A birth story

In this holiday season, here’s what I’m thankful for: my daughter is alive.

Every parent of a biological child has a birth story, and I am going to tell you about the birth of my daughter. I imagine that every birth story reflects what it feels like to be a parent, no matter how “smooth” the birth. I imagine that most birth stories aren’t the ones that the parents involved expected to tell.

My baby almost died. But she’s here, she’s alive, and now she is almost six months old.

Our daughter was due June 6, but by our last checkup (on June 7), there was no sign that she was in any hurry to come out. By all accounts (ultrasounds, fetal heartbeat monitors, etc.), she was perfectly healthy in there, but Katie (my wife) was showing no signs of labor.

Our OB-GYN said she didn’t want to take any chances with complications, so she asked us to check into the hospital on Sunday, June 10, to start inducing labor, with the expectation that our daughter would be born on Monday. It was also the expectation that inducing would take long enough that our OB-GYN would be able to attend the birth. As you are about to find out, that didn’t happen.

We checked into the hospital on Sunday night, at about 7:30, and they started the induction at about 10:30. An ultrasound, conducted by an exhausted doctor who happened to be the mother of a six-month old herself, indicated that everything was ok.

Everybody left the room. The only sounds left were the fetal monitor (like listening to a heartbeat on speakerphone) and the low sounds of The Philadelphia Story, the comfort food movie Katie wanted to watch while we waited for labor to begin.

We waited. And we waited. Katie fell asleep. I didn’t.

After a couple of hours, that’s when things started happening. At first, as I laid on the world’s least comfortable couch “bed,” I noticed that the monitor heartbeat started to drop and get really irregular. I thought this was odd, but I ascribed it to our daughter just moving around in the womb and Katie trying to get comfortable by shifting in bed. A slipping monitor seemed like a reasonable explanation.

And then three nurses and the on-call OB-GYN and burst into the room, flicked on the lights and started fussing over Katie, moving her, checking the monitor, readjusting it. Then an anesthesiologist waltzed in and asked, “So, are we doing this now?”

The OB-GYN, a preternaturally calm woman in her late fifties, explained that the baby’s heart rate was dropping intermittently, independent of Katie’s contractions (which were minor, at best -- she couldn’t even feel them). She said that if the trend continued, we “may” have to consider a C-Section. Oddly enough, this did not send us into a panic. They readjusted the monitor, Katie fell asleep again, and I listened really hard at that damn fetal monitor, waiting for something to sound wrong.

I didn’t sleep, and I waited. An hour and a half later, I started hearing a disturbingly different sound. That healthy heartbeat slowed down dramatically. (Science Aside: A normal, healthy fetus has a heart that beats between 140 and 160 beats per minute. Our daughter’s pulse slowed to 80 beats a minute).

The same five people (three nurses, two doctors) who I’d seen earlier that night burst through the door again, but this time it was different.

The anesthesiologist already had a clipboard in his hand, a consent form for putting Katie under if they couldn’t get her into the OR fast enough. The OB-GYN stood off to the side, keeping out of the way but making sure that everybody was doing their job. I walked over to her, and I asked her, “Does this mean we’re going to have to consider the C-Section?”

“It means that we’re doing this right now,” she said, with a calm urgency that I think only doctors are capable of. Katie signed the consent form.

They had Katie out of the room in less than five minutes. One of the nurses threw a set of scrubs at me and said she would come back for me. As Katie was wheeled out of the room, she asked me to call her parents, who were staying at our house.

It was 2:15 am.

So I’m pulling the scrub pants over my jeans with one hand and calling my in-laws with the other, somehow managing to multi-task despite being terrified. Katie’s mom answered the phone, said they were on their way, and I finished getting dressed.

No one came back for me.

I burst out of the room, and I saw a random hospital worker and demanded they tell me where I was supposed to go. This confused person stared at me with confusion until the aforementioned nurse came running down the hall. She said, “come with me, but you might not be able to come into the OR.” (Apparently, if they have to use full anesthesia, you -- meaning the partner -- are not allowed to attend the C-Section). I raced after her and stopped at the OR doors. The nurse popped her head in, and, thank God, she came back to let me in. I walked in, and they were just finishing Katie’s spinal block. I saw the needle withdrawn and they laid Katie down on the operating table.

They raised a sheet between Katie’s head/chest and her abdomen. I stood around, flittering about like a crazy person until a doctor I’d never seen before gave me a chair and told me to sit down next to Katie.

I held her hand and asked the doctors if I could watch. They said yes, and I stood up. I asked Katie if she wanted me to tell her what was going on. She said, “absolutely not.”

Ten minutes later, they pulled my daughter out of Katie’s uterus.

My daughter stared right at me. No noise, for three seconds. The longest three seconds of my life. I was afraid she would never breathe. I was afraid she was already dead.

And then she started screaming, and my knees almost buckled.

“Oh my God!” I stammered.

They took my baby over to a table to measure her. She pooped everywhere while scoring high on Apgar marks (the scale they use to determine a baby’s health at birth).

What they don’t tell you is that the birth through a C-Section is the shortest part of the operation. They gave Katie and me a choice. I could stay with Katie in the OR, or I could go with my baby into the recovery room. Katie, who was shivering (apparently, with the hormone withdrawal of birth, that’s normal), told me to go with my daughter. So I did.

It was all so fast, I didn’t know what to think. The whole process, from labor room to OR to recovery room with my brand new daughter, lasted about 20 minutes.

After it was over, that’s when I found out how dire the situation really was.

“You must have had some angels watching over your daughter,” said the head nurse. “If your wife had gone into labor at home, your daughter wouldn’t be here.”

You see, my wonderful, beautiful, active daughter had managed to wrap the cord around her midsection and around her neck. In fact, she was moving around so much that she had even managed to tie her umbilical cord into a true knot.

Imagine that for a second. A baby that had moved so much in utero that she tied her cord in a knot.

Our doctor explained later that the drops in pulse were due to our daughter pinching the cord, (via movement, via the knot) slowing the blood/nutrient flow from the placenta to my baby. Less blood, less work for the heart. And eventually death, had Katie gone into labor naturally at home before the doctors could figure out what was going on.

There’s more to say about this journey, about being a parent. But I need to tell you something important.

I thank God every day that my daughter is alive.