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| Dallin Daniel Lawson, August 11, 2012 |
It was the longest red light in the history of modern traffic. And it stopped me at a very inopportune time. For one thing, my wife was in the passenger seat of the car and in labor--that was the small problem. But the bigger problem was that my wife was really in labor. I’m not sure what the technical term for it is, but my wife was in the stage of labor that makes a woman pee her pants without even caring; the stage that makes a tidy-mouthed Mormon say the “F” word many, many times. My wife’s body was succumbing to a force far beyond either of our control. And we were stalled at the longest red light in the history of modern traffic. Within sight of the hospital.
If you asked me to pick the worst possible time for the Lawson family to have a baby, I would have picked the Summer of 2012. In the spring, my long search for a job had led me from our home on the border of New Hampshire to Caribou, Maine on the border of nowhere. For those of you who need to brush up on your subarctic geography, Caribou is situated in the sparsely-populated Aroostook County and boasts itself to be “the most northeastern city in the United States.” Moving is always a hassle, but moving to the far reaches of civilization came with some special challenges.
The first challenge was finding a place to live. Even after two exploratory expeditions to The County, the only rentals we had to choose from was a newly-renovated shack and a cozy three-bedroom hole. After going from Plan A to Plan B and beyond, we finally decided to buy a home. The only problem was that we couldn’t close on it until the middle of August, and we had a baby due July 29. To start work in June, I had to pioneer ahead of the family and move into a hotel room. Alicia, eight months pregnant, was left to take care of two kids on her own. In July, I spent a weekend moving all our things from Berwick to a storage unit in Presque Isle, and thereafter Alicia and the kids spent the summer living out of a duffel bag and splitting time between the homes of Alicia’s mother and my parents.
The second challenge was a problem of distance. Caribou isn’t really close to anything except potato fields and the Canadian border. After Alicia moved in with family, I was four-and-a-half hours away from her. And because Alicia has what I would consider both a paranoid bias against hospital births and a perplexing abhorrence for the modern medical advances that could make squeezing a human being out of your private parts bearable, she insisted that we have the baby at her midwife’s birth center in Stratham, New Hampshire. Thus, not only was I living and working four hours from my wife, but I was also a solid six hours away from where my child was supposed to be born.
So from these impossible circumstances we spawned an impossible plan: at the first sign of labor, I would get into my 265,000-mile Toyota Camry, then stomp on the gas as if I caught it breaking into my house. I would then pick up Alicia and drive to the birth center in time for her to squeeze a baby into a birthing pool.
Obviously the whole thing was ludicrous. You don’t have to dig very far into a bag of hypotheticals to imagine what could go wrong. But despite my best efforts of persuasion, neither the prospect of me missing my son’s birth nor the hazard of having a child born in the back seat of our Volvo phased my wife. The ludicrous plan was in place.
So our boy’s due date, July 30th approached. I started answering my phone during important meetings with the greeting: “Hello, are you in labor? No? Okay, bye.” I went to bed wondering if that night would be the night of the mad dash. I would drive south on weekends and on Sunday I would wonder whether I should drive back. To be safe, I waited until Monday morning to return north, starting my long drive at four o’clock in the morning.
But the midnight call never came. The due date came and went. Every weekend I hoped the baby would come, but each Monday I drove north. Alicia was a week overdue and was still feeling nothing. I called her more and more frequently, thinking that surely she couldn’t hold that baby in another hour.
But she did. As she approached being two weeks overdue, she began having some occasional contractions. And though I felt crazy for not high-tailing it south each time she mentioned one, there were no solid signs of labor, so we waited.
Finally, Friday, August 10 arrived. And I breathed a sigh of relief, since I had made it to the weekend at which Alicia would be two weeks overdue. I had done some research on the risks of childbirth and had decided in advance that this was the time when the balance between respecting my wife’s childbirth choices and making whatever unilateral decisions needed to be made in order to protect the well-being of my wife and child tilted dramatically; in other words, if this baby was not in the water by Monday, I was going to drive Alicia to the hospital against her will and let the doctors fetch the baby out with whatever needles, knives, vacuums, plungers or metal tongs they saw fit. Even if she went kicking and screaming, even if she hated me forever, I vowed that I would bring that girl to a hospital.
On Friday Alicia went to an acupuncturist because (1) they’ve been doing it for thousands of years so there must therefore be mysterious energy currents in the body that can be methodically stabbed to induce labor, and (2) Alicia likes her childbirth to be even more uncomfortable than it has to be.On Saturday we drove down two hours for a checkup with the midwife. The midwife asked me how I was feeling (a question she asks frequently). I told her that, given how far overdue Alicia was, I was nervous and wanted to know what Plan B was just in case we didn’t make it back to the birth center in time. I was trying to talk about a hospital intervention, but asking a midwife about hospitals or interventions is like asking a Catholic priest what contraceptives he recommends. Alicia got her membrane stripped and a prescription for castor oil, but I didn’t get my answers. We drove the two hours back to Winthrop.
Alicia took a dose of castor oil around 12:30. She took another dose about an hour later. At 2:00 she felt something in her midsection. It came on so quickly that she thought it must have been the castor oil doing what castor oil is supposed to do. She called her midwife, who told her to take a hot shower and crawl into bed. Alicia took a hot shower and crawled into bed, but the discomfort in her midsection started feeling more and more like strong contractions. She called her midwife again, and around 2:30 we took flight.
Out of the gate, Alicia’s labor was surprisingly strong considering it had only started a matter of minutes ago. I realized that this was the real deal when I started singing a Willie Nelson song and Alicia abruptly told me to stop singing that Willie Nelson song (even though it was a very appropriate rendition of On the Road Again).
Not only were her contractions strong, but they seemed incredibly close together. Just by listening to her hurried, focused breath, and watching for when her body tensed in her seat I thought I could time the intervals between contractions. When I first measured one at five minutes, before we were even on the interstate, I thought my math must have been wrong.
When we merged onto the interstate I drove with a sense of urgency, 80 m.p.h. with hazard lights when I thought they were appropriate.
As we got into Gray the contractions seemed to get angrier. I was trying to keep track of how far apart they were, but it was hard to tell by watching the car’s clock because they were down to a matter of seconds. 4:09 to 4:11--is that three minutes or two minutes? Maybe it’s just a little over one minute!
As we approached Portland Alicia was fading in and out of contraction-induced stupors. She could barely get a sentence out before her breathing became short, quick and rhythmic and she was beyond language.
When she came out of one I said, “Alicia, I’m thinking that we should go to a hospital.”
“No, no. We’ll make it. I was three minutes apart when we were driving down with Annalise.”
I wanted to discuss the matter further but another contraction rudely interrupted.
I sped and weaved through traffic as quickly as I thought I could do so safely, half hoping that I would get pulled over so that I could get a police escort to the nearest hospital.
“Alicia, those ones were like thirty seconds apart!”
I handed her the phone and told her to call her midwife.
“Yeah, we’re getting near Portland . . . Uh huh . . . They’re about a minute and a half or two minutes apart . . . Yep . . . HoldonI’vegottagiveyoutoDan.” She thrust the phone over to me as another contraction gripped her.
Now I had Alicia call her midwife in the hopes that the midwife, drawing from her vast experience, would acknowledge the urgency of our situation. I was hoping that she would recognize how dangerous it would be for us to drive the remaining hour-plus to the birth center when Alicia’s contractions were strong and startlingly close together. I was hoping that the midwife was the sherpa who would know when going for the summit of Mount Everest isn’t worth risking your life. Instead of the decisive guidance that I was hoping for, the midwife answered with characteristically kum-ba-ya and “own-your-birth” vagueness.
“Hi, Dan? Yeah, it’s really up to Alicia, whatever she wants to do.” I grit my teeth at her refusal to even say the word “hospital.” “Do you guys have anything in the back seat? Maybe Alicia would be more comfortable lying down back there.”
Not only was the midwife failing to give decisive guidance, it was pretty clear that she was not grasping the problem. Our problem was not that Alicia was uncomfortable, our problem was that a baby was about to come out of her vagina and land on the passenger side floor mat.
I had already made up my mind by the time I hung the phone up. “Alicia, I’m taking you to the hospital.”She didn’t fight me. I expected her to, but she didn’t. The fact that she didn’t fight me actually scared me. Up to this point I would have had more luck convincing Bashar al-Assad to relinquish the Syrian presidency than I would have had convincing Alicia to abandon the birth center. Her acquiescence told me that she too knew the end was near. Her only request was that I bring her to Mercy hospital.
I managed to get the number for Mercy from the GPS.
“Hello this is Mercy Hospital.”
“Hello. Wife. Labor. Not going to reach birth center. On our way.”
“Let me transfer you.”
. . . .
“Hello this is Mercy Hospital.”
“Hello. Wife. Labor. Not going to reach birth center. On our way.”
“Let me transfer you.”
. . . . .
“Hello. Wife. Labor. Not going to make birth center. On our way.”
“Who’s your midwife?”
“Val.”
“Val?”
“Coastal Birth Retreat in Stratham, New Hampshire.”
“You should go there.”
“Not gonna make it. Coming to you.”
“Ummm... I’m going to recommend you go to Maine Med.”
I changed our destination in the GPS. During that perfect waste of time I got off the exit and was now jerking the car through the city of Portland’s endless traffic lights. It was starting to feel like a scene from the Bourne Identity.
For those of you who might one day be driving an extremely pregnant woman to a hospital, I will insert a small tip. In the event that there is a conflict between the directions your GPS gives you and the directions the irate, half-blind-with-pain woman in the passenger seat gives you, trust the former.
I learned this lesson the hard way when Alicia saw a sign that said, among other things, “Maine Medical Center.” Alicia made us turn around and pull up to the building. It didn’t take long to realize that this building was not the hospital, but what appeared to be some kind of satellite office. Despite this, Alicia was seriously about to walk in and declare the office to be the birthplace of her child. I’ve since done a little research and found out that what Alicia thought was a hospital was in fact NorDx, a clinical laboratory. Oh, if only those lab technicians knew how close they were to delivering a baby.
To recap, the takeaway from this is to never take directions from a desperate woman in labor.
I got back onto our route to Maine Med feeling like I had just lost ground in the race between me and the baby that was swimming like an Olympian for the finish line. Though I knew we were going the right way, each quick breath and each foul curse from Alicia made me feel like the hospital was slipping farther away.I was starting to think we might actually make it when Alicia let out a low, ominous groan that I recognized from experience meant that she was feeling what she later described as “the worst diarrhea you’ve ever had in your life.” The baby was coming out, and pretty soon there was going to be nothing that I or Alicia could do about it.
This is when we stopped at the longest light in the history of modern traffic. Alicia let out another groan reminding me that the race was still on and that the contractions did not have to stop for traffic lights. I was losing ground again.
“Oooooh, I can feel the baby.”
I didn’t know what to do. I’m not going to make it to the hospital. This light is never going to change. Look at it. It’s laughing at me. It’s conspiring against me with the contractions. I debated whether I should pull over, call an ambulance, and deliver the baby myself. Ruefully, I remembered that I hadn’t read the chapter of The Birth Partner dedicated to roadside deliveries. However, I had read it two years ago before Anna was born and tried to piece it together in my head. You just catch the baby, right? And then you leave the umbilical cord alone, I think. What about the placenta? I’m supposed to make sure it’s all in one piece, I remember that. Should I just do this myself? What would Ferris Bueller do right now?As quickly as the light turned green, my thoughts went from crippling indecision to extreme focus on the one thing I had to do.
Go. Drive. Get there.
To the hospital. Follow the red sign. To the emergency department. Park. Leave the car.I rushed into the ER.
“Wife. Car. Labor. Not going to make it.”
I thought that since I had done my job in getting Alicia to the sanctuary of the hospital that the great mechanism of the medical facility, with all its protocols and standard operating procedures would take over. The look of surprise and uncertainty that I got was somewhat disconcerting. Should anything be surprising to someone in the ER?
They got Alicia into a wheelchair and we were off through the halls. Alicia was writhing. I wondered if they understood how close to giving birth she was but would have felt strange saying, “No, seriously, get your gloves on.”
As it turns out, I should have said just that. The wheelchair stopped to wait for an elevator (it turned out to be the longest wait for an elevator in the history of elevators). Alicia suddenly pressed her hand to her crotch and yelled, “I feel its head! I can feel it coming out.” And then it was chaos.
The two nurses that were with us ducked the wheelchair into the first empty room that they saw. In their haste, the wheel got caught in the doorway and the nurse roughly had to yank it around the corner. One of the nurses ran out of the room to get help. The other positioned herself under Alicia, still in the wheelchair.
“Get me a glove!”
The Depends came off and I could see that, just as Alicia had said, the baby’s head was coming out.
“I need a glove!”
Alicia tensed, and gripped the arms of the wheelchair.To this point I had been cool when I needed to be cool. I had been calm when I needed to be calm. I had been decisive when I needed to be decisive. I had raced through the unfamiliar streets of Portland under the most stressful of circumstances just fast enough to get my wife to the hospital before she popped.
But now my job was done and all I needed to do was stay out of the way. Now I didn’t need to be cool, or calm, or decisive. So I squatted in the corner of the room and succumbed to the flood of emotions that came to me. It was terrifying. Seeing your child come out of the womb--unnaturally blue, limp, not breathing, and with a pool of blood--is always scary. But add to that the fact that the child is being born from a wheelchair over a hard tile floor into the hands of a single nurse who was at the wrong place at the wrong time; a nurse who didn’t even have time to put gloves on.
So I squatted in the corner and let the tears come because I was downright scared. And then I let the tears come because I heard my boy take his first gasps of breath and wail to let us know that he was alive. And then I let the tears come simply because I had done my job--and at 4:43 p.m. on August 11, 2012, I had a son. He was perfectly healthy, weighing in at 8 pounds, 10 ounces. I wanted to name him Gray, but we settled on Dallin Daniel Lawson.
After a while the smoke cleared. The commotion of nurses and doctors finally ebbed. Though I thought an emergency room would have seen everything, I soon discovered that our boy’s birth was quite an occurrence. During our hospital stay, several versions of our story circulated back to us. “So you are the ones that had the baby in the ER?” “So you guys were on vacation and just had a baby here?” “Oh, you must be the couple from New York.” I was a little embarrassed about the whole thing and thought I’d just let the rumor to continue, as if it gave me an excuse for being reckless. “Yes, we’re the couple that had the baby in the ER. I know it sounds stupid to go on a vacation when you’re so pregnant, but we’re from New York and don’t know anything about anything.”
We spent a night in the hospital, spent the next day watching the last day of the Summer Olympics, and took Dallin home in the afternoon.
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| Juliette, Annalise, and their new brother Dallin |
This past summer I slept at my parent’s house. I slept in a cheap motel. I slept in hotel rooms. I slept in an apartment. I slept in a rental home. I slept in a bed. I slept on a floor. I slept on an air mattress. I slept in my car. I slept in my office. I slept near my wife and I slept near my daughters, but most nights I slept alone. Now every night I come home after work and tuck in my girls. I go to sleep in my bed, next to my wife. And next to my bed is a cradle, where my new baby boy sleeps.
Now, more than ever, I thank my Heavenly Father for the blessing of a home where we can be each other’s strength each and every day.
1 comment:
I can’t believe I’m just reading this beautiful story. I love your writing Dan. This is a treasure.
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