into full labor,” Dr. Gerber said. Then, having completed her pep talk, she left the room.

“You'd think being sixty-one would give you some special treatment,” Bill said once she'd left.

“Seriously,” my mother said.

The sun rose orange in the sky. Streaks of light poured into the room, so much that we lowered two of the shades. The hours unfolded at a protracted pace. Each time someone came to check on my mother's progress, they said the same thing: “More Pitocin. We'll check in again two hours.”

“It's not as if we can perform the C-section ourselves,” my mother said, though I thought I could hear wistfulness in her voice.

It was eleven in the morning, and no one besides my mother had slept for more than an hour during the night. We laughed at things that weren't funny: the stick-figure icons on the TV menu; the terrible production quality of the educational videos on the in-house birthing channel.

Punchiness gave way to impatience. Adrenaline and lack of sleep distorted my reality. The hallways started to look elongated and bendy, like a fun house's. My reflection in the mirror looked unfamiliar.

Bill's parents stopped by again to show support. Ellen and Chris returned after an entire next day of work, incredulous that my mother was still laboring. I felt claustrophobic. The jovial atmosphere I'd enjoyed in the room the night before now felt distracting. I felt even further away from the baby and grasped to make some connection. The staff's lack of urgency or concern began to feel robotic and disturbing. Part of me questioned whether our baby was even still
inside my mother: Would he ever actually be brought out, or would we continue indefinitely in this limbo?

We won't go later than midnight,” Dr. Gerber said when she arrived to check on us again. “If you haven't gone into full labor by then, we'll move to cesarean.” At least we had an end point now. My mother and I had been in the hospital for thirty-three hours. She'd been in induced labor for twenty-eight. The next scheduled check-in was at 9:00 PM.

I felt a resurgence of energy. My mother encouraged Bill and me to go out for something to eat. She felt comfortable with my father sitting with her and would welcome an hour to rest. Based on the way the past check-ins had gone, none of us anticipated anything much would change at nine.

I wasn't sure if I could eat, but my stomach rumbled in response to the idea of food and I reached for my coat. My sister said she would join us and suggested a sushi place one block north. We bundled ourselves into coats, hats, and gloves and walked into the night. The sky was inky black, and our breath looked like white smoke in the air. The wind hit like a wall. It was so strong that we had to hold the side of the building to stay upright.

I felt strange being outside the hospital. Prentice had become an insulated pod. Out on the street and even amid the cozy warmth and tinkling of ceramic spoons against bowls of soup at the restaurant, I felt thrust into the ether.

We set our phone timers for eight fifty, giving ourselves ten minutes to return to the room. “No need to run back, though,” Bill said, eyeing his phone. “I'm sure they're going to tell us we're going until midnight.”

While we ate, my sister described the cesarean, a procedure she'd participated in during her obstetrics rotation.

“The ones I've seen are pretty fast,” she said. “It only takes maybe ten minutes to get the baby out.”

I was usually the one engrossed in medical discussions with my sister while Bill reminded us such conversations tended to ruin a meal. Tonight, however, Bill was riveted and I hummed a song in my head. I didn't want to hear too much detail. As much as I endeavored to focus on this as a new experience, images of my own cesarean pushed themselves forward when I thought about the operating room.

I didn't care to add any visuals to those already flooding my mind. I turned to the side and saw a wall of water running down a large slab of slate near the entrance to the restaurant. The fixture reminded me of the water feature in the solarium of our house. It was likely our baby was going to be born via C-section that night, and I was going to do everything in my power to be all there—in the OR and in life—for him.

“I'm more worried about them continuing the labor than I am about the C-section,” my sister was saying. “Thirty-two hours is long, even for a young person.”

I looked around the room for our waitress, with her long shiny hair and pressed blue-and-white kimono. She was taking a long time bringing the check. I eyed my phone, wondering if I should run back to the room and let Bill finish and pay.

“There's no hurry,” Bill said. “I'm sure we'll go until midnight.”

I tapped my foot under the table and tried to restrain myself until the check came.

At three minutes past nine, we rounded the corner toward the nurses' station and I saw a mob of bodies outside the entrance to our room. The door swung open, and more doctors and nurses in lab coats and industrial scrubs swarmed the room like bees.

“Oh my god,” I said, racing toward the door.

I pushed through the crowd and slid on the polished floor. The
room was unrecognizable. Glaring lights shot down from the ceiling, and Dr. Gerber was standing in scrubs by the head of the bed. At least fifteen people, including the resident who'd been on duty the night before, were moving about, checking monitors, hanging another IV bag.

“We're going to section,” Dr. Gerber announced, a triumphant smile on her face. My mother was sitting up, radiant.

“It's time!” my mother said.

A hospital attendant instructed us that we needed to move our things to the postdelivery room on the fourteenth floor. Another barked that whoever was going into the OR needed to change immediately into scrubs.

My body tried to catch up with my cognitive process.
We're going into the OR for a C-section.
Our baby was, in fact, finally about to be born.

“This is happening,” Bill said. He grabbed my shoulders from behind. I turned to face him. Years before, the first or second year we lived in England, Bill had awakened me after having a powerful dream. We had only just been married and I was still on the Pill, still years from even trying to start a family.

“I met our child,” Bill said. “She came to me and said, ‘It's going to be okay, Daddy.' She took my hand. It didn't feel like a dream, Sara. She was so real.”

We'd talked about the dream once or twice in the beginning of our fertility endeavors. Sometime after the twins died, though, we'd stopped. Trying to convince ourselves it had been a prophesy or assurance that we would have children became too painful. We had to find a way to move forward knowing that there were no guarantees.

Neither of us had mentioned the dream in a long while, but I thought of it now as we moved toward our son's birth. I pressed
myself against Bill's chest and squeezed hard. In six years, we'd held to our promise to not turn away from each other. We had never fully lost faith.

“Only one of you can come into the room,” Dr. Gerber said. Bill and I joined my father at the foot of my mother's bed. The doctors had been pressing so hard for a vaginal birth that we didn't even know the hospital protocol for C-sections. I had not really considered that we wouldn't all be allowed in for the birth. How often did a sixty-one-year-old woman give birth to her own grandchild?

Now, I wanted with all my soul to be in that room. I was sure Bill and my father felt the same.

The three of us cleared more space around my mother's bed. Around her was the din of a pre-OR circus. I felt a pull inside my own body, a palpable connection not just to the baby, but to my mother as well. I felt a wave of calm. Whatever she decided would be fine. A tall, angular male nurse cut through our circle and extended a set of scrubs. “We need to know who's coming,” he said. “You need to decide now.”

“Sara,” my mother said, her eyes on mine. “Bring the Great Mother with you.”

I looked at Bill, wanting a moment with him, to find out how he felt. He smiled at me, and the nurse pushed the scrubs against my rib cage.

“Now,” he said. Dr. Gerber called to the team that it was time to move. After the creeping pace of the past thirty-six hours, action felt accelerated.

Bill and my father threw our belongings into bags. I could see Bill almost at the door, his shoulders stooping just a bit under the weight of the large duffel bag and our laptops. I ran to meet him, standing on tiptoe and grabbing the sides of his face so I could kiss him.

“Big picture, right?” I said. It was what we'd said to each other when we'd faced other obstacles or delays. “Big picture” was having our baby.

“Bring him in, Sara. Bring him in safe,” he said.

It wasn't fair that Bill didn't get to come with us, but I'd seen the futility of arguing against hospital policy. I swept aside the guilt I felt and pulled the gray scrubs over my clothes. I promised myself I would be in the room for both Bill and myself.

By the time we left the room for the OR, every member of the surgical team was covered top to bottom in gray. We walked en masse down the hallway. The mood of the entourage was focused, as if they were all feeling, with my mother and me, the significance of our mission.

The OR was gleaming and white. Bulbous lights beamed onto the operating table. Michael, the primary anesthesiologist, began to administer pain medication through the same tube used for the epidural. I again tried to untangle myself from memories of my previous visits to the OR.

All I could see of my mother was the strip of her eyes between her surgical cap and gown. I was afraid to ask if she was scared, but I forced myself. In what she was about to do, I believed my job was to support her and be present for the birth of our child.

She only nodded at first, yes to feeling scared.

Later she told me she was praying:
Please don't bring us all this way and leave us.

I squeezed her shoulder.

The surgical team assembled at the base of the bed. A nurse lifted a tall paper sheet and fastened it to a bar, separating my mother's head and our view from the rest of the room. I heard a loud sucking sound as a machine came to life. Dr. Gerber called commands to her team. Michael went to work, flicking his finger on the tube of
an IV that would deliver numbing medication to my mother's body. A nurse pulled a chair next to my mother's head and told me to sit beside her.

As my mother answered Michael's questions about what, if anything, she could feel below her waist, my brain finally worked out the calculation that I had been resisting for six years: two years of acupuncture, six IVF cycles, three hundred injections, two stillbirths, a miscarriage. I bit down on the side of my cheek. It had all led to this moment.

“I'm beginning,” Dr. Gerber announced.

“This is it,” my mother said. I offered up a prayer to the Great Mother.

“Please,” my mother added, “please finish this in joy.”

I began to cry. A tear ran down the side of my mother's face. Then she jerked and grimaced.

“I'm in,” Dr. Gerber said.