Aleigh and Isaac
I’m pretty sure I’m going to die at this point. And the funny thing is, I don’t care. But that’s the morphine talking. Or rather, the morphine-Benadryl-Gravol pumped into my veins five minutes ago. I am legitimately dying of an overdose. My uncle is there. And my friend’s husband. And tiny oranges are bouncing around my room with little, curly tails.
Back on earth, our son is 5.5 hours old. He has been cut out of my body and taken to intensive care because he is too little to breathe. He weighs 2.5 pounds. He is 2.5 months early. We haven’t found a decent place to live and our apartment is full of cat hair.
11:25 p.m. Enter a Nurse: “How are you feeling, on a scale of 1 to 10?”
(I puzzle at how to rate the aftereffects of my C-Section. I err on the side of non-whininess.) “Oh, about a 4.”
Are you feeling sick?
I feel sick and itchy. And I’m in pain.
The doctor left orders to give you this.
Down goes the plunger. This is the last time I will feel that there is anything normal about childbirth.
11:26 p.m. I start to puke. Violently. My husband goes into the hallway to tell the nurse there is something wrong. She gives him a towel.
11:30 p.m. There is no towel big enough for the blood filling up my belly where the internal stitches have ripped apart.
11:35 p.m. The Nurse realizes that neither I nor my husband is hysterical. Enter 5 more nurses, then doctors, interns.
My husband says, “Her pupils are different sizes.” He makes me talk to him but the things I say aren’t the things I am thinking. I am telling him to take care of our son, because I am not going to be around. Whatever my mouth is saying, it makes no sense.
The doctor with the red hair says something about my blood pressure. As in, I don’t have any.
I die. Twice.
The Naloxone, a drug used to counter heroin overdoses, hits. And with it comes the realization that my blood pressure, my pupil size, my life, are all my responsibility.
The red-haired doctor inserts an arterial line. Without anesthetic. And then the world goes dark and I am back in the OR for seven hours.
I have to learn to walk again. If I walk, I can see my little boy in the NICU. It’s a million miles away. But I walk. I have a wheelchair but I walk it down the hall. It is a double wide wheelchair and, when I sit in it, people always make comments about how tiny I am. I don’t want to be tiny. I want to be big. I want to scream at them and say, “It’s just this huge wheelchair that makes me look small!” But that would be crazy. So I push the wheelchair down the hall. My legs have swollen up like sausages and I have no ankles. I have a path of bruise that goes from my sternum to my knees, and looks like a purple-yellow-black wishbone. But I walk.
I am discharged. Ike stays in the hospital for 48 days. I see him every day, except the days when I can’t. I can’t touch him much because it agitates him and his heart stops beating or he forgets to breathe. So I talk to him; he likes to hear my voice. When I run out of things to say, I read. By the time he is two weeks old, he has read all of Beatrix Potter and much of Alice in Wonderland. Parents aren’t allowed to look at the other babies in the NICU. Sometimes, something happens, and they chase us all out to deal with the medical emergency. I talk to the girl at the next isolette. Her daughter weighs one pound and wears doll clothes from Walmart. She lactates whenever she sees a breast pump.
I begin to obsess over clothes and, particularly, hats. This is stupid. The NICU has beautiful sleepers for the little ones. Women donate their time to make tiny, tiny hats, using a mandarin orange as a model. But I can’t feed him. I can’t hold him. I can only change his diaper with permission. The one thing I can do is to make sure he has his own clothes. I trawl the city for hats small enough, order them online, but they are still too big.
And slowly, he grows into them. Slowly, the baby gets stronger. He moves from the intensive side of the NICU to the observation side. I have a little celebration every time another tube or wire is removed. He goes from an isolette to a normal, tiny crib. He breathes normally. His heart beats normally. There are setbacks, but mainly he gets better. And then one day, almost without warning, he is ready to leave. He is 4 lbs 13 oz. He looks like a tiny doll in his giant car seat. We take our hat collection and go home.
I’m pretty sure I’m going to die at this point. And the funny thing is, I don’t care. But that’s the morphine talking. Or rather, the morphine-Benadryl-Gravol pumped into my veins five minutes ago. I am legitimately dying of an overdose. My uncle is there. And my friend’s husband. And tiny oranges are bouncing around my room with little, curly tails.
Back on earth, our son is 5.5 hours old. He has been cut out of my body and taken to intensive care because he is too little to breathe. He weighs 2.5 pounds. He is 2.5 months early. We haven’t found a decent place to live and our apartment is full of cat hair.
11:25 p.m. Enter a Nurse: “How are you feeling, on a scale of 1 to 10?”
(I puzzle at how to rate the aftereffects of my C-Section. I err on the side of non-whininess.) “Oh, about a 4.”
Are you feeling sick?
I feel sick and itchy. And I’m in pain.
The doctor left orders to give you this.
Down goes the plunger. This is the last time I will feel that there is anything normal about childbirth.
11:26 p.m. I start to puke. Violently. My husband goes into the hallway to tell the nurse there is something wrong. She gives him a towel.
11:30 p.m. There is no towel big enough for the blood filling up my belly where the internal stitches have ripped apart.
11:35 p.m. The Nurse realizes that neither I nor my husband is hysterical. Enter 5 more nurses, then doctors, interns.
My husband says, “Her pupils are different sizes.” He makes me talk to him but the things I say aren’t the things I am thinking. I am telling him to take care of our son, because I am not going to be around. Whatever my mouth is saying, it makes no sense.
The doctor with the red hair says something about my blood pressure. As in, I don’t have any.
I die. Twice.
The Naloxone, a drug used to counter heroin overdoses, hits. And with it comes the realization that my blood pressure, my pupil size, my life, are all my responsibility.
The red-haired doctor inserts an arterial line. Without anesthetic. And then the world goes dark and I am back in the OR for seven hours.
I have to learn to walk again. If I walk, I can see my little boy in the NICU. It’s a million miles away. But I walk. I have a wheelchair but I walk it down the hall. It is a double wide wheelchair and, when I sit in it, people always make comments about how tiny I am. I don’t want to be tiny. I want to be big. I want to scream at them and say, “It’s just this huge wheelchair that makes me look small!” But that would be crazy. So I push the wheelchair down the hall. My legs have swollen up like sausages and I have no ankles. I have a path of bruise that goes from my sternum to my knees, and looks like a purple-yellow-black wishbone. But I walk.
I am discharged. Ike stays in the hospital for 48 days. I see him every day, except the days when I can’t. I can’t touch him much because it agitates him and his heart stops beating or he forgets to breathe. So I talk to him; he likes to hear my voice. When I run out of things to say, I read. By the time he is two weeks old, he has read all of Beatrix Potter and much of Alice in Wonderland. Parents aren’t allowed to look at the other babies in the NICU. Sometimes, something happens, and they chase us all out to deal with the medical emergency. I talk to the girl at the next isolette. Her daughter weighs one pound and wears doll clothes from Walmart. She lactates whenever she sees a breast pump.
I begin to obsess over clothes and, particularly, hats. This is stupid. The NICU has beautiful sleepers for the little ones. Women donate their time to make tiny, tiny hats, using a mandarin orange as a model. But I can’t feed him. I can’t hold him. I can only change his diaper with permission. The one thing I can do is to make sure he has his own clothes. I trawl the city for hats small enough, order them online, but they are still too big.
And slowly, he grows into them. Slowly, the baby gets stronger. He moves from the intensive side of the NICU to the observation side. I have a little celebration every time another tube or wire is removed. He goes from an isolette to a normal, tiny crib. He breathes normally. His heart beats normally. There are setbacks, but mainly he gets better. And then one day, almost without warning, he is ready to leave. He is 4 lbs 13 oz. He looks like a tiny doll in his giant car seat. We take our hat collection and go home.
