When Anthony Was Born...

You can prepare for a lot of things in life. A premature baby is not one of them. It happens, and for everyone who goes through it the experience is a bit different, but often the same. First comes panic, then fear...and then an odd sense of calm as the shock sets in. For my wife and I it was a barely orchestrated chaos that included ominous words like "footling breach" and "minimal time" and "NICU crash unit". We had minutes to learn a new language, assess how our lives were now completely out of our control and to pray for our child, this tiny life that had somehow arrived eleven weeks early.

Before long there was a whirlwind of doctors and nurses and this was very odd, because it was a small hospital, and it was 3am. Maybe it was because I was a man and the world to me is often viewed through a business-like prism, but that was when I first became frightened. I mean, this was just a birth, right? Yeah my wife was going to need an emergency c-section but those happen all the time, right? Yeah my son was coming early but that happens all the time too, right? So why all the labor hours (no pun intended) over my wife? Why all these extra people, clocking all this extra time (overtime no doubt), and why was her doctor being called from home straight out of bed at 3am? This was Los Angeles. There were plenty of doctors on staff right here. And I had the oddest thought, one word really: liability.

It was a cynical thought but I felt in my gut that the simple act of scrambling to get my wife's own doctor there at such an odd hour was sudden proof that everyone in the room felt that this was all going to go terribly wrong, and no one wanted the responsibility. So we waited, and when the doc finally arrived she rolled up her sleeves, looked at all the paperwork and then looked at my wife....then she calmly asked the head nurse to call over to Huntington Memorial Hospital in Pasadena. We would "need the NICU crash unit". The baby might have to go by helicopter or ambulance "once it was born". I froze. Up until now, in all of our appointments with her, our doc had always called our baby "him or her" or "he or she".

You know, like at the end of the sonogram when everyone wants to keep it a secret, the doctors say "he or she" is doing quite well or "the baby, him or her, is moving". Now my child had become an "it". And therein was born my second cynical thought of the night: our doctor was already getting some emotional distance from the baby, our baby, should "it" die.

And so we waited, for whatever forces in the universe, human or otherwise, that were going to take their places this night, on this stage, of what was now beginning to appear less like a play, and more like a tragedy.