The worst day / best day of my life.
The worst day of my life was also the best day of my life. The day I thought I had killed my wife. The day our son was born.
It wasn’t supposed to be that way, life is full of surprises… Some good, some bad.
How can I describe the feelings I had after being ousted from the operating room where my wife had just delivered our son by cesarean incision? Despair? Shock? Fear? The surgeon had pointed me towards the door as the heart pressure gauge sounded an alarm of low blood pressure; my wife was dying.
All my medical training was for nought. I could only think, was she hemorrhaging because of her placenta or going into anaphylactic shock from the drugs she had been given? I had a long 15 minutes to contemplate why and what it meant. My son would be motherless and I would be a widower with a baby to bring up. A huge hole of hell opened up in front of me. Would I have to bring my son to the morgue to say goodbye to his mother?
It was a long journey to this moment - to this crux of our lives together. Choices I had made weighed heavily on my shoulders. If I had taken the job at….or stayed put? Why go to Paris, the most dangerous option fraught with difficulties? Why send my wife to her parents during the pregnancy, when she had the best care in Houston, a great gynaecologist and not the country bumpkin she had here. Luckily the gynecological surgeon knew his stuff. But the contractions wouldn’t come and they gave her tons of oxytocin.
At 30 I had decided to have a child and to take a brave step by going to Paris to work. The first was easy, we did that while on vacation in Paris.The second was more difficult. I thought it would be. I had contacted French surgeons and editors and they all said come over. No contracts. I had other offers of jobs, even one in Munich where I would be paid the salary of a typist (what?). And offers from top of the line universities medical schools.
So I was playing my hand at the poker game of life, taking a great risk, and throwing it all on the table. We had sold our condo, so had some money. Not much. I was worried about a serial killer on the loose in Houston so I drove my pregnant wife North. But here my wife was dying on an operating table, and I couldn’t do anything. All because of my egoism.
Our son had come out of her looking fit and big, a long baby. He wouldn’t fit in my wife’s birth canal. He was covered with vernix caseosa and his head was normal and not deformed by normal birthing, He had a super Apgar score, and was wailing away. He was perfect. But then the drop in blood pressure.
I thought about how I grew up with the belief that in Catholic hospitals they would save the child and not the mother; it was my greatest fear.
Then I arrived and things started going wrong. My father in law lost his job and then the grandfather decided to move to Ontario and his grandson as well. All of this was too much for my mother in law who lost it. Meanwhile I was still trying to finish a book I was illustrating and another book for a French publisher. I had interviewed for jobs, but had turned them down. My only choice was France but I needed a visa. And it took months…
Finally they called me back in to the operating room where my wife had recovered and was being wheeled out. I had to get our son and carry him to her in her hospital bed where she was recovering from the surgery. What a handful. What a blessing. What a relief. Mother and child were doing fine. I wasn’t doing fine but I kept it inside me. Even when I went back to the in laws where my brother in law told me it (child birth) was like having a big bowel movement. I kept cool calm and collected, but under it all I was seething. Anyway, the worst was over. Or so I thought…
Our son weighed 9 lbs 1 ounce (4.1 Kgs) 53 cm tall
