Someone Could Get Hurt: A Memoir of Twenty-First-Century Parenthood (16 page)

B
efore the malrotation, before the phone call from the operating room to let us know if our new son was going to live, there were the arguments for and against a third child. Having a third child means you should never again expect the world to sympathize with you. Even people with two kids deserve some compassion because until you have two children, you have no idea how big a pain in the ass two kids are. You think it’s going to be double the work, but it’s not. It’s
four
times the work because you’re managing both the kids
and
the complex relationship between them, which is exhausting. The burden grows exponentially. That’s two children ruining your pizza instead of just one.

People with four or more kids are crazy people who belong in jail, but three edges between being dedicated to family and being a glutton for punishment. I was never 100 percent into the idea. While we were in the trying-to- conceive stage, my wife would tell me to get away from the microwave whenever I heated my leftovers so that my testicles wouldn’t get bombarded with a dash of extra radiation. But sometimes, I would stand in front of it anyway.

“Get away from there!” she said once.

“Are you sure? Because, you know, we’ve got two nice kids. Tempting to quit while we’re ahead, no?”

“I know. I know it’s not the easiest decision. But seriously, stop cooking your balls.”

So we knew three kids would be a world of shit going in. But after a while, we deluded ourselves into thinking it would be relatively easy. We were veterans of the birthing process. The wife would go to the hospital, get C-sectioned real good, and we’d be all set to go. That’s one of the perks of having extra kids. You get to walk into that hospital acting like you own the place. You get to sneer at all the newbie parents who have no idea where the delivery ward is. There are no surprises waiting for you.

Except when your wife begins contracting at seven months and needs to be rushed to the hospital for early delivery. Except when they bring out fancy new high-resolution ultrasound machines that look ready to transform back into Optimus Prime at any moment, machines that end up detecting certain “abnormalities” in the fetus. Except when a team of doctors including an ob-gyn and a high-risk fetal specialist comes in to explain to you and your wife that your son might have some kind of genetic hiccup, and then the specialist proceeds to hop onto Wikipedia in front of you because she knows so little about the condition she thinks your son might have.

We were in the antepartum unit when they told us about the fetus. His head was too big. His tongue was too big. The openings to his kidneys were dilated. They feared that he might have a genetic defect classified as an overgrowth syndrome—a suite of conditions with possible symptoms that range from the benign (you have a big head) to the severe (you are mentally retarded).

The ob-gyn suggested we might want to hold off on tying my wife’s tubes during the C-section in case anything happened to the child and we wanted to try to have another one to replace it. There was no warning for any of this. A new and far more difficult future was suddenly THERE, eating us up and spitting us back out.

“I know this is a lot to absorb,” said the ob-gyn. “We’re going to leave now so you two can talk about it in private.”

When the doctors left, my wife burst into tears.

“I wasn’t ready for that,” she said.

“Neither was I.” I knelt by the hospital bed and gripped her hand. “But this is not the end,” I told her. “It’s not. Don’t think this is the end. There’s so much more of this life and so much of it will be good, I promise you. There will still be graduations and Christmases and weddings and everything that’s wonderful, everything that’s so much better than this. I swear it.”

“I saw his face on the ultrasound. He was beautiful.”

“This is not the end.” And I wanted to believe that. I hoped that, through the hot tubs and giant amusement park mousetraps and late-night arrests, perhaps we were trained for this exact moment, that we had enough strength and love to make it through the birth, the interminable wait for test results, the surgery, and the phone call.
That
phone call.

•   •   •

T
he baby had survived so much up to that point. He was delivered seven weeks early, but he could breathe. His eyes and heart and kidneys were all functioning properly. At one point, a neonatologist who never removed her surgical mask told me that the baby’s brain scan had come back negative. He wasn’t going to be mentally handicapped. He would be able to talk and think and learn just like his brother and sister could. I wept tears of joy in front of the doctor. She patted my arm gently and scurried away.

The baby had served nine days in the NICU so far with little complaint. But now came this. Now came the disembowelment.

I took the phone from the receptionist, and as I put it to my ear, I had a split second to imagine what it would be like if the surgical assistant told me that the baby’s digestive system was compromised. That the baby would die. And the vision seemed so possible that I felt as if it were now inevitable. I prepared myself to deal with it.
This was meant to be. He was meant to live this long and no longer, and I will not spend the rest of my life bitter. I will not pine for some imaginary little boy with perfectly arranged insides who has the ability to live for eighty years because that’s not who this boy was. He was meant to be dead. Please, God, don’t let him be meant to be dead.

“Mr. Magary?”

“Yes.”

“This is Dr. Holman from the OR. Dr. Staffen has had a chance to examine the bowels and they are one hundred percent healthy. Your son is going to be just fine.”

I responded loudly so that my wife could overhear. “He’s going to be okay?”

“Yes, the doctor will be out to talk with you once the procedure is finished.”

“Oh, thank you. Thank you very much. So he’s not gonna die, right? I just want to make double sure.”

“He’s going to be all right.”

I gave the phone back to the receptionist, and my wife and I collapsed into each other, heaving long sobs. Before this, I never knew that joy and misery could merge into a single emotion, that you could cry for ten-minute stretches while feeling simultaneously overjoyed and horrified. But now I knew it firsthand: a whole new dimension to the human condition. Call it joyful sadness. Call it sad joyfulness. Call it
jadness
. Who knows. All I know is that I had a hard time differentiating between THANK GOD MY SON IS ALIVE and HOLY SHIT MY SON JUST HAD HIS INTESTINES TOSSED. There was no clear division in that moment. There was just the overwhelming happening of it all. Kathy the NICU nurse brought us back to another private room where we sat, dazed from emotional overload.

“We may have to go to church now,” my wife said to me.

“Yeah, maybe.”

“I mean, you know. He’s gonna live.”

“I know. I do like having Sunday mornings free, though.”

“It would teach the other two a bit of gratitude.”

“That it would. I’m still not sure I believe any of that God stuff, but yeah. I want to be more grateful. If not to God, then to . . . I dunno . . . life, I suppose.”

Half an hour later, the surgeon came in and told us that the baby was hunky-dory and already back up in the NICU. All that was left was to bust him out of there and bring him home. I was certain it would be a cinch. We were already past the hard part. Getting a baby out of the NICU would be nothing. It’s EASY, isn’t it?

•   •   •

N
o matter how fortunate you are in life, if you have a child in the NICU, you will feel like God ripped you off. Every day, you walk into the NICU praying that your child will finally be healthy enough to go home. And as you make that walk, you pass by dozens of new parents strolling out of the postpartum unit with healthy, happy, full-term babies. I walked to the NICU every day to see our baby and I would see new fathers pushing their wives out of the elevators, holding flower bouquets and IT’S A BOY balloons, and I would fight with all my strength to not feel as if I had been cheated. I already had two perfectly healthy, wonderful children. I had already been treated to two moments when I was just like the ecstatic families strolling out of the hospital. And our third child had survived being gutted and cleaned like a fish. There was no reason for me to be bitter. At all.

But the feeling was there, no matter how hard I fought against it. The shift between the maternity ward waiting room—with boisterous families either waiting or celebrating—and the entrance to the NICU was too jarring not to affect me. The NICU entrance lay past the third-floor lobby, through a set of double doors and down a silent white hall to a modest reception area, with a tiny waiting room of its own that was perpetually empty. I would check in by showing the receptionist my wristband (which was growing more faded and crackled by the day; I worried constantly about it falling off) and then wash my hands thoroughly at one of the two sinks to the left of the receptionist’s desk. You were allowed to bring covered drinks into the NICU but I never did because I was the exact kind of person that would trip and fall and spill a forty-two-ounce Coke Zero directly into a newborn’s respirator.

All NICU entrants had to sterilize their hands at a special washing station to prevent infection. There was a bathroom right next door to the station and I used it every time I visited because I was so terribly nervous about finding out the baby’s status that I always ended up having to take a giant shit. Then I would worry that it was inappropriate to take a shit in a NICU. I would wash my hands compulsively afterward but still worry that I hadn’t gotten all of the filth off, that I was spreading fecal matter all over the place and giving every infant in the unit meningitis with my poopy hands.

The NICU was divided into sections based upon the severity of each infant’s condition. The ones at the back were high-risk babies that needed careful monitoring, my son among the unfortunates. As I walked to the back of the unit, I could always see the other babies along the way. Some weighed as little as a single pound. It seemed unfathomable to me that anything that small could grow at all, that it could add fat and muscle and become something other than a tiny, helpless little creature. Some of the babies were housed in bassinets lined with foil that had heat lamps shining on them at all times, like burgers set out for pickup in a T.G.I. Friday’s kitchen. Some were being rocked gently and fed by traumatized mothers still wearing their hospital gowns. You could hear the babies crying, some of them emitting a high-pitched “neuro-cry” that was a clear signal that their brains had been compromised.

I tried not to stare at the other children because it seemed like I was being intrusive, but I couldn’t help it. I would see doctors and nurses talk to other parents in hushed tones and wonder what was wrong with their children. The majority of babies were housed in alcoves, with only a curtain surrounding them for privacy. A handful of babies got actual private rooms. I wondered if you got a room because your baby was certain to pass away. All of the joy and anticipation you could feel in the main waiting area of the maternity ward was missing here. Once inside the NICU, there was nothing but angst. You knew that every second in this place, someone was holding his or her breath. I wondered how many couples walked out of the NICU every year empty-handed.

After the baby’s surgery, I walked back to his isolette with my wife so that I could stare at him. The entire incubator was covered with a fitted giraffe blanket, to give parents a sense that this was a warm and cute place, not the terrifying place we all knew it to be. There was a flap at the top of the blanket that I could unsnap and open to look down at the baby, as if I were staring at fish underneath a glass bottom boat. I pulled the flap open and saw my son lying on a biliblanket, a blanket that lit up with changing colors to help lower the baby’s bilirubin levels (high levels of bilirubin cause jaundice). It would shift from green to yellow to red every few moments, as if my son were onstage at a rock concert.

“Should we take a picture of him?” I asked my wife.

She shook her head and began to cry. “I don’t want to remember any of this.”

There were tubes and wires sprouting out from all over his body. There were three wires running from his foot that went directly to a monitor that displayed his heart rate, his blood pressure, and the oxygen levels in his blood. Whenever the vitals got too high or too low, the monitor would beep like a smoke alarm and the nurses would come over to make sure the child wasn’t dying. Sometimes a baby will forget to breathe and his heart rate will plunge down to virtually nothing before the nurse gives him a nudge and he suddenly remembers, “Oh, hey! OXYGEN.” This is called bradycardia, or a “brady” for short. Our son bradyed a lot. It was fucking scary as hell.

All over the NICU, something was always beeping. If not our son’s monitor, then someone else’s IV. The nurses would rush to another alcove and I would find myself grateful there was a baby sicker than my own. I hated myself for thinking that. I had a hard time recognizing which beep was coming from where. Every beep was a chance to worry. The beeps rained down twenty-four hours a day, from all directions. The nurses had clearly gotten used to them. I never did. A handful of unlucky parents had to take the monitors home with them when their children were discharged, to keep tabs on their vital signs. Those home monitors often malfunctioned, beeping all night long.

For days after surgery, the baby’s stomach needed to be completely empty. The nurses placed a tube in his mouth that snaked all the way down to the inner lining of his stomach, to suck up all the excess fluids. Once we began feeding him, we would have to make sure that no nasty green fluid came back up. Otherwise it would be back to the OR, and without any guarantee that things would turn out okay a second time.

There was also a CPAP device, a cumbersome series of nasal tubes that made it look like the baby had a snorkel pasted to his nose. The tubes ran to a pump that periodically blasted air into the baby’s lungs because, although his lungs were functional, he didn’t yet have the strength to take in enough oxygen on his own. The tubes had to be held in place with clear plastic tape, and I could see the tape pulling at my son’s cheeks, dragging them up with the tube and giving him a deranged Joker smile that I didn’t want him to have. There was an IV running from a prick in his heel that delivered vital nutrients straight into his bloodstream since he wasn’t allowed to take food orally yet, plus fentanyl to keep the pain away. The IV was held fast in place by surgical tape that wrapped around his foot again and again, like a little mummy foot. I could see his toes turning red from all the capillaries being squeezed together.