Chapter 3
The captain found him there and said to him, “What are you doing asleep? Get up and pray to your god for help.”
Jonah, Chapter 1 Verse 6, Good News Bible
Memory doesn’t preserve the specific order of events. There is one bright dividing line, what went before and what went after we understood that this baby was going to get itself born, like, this week. After, things started moving, though still in that interminable, uncomfortable hospital pace. And the focus became clear: it wasn’t what we wanted to happen, but it was happening, it was something clear to look forward to. There would be more, and more after that, but it was a place to reach first. Before was only the uncertainty, the waiting. Of all the things I remember it isn’t always clear which details came before and after we finally got that information. The ultrasound, though, definitely came before.
Jennifer had one ultrasound before there was any hint of a problem: already there was another dividing line there in memory, of the things that happened before when we were still comfortable in the assumption of a normal and uneventful delivery. The second ultrasound was as interesting and exciting as the first, but it also came in the midst of that anxiety and uncertainty of our hospital time. The carefree enjoyment of the prospect of a challenge a long way off yet was gone. Still, it was a break and a relief from the waiting.
The first ultrasound, the technician hadn’’t been able to determine the gender (the subject of whether to even ask was one on which we’d received a lot of contradictory advice). That wasn’t an issue this time. “Well, it’s definitely a boy,” the operator said, pointing out the relevant anatomy. Definitely a boy. Just like that, it became he, baby became Jonah. We’d chosen two names before we knew. One reaction the same the second ultrasound as the first: it’s really there. He’s really there. Our Jonah. We talked to him then, told him he had to stay inside, stay inside Mommy as long as possible. I’m sure he would have agreed completely; none of us knew it just wasn’t our fate.
I can’t remember if the person who did know what was going on came to tell us that second day or the next. Morning or afternoon. Can’t remember. All I remember for sure about what happened on the second day was the ultrasound, and my first encounter with the evil chair thing, and the raccoons.
Chair thing is a piece of furniture designed by a mad sadist. Disguised as a not-very-comfortable armchair in which I had squirmed many an edgy hour away in, it extruded it’s lower half, up and out on some sort of spring-laden and ill-working armature, to make an absolutely unbearable bed. That night, I stayed with Jennifer and made the mistake of trying to sleep on chair thing’s bed configuration. Its designer had managed to take all the sagginess, discomfort, circulation-stopping frame-dividers and mechanical wobbliness of a full-sized hide-a-bed and jam them into a sleeping surface significantly smaller than a twin mattress. Chair thing defeated my first attempt to sleep on it sometime late that second night. Jennifer was asleep. I wandered out into the hall. Still light and activity, but muted. Without a window or other obvious signal, it still felt like night. But I wanted something more than a vague feeling so I went outside to meet the night in person.
It was quiet and deserted along the loop of pick-up and drop-off lane out the front doors of the hospital: the parking lot was nearly deserted and traffic on the road past that was sparse. Further off a steady hum from the freeway could still be heard. A sharp rustle surprised me from the right. Eyes flashed back at me, from the... trash receptacle? The sidewalk along the lane was lined with standing ashtrays with garbage containers below. A fat raccoon was squeezing out of the opening of the one nearest to me. It seemed too big for the can, let alone its opening, no bigger than the lid of a shoebox. It wriggled it’s round hind end out of the hole and dropped a couple feet to the ground, never taking its eyes off me. Then it took the bagel shop bag it had pushed out of the trash before in it’s teeth and began to drag it into towards the shadows of the benches and foliage around the corner of the building. I started laughing. There was a second, smaller raccoon hanging further back, trying to decide whether to retrieve some tasty scrap it had already excavated, or simply flee until I removed my presence. The hospital was just above the Mississippi; raccoons must forage the garbage of the city all along that natural border: the banks were blanketed with shrubs, weeds, and scrubby trees.
Nervous exhaustion searches earnestly for any source of relief, maybe. Then again, maybe there is something to traditions that see significance in all of our visitations from the wild parts of life that we have left behind. They were just raccoons, digging in the garbage for food. Those raccoons made my day. They seemed to say, however things in my narrow viewpoint had gone askew of the expectations, the assumptions, the plan, in the big picture it was all moving along just as planned, unexpected creatures were getting by with unusual resources. They were getting by: we would get by too. Me, and Jennifer, and baby Jonah.
-=-
I don’t remember his name. I can picture his face pretty well, though I only saw him, and not to speak to, one time more. I think of him as Doctor Important. Finally, somebody important enough to tell us what was going on, without a lot of noncommittal maybes. I liked him: he had a kind, friendly face, healthy middle age and clearly doing what he was supposed to be doing. He called Jennifer “kiddo” and projected a lot of “everything’s going to be okay” confidence. What he was telling us, though, was that Jennifer had “the syndrome” (preeclampsia), and that the solution was to induce labor as soon as possible. He had a lot of very good reasons why this was the case: but Jennifer and I weren’t fighting the decision anyway. In situations of this nature my instinct is generally to trust the experts (or at least the far-more-expert than myself). I suspect both of us were also starting to feel just how tough a truly long-term stay in the hospital would be under these conditions - of course mostly for Jennifer, but it took its toll on me as well. Doctor Important told us that their research had convinced him it was safer for both the baby and the mother to deliver as soon as possible, and that Jennifer had made it to a point in the pregnancy where the outlook for the baby was excellent. He told Jennifer they were going to make sure her health was in no danger. He told us that he understood the position we were in because his own sons had been born prematurely. That was good to hear: it softened some of that divide between the them and us that comes with the territory of any Establishment.
He also told us we probably wouldn’t see him at the birth. “This is a learning place,” he said - it was a university hospital - “the residents need to learn. Besides, I always say to people, if you don’t see me in the big chair, that means things are going well. If I show up it means we’ve got problems.”
More stuff, practical stuff about the course they would pursue to trick Jennifer’s body into giving up it’s tenant ten weeks earlier than expected. I listened, but my mind was fixed on the overwhelming message of all this information. Just as the ultrasound had suddenly given our baby a name, a more exact identity, the visit from Doctor Important had given us the understanding that we were going to be meeting Jonah in person, very soon.
this is what is up with this.
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