I was asleep.
I don’t recall whether I was dreaming or not, but I was sleeping well. While it wasn’t too late in the morning — around 9am or so — since I was working nights at the time, I hadn’t been asleep for more than a few hours. What I do recall is that I awoke to my wife’s frantic cries.
“Get up! My water just broke!”
For some couples expecting a baby, that might be a happy, even welcome occurrence. For us, it was not. My wife was just a few ticks over 26 weeks pregnant. And even though she’d just had a good checkup with the Doc a few days earlier, we knew this was bad. And certainly unexpected.
Our first child a couple years earlier had been a handful for my wife. She had suffered pre-term labor beginning at 26 weeks, and though her water never broke, she endured labor pains roughly every 15 minutes for the last 10 weeks of the pregnancy, on bed rest the whole time, finally delivering our oldest son at 36 weeks. He was four weeks premature, but relatively healthy, and home with us after a short, three-day stay in the hospital.
Because of this, our OB Doc was watching my wife very closely this second pregnancy. Considered an “at-risk” pregnancy, she was being checked every week, and after some small, very early-term issues, she was doing well and everything was proceeding normally with no problems.
Until this.
We were in a new home, and less than a week earlier had just finished remodeling our new bedroom. We’d been sleeping on the couch and in a chair up to then. That morning, as I slept in our new bedroom, she had wakened earlier and was sitting in my recliner reading a book to older brother when it broke loose. No labor pains, no trauma: it just broke.
In my recliner… but more on that later.
We scrambled ourselves together quickly. I honestly do not remember what we did with our son, but he was secured somewhere, and we rushed to the hospital. I remember our car had a problem with a tire that I had planned to get fixed that day, but instead we were breaking the speed limit on the way to the hospital, fighting a significant tremor in the steering wheel because of the tire.
We check in and get ushered back to a room. The wife was not having labor pains, that was the weird part. We simply didn’t know what to do, or what to expect. The doctor comes in, and explains that if it were just one week earlier and we’d had the baby, we would actually have the choice of just holding our baby and allowing it to die, or asking the doctors to do what they can to save it. We’d actually be given the choice to allow our child to die. But since we were at 26 weeks, they were mandated by law to deliver the baby and do whatever they can to save it. And then, I will never forget what he said next. I remember it verbatim:
“But you don’t want to have this baby today. If you have this baby today, you’re gonna have problems.”
All well and fine, I say, but what does that mean, since her water has broke? He explains that given her condition, she is at risk of infection, and so they are gonna take a “hands-off” approach to her, and while they won’t do anything to prevent labor should she go fully into it, they will give her muscle-relaxers if she simply has labor pains. They’ll put her on meds to help the baby develop more quickly, but that’s about it. He then tells us that’s she’s gonna lay in that bed there in that hospital until she delivers.
“When will that be?” I says. He says, “98% of women who’s water breaks go into labor within 48 hours, regardless of when their water breaks. However, I’ve seen some woman like this carry to term.” That’s 40 weeks, I say. Does that mean she might have to stay in the hospital for the next 14 weeks?
“Yes,” he says. “She’s not leaving here until she delivers.”
And so we wait. The next week goes relatively smoothly. She lays in bed in the hospital. I go back and forth to work, to the hospital, to home with the son, bringing him up periodically to see Mommy. The following week, not so well. She begins to endure regular labor pains, and as a defense, they keep her drugged up on muscle relaxers. The final three days, she’s in a constant drugged stupor.
I finally go to the doctor with concerns that such a state can’t be good for her health. I explain clearly: “I want my baby to be well, I really do. But I will sacrifice the baby in a heartbeat to make sure my wife is OK. So you need to do something.”
He breaks down and does a physical check of my wife and discovers that our baby has decided to stick his foot out of the birth canal, and she’s ready to go. I say “she” because we were absolutely convinced we were having a baby girl. We hadn’t confirmed it officially, but all indications were it was a girl. And there was no evidence of a boy. We hadn’t found out the gender of our first son, and we didn’t want to find out with the second either. But we were speculating. We hadn’t gone as far to decorate the baby room for a girl, but we were virtually certain our oldest son was going to soon have a baby sister. Little Tori Michelle was on her way — early, apparently.
“It’s time to take this baby,” Doc proclaims.
A C-Section is scheduled immediately, and I ask if I can go in and watch and be with my wife. And here is where he tells me the other thing which I remember verbatim. He get’s right up in my face and says, “Dude, if you go in that room and pass out on me, or cause me any other kind of problem, I’ll kill you myself after I’m done.”
The marching orders being firmly set, I assure him he won’t have any problem with me. From that moment, they had my wife prepped, in surgery, and our baby delivered within 30 minutes.
I’ve heard stories about women scheduling C-Sections like they might a simple dental appointment, and they make it all sound so easy. I was surprised to find out just how vigorous a C-Section is. And while I’ll spare you the details, I’ll just say that it isn’t a mild, minimally-invasive procedure. I watch the whole thing from the head of the bed. The wife is awake, but totally numbed and feels nothing below her chest. In the end, our baby was delivered.
And it was a boy.
We’re stunned, yet still thrilled. 2 lbs. 11 oz. Apparently it wasn’t Tori Michelle who was in such a hurry, but rather a little baby boy. After he’s disconnected from his mother, we don’t get to hold him. Rather, he’s whisked away to some unknown place and we’re told we’ll be allowed to see him at a later time after he’s stabled. They begin to put my wife back together, which was a fun scene to watch, but a story for another time. After 10 minutes or so, the door opens to the room and in walks a nurse holding our new son. She brings him to us and says, “Would you like to hold your son for a few minutes?”
Of course. And we do. Well, Mommy does. I watch, because I am genuinely afraid of breaking him in half. He’s SO tiny. Tinier than I’d ever imagined. Apparently, he’s doing well. After just a couple minutes, the nurse says she’s needs to take him back, and she’s gone again with our son in her arms. I ask the Doc how often do they bring preemies back into the delivery room for the parents to hold? He replies, “He must really be doing well, because I’ve never seen them do that.”
What followed was an eight-week emotional roller coaster, the likes of which I would never wish on anyone. Not due until the end of January, our baby was born October 22, a full 11 weeks premature. At under 3 lbs., he barely fills the palm of my hands. He’s given baths in what is essentially little more than an average sized cereal bowl.
Even though he’s tiny, he’s generally well developed. The problem is his lungs. His lungs are so small, and so little developed, that he has trouble breathing on his own. I can barely hold him. He’s so small, I’m afraid of him. But his Mommy and the nurses aren’t afraid at all, and they move him and shift him and turn him over like it’s nothing, despite all the wires and tubes attached to him. None of which makes him happy at all. When they’re so little, preemie babies like that can’t cry yet. So our baby grunts and growls whenever he’s unhappy. So much so that we begin to call him “Bear” and his Big Brother picks out a little white teddy bear from the gift shop and gives it to him. “Little Bear,” as the toy becomes named — not more than 5 or 6 inches tall — is placed in the incubator with our own “Bear” and dwarfs him in size.
It’s here that I have to make an honest disclosure. Relatively-speaking, our baby was pretty healthy. There were lots of babies that came and went during the next eight weeks who had real problems, far worse than ours. We saw it physically, and we knew it instinctively, but it didn’t make our ordeal any less scary to us. One minute he’d be doing really well, the next he’d be moments away from going on a respirator and being rushed off to the far more serious Riley Hospital. We’d go home one evening with him breathing great and feeling well, only to arrive the next morning to find the nurses scrambling to get him stabilized again.
Every day, up and down, back and forth. For eight weeks.
Finally, with a mandate that he could not leave our house except for Dr. appointments until the following Spring, on December 23 — two days before Christmas — he was allowed to come home and be with his Mommy and Daddy and Big Brother.
I tell you this story because this past Saturday, our “Cody Bear” graduated high school. He’s grown into a stunning young man, both intellectually and physically. Aside from some asthma issues in his early years, you’d never know today that he was ever a preemie, or ever so tiny.
He’s smart and witty and handsome and stubborn and a handful. The past 18 years have been fun, exasperating, adventurous, exciting, frustrating, and ever so wonderful, and I could not be more grateful that our miraculous little 29-week preemie pulled through. He’s known what he wanted ever since he stuck his foot out the birth canal. And he’s grunted and growled his way into a Godly young man we couldn’t be more proud of. He is our proof that God answers prayers.
Oh yeah, about my recliner. It was dried and cleaned. It survived. No worries.
