Little Lion— 1

Perhaps you have read the beautifully illustrated children’s book “On the Night You Were Born” by Nancy Tillman. Buy it here.
It goes like this:

On the night you were born, the moon smiled with such wonder that the stars peeked in to see you and the night wind whispered. “Life will never be the same.”

I’m completely with this fun blogger, The Ugly Volvo (theuglyvolvo.com), who wrote a personalized version for her son. Much more realistic.

For us it was more like:

On the night you were born, Daddy woke up confused and Mommy screamed for the promised nitrous oxide that the hospital didn’t have in stock.

But, it is true that life has never been the same.

1. Arrival

Without sharing all the details (because Lord knows you don’t want to read everything!), here are some fun tidbits:

• Mr Mechanic was out until after midnight dealing with a separate family emergency. He barely got any sleep before I woke him up to head to the hospital.
• The nurse argued with the doctor about how dilated I was, because she didn’t believe I could dilate from 4 cm to 7 cm in 40 minutes.
• I fainted after. Apparently your blood pressure does freaky things during/after childbirth.
• I was promised nitrous oxide/laughing gas as the pain management technique, but they didn’t actually have it at the hospital (Seriously?!? Seriously?!?).
  So I asked for something else, and they said no, nothing else.
  I sat up in bed and announced to Mr Mechanic we were going to another hospital (at 4 o’clock in the morning). Miraculously they DID have an injection of something for me. Liars.
• 1 hr 30 minutes later it was time to push, but I couldn’t: I was all out of breath and energy. So the awesome doctor gave me the fastest episiotomy ever, jumped up on the bed, straddled me and heaved on my belly to manually push out the baby.
  I didn’t even know that was possible, did you?
  Had a belt of purple bruises across my abdomen for a week, but baby avoided any problems with delayed labor and I avoided more serious surgery.

• 

Little Lion arrived and was placed on my chest, a reddish squiggle.
Except – he didn’t cry. I remember praying aloud for the baby to breathe. Breathe! BREATHE!
Until the doctor calmly reassured me he was breathing – just not crying.

I fainted, and somehow woke up in another room beside this squishy newborn totally dependent on me and Mr Mechanic.
Everyone said the baby was a perfect specimen, and we could go home the next day, as long as I didn’t faint anymore.

But Little Lion wouldn’t – or couldn’t – nurse. So, we prepared a bottle of formula and sent for a nurse.
She held Little Lion lovingly and started to give him the bottle.
Then her expression changed, she abruptly stood up, announced in Swahili he wasn’t breathing properly, and charged out of the room with Little Lion in her extended arms.
Her shouted prayers for “Jesus! Help!” echoed behind as she ran down the stairs.
Mr Mechanic and I followed in a panic, catching her prayers through the maze of the empty clinic, and arrived at an emergency room with oxygen tanks.

By now, the nurse was screaming instructions at full volume: “Call the doctor!” “Get the oxygen tank working!” “Jesus – Help us!” “Bring this item!” “Jesus Christ!”
While Mr Mechanic and I stood aside completely helpless, absolutely terrified.

The oxygen tank wasn’t working.
The nurse dropped the items around and under the examination bed and laid Little Lion on the too-long padded table and manually started delivering oxygen by “bagging”: squeezing a device over his nose and mouth in an effort to pump the oxygen into him.

By this time, despite the poor lighting of a single bare bulb on the ceiling, I could see that Little Lion was turning blue.
And the nurse wasn’t stopping. Between shouts of “Jesus! Help!” she kept right on squeezing oxygen. “Jesus! Save us!” Squeeze. “Savior! Come!”
A minute passed.

The doctor swooped in, and I noticed Mr Mechanic was not beside me. He wasn’t even in the room.
“Jesus!” The nurse was bagging and updating the doctor. “The blood of Jesus over this child!” And I needed to sit down or I was going to faint. “Jesus! Save us!”

Mr Mechanic was just outside the door, on his knees, fervently praying. I knelt down beside him and I sort of prayed. It was a jumble of babbling and gasping for breath, my whole being willing for God to make my baby breathe, and intermittently not fully articulating any word or thought just sending up some desperate emotions.
And sometimes, I copied the nurse and called: “Jesus! Help us!”

And we listened for anything, anything at all.
Two minutes passed.
The nurse’s shouted prayers paused.
A terrible stillness escaped the emergency room and entered the hallway beside us.
Mr Mechanic and I opened our eyes and felt the cold hovering around us.

And Little Lion cried.
It is the only time I have delighted to hear him cry.
Because I knew it meant he was breathing.

Chapter 2