Nice To Meet You
The story of how we met.
[Letter #029]
Good morning, son.
If you’re just casually leafing through a stack of these letters someday, you might notice a particular date is missing from the series. I usually get a letter out to you about once per week, and there was indeed one that I had intended for June 18. You will, no doubt, know very well by now that your mother and I encountered a rather unexpected situation just one day later. I hope that you’ll excuse my absence. It’s been a rather action-packed ten days.
While I am far more interested in Juneteenth as a holiday than I am, say, Independence Day, just to note two holidays around this time of the year, I have to admit that I’m both happy and relieved that you chose the former for your birth over the latter. Being born on a holiday always comes with its pros and cons, but it’s impossible to avoid being associated with the celebration of the day itself for the remainder of one’s life. I’m sure you’ll agree that it’s far better to be associated with freedom from imperial control than with the birth of the empire itself.
Enough about holidays though. What the hell happened? You weren’t scheduled to arrive here until at least July 5. Your original due date was five days after that. That means that you showed up about three weeks early. You’re not even supposed to be here yet.
Despite that, I just now swaddled you and put you down in your bassinet next to your mother. You’re really strong, by the way. Big too. You came into this world at a massive 8 pounds, 4 ounces — and recall, that was three weeks early. Had you gone full term, you might have beaten your Papa’s record (I was 11, 5).
While you’re here and doing well now, it’s been quite the journey since I last sat down at this desk to write you a letter. Today, I just wanted to tell you a little bit about it. I’ll skip some of the gross or boring bits, but I hope you’ll indulge me otherwise.
Early morning on Tuesday, June 18, your mother woke me from the bathroom. I had no conception of time at that point, and I thought it must have been well past dawn. Maybe I had overslept an appointment or something.
“I think my water just broke.”
Something just broke? I’ll fix it later. Why am I so sleepy right now? Is it the middle of the night?
Wait, hang on. I think she said “water broke.” Yeah, that’s not something fixable. Let me think about this for a moment. I’ll ask her to repeat what she said in order to buy me some time to figure out what all of this means. Scanning through my sleepy brain’s recent memory, I recall learning from one of those birthing classes that water breaking doesn’t mean what it means in the movies. It’s not a sudden emergency situation that becomes a frantic high-speed chase scene to get to the hospital before the baby pops out. Ok, so we probably have several hours at least before we must do something about it. Can I get some more sleep?
Well, what did they say about a ruptured amniotic sac? Something something bacterial infection risk over time. I realized I didn’t know enough or couldn’t remember enough to answer all of my questions, so I decided more sleep was impossible. My phone said that it was around a quarter past 4:00 AM. I got up.
Checking on your mother, we decided together that this was indeed a water-break situation. We called the OB office, and they got us on the phone with the on-call doctor who advised us to go ahead to the hospital to get checked out. We packed a bag rapidly and did just that. We had every intention of already having such a bag ready to go, but you see, somebody decided to show up three weeks early.
While we were trying to pack things up though, your mother mentioned something concerning. She hadn’t felt you kick at all since the water-break thing started. Maybe it was nothing — sometimes you just didn’t kick much. But, this was weird, right? This happened when you were at 36 weeks, 6 days of gestation. You were supposed to be getting more active. Could something have gone wrong? Is this what happens when something goes wrong? You are our first, so we had no idea. There are so many little details that can’t be known beforehand, and you never think to ask every single thing.
You hadn’t kicked yet. I didn’t show it to your mother, but this scared me. This was truly the first time that I even considered the possibility that I might lose you. To this point, you hadn’t been truly “real” yet. I mean, we wouldn’t even call you by your name until you were well on your way to being a healthy human. This was probably the moment when I actually considered you to be “real” though, and I thought that losing you would crush me. Earlier in the pregnancy, it would have been a disappointment, but I would have been able to compartmentalize it so as to help your mother get through it. Now though? No, you were already my son, although the thought wasn’t apparent to me until I considered that you may have stopped moving indefinitely.
She felt you kick.
I could breathe again. I don’t think I hid my relief at all. We continued collecting our things and headed to the hospital.
Your mother was confirmed to have a ruptured amniotic sac, so we were admitted to the Labor & Delivery floor. The doctor advised us that there was no immediate rush, but you’d have to be born without 24 to 48 hours to avoid bacterial infiltration, just by way of the normal biota of your mother’s body.
They started your mother on medicines that were intended to make her body more ready to give birth and to induce labor. She did feel some contractions for a little while, but these eventually faded away and stopped altogether. There was no dilation — at all — for over thirty hours. The water had broken, but no other element of your mother’s body was ready for labor. Even without contractions, spending thirty-plus hours in a hospital room getting injected with all manner of intravenous potions is thoroughly exhausting, to say the very least. Your mother was afraid that even if we could somehow kickstart her labor process and actually make it to the birth stage, she would not have the energy remaining to go through with it. It was decided that a c-section would be the best option.
This point felt hopeful. All of the monitors showed that you were doing very well — healthy. The nurse provided me with a surgical gown to cover my clothing, a mask, and a net for my hair. I was going to be allowed into the operating room when you arrived. She took me down a hallway that had a little side hall where she instructed me to sit for now. They were going to prep your mother for surgery and then invite me in. I would get to witness your debut.
I sat in that chair for several minutes with nothing much to do. I poked my phone and then greeted the other father there waiting his turn to witness his child’s birth as well. There were some rapid steps in the main hallway next to me, but this is a hospital. There are always people walking quickly. The other father was invited back, and I wished him well and congratulations. I then sat there alone, at one point momentarily moving aside for the janitor who needed to push a bin by me.
There were a few more rapid steps in the main hallway. Then, there were a couple of … shouts? Yeah, definitely raised voices. The rapid walking turned into running, and these people, dressed in full scrubs and operating room attire, were all headed in the same direction — your mother’s direction.
I texted your uncle. “People running and loud voices. That’s concerning.”
More of them ran by, again all in the same direction. The operating room had to be full of medical staff by now. What’s going on?
“Where is the doctor?! Call her! We need her in here now!!”
Son, I’m not embellishing this story in the slightest. This is what I saw and heard that day, sitting alone in that side hall on an old ratty swivel chair, dressed head-to-toe in surgical plastics, and with no agency beyond standing up and then sitting back down again. I didn’t have full confirmation that this emergency was your mother’s, but when they were calling for the doctor, they were calling for her doctor. It was easy enough to piece it together.
I realize that medical science is pretty advanced these days, and I also understand that fatalities for either mother or child during childbirth have become really uncommon. That doesn’t mean that it doesn’t ever happen though.
I had to sit there and try not to think about it — try not to think about how, where I had before believed that my family was about to grow from two to three, that it was not impossible that it was about to shrink to just me. What would become of me if you both exited my life that day? What if your mother survived but we lost you? What if you were saved but she died? None of these questions had any acceptable answers. I just could not accept them or even consider them. Several minutes passed, each one a century.
One of the surgical nursing staff came to my side hall and knelt next to my chair. I don’t know why that kneeling position seemed to me to be a sort of preamble to forthcoming terrible news, but it did. She spoke with what seemed like a practiced calm, a manner developed from many experiences of delivering heartbreaking messages resulting from tense moments.
“Has anyone filled you in on what’s happened yet?”
“No!” I tried to keep the anxious irritation from my voice, but I failed miserably. Keeping cool the way my father used to under these sorts of situations is always what I prefer to do, if it’s possible. This time, it simply wasn’t.
She continued. “As you know, we were prepping your wife for the c-section. We were having a little difficulty detecting the baby’s heartbeat at first. That could be normal, but we were concerned about it. Once we administered the anesthesia to her however, we could no longer find the fetal heartbeat at all. This immediately triggered a code, and we were forced to do an emergency c-section right there. This is why we couldn’t bring you back for the surgery. We were able to get the doctor back and the operation was completed. The baby should be brought to this room here,” she motioned across the main hallway, “and you’ll be able to see him.”
“Hold on, please.” I had not heard the thing I wanted to hear yet. “You’re saying that the c-section is already done and the baby is already here?”
“Yes.”
“Could you tell me that mother and baby are both healthy and doing well?”
“Oh, um, yes. They’re both fine,” she said, as though that was just a given.
“Lead with that!!” Yes, I nearly shouted it.
I rose from the chair and stepped around her toward the room across the main hallway. To say that I was upset with this nurse for dragging things out would understate it significantly — she did apologize as I was stepping away though — but it didn’t matter anymore. You were safe, your mother was safe, and now you were born into the world.
As I entered the room, you were brought around in front of me to be placed on a table with clear plastic walls, an incubation light, and a great many gauges, buttons, and knobs. With deft alacrity, the staff placed a snarl of leads on your abdomen and smacked your back with a little suction-cup-looking device. They explained that this would help remove the remaining fluid from your lungs. They then arranged a C-PAP mask over your head with the explanation that your lungs had not yet developed sufficient surfactant to transfer oxygen in the air to your bloodstream. That must have been why your chest was rapidly pumping, but you didn’t seem to be making progress.
They wheeled you into the operating room just long enough for your mother to see you, challenging as that was with your new residency within the plastic incubation box. You were born on the day that marked 37 weeks of gestation, but they said that the lungs are some of the last bits to develop, and yours had not quite yet finished. Thus, they whisked you off to the NICU where you would remain for another couple of days, only then would you be rejoined with your mother in her room. You took a little longer to make it out of the woods than we thought, but I no longer feared for you.
I won’t go into details here about the complications that your mother suffered, but suffice it to say that it was a continuation of the same wild ride with another few scary moments. It took several more days of trying to troubleshoot problems and wait around for the treatments to kick in. It really felt like every day there was a new problem, a new scan or test, a new disappointing lab result. Each came with a long list of risks, potential treatments, and ambiguous durations. I did not fear that I would lose your mother anymore, but there was a constant, low-level threat of that the entire time.
We had no idea how much longer it would take to get her healthy enough to bring everyone home. Having gone to the hospital on Tuesday morning before dawn, we were finally discharged on the following Sunday night. Your mother’s labwork wasn’t perfect at that point either, but the doctors felt like she would do better at home from that point on.
Son, when I’ve said before that I could not wait to meet you, I must clarify that this was a figure of speech. I was excited to meet you, and you did not disappoint, but I absolutely could have waited for another couple of weeks — especially if that meant that we would have had fewer complications with the whole ordeal. That said, exactly how much larger would you have grown if we had waited? Would the risks of complications actually decrease or would they have increased? Who knows?
None of that matters now. You’re here, and it’s so very good to finally meet you. You are indeed the person to whom I have been writing these letters all this time, and it’s wonderful to finally give you your name. We no longer need to call you Tiny Bear, but we still do anyway. Your mother seems to be recovering well now, and you’ve been growing faster than the average since you’ve been home.
I’m proud of you, son. I love you. I can’t wait to get back to writing more to you, especially now that I can see you with my eyes and watch you grow up. You were born into a rapidly shifting world, and you’ll need to be both strong and smart to handle that in the future. I’m going to do my very best to make sure that you’re up to it. Until then, I guess I’ll just change your diaper again. Goodness knows, you need it.
I’ll get back to my regular sort of letters next time.
Your father,
Papa Bear
[Author’s note: This is a series of letters that I intend to print to paper and deliver to my son, probably around the year 2040. You are more than welcome to read along. The links in the article are only for you, the reader, and will include citations, jokes, asides, and links to books or other items. If you happen to purchase anything through such a link, I’ll get a small commission. Every little bit helps, right?]
