Chapter 1
From deep inside the fish Jonah prayed to the Lord, his God:
“In my distress, oh Lord, I called to you,
and you answered me.”
Jonah, Chapter 2 verses 1-2, Good News Bible
I’m sitting at Jennifer’s bedside in the hospital, counting the different tubes and drips and monitors she and the baby are connected to because it pushes back the fear and the feeling of helplessness. There are something like eight people in the room at this point, and with the exception of Judy the nurse I’ve never seen any of them for more than a few minutes before.
Magnesium sulfate, Pitocin, oxygen,
I’ve gotten used to the endless parade of new faces among the hospital staff, I suppose it is the inevitable nature of a big, busy medical establishment. Anyway, this is a night crew, and we haven’t seen much of this group before, other than the nurses. It is night, sometime at night (I’ve lost track of the time), the night at the end of a long, long and strange day that started on an ordinary morning that I expected nothing of except the routine tedium of the work week, a day that is ending, now, four days later.
A man comes around a curtain - his face seems familiar but I can’t place where I might have seen him before. He takes in the scene and announces “it looks like we’re going to have a baby pretty soon.”
heart monitor, epidural,
I feel helpless because there’s not much for me to do. Be there for Jennifer. Be the only person in the room besides her and Judy the nurse who isn’t some intern or technician whose name I can no longer remember. We were scheduled to take the first childbirth class next week. Judy is coaching Jennifer through the contractions.
I’m scared because everything has gone sideways and I haven’t known what was going to happen all week. There is, as the man said, about to be a baby pretty soon. It is the evening of September 30th, Thursday, and one way or another Jonah is about to make his appearance in the world. His due date is December 12.
-=-
The fact of the matter is that for most of us, for the most part, life is predictable. We know what we’ll be doing tomorrow. We know what we expect of the week. We know where the day is likely to take us. And whatever the romance and adventure of fiction might suggest, when this stops being the case it usually means that something has gone badly wrong. It’s easy to lose track of how seriously your modest and reasonable expectations of life have been violated in the rush of it actually happening. But moments come, when it is all paused and briefly suspended, waiting for the next rush and tumble, and I am having one of these moments, standing outside myself and looking at the reality diverge ever more seriously from my expectations, and wondering: how did we end up here?
-=-
I was zoning out in the doctor’s office. I don’t remember what I was thinking about, probably work. It was Monday morning. We were there for a prenatal checkup and my role was purely incidental. I had planned on skipping this one: I had forgotten to tell my boss I needed to be in late. At the last minute Jennifer had asked me to please come anyway, so I did. It was only work, I was in no hurry to get there on Monday morning. So I called in and we went.
We’d been through a few of these appointments before. I was tired as usual on a Monday morning, half there, coasting through what had become routine. But suddenly I am paying attention because the doctor was frowning. She was looking at something on the computer and I did not like the expression on her face at all. Maybe I was having a premonition, maybe I’m just good at reading faces. The doctor said she wanted to take Jennifer’s blood pressure again, check what the nurse had recorded. I remembered then that the nurse had frowned, too, when she had taken Jennifer’s blood pressure. But she hadn’t said anything about it.
The doctor was saying something about Jennifer’s pressure being too high. I exchanged worried looks with Jennifer and thought about the last few weeks, how she had been complaining about not feeling well, about the swelling in her ankles and feet. I had passed these issues off as ordinary discomforts of pregnancy.
The doctor said she wanted us to go to the hospital, and have Jennifer checked out there to be on the safe side. If I had truly had a premonition before of what was coming, it was gone by then. Just a little kink, a little bump on the road, I told myself. Everything is going to be fine, I told Jennifer.
-=-
We’d been to the hospital before, for an ultrasound, and a tour of the relevant facility, what they called the Birthplace. It’s fairly active but quiet. A young couple, the woman extravagantly pregnant, waited at the check-in; doctors and nurses walked the halls. It looked like morning routine anywhere, it was calming. We waited our turn, Jennifer provided information, details of insurance to the matter-of-fact, middle-aged woman behind a desk that served as a boundary to some sort of open office-business space and nurses staging area. A slow morning, it looked like. We were sent to wait for a nurse to collect us and take us to a room.
The room wasn’t a doctor’s office, it wasn’t a waiting room. It was a hospital room. Adjustable bed. Prongs and contraptions coming out of the wall. A television bolted to the ceiling. A chair that looks like it’s designed for someone to sit out a long haul. The nurse gives Jennifer a hospital gown. We’ve been a little slow on the uptake, but it’s starting to sink in: we may be here a while.
this is what is up with this.
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