“I’ve been working on getting you guys your own room,” she said. “I’m gonna try.”
Just then, Eric stepped into the hallway. We asked how Tiffany was feeling, and he hung his head.
“Not good.”
“The epidural didn’t help?”
“It made her worse. She wants someone to come check on her.”
Karyn jogged into Tiffany’s room. We wondered if this was a sign that things were progressing, but when she came back out, it was clear that it wasn’t.
“Those babies of yours are very stubborn,” she told us. “I don’t think they’re coming tonight.”
“How’s Tiffany?”
“Nothing out of the ordinary. I think she just needs to rest.”
Drew put his arm around Eric, and I smiled a devious little grin. “So she probably shouldn’t play cards then, right?”
As we sat at Tiffany’s bedside, nurses kept stopping by to thank us for dinner and to wish us well. It was clear Drew had done exactly what he set out to. We were like celebrities to the hospital staff, and they were all rooting for us. It was only around the fifth thank you that I noticed something strange. Everybody who stopped in to see us was back in their street clothes.
Even Karyn was changed out of her Looney Toons scrubs the next time we saw her. “Just wanted to say good luck tonight!” she peeped.
“Are you leaving?” I asked.
“Yeah. Shift change.”
I don’t know why we hadn’t anticipated this, but the nurses we’d spent all day wooing were on their way home. They were being replaced by a new batch, with nothing left in the break room to greet them but the end stubs of bread loaves and a bunch of trash. We were going to have to start all over again.
“Any idea who our new nurse is going to be?” I asked.
Karyn shook her head, consolingly. “Yeah, you’ve got Betty.”
“What’s wrong with Betty?”
Karyn patted me on the shoulder. “She’s a wonderful nurse. You’ll get great care.” Something in her tone wasn’t at all reassuring. She looked over her shoulder, as if Betty might be stalking up behind her. Then she whispered, “She’s not the friendliest.”
As usual, Karyn was overly polite. I tracked Betty down in the hallway half an hour later, while she was reading another patient’s chart. A short, thin African American woman with thick glasses, she was all business.
“Betty? Hi, I’m Jerry in room 303.”
“I’ll get there when I get there,” she rasped, never taking her eyes off her clipboard.
Before my brain could respond, my body had instinctively taken five steps backward. Betty was smaller than I was, but I’d never met anyone so intimidating. “Oh, okay,” I muttered, then I crept quietly back to Tiffany’s room.
Before Betty came in, Dr. Robertson swung by to check on Tiffany. “Still nothing, huh?” Tiffany told him how the epidural had only increased her pain. After a brief exam, he determined the shot hadn’t been administered properly, and he ordered her another epidural, stat. Tiffany smiled. I was starting to like him at last.
After the next injection, we saw a noticeable difference in our surrogate. She was calm and relaxed, with a doped-up expression on her face. I had no idea how strong the shot actually was, but whatever its effect, she was definitely grateful. I thought of challenging her to a rematch of Rummy 500 now, to see if she played nicer.
Then a voice rang out behind me. “WHAT ARE ALL THESE PEOPLE DOING IN HERE?”
I whipped around to see Betty, finally making an appearance. Drew smiled and extended his hand.
“Hi, I’m Drew. This is my partner, Jerry, my mom, and my sister Susie. She was our egg donor!”
Betty looked right past him, focused only on Tiffany. “I don’t care who you are!” Betty shouted. “This woman needs her rest. Everyone but the husband needs to leave. Now!”
I turned to Tiffany, but she was no help. She was still reclining in bed, blissing out on her epidural. I waited for Drew to work his charm, but he said nothing. When I looked around, I realized why. He had already fled the room. So had Susie and Mrs. Tappon. Other than Eric, I was the only one standing there, and Betty was boring through me with her eyes. “Okay, bye,” I whispered.
By the time I reached the waiting room, Drew was freaking out. He had left Tiffany’s room so fast that he forgot his Blackberry. It had only been a minute or so, but this was already the longest he had ever gone without it.
“I have to go back,” he announced.
Susie and I pled with him not to go or at least to wait until Betty had moved on to another patient. We were terrified of what she might do to him if he showed his face again. With all the surgical equipment at hand, she would have plenty of options.
“I know exactly where I left it,” he assured us. “I’m just going to sneak in, not say a word, then duck back out again. She won’t even know I’m there.”
I took a deep breath and showed Susie my panic face. She gave me hers, too.
As Drew slid through the doorway of room 303, I waited to hear thunder or the sound of two jumbo jets colliding above us. Instead, there was silence. The door closed behind him, and nothing happened. A minute went by, then another minute. What could be taking so long? What had Evil Betty done to him? I wanted to check on him, but there was no way I was going in. Our kids needed at least one dad to make it through childbirth.
When the door finally opened, Drew began sprinting toward us, as if being chased by a bear. It was pretty much how I expected him to emerge, but then I noticed he wasn’t holding his Blackberry. “Let’s go!” he shouted.
“What?”
“It’s time!”
I wasn’t sure what he meant, until he grabbed my hand and started dragging me toward the room.
“You’re kidding!”
“No, the babies are coming,” he insisted. “C’mon! They said to hurry!”
25
Another Coming-Out Story
I look surprisingly good in scrubs. I was surprised, at least. I mean, who looks good in scrubs? Not most doctors. Hardly any delivery room dads. Only about half the cast of the TV show Scrubs. Yet somehow, on me, they worked. As I was checking myself out in the crinkly blue paper garments, I wondered if I had missed my calling. Maybe I should have been an industrial supply fashion model. Or maybe I was just dizzy with the fact that I was moments away from meeting my son and daughter.
“Let’s go, dads! Those babies are coming!” Evil Betty poked her head in and was gone in a flash while Eric, Drew, and I were still slipping what looked like tiny shower caps over our shoes.
“C’mon!” Drew said, grabbing me by the arm. There are articles of clothing you can slip on while you’re running, but footwear is not among them. I stumbled my way around the corner, trying to remember where the delivery room was.
“Who’s going to cut the umbilical cord?” Drew asked. “One each?”
I had a sudden attack of stage fright. “No,” I said. “You do both. I’m afraid I’d pass out.”
Hospital policy mandated that twins be delivered in an operating room due to the likelihood of the woman needing an emergency C-section. It was a huge space, full of blinking and beeping medical equipment. Except for Bennett and Sutton, Drew and I were probably the last of the key players to arrive.
Eric had agreed to be our official birth photographer so Drew and I could just enjoy the experience. It was a relief because Eric was sure to feel a lot more comfortable than I would pointing the camera at certain key places. Tiffany had a large sheet draped over her lower half, so Drew and I positioned ourselves discreetly behind her head, clear of the viewing area. She told us she didn’t mind what we saw in the delivery room, but I minded. As much as the expectant father in me was dying to see my kids, the kid in me was nervous about catching sight of a woman’s hoo-hoo.
All around us, people were shouting medical terms. “BMTs!” “Infarction!” “Hemostat!” They were all words that sounded familiar from TV medical shows but that still meant nothing to me. I may as well have been scanning the male faces trying to crown this staff’s McDreamy.
We’d only been in the room a few seconds when Dr. Robertson announced it was go time. “Cauterize the arterial phlebotomist!” he announced, or something like that. A ring of nurses sprung up, seemingly from nowhere, and surrounded Tiffany’s bedside. There must have been at least six of them. One on each side held one of Tiffany’s hands. Two leaned down by her face, and two bent over her feet. All at once, they started directing encouragement toward her head. “Come on, you can do this!” “You’re ready. I know you’re ready!” “This is it, this is what you’ve been waiting for!”
Then one of them started counting loudly, so everyone in the room could hear. “Three . . . two . . . one . . .”
And then, all the nurses screamed in unison, “PUSSSSSSSSHHHH!!!!!”
That’s just what Tiffany proceeded to do, as hard as I’ve ever seen anyone push. She pushed and pushed and pushed some more, and the whole time, the nurses kept repeating, “Pushpushpushpushpushpush!”
When Tiffany relaxed, they went back to their general encouragements. “Good girl!” “Good pushing!” “You’re doing great!” The entire process was kind of disturbing, less like I pictured childbirth would be, more like an exorcism.
Everyone calmed down for about twenty seconds, then the encouragement ratcheted back up. The next thing I knew, the lead nurse was counting again. “Three . . . two . . . one . . .”
“PUSSSSSSSSHHHH!!!!!”
The combined force of the shouting and the pushing practically made the room shake.
“Oh my God,” Drew said. “Are you looking?” He motioned toward the part of Tiffany’s body I was trying very hard to ignore.
“No!” I said. “I’m not looking.”
“I can see his head!”
I nodded nervously. “Great! I’ll look soon.”
“Look!” Drew demanded. “Look now! Your son is being born!”
And so I looked. I can’t say it was the most flattering view of either Tiffany or Bennett, but for the split second I was willing to take a glimpse, I witnessed the miracle of life.
The nurses were now chanting at fever pitch. “This is it!” “One more big push!” “You’re doing so well!”
“Three . . . two . . . one . . .”
Then I heard someone crying. It could have been any of us, really.
The next thing I heard was the clicking of Eric’s camera shutter, and I realized that just a few feet in front of my face was a tiny person. Dr. Robertson held him up like a fisherman displaying a prized trout, and for all I could tell, this may actually have been a fish. He was so covered in clumps of chalky goo that it was hard to tell what species, genus, class, or phylum he might belong to. He was humanoid, at best. A curled up lump of dough, mushy and underbaked. One thing was for sure, though. This repulsive little mole rat was the most beautiful sight I’d ever seen. This was my son, Bennett.
For that one moment, there was no one on Earth younger than he was. Everything he saw, heard, and felt in that instant was brand new to him. Light, air, cold, confusion. Things most of us barely noticed jolted his tiny brain in a tsunami of stimuli. It was hard to conceive of something so new as this little boy. He had never been hurt or hugged, never seen day turn into night, never felt the soft touch of cotton against his skin, never seen a kangaroo or tasted a Fruity Pebble, never fallen asleep to the sound of crickets or woken up to a dog licking his face. Just for now, he belonged to that .001 percent of living creatures who couldn’t recognize Mickey Mouse or Mario. Or me, for that matter. But he would know me before them, and despite what he might say while slamming his door as a teenager, he would love me more. I would be there for millions of my son’s little discoveries, things that would shape him into a person all his own. For now, the sum total of his breaths could be counted on one of his tiny, balled-up little hands, but already, my entire world had changed. Bennett had become a person, and I had become a parent.
No one told me what I should do next. Drew and I were the least relevant people in the room—medically, at least. We were spectators, and as such, we were free to focus on whatever we chose.
A couple of people did a couple of hospital-type things to Bennett, then they left him in the warmer to fend for himself, messy and naked. He sputtered and stretched, probably trying to feel the uterine walls or the touch of his sister, all the things that had confined and comforted him for the last nine months. For the first time, he had his own space—more of it than he could handle. I’m not sure if a two-minute-old human is capable of real happiness, but I imagined that’s what he was feeling.
I wanted him to know I was there, that this gargantuan life change he’d just gone through wasn’t an abandonment. But the doctors had coated his eyes with a thick gel that probably served some important function while also temporarily blinding him. Was I allowed to touch him? No one told me I couldn’t. I’d already scrubbed off at least three layers of hand skin before I entered the OR. Besides, Bennett was the one covered in gross stuff, not me. Anyway, he was my kid. If I were a horse or a mongoose, I’d have given him a full tongue bath by now and snarfed down his placenta. I decided to go for it. I stroked the back of his hand gently with my index finger. He made the slightest twitch in response, but he didn’t pull away.
I felt like I should say something profound and memorable, a “One small step for man . . .” kind of thing. Surely, this was the closest I would ever come to landing on the moon. If ever a moment in my life called for erudition, it was this one. These would be the first words my son would hear me say.
“Hi Bennett,” I whispered, finally. “We’re your dads.”
It was then that I noticed a tied-off umbilical cord, protruding from his midsection. In the rush of activity, I had completely missed the big moment.
“Did you cut his cord?” I asked Drew.
He shook his head. “I didn’t even see them do it.”
The unprecedented cocktail of emotions swirling inside me suddenly received a twist of anger. Maybe it was just a matter of expediency that Dr. Robertson decided to cut the cord himself. There was no time for parent involvement, not with twins. He had another baby to deliver. Snip, on to the next one. That was probably all it was. Or maybe he’d never accepted us as dads.
He didn’t even ask us if we wanted to cut the cord.
I decided to say something—to make a scene, there in the delivery room, if need be. “Excuse me, Doctor, but we’d like to cut the cord next time.” Yes, that’s what I’d say. I rehearsed the line in my head as I slowly turned around.
I couldn’t even see Tiffany. There were so many doctors and nurses surrounding her. While I’d been busy bonding with Bennett, the mood around me had shifted drastically. The number of people in the room had tripled. The door burst open, and a nurse wheeled a new machine into place with great urgency.
Drew clutched my hand. I searched his face for an explanation. He was always so much better than I was at deciphering situations. His face was starkly white. He stood stone-still, petrified, the only movement in his entire body coming from the frantic quivering of his lower lip. I’d never seen him so frightened before.
“We need to go now!” Dr. Robertson announced.
People began shouting jargon at each other. “Triage!” “Avulsion!” “I need fifty ccs of coagulated antigens, stat!”
Amid all of that, the pushing had begun. “Three . . . two . . . one . . . PUSSSSSSSSHHHH!!!!!”
Then I heard one thing very clearly, from a nurse who was staring at a monitor. “We’ve lost the baby’s heartbeat!” she declared.
26
Heart-Stopping
“Three . . . two . . . one . .
. PUSSSSSSSSHHHH!!!!!”
Never before had I wished so strongly that I had spent seven years of my life in medical school. It would have been worth it just to know what was going on in that moment. All I could tell for sure was that something was seriously wrong with our daughter. Once she was mine to hold, I would be able to protect her, to whisper softly in her ear to calm her, to kiss her boo-boos and make her pain go away. For now, I could do nothing but stand at Tiffany’s beside and join the chorus of cheerleaders.
“You’re doing great!” “We’re almost there!” “Attagirl!”
I didn’t know what I was saying. I was so nervous.
It was then I felt a nudge. More people were squeezing in to chant, as if the problem were merely one of volume. Six people caterwauling, and the baby’s still inside. Let’s try ten. My poor daughter. They really expected her to move closer to the sound of these screaming strangers? I sure wouldn’t.
At some point, an unwelcome guest had snuck into a prime location. She appeared instantly, as if by witchcraft. It was Evil Betty, and she’d squeezed her way through the throng right next to Tiffany’s head. She had that look on her face again, like it was time to lay some smack down. She bent down, whispering angrily in Tiffany’s ear.
How dare she interrupt at this moment! A voice in my head told me to lunge for her, to tackle her to the ground, there in front of everyone, rather than let her upset my surrogate yet again. It’s a story I could tell the kids someday. Daddy made a scene in the delivery room. I’d been mild-mannered all my life, but when the need arose, I transformed into a hero and saved the day.
Instead, I did what I always do and glowered quietly at her. I doubt she noticed.
“Three . . . two . . . one . . . PUSSSSSSSSHHHH!!!!!”
On that third push, Sutton emerged—or so I could only assume. A team of doctors surrounded her like a rugby scrum and shuttled her off to the new piece of equipment that had just been wheeled in. I barely caught a glimpse of her, maybe a toe or a shoulder. She went by so fast I couldn’t tell which it was.
Mommy Man Page 24
