Baby Love (20 page)

Then he made it out a little farther, but got caught under my pelvic bone on the right side. Which hurt like hell, in addition to all the other hurting like hell going on. Then he and I did the “Okay, let’s get you out from under my pubic bone” dance for what seemed like an eternity. I was pushing so hard I thought the sides of my head were going to burst open. I was pushing so hard I thought I was going to knock myself unconscious. I was pushing so hard and I still couldn’t feel the baby coming out.

The room was filling up with people but I couldn’t focus on who they might be or why they were there. Sonam’s backup doctor came in completely covered in OR blues and stood very close to me, speaking directly into my ear. She said, The baby is in distress. If you can’t get the baby out in the next few pushes, we are going to have to do a C-section. Do you understand what I am saying? I looked at Glen and he was stable and calm, and then I heard Sonam tell the doctor that she knew I could do it. She is definitely going to get this baby out, she said.

The only thing I could think to do was get on my hands and knees and try to get him out that way. Sonam was yelling, Push your baby out, Rebecca. Bring your baby into the world, Rebecca. Come on, push. I could feel all the people in the room watching, suspended in the moment. I had a flash that I should feel embarrassed about being naked on my hands and knees in front of a room full of strangers, but honestly, I couldn’t have cared less. Really. It was more like, I hope they understand that they are experiencing a goddamn miracle right now. It doesn’t get more real than this.

Then time opened up, the seconds expanded into a dozen dimensions, and everybody in the room fell into it. At the exact moment I thought I was going to collapse and be wheeled into the OR and cut open, I felt the baby’s head pop free and Sonam said, That’s it, one more big push, one more, come on. And I pushed and then he was slithering out of my body and everyone in the room broke into applause and I started crying and fell back onto the bed.

People were making all kinds of oohing sounds and Sonam said, You did it! You had a healthy vaginal birth! Then she asked if Glen wanted to cut the umbilical cord. Glen said yes and took the scissors and did a blessing over the baby in Tibetan. With one snip, me and my boy went from one to two. Sonam placed him on my chest and the two of us lay there together, exhausted.

He was breathing heavily and looking around with calm curiosity. I couldn’t see him so much as feel him, his slippery, smooth torso and floppy limbs. And his mind, I felt his perfectly open and clear mind. He was so present, so unencumbered by ideas about what he was seeing that I felt I was holding a being from another planet.

Then they took him away from me and I started to hear doctors mumbling about meconium and they asked Glen to go with them to the NICU and then I was just lying there, with a gaping hole in my belly and no baby in my arms.

When I arrived at the NICU, the nurses brought me over to Tenzin. I almost broke down. He was completely naked, strapped under an oxygen tent with tubes and monitor leads coming out of his arms and legs. He looked cold, even though there was a warmer over him. The right side of his face was bruised, and skin was peeling off all over his body. His breathing was so labored that his chest and neck lifted off the table each time he took a breath. I couldn’t touch him because he couldn’t come out of the tent, but I got close to the plastic cover and told him that Mommy was right there and he didn’t have to worry and he’d be better soon.

He didn’t move. I thought I was going to pass out. The word “agony” doesn’t begin to capture what I felt.

Because the neonatologist wasn’t there yet, the only thing I could do was talk to the nurse assigned to him and try to forge a bond. I hoped that my love and concern would be transmitted through her to the baby. Then I went to my little hospital room filled with unopened bags of stuff I thought was so essential to labor and passed out.

Four or five hours later, one of the neonatologists, Dr. Morales, came into our room. She said that Tenzin has meconium, the first waste product of the baby, in his lungs and that is making it hard for him to breathe in enough oxygen. He’s getting oxygen now under the tent, and they’ve started him on a round of antibiotics to ward off infection. She said he is very vigorous, and has a very strong cry, which is a good sign. She said that babies with meconium are usually in the hospital for a week to ten days. She said we just have to watch him and hope the meconium cycles through and that he will be able to breathe on his own soon.

There are three neonatologists here who rotate. We met the second today. Turns out he is the father of an old college class-mate, which is vaguely comforting.

Anyway. Dr. Thompson came into my room and we had a long talk. He thinks Tenzin had meconium in his lungs before he was even born, and that once he began to breathe, it corrupted the lung tissue. He said there was no meconium in the amniotic fluid so they didn’t realize that he needed to be intubated at birth. I wanted to say no, it wasn’t that there wasn’t meconium in the fluid. There was no fluid. My water didn’t break at all, probably because Tenzin was further past term than any of us thought and should have been induced.

But I didn’t say that and instead just tried to listen to him without panicking. He described the meconium as tarlike and extremely noxious. If Tenzin breathed it in for several minutes, which he must have because he was on me for at least that long, there may be some lung damage. He says it is unlikely, and usually babies with meconium aspiration syndrome (MAS) go home after their time in the NICU breathing normally and have no long-term effects. He said the X ray shows that the right side is more “involved” than the left, which makes sense because that was the side that was hurting so much during labor, the side that got hooked under my pelvic bone.

I am able to process what the doctors tell me about Tenzin, but I must be in shock because that is all I can do. I can’t believe how hard the labor was and how unprepared I was for it after all of that preparation. I can’t believe he’s in the NICU. I can’t believe I am not nursing my baby right now, bathed in the idyllic glow of postpartum. Instead, I feel like I’ve been in a car accident.

I went online and put in “in utero meconium aspiration.” The first listing that came up was “in utero meconium aspiration: an unpreventable cause of neonatal death.”

 

 

THERE WILL BE no neonatal death on my watch.

Janet the breastfeeding consultant brought me a big yellow breast pump today. Even though I’ve gone over breastfeeding on the antidepressant a dozen times with Marie, Dr. Lowen, Sonam, and anyone else who would listen, I had to get another opinion from Janet, who referred to a book she carries in her pocket that says that the benefits outweigh the risk. I revved up the pump and got to work. Just a little colostrum, but it was enough to put in a bottle and take over to the NICU to store in the fridge.

Storing food for the babe. Check.

Babies are flying through the NICU today. Every couple of hours there is a new “Jesus” or “Christopher” from the mostly Catholic moms. A volunteer group knits hats for the newborns, and so the baby Jesuses are lying in their plastic bassinets with tiny green and red caps on. Christmas isn’t my thing, so I picked a nice beige one for Tenzin when his nurse, Rose, offered. Rose is from the Philippines and is very auntie-like. She talks to Tenzin in a singsongy voice, very loud, which seems to get his attention, and assures me he’s going to be fine when I stare at him with longing and worry.

Tonight was better than last night, primarily because they’ve taken the oxygen tent away and given him a cannula that threads around his head, so at least he’s not like the boy in the bubble. I can touch his forehead and rub my nose against his cheek. His breathing is still extremely labored, but so far everyone tells me he’s quite vigorous for a baby as sick as he is, a good sign.

I was supposed to go home today, but Sonam managed to get me an extension, and then the hospital offered me a room for after that. They have a rooming-in policy for moms with sick babies. I can have a room close to the NICU as long as they don’t need it for an incoming mom. I feel such gratitude for this humane policy, and wonder if the fancy, more expensive hospital has a similar policy. I don’t know what I would do if I had to leave him every day. I don’t think I could survive it.

It’s two a.m. and I think I am having a nervous breakdown. I paged Natasha 911, and when she called I told her everything and she said it’s all normal. Most women crash around day three postpartum. It’s when all the feel-good hormones you’ve been carting around with the baby inside suddenly plummet, never to be seen or heard from again. I cannot wake Glen up again with another string of woes, but really, I feel unfit to be a mother, and that I failed at giving birth. If I hadn’t been so pigheaded about natural childbirth, I might have known that he was late and had him induced, and then we might not be going through this. I refuse to beat myself up, and then I start swinging.

If all that wasn’t enough, I hurt in so many inconvenient places it is ridiculous. I can’t walk a step without feeling like my uterus is going to fall on the floor, and my lower back, where the epidural went in, is
killing
me. I could take a Vicodin to take the edge off, but the pain doesn’t seem intense enough to justify passing a narcotic on to the baby. Sonam’s backup midwife checked me this morning and reminded me that this is the kind of back pain that makes epidurals problematic. I didn’t say anything, but I thought I would have to be damn near paralyzed to think twice about having another epidural. As far as I am concerned, that needle saved my life.

I am completely sick of dealing with blood and urine and shit and milk. It’s like my whole body has been reduced to a quintet of oozing sores. And where is my baby? Where is my baby? Where is my baby?

I COULDN’T TAKE IT. I had to be near him, so I went over to the NICU and watched him sleep. His vulnerability is heartbreaking. I don’t understand how human beings have survived these feelings for millions of years. How mothers have survived losing their sons to war, their daughters to marriage and relocation, and their children to disease and famine.

When I was in my twenties, my mother told me that she had to decide to love me, that she could have gone either way and she
chose
to love me. At the time, her words seemed strange, but I had no reference point so I just nodded and felt grateful that she’d made the choice that didn’t leave me motherless. Seeing Tenzin’s vulnerability makes me shake my head in wonder at her disclosure. There is no choice involved in my love for Tenzin, and if there were some secret place where I wondered, and there isn’t, I would never tell him about it.

What I will tell Tenzin one day is that his need for me and my love for him are by far the most powerful human truths I have ever known. I would give my life for his in a heartbeat, and in some ways I think that is what is happening. Giving birth
was
like dying and being reborn. I went into labor one person, and came out two. I went into labor with a singular consciousness, and came out with a consciousness that transcended my own. I understand now the Tantric teachings on giving birth to your enlightened mind, and why the feminine is exalted in those teachings. Women can literally give birth and, through this process, birth an expanded understanding, a more enlightened, transpersonal view.

I thought there would be loss and mourning involved in the abandonment of my preoccupation with myself, but so far, even with the unbelievable pain and complications, it is all gain. I feel lighter, clearer about what needs to be done, and what my role is in the whole big, astonishing universe. Tenzin is my son and I am his mother. Is there anything else?

I am feverish today, sweating and shivering. My breastfeeding book says it could be milk fever, which makes sense because my breasts are like giant gourds. Really. They are astoundingly, almost obscenely engorged, painful to touch, and just, I don’t know, so intense. When I walk, it’s like I am a pair of breasts walking with a body attached. They lead when we enter a room, demanding acknowledgment and respect from all who come near.

Did I mention that they hurt?

I started pumping a couple of days ago, when Janet told me to store the colostrum, but today the floodgates have opened. I am now pumping every couple of hours, and filling bottles and bottles of milk. If I don’t pump, I leak until I am drenched. Every time I walk over to the NICU to put another bottle in the fridge, one of the nurses says, Another one?

So here I am, scribbling this as I sit on the edge of the bed with my breasts stuck into mechanized suction cups strapped to my body with an elastic pumping bra. I feel like a cow, but every time I fill up another bottle I have a brief moment of ecstasy. My body is producing food for my baby. It doesn’t get much better than that. Well, maybe it does. I’d rather be nursing. That would make a great bumper sticker to stick on this pump.

I’d rather be nursing. Yeah.

Not good. Tenzin is not improving and we have moved on to check for other possible diagnoses. Roth ordered a cardiac echo, which will check to make sure the valves in his heart are working properly and that the one that is supposed to have closed by now has done so.

That was sobering news. I settled in a little more after hearing that. When I was thinking we’d be going home in a week, I was more transient, mentally, but now it could be weeks.

I’ve moved into a new room because Labor and Delivery filled up and they needed my old one. This room is pretty rustic and has a mysterious leak in the floor. Getting out of bed this morning, I stepped in a huge puddle. After I told the nurse, a very nice man came to mop the water up, but within fifteen minutes the water was back. Then the engineer came up and said he couldn’t figure out where the water was coming from. I told him I don’t really care about the water, I just want to be close to my baby.