25
I look surprisingly good in scrubs. I was surprised, at least. I mean, who looks good in scrubs? Not most doctors. Hardly any delivery room dads. Only about half the cast of the TV show Scrubs. Yet somehow, on me, they worked. As I was checking myself out in the crinkly blue paper garments, I wondered if I had missed my calling. Maybe I should have been an industrial supply fashion model. Or maybe I was just dizzy with the fact that I was moments away from meeting my son and daughter.
“Let’s go, dads! Those babies are coming!” Evil Betty poked her head in and was gone in a flash while Eric, Drew, and I were still slipping what looked like tiny shower caps over our shoes.
“C’mon!” Drew said, grabbing me by the arm. There are articles of clothing you can slip on while you’re running, but footwear is not among them. I stumbled my way around the corner, trying to remember where the delivery room was.
“Who’s going to cut the umbilical cord?” Drew asked. “One each?”
I had a sudden attack of stage fright. “No,” I said. “You do both. I’m afraid I’d pass out.”
Hospital policy mandated that twins be delivered in an operating room due to the likelihood of the woman needing an emergency C-section. It was a huge space, full of blinking and beeping medical equipment. Except for Bennett and Sutton, Drew and I were probably the last of the key players to arrive.
Eric had agreed to be our official birth photographer so Drew and I could just enjoy the experience. It was a relief because Eric was sure to feel a lot more comfortable than I would pointing the camera at certain key places. Tiffany had a large sheet draped over her lower half, so Drew and I positioned ourselves discreetly behind her head, clear of the viewing area. She told us she didn’t mind what we saw in the delivery room, but I minded. As much as the expectant father in me was dying to see my kids, the kid in me was nervous about catching sight of a woman’s hoo-hoo.
All around us, people were shouting medical terms. “BMTs!” “Infarction!” “Hemostat!” They were all words that sounded familiar from TV medical shows but that still meant nothing to me. I may as well have been scanning the male faces trying to crown this staff’s McDreamy.
We’d only been in the room a few seconds when Dr. Robertson announced it was go time. “Cauterize the arterial phlebotomist!” he announced, or something like that. A ring of nurses sprung up, seemingly from nowhere, and surrounded Tiffany’s bedside. There must have been at least six of them. One on each side held one of Tiffany’s hands. Two leaned down by her face, and two bent over her feet. All at once, they started directing encouragement toward her head. “Come on, you can do this!” “You’re ready. I know you’re ready!” “This is it, this is what you’ve been waiting for!”
Then one of them started counting loudly, so everyone in the room could hear. “Three . . . two . . . one . . .”
And then, all the nurses screamed in unison, “PUSSSSSSSSHHHH!!!!!”
That’s just what Tiffany proceeded to do, as hard as I’ve ever seen anyone push. She pushed and pushed and pushed some more, and the whole time, the nurses kept repeating, “Pushpushpushpushpushpush!”
When Tiffany relaxed, they went back to their general encouragements. “Good girl!” “Good pushing!” “You’re doing great!” The entire process was kind of disturbing, less like I pictured childbirth would be, more like an exorcism.
Everyone calmed down for about twenty seconds, then the encouragement ratcheted back up. The next thing I knew, the lead nurse was counting again. “Three . . . two . . . one . . .”
“PUSSSSSSSSHHHH!!!!!”
The combined force of the shouting and the pushing practically made the room shake.
“Oh my God,” Drew said. “Are you looking?” He motioned toward the part of Tiffany’s body I was trying very hard to ignore.
“No!” I said. “I’m not looking.”
“I can see his head!”
I nodded nervously. “Great! I’ll look soon.”
“Look!” Drew demanded. “Look now! Your son is being born!”
And so I looked. I can’t say it was the most flattering view of either Tiffany or Bennett, but for the split second I was willing to take a glimpse, I witnessed the miracle of life.
The nurses were now chanting at fever pitch. “This is it!” “One more big push!” “You’re doing so well!”
“Three . . . two . . . one . . .”
Then I heard someone crying. It could have been any of us, really.
The next thing I heard was the clicking of Eric’s camera shutter, and I realized that just a few feet in front of my face was a tiny person. Dr. Robertson held him up like a fisherman displaying a prized trout, and for all I could tell, this may actually have been a fish. He was so covered in clumps of chalky goo that it was hard to tell what species, genus, class, or phylum he might belong to. He was humanoid, at best. A curled up lump of dough, mushy and underbaked. One thing was for sure, though. This repulsive little mole rat was the most beautiful sight I’d ever seen. This was my son, Bennett.
For that one moment, there was no one on Earth younger than he was. Everything he saw, heard, and felt in that instant was brand new to him. Light, air, cold, confusion. Things most of us barely noticed jolted his tiny brain in a tsunami of stimuli. It was hard to conceive of something so new as this little boy. He had never been hurt or hugged, never seen day turn into night, never felt the soft touch of cotton against his skin, never seen a kangaroo or tasted a Fruity Pebble, never fallen asleep to the sound of crickets or woken up to a dog licking his face. Just for now, he belonged to that .001 percent of living creatures who couldn’t recognize Mickey Mouse or Mario. Or me, for that matter. But he would know me before them, and despite what he might say while slamming his door as a teenager, he would love me more. I would be there for millions of my son’s little discoveries, things that would shape him into a person all his own. For now, the sum total of his breaths could be counted on one of his tiny, balled-up little hands, but already, my entire world had changed. Bennett had become a person, and I had become a parent.
No one told me what I should do next. Drew and I were the least relevant people in the room—medically, at least. We were spectators, and as such, we were free to focus on whatever we chose.
A couple of people did a couple of hospital-type things to Bennett, then they left him in the warmer to fend for himself, messy and naked. He sputtered and stretched, probably trying to feel the uterine walls or the touch of his sister, all the things that had confined and comforted him for the last nine months. For the first time, he had his own space—more of it than he could handle. I’m not sure if a two-minute-old human is capable of real happiness, but I imagined that’s what he was feeling.
I wanted him to know I was there, that this gargantuan life change he’d just gone through wasn’t an abandonment. But the doctors had coated his eyes with a thick gel that probably served some important function while also temporarily blinding him. Was I allowed to touch him? No one told me I couldn’t. I’d already scrubbed off at least three layers of hand skin before I entered the OR. Besides, Bennett was the one covered in gross stuff, not me. Anyway, he was my kid. If I were a horse or a mongoose, I’d have given him a full tongue bath by now and snarfed down his placenta. I decided to go for it. I stroked the back of his hand gently with my index finger. He made the slightest twitch in response, but he didn’t pull away.
I felt like I should say something profound and memorable, a “One small step for man . . .” kind of thing. Surely, this was the closest I would ever come to landing on the moon. If ever a moment in my life called for erudition, it was this one. These would be the first words my son would hear me say.
“Hi Bennett,” I whispered, finally. “We’re your dads.”
It was then that I noticed a tied-off umbilical cord, protruding from his midsection. In the rush of activity, I had completely missed the big moment.
“Did you cut his cord?” I asked Drew.
He shook his head. “I didn’t even see them do it.”
The unprecedented cocktail of emotions swirling inside me suddenly received a twist of anger. Maybe it was just a matter of expediency that Dr. Robertson decided to cut the cord himself. There was no time for parent involvement, not with twins. He had another baby to deliver. Snip, on to the next one. That was probably all it was. Or maybe he’d never accepted us as dads.
He didn’t even ask us if we wanted to cut the cord.
I decided to say something—to make a scene, there in the delivery room, if need be. “Excuse me, Doctor, but we’d like to cut the cord next time.” Yes, that’s what I’d say. I rehearsed the line in my head as I slowly turned around.
I couldn’t even see Tiffany. There were so many doctors and nurses surrounding her. While I’d been busy bonding with Bennett, the mood around me had shifted drastically. The number of people in the room had tripled. The door burst open, and a nurse wheeled a new machine into place with great urgency.
Drew clutched my hand. I searched his face for an explanation. He was always so much better than I was at deciphering situations. His face was starkly white. He stood stone-still, petrified, the only movement in his entire body coming from the frantic quivering of his lower lip. I’d never seen him so frightened before.
“We need to go now!” Dr. Robertson announced.
People began shouting jargon at each other. “Triage!” “Avulsion!” “I need fifty ccs of coagulated antigens, stat!”
Amid all of that, the pushing had begun. “Three . . . two . . . one . . . PUSSSSSSSSHHHH!!!!!”
Then I heard one thing very clearly, from a nurse who was staring at a monitor. “We’ve lost the baby’s heartbeat!” she declared.