A Child Is Born

It was midnight when the phone rang. The doctor wanted permission to perform an emergency Caesarean section. “Your wife’s condition is extremely serious. Her kidneys are failing; her liver is failing, and her blood pressure is 210 over 180. We had to medicate her to prevent a stroke. She’s not sufficiently coherent to grant consent for the procedure. The baby has to come out, now.”

Stunned and shaking, I woke my other children, packed them in the car, and raced off to Kapi'olani Medical Center. When we arrived, a nurse handed me a set of scrubs. Apparently, I was going to be permitted to enter the operating room for the birth of my daughter. I dressed and waited, but no one ever called for me. An hour passed. Two nurses emerged from the operating room, pushing an incubator. Kyra had arrived ten weeks early. She weighed only three pounds, six ounces.

I walked with the nurses as they transported my daughter to the neonatal intensive care unit. Kyra appeared lifeless. Her legs were wrapped in white bandages, covering the spots where wires and tubes touched her tiny body. Her head was no bigger than a baseball, her threadlike fingers translucent. I fought the urge to cry and scream; I didn’t want to frighten my other children.

At the neonatal unit, Kyra was unresponsive. The doctor explained that at birth, Kyra was not breathing on her own and had to be resuscitated through the first five minutes of her one-hour life. They felt confident that she was never deprived of oxygen, but they wouldn’t be able to fully assess her condition until the drugs given to her mother to ward off a seizure had passed from her system.

Three hours after our daughter’s birth, Kellie finally exited the operating room and was wheeled into the intensive care unit. The doctors had tremendous difficulty controlling her bleeding. Her surgeon looked exhausted. Kellie’s complexion bore a mask of pale winter grey, a stark contrast to the mottled mess of black and purple that covered the remainder of her body. She looked as if she had been hit by truck.

Kellie was seldom conscious, so I spent my days with my infant daughter. The nurses placed a rocking chair next to the incubator where I took up residence for the next week. I held my daughter whenever the doctor’s allowed, rocking her in the chair, letting her lie against my bare chest so she could feel the warmth of my skin on her face, feeding her from a miniature bottle so that I could wean her from the feeding tube that her medical team had snaked deep into her chest. A card hung over her incubator enumerating the various symptoms and conditions that commonly plague those born too soon. None of the items on Kyra’s card were checked. Scribbled large in bold black marker were the characters “F & G.” I asked a nurse to explain. “It means feed’em and grow’em,” she replied. “Your daughter is small, but healthy. I think she’ll be okay.”

Kellie was not okay; it was day five and her condition had not improved at all. She was getting worse. Even when she was awake, she was hardly aware of her surroundings. Almost in desperation, her doctor began transfusing whole blood. Then, as quickly as this nightmare had begun, it ended. Pink suddenly returned to her cheeks, and Kellie began to recover.

Eight days after giving birth, Kellie came home.  Kyra joined us nine days later. Our pediatrician told us that she would need to monitor our daughter’s progress closely over the next two years to ensure that she met developmental milestones.

Last Thursday evening, the memories of her birth came flooding back; I couldn’t stop them. Once again, I struggled to hold back the tears. Kyra had just left our bedroom after showing her mother and I her grades. On Wednesday, she completed her freshman year at Mission Vista High School, ranked first in her class of 396 students. 
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Today's post will be entered in yeah write's weekly writing challenge. Entries will be posted on Tuesday.