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Pink, Soft and Crying…
Posted under Daughters 
It was midnight and I was just coming home from my 2nd shift job. I was tired and all I wanted was for my head to find that pillow. I tipped toed in as quietly as I could trying not to wake my wife. She hadn’t been sleeping well lately being that she was two weeks past her due date.
She was awake. The contractions had started earlier in the evening and they seemed to be getting closer. It was time to call the doctor and head for the hospital. Those damn Braxton-Hicks fake contractions set us up one too many times before. This time it was the real thing.
Off to the hospital we headed, anticipating the birth of our first born. We were excited and anxious at the same time. Running on adrenaline (before Red Bull) we checked in and were sent up to a labor room.
She was hooked up with various monitors and a couple of IV’s of drugs, one of which started to make her ill. Have you ever tried to move a nine month pregnant woman with IV’s and monitors from a hospital bed to the bathroom so she can be sick?
Might as well have asked an elephant to disco dance.
Around 4:00 in the morning they decide to break her water. MORE great fun. This is where labor picked up speed. Hard and heavy but yet she wasn’t dilated enough.
The previous month, she and I attended Lamaze classes. For breathing excercises we picked out this beautiful calendar with flowers on it. She would count out the flowers to control her breathing. Four beats of breathing counting out four of the flowers. Very sweet.
I pulled out this beautiful calendar for her to use. She tried to count out the flowers. It wasn’t working. She grabbed the calendar out of my hands and threw it across the room.
That evening I chose to wear an old style Mickey Mouse shirt. She proceeded to use her index finger and pound out M-I-C-K on my shirt with enough force that I ended up with bruises.
This went on for a couple of hours and then our savior showed. The anesthesiologist asked her if she’d like pain medication such as an epidural. With a voice sounding like the possessed Linda Blair from The Exorcist, she said yes, NOW!!
After the epidural kicked in she was cruising through labor. She’d occasionally look over at the monitor and go “Oh look I’m having a contraction.” She would drift in and out of sleep. Nurses would come and go. Checking her status and verifying that the baby had dropped but was not ready.
By the late afternoon I’ve not slept yet; my wife has had the luxury of cat-naps in between checks. The doctor came into the room and after checking her says that the baby is facing up, not down as it should be. They may use forceps to rotate the baby if massaging doesn’t work. Massaging didn’t work.
As they prepared to go ahead with the forceps the monitor started to alarm. The baby was in distress. Time to take this baby now. They quickly informed me that they are going to deliver by cesarean. They handed me surgical garments and wheeled her with me in tow straight into the delivery room.
My wife’s arms were strapped to a board and a small curtain was placed on her chest so as to block her view of her abdomen. They rolled a chair next to her head and told me to sit in it. I was warned that if I passed out, I was on my own. The room was filled with half a dozen people and all of them were busy.
As the surgeon started his work, I talked with my wife about baby names. If it’s boy we had a name picked out but, if it was a girl we weren’t sure. I was fascinated at the surgery and tried to tell my wife as many details about what was going on as I could. I was so wrapped up in it that when the doctor started to pull my daughter out he had to remind me to grab the camera and take a picture.
Our daughter was born at 7:31 that evening, twenty one years ago. After nineteen and half hours of labor our first born came into this world all pink, soft and crying. The most wonderful thing I had ever witnessed up until that point. After placing her in her mother’s arms we knew her name. Katherine.
Happy Birthday Katherine,
Love Dad…
(There Goes My Life)
