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  • The Week Before

    Having a baby can be stressful. Toss in a global pandemic and it's downright maddening.

The Week Before

Having a baby can be stressful. Toss in a global pandemic and it's downright maddening.

Her voice startled me. There it came, unseen from upstairs, hurtling through the hallway full of vigor and angst.

             Brad!!!

I jolted. There was a distinct jolt. Then silence.

            Can you put my pee on ice!?!

This was a relief. My first thought was that her water had broken and we’d soon be rushing to the hospital to have a baby. We weren’t ready for that. I wasn’t ready for that. Putting her pee on ice, this I could handle.

The night before, my wife Victoria was feeling anxious and her blood pressure suddenly spiked. This was particularly concerning because she was 37 weeks pregnant and high blood pressure, we learned, can be dangerous to an unborn child. We were summoned to the hospital around 10pm so the obstetrics staff could monitor her and the baby in the ominously titled O.B. Triage unit.

It was early-May and by now the COVID-19 pandemic had already resulted in business closures, travel restrictions and, in our hometown of Anchorage, a stay-at-home mandate, framed in the most Alaskan of vernacular as a “hunker down” order. Victoria and I had been hunkering for almost two months and we’d gotten pretty good at it. In truth, we had no plans to un-hunker anytime soon. It was surprising how little we missed the trappings of modern society. It turns out that life is actually quite livable without surly waiters pedaling lukewarm appetizers, $22-dollar drinks, and salad that, let’s be honest, is just a bowl of lettuce and mandarin oranges. We worked from home, did curbside grocery pickups, and went in public as little as possible. If forced to venture into a human jungle (Costco!), we carefully planned our maneuvers like fighter pilots, routinely shouting orders to one another: Mask-up! Sanitize! Don’t look at anyone, talk to anyone, or go near anyone!

Our motto, especially while pregnant: Leave nothing to chance, assume the coronavirus (Rona!) lurks everywhere.

Yet here we were carelessly loading ourselves into the car for a late-night hospital run. This is where sick people go! Would the hospital hold us captive as Victoria’s blood pressure went higher, or worse yet, would they induce delivery on this poor baby right now? How long would we be there? Is this how ‘Rona finally beats us? There in the garage, I suddenly realized just how woefully unprepared I was for all of this. It should not have come as a surprise to me, at 37 weeks pregnant, that we would inevitably need to leave our safe quarantine bubble and venture to the hospital to have a baby. Yet somehow it seemed like an alarming development. How else would this baby girl come into our lives? Perhaps I’d assumed she would one day just transpose herself through the walls of Victoria’s belly as we continued merrily hunkering? Oh look, the baby’s here!

As Victoria climbed into the car, I chucked half-packed suitcases into the backseat unaware if they contained the essentials of childbirth like diapers and baby clothes. I must admit though, I made sure I had an extra pair of pants and that zip-up hoodie I bought on a trip to Friday Harbor. Surely the hospital has snacks, right!?! I ran back inside, shoved our one-year old bernedoodle puppy into his crate and slammed it shut. I will see you again Leo, I promise!

Inside the hospital room, a masked nurse probed Victoria for an I.V. Her blood pressure remained high, her stomach was churning, and she was full of anxiety. Victoria and I donned cloth masks made by her mom, and by this point I’d already sanitized my hands a half-dozen times. On a monitor, the baby’s heartbeat happily raced along, unaware that inside this quiet, cold hospital room, her parents were conjuring images of welcoming her with open arms into a dystopian virus-ravaged world of chaos and fear.

I paced the room as the nurse came and went. Victoria attempted to take deep calming breaths, which presented more like labored gulps of air and managed to leave me feeling slightly breathless. I’d seen all of the signs before—her inability to relax, irritability, an unsettled stomach that, in this case, she may have been interpreting as symptoms of labor. I don’t think we need to be here, I casually suggested to Victoria and the nurse. I think this is a panic attack. You just need to relax. This is not a recommended thing to say to a nervous pregnant woman and her nurse at midnight in a hospital room.

Victoria and I had been married for almost 13 years and known each other for nearly twenty. Although we were both flirting with middle age, this baby girl would be our first child. I could count on one hand the number of babies I’d held (but in no way was responsible for keeping alive!) in my life, and Victoria’s credentials listed a stint as a teenage babysitter as her primary experience. We were entering parenthood as true freshmen. Still, it’s not like we were completely inept—we were functioning adults, with actual jobs. Plus, we had the advantage of knowing one another pretty well.

Victoria was the diligent one, the one who enjoyed hard work, the maddeningly detailed person who oscillated comfortably between her fiery Italian roots, and her mom’s warm Alaska Native stoicism—equal parts white hot temper and zen patience, with a dash of street smarts from her early years in Brooklyn, NY. I was the idea guy, the big picture person, meta if you will, prone to jumping from thing to thing with blind optimism and a we’ll-figure-out-the-details-later! action plan. It worked, our version of yin and yang, for the two of us. How this model translated into parenthood was yet to be determined.

Shortly after my sage advice that Victoria simply relax, the nurse pointedly assured her that we did the right thing coming in to the hospital, that she was smart to listen to her body, especially at this late stage of pregnancy when you never can be too careful. There were smirks radiating from underneath those masks, I just knew it.

The nurse monitored Victoria’s blood pressure, which was slowly coming down, and shuttled vials of blood to the lab. Earlier in her pregnancy Victoria had been diagnosed with borderline gestational diabetes and preeclampsia, the latter a complication marked by persistently high blood pressure. Both of these issues posed risks for our unborn baby girl and required careful management. For weeks we’d been pricking Victoria’s finger daily to measure blood sugar levels, and discussing safe birthing options with our doctor, including scheduling an early-induction date a little more than a week later.

I knew the gravity of all of this, of course, yet somehow managed to resent the fact that we’d extracted ourselves from the safety of our bedroom and driven into the Wild West of the coronavirus, armed only with homemade cloth masks, copious amounts of hand sanitizer, and a trunk full of weekend-wear. This resentment bubbled up inside me, literally, in the form of painful and overwhelming intestinal bloating at the precise moment Victoria’s nurse reassured her that we’d made the right choice to join her in this particular version of hell. As she spoke her tender words, I clenched my rectum, and quietly prayed for her to leave.

As soon as the nurse complied, I darted to the bathroom that adjoined our room, just on the other side of a paper-thin hospital wall. Once inside I found a second door that led to another hospital room (A shared bathroom?!? Another paper-thin wall!), and no discernible locks on the doors. This did not promote the type of comfort and security that one often needs when resolving a hot air balloon of flatulence. As soon as I came to rest on the toilet, I was convinced I’d heard the nurse return to our room. I imagined the entire nursing staff looking for me, their ears pinned to the door, awaiting the faintest of sounds to confirm my location. I paused mid-blow, buttoned up, flushed, and emerged from the bathroom as if I’d just casually returned from washing my hands—it’s the responsible thing to do in this day and age after all!

The nurse was nowhere to be seen.

What’s wrong with you? Victoria asked.

My stomach, I said pivoting180 back to the bathroom.

You’re having Couvade, she scoffed.

Couvade? Is that French for COVID or something?

No! Cou-VADE.

She’d mentioned this before, but here she offered an unprompted reminder that Couvade syndrome was the term for the sympathetic response a husband sometimes has when his wife is pregnant, such as weight gain, insomnia, moodiness, or digestive issues. I balked at this.

Nope. That’s not happening.

The nurse interrupted us for another blood pressure check, and I once again assumed the posture of a normal person, while the psi inside my colon ratcheted up like a roller coaster making its initial ascent. Victoria’s blood pressure continued moderating and her anxiety seemed to be evening out. Her focus had turned to me. As soon as the nurse left again, she ordered me back to the bathroom.

It’s fine! Just go, no one cares! She said.

You seem to be doing fine! I shot back. Why is no one telling us when we can go home?

This dance continued. Each time the nurse exited, I retreated to the bathroom in search of relief. Inevitably I would hear a door slide open and the murmur of voices, to which I would respond with a prompt flush and return to my post in the room as if I’d never left. It occurred to me at some point that maybe this Couvade syndrome wasn’t so far fetched—in fact maybe Victoria and I had been volleying our collective anxiety back and forth for some time.

Although the child we were awaiting would be our first, it was the third time we’d been pregnant. A few years back we’d been hit with a double-blow of miscarriages within just five months. The first presented itself to us at about week eight of the pregnancy when we’d flown to Fairbanks to celebrate a friend’s 40th birthday. We woke up in the basement spare bedroom of our friend’s family home the day after the party and Victoria called me to the bathroom in a panic over some alarming bleeding—it was immediately clear that something was gravely wrong. It occurred to me that this was yet another reason why adult married couples should never have sleepovers. Not only did we have a very private emergency on our hands, but we still had to go upstairs for brunch and, since it was a pre-COVID Sunday, to watch a football game on television (remember live sports with real fans!).

By the time we made it home—which required navigating a busy airport and taking a 45-minute flight—we’d privately consulted with a doctor and made arrangements to go in the next day. That afternoon, I busied myself with a bathroom repair project at home and managed to Homer J. Simpson a screw right into a copper pipe, triggering a flood of water cascading into the walls of our house. In hindsight, this was not a good omen—our first miscarriage would be confirmed just days later.

In just a few months we learned we were pregnant again. Our joy would once again be short-lived, this time replaced with a new vocabulary word: Ectopic. This extremely rare condition refers to a viable pregnancy that settles in a woman’s Fallopian tube instead of her uterus. An ectopic pregnancy, it turns out, can be fatal if not swiftly removed. The process of childbirth, it seemed, was mocking us.

It was about this time that I considered adopting a policy of unfriending all expecting parents or parents of newborn children from my social media accounts. You can see the story unfold from the moment they post that all-too-cute pregnancy announcement. We’re so surprised and over-joyed! Then comes a series of bashful we’re-not-ready-but-look-at-our-HGTV-quality-nursery posts and before you can say baby registry you’re seeing the same old hospital delivery room photos: A tired mom, a befuddled dad, and a wrinkled little mess who can’t even open its eyes. Welcome to the world Declan! Soon the narrative turns to sleep deprivation (insert cute family photo posted at 2:41am—look who’s ready for a milk party!?!) and shock over just how darn fast time is moving. We can’t believe our little pickle is one month old! The rest of their social lives are already written at that point I figured, so why go through the drudgery of bearing witness. I wasn’t bitter, I just couldn’t compete with this adorable content.

Victoria had surgery to remove the ectopic pregnancy two days before Valentine’s Day in 2016. In the years that followed, we more or less swore off of children—or at least assumed it just wasn’t meant to be. Maybe it wouldn’t be so bad being old and childless we reasoned, picturing spontaneous weekends in Vegas, rainy days spent with wrinkled paperbacks, and long pensive walks on some gloomy beach somewhere. Who needed play dates and whiny toddlers anyway? In time we filled this void with traveling, work, obsessions with money/exercise/cooking, and by arguing incessantly, drinking excessively, and considering divorce.

Then we got a puppy, which in some ways seemed to mark a turning point. Here we were, forced to nurture something other than our own narcissistic sense of doom, and forced to watch each other unlock quantities of love and warmth we’d forgotten about. It was a wonderfully nourishing thing to see Victoria alight with love again, and it left me realizing that there was, perhaps, more where that came from.

And there it was, clear as could be, a tiny pulsing bean, in monochrome light, raw and naked, holding in it’s grasp the full potential of humanity.

Still, in September of 2019 when Victoria handed me a small blue gift bag containing a positive pregnancy test, my first words were Oh, Shit! This was a cry of resistance, a statement of alarm, a line in the sand: I refuse to let this take root in my heart. And we’re not letting you back in either social media moms! It seemed natural, almost comforting, when our first doctor’s appointment didn’t go as planned and no heartbeat was detected. Of course not, here we go again. A week later, Victoria and I returned to the doctor, growling with angst as we expected the worst. As the ultrasound made a winding trek through a forest of shapes and textures, the doctor landed on a blurry round object and paused, to say, in what must be the slowest reveal in the history of modern obstetrics: I. See. A. [long, silent pause as I consider stepping out for lunch] … heartbeat.

And there it was, clear as could be, a tiny pulsing bean, in monochrome light, raw and naked, holding in it’s grasp the full potential of humanity. This heartbeat, capable of powering a feisty newborn, a wobbly toddler, a moody teenager, chugging along through algebra, biology, literature and high school gym class, surging ever-faster for sports, love, and the experimental college years, powering late nights, early mornings, the ecstasy of success, the pain of failure, and the potential for greatness—beating ceaselessly into adulthood, fueling a family of its own, an aging body, a graying vessel, a soul borne into history, until it expires, if all goes well, many decades from this moment, warm in a bed, surrounded with the love of people she has yet to meet.

This heartbeat, however improbable and unlikely, suddenly held that magical promise and no matter how much we resisted, we were bound to it, ready to wrap it in an unbreakable kind of love for as long as possible.

By Christmas we were strategizing our social media reveal and wishing we’d paid attention to all those clever parents we’d cast into oblivion. This, it turns out, is mandatory. If you maintain even a shred of a social life (the standard I strive for), then you’re obligated to make some form of a cool/meaningful/creative/non-offensive announcement about the most important moment in your life so that people who you barely know feel intimately connected to you. We went with a slow-play baby announcement, ringing in 2020 with a reflective collection of smiling/quasi-adventurous photos and slyly slipping in a photo of Victoria and I posing with a pair of pink baby booties. Your move Instagram dads! One early reaction was that we’d buried the lead, which I took as a compliment. I closed the post by saying 2020 is going to be a fun year [smiley emoji!]. Globally speaking, this phrase did not age well.

By March, we were well aware that after two painful miscarriages resulting in years of marital discontent and followed by a surprise pregnancy, we’d be welcoming our first child into the gnarled teeth of a global pandemic. As COVID-19 began steamrolling the United States, killing thousands, forcing citizens into self-isolation, and fundamentally changing how we view nearly every aspect of society, our concern over bringing a child into the world under strange new hospital protocols and without the in-person support of family or friends left us feeling… a little anxious. Imagine that! This all seemed to make sense to me sitting on the toilet in the wee hours of the morning at the O.B. Triage unit—that maybe this cyclone of pent up nerves was actually something akin to Couvade syndrome. Maybe Victoria and I had been drinking from the same anxiety-hose for a long time. Maybe this had a lot more to do with the fear of becoming parents, of the changes it might bring to our lives, the fear of screwing it up, or the fear that something could still go wrong and snatch all of this happiness away from us. Maybe that’s why Victoria had a panic attack right before bedtime, and maybe that’s why I was nervously attempting to expel a warm front of air from my quivering guts while cowering in fear that the nursing staff (strangers!) might (gasp!) hear my normal bodily function.

Maybe we both actually just needed to relax.

After 2am, the nurse suddenly popped in and said we were being discharged. Victoria’s bloodwork looked fine, her blood pressure had moderated, and she was feeling much less anxious. We’re going to need to monitor your urine for protein over the next 24 hours, the nurse said. Increasing protein in the urine, it turns out, was a sign that preeclampsia could be impacting the baby and may indicate a need to move up our induction date. Victoria was given a big red jug to collect her pee in and we were told to keep it cold.

The next day, I filled a bucket with ice, submerged the red jug, and placed it in the garage. If all went according to plan, there was a little more than a week left before our scheduled induction date. Suddenly, it felt like just enough time to prepare for everything to change.

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