Raising Blaze Page 2

  By the time John left, I had convinced myself that I was much better off without him. Buttressed by the unconditional support of my family, I decided that “going it alone” was entirely preferable to the misery I would likely feel if I pursued any kind of relationship with John. I had plenty of time, I reckoned, to get used to the idea of being a single mother. On balance, I was quite happy. I wanted my baby and I couldn’t wait to meet him.

  There was only one moment during my pregnancy when I faltered and felt a hint of something I had to call grief. I was in the middle of my first prenatal checkup. The doctor had given me a due date and a prescription for vitamins. He told me that I was in great health and that I should have an easy and trouble-free pregnancy. He put a stethoscope to my still-flat belly and instructed me to listen. I heard a quick, pulsing heartbeat that wasn’t mine coming from within my body. It was a reality then, that very soon I would be responsible for a completely new person. There was an intense joy in this but, at the same time, I experienced deep pain at being separated from John. It was really the two of us who had made this third, I thought, and I wished he had been there with me, listening. That heartbeat belonged to his baby as well as mine. If only he could hear this, I thought, he wouldn’t be able to find a place for his anger. How could anyone be angry in the face of such magic?

  I was convinced I was going to be a champion in delivery, just as I was smugly sure I had orchestrated the perfect pregnancy. Blaze, however, had different ideas from the start. He was very late, for one thing. My original due was set at the beginning of July, so from the middle of June I was anxiously looking forward to his arrival.

  I’d shut myself up at home for the last few weeks of my pregnancy. I was so large I could balance a teacup and saucer on my protruding belly. It was the hottest summer on record in Portland that year and I had no air-conditioning. For the better part of three weeks I lay on my sweaty bed directly facing a fan, watching the interminable Iran-Contra hearings, which promised to be as endless as my pregnancy. Every evening I stared at the little trunk I’d filled with tiny baby clothes and blankets. I folded and refolded them, arranged them according to color, tossed them around my bed and put them back again. And waited.

  Two weeks after my due date, I was frantic. I could barely breathe and sleeping was out of the question. The baby’s endless hiccups (“An excellent primitive breathing reflex,” my doctor assured me) kept me awake, staring at the changing colors of the sky every night. I couldn’t eat more than a single piece of fruit at a sitting owing to my squashed stomach and I was in the bathroom every fifteen minutes. Besides all of these mundane physical discomforts, I was beginning to think I was carrying an alien life-form within me. I could see the outline of feet against the tight skin of my belly as the baby moved around in his limited space, but as the days and nights stretched on and on, baby became intruder in my mind. My grandmother had an accurate (if somewhat cold) Yiddish term for this. She called the unborn baby a mitfresser, which translates, roughly, into eat-along.

  “Who are you?” I asked the rolling skin of my midsection, although I wasn’t entirely ignorant of the answer. There were at least a couple of things I did know about this baby. An ultrasound taken a week after my due date showed that the baby was a boy, something I’d assumed from the beginning. I fully agreed with a friend of mine who said, “It would just be so out of character for you to have a girl.”

  I also knew that this baby’s name was Blaze. The name had come to me in the middle of a bad first-trimester cold. I couldn’t take any pain relievers or decongestants so I lay in a miserable heap on my bed watching TV shows that I would never normally watch. A character on one of these shows was named Johnny Blaze. I knew immediately and without any kind of reason that Blaze would be my baby’s name. It was almost as if he’d named himself.

  Being a suspicious type, though, I wasn’t confident enough in the choice of name to forgo researching its origins. I didn’t want to brand my kid with a name that had negative connotations. Aside from mine, names were quite a big deal in my family. Every one of my siblings had spent time explaining the origins of their names. I didn’t want my child to experience even the most subtle problems because of his name (yes, I had really thought of everything—what a well-prepared mother-to-be!).

  The first few baby name books I consulted listed Blaze as a derivative of the Latin Blasius, meaning “one who stammers,” which was totally unacceptable. Fancy laying terrible communication skills on a kid from the get-go. Because I was so attached to this name, though, I kept searching. Finally, I found what I’d been looking for, a mention of Saint Blaze, a fourth-century Armenian bishop who had hidden in a cave during the persecution of the Christians and tended to wounded animals. He was one of the patron saints of physicians, invoked against ailments of the throat. This was good enough for me.

  Despite my preparedness with a name, baby clothes, crib, and an almost desperate desire to deliver, I began to have a sneaking suspicion that I was never going to go into labor naturally. It was in this state that I found myself in the hospital’s waiting room on the morning of July 22.

  “I’m not leaving until he’s out,” I warned Maya. “I don’t care if they have room or not. I’ll give birth right here if I have to.”

  There was one other, nonpregnant, woman in the waiting room listening to this frenzied conversation I was having with my sister. She waited for a lull before she said, “Is this your first baby?” I admitted that it was and she asked me when I was due. When I told her that I was already two weeks past my due date, she nodded sympathetically.

  “They going to induce you?” she asked. I answered that this was my fervent hope.

  “Make them do it,” she said stridently. “I was three weeks late with my first and they did nothing about it. The baby ran out of oxygen in there. He died. My baby died. They could have saved him if they’d given me an induction.”

  I stared at her, horrified. What a thing to say to a pregnant woman! And what was the proper response to such a statement? “I’m sorry?” “Thanks for letting me know?” I felt a panic coming on as I searched my brain for something appropriate to say.

  “Stand your ground,” she added, before I could say anything. “You wouldn’t want that to happen to you.”

  My obstetrician mercifully rescued me at that point. She appeared like a guardian angel at my shoulder and said, “Good news. We’ve got room for you downstairs. Looks like you’re going to have your baby today.”

  I was totally unconcerned about the pain of labor, despite what I’d heard from other mothers about the agony of childbirth. I had vowed to avoid any drugs during the process. As far as I was concerned, pain meant that birth was imminent and, therefore, not a bad thing. Besides, my own mother had given birth to all of her children without any pain medication. She’d assured me that her labors had been short and uncomplicated and I saw no reason why my own should be any different. I thought women who complained of endless labors and excruciating pain were wimps who were too emotionally detached from childbirth to appreciate the process. I was actually looking forward to birthing my baby. I felt fearless.

  My family arrived at the hospital in stages. Maya was with me from the beginning, alternately watching TV, eating snacks from the cafeteria, and keeping a running commentary about the shrieks of pain from other women in labor, all of which we could hear through the walls. Our favorite among these was the woman who kept yelling, “Ow, ow, ow-ee, ow-ee! Shit! Shit!” over and over again, her words in the exact same pattern each time.

  “Ow-ee?” Maya questioned, eyebrows raised.

  “Just don’t let me do that, okay?” I begged her. “Just shoot me if I start screaming.”

  “Ow-eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!” came the wail from the next room.

  “Yup, okay,” Maya said, staring ruefully into her plastic foam cup. “You know, this is supposed to be hot chocolate, but you’d never know it. Everything comes out of the same nozzle down there: hot chocolate, tea, coffee,
soup. I can’t tell what this is. Want some?”

  By the time the drugs I’d been given to induce labor had really kicked in and I was having contractions every minute, my parents and my siblings were all there, wandering in and out of the room, eating potato chips and chocolate and arguing with each other.

  It was then that I realized fully that having a baby is a completely solo effort. There was no way to drag anybody else in and have them take over. I could barely see and certainly could not move with all the equipment strapped to my body. There were several IV lines and a fetal monitor that amplified the baby’s heartbeat to a level that was impossible to ignore. That rhythmic thump was so loud and elemental I continued to hear it hours after Blaze was delivered.

  After three hours of solid one-minute contractions, my legs started to shake uncontrollably and I worried about losing control completely and screaming in agony. I felt as if I were being slowly torn in half, from the inside out, and started to wonder how any woman could survive this kind of pain. I wondered if I was going to survive it. Visions of camels passing through the eyes of needles danced through my head. This is too hard, I thought several times, I can’t do it, make it stop. Every time this thought crossed my mind, it was immediately followed by the terrible realization that I had to do it, that there was absolutely nowhere to go and nobody who could make it stop.

  My mother, worry etched into her face, stood at the end of the bed and grabbed hold of my feet, the only part of my body she could really reach, squeezing hard. I looked at her and felt an immediate and deep sense of betrayal. I couldn’t believe that, as my mother, she hadn’t seen fit to tell me about a pain that was—as close as I could equate it—like having my legs tied to two trucks that were driving off in opposite directions.

  “Why,” I panted between contractions, “didn’t you tell me it was going to be like this?”

  “Would you have believed me?” she answered.

  After several hours of hard labor, I demanded that Maya kick everybody out of the room. “I need drugs,” I told her. “Now.”

  “But you told me you didn’t want—”

  “Now!” I had thirty seconds before the next contraction was going to overtake me completely and I couldn’t afford to waste time telling her how I’d totally given up on the concept of a drug-free childbirth. I was only four centimeters dilated after ten hours of labor and quite certain that I would never make it without the kind of chemical help that only a day earlier I had sworn I would never take.

  The anesthesiologist who gave me an epidural was easily the most popular person in the hospital. Laboring women who saw him greeted him with the fervency of disciples. It was no different for me. Ten minutes after he painlessly inserted a needle into my lower back, I was completely pain-free and briefly entertained the notion of naming my baby after him. I could feel my entire body relax in the absence of that intense pain and I was prepared to go through many more hours of labor, but within twenty minutes, I had progressed to full dilation.

  That was the moment that things began to go wrong for Blaze. The fetal monitor began showing dips in his heart rate with every contraction and, as the minutes passed, the dips became more sustained. Because I had Blaze at a teaching hospital, I met the doctor who would deliver him only an hour before it happened. This doctor began looking at the monitor’s printout with concern and started talking over my body to the nurse on the other side of the bed.

  “Have her tracings been like this all night?” he asked and the nurse murmured something about the last half-hour.

  Alert now that I was free of pain, I asked him what was going on.

  “He’s probably caught the umbilical cord around his neck,” the doctor told me. “Looks like he came down pretty fast after the epidural.” He went on to assure me that I wouldn’t have to worry, that the baby was on his way out now and that he didn’t think it was severe. He also told me that I should start pushing immediately.

  I pushed on command, totally removed from any physical cues. The doctor, intern, and labor nurse in the room had all become very serious, engaged in the clipped, instructions-only dialogue peculiar to crisis. In a very small unoccupied portion of my brain, I realized that had I not been caught in the middle of the most difficult act I’d ever performed, I would have been completely terrified. I could see nothing over the equipment I was buried under and relied on the reflection in my sister’s eyes to see what was going on in my own body. She was rapt, occasionally prompting, “Come on, I can see the head.”

  I heard the labor nurse say, “Lots of hair on this baby.”

  I felt my ribs stretching and my body tearing.

  I said, “I can’t do this,” and was ignored.

  The doctor said, “There it is, there’s the cord.” I asked if I should push and they all yelled “No!” in unison. The umbilical cord was tightly wrapped twice around the baby’s neck. The doctor had to literally cut it off his throat before pulling him out of me and laying him on my stomach. He had entered the world strangled by his own life-line.

  Blaze was positioned so that his face was turned up to mine. His eyes were very dark but wide open and I looked directly into them. They were full of brand-new life and they were gazing right into mine as if to say, “Here I am, it’s me.” I could see his very soul in that moment, shining and silently beckoning to me. My hands went out to him automatically and I cupped them around his small body. “Oh, it’s you,” I said out loud. “I know you.” And then I started weeping.

  Women talk about falling in love with their newborns. There was all of that for me too and more, because, in that instant, I recognized him. He let me in at that very first moment and I understood completely the connection between the two of us. In doing so, I missed the flurry of activity going on around us. I didn’t notice that Blaze wasn’t making any sound at all. I missed the nurse calling out an Apgar score of 3 (a scale of 1–10 measuring heart rate, respiration, and muscle tone on a newborn—3 being not that far from dead). I never heard anyone say “blue and floppy,” although Maya did, and moved back from the delivery table. All I saw was the life, startled but intelligent and powerful, in his slate-colored eyes. That look was a gift to me, an unbreakable bond between us. My faith in Blaze was born in that very moment.

  I was still weeping tears of joy when the nurse lifted him carefully from me and said gently, “We’ll bring him right back. We’re just going to give him some oxygen. He needs a little jump-start.”

  It was many weeks before I learned what happened to Blaze next. My parents, afraid of sending me into frightened hysterics, waited until then to tell me the following scene: My mother, who was waiting outside the door with my father, realized that the baby had been born when she heard me crying. Those tears were familiar to her. They were both waiting anxiously to be let into the room, but moments later the nurse came out holding the baby and ran across the hall to the neonatal-care unit. My mother, predictably, went into a panic. My father was rather more decisive about things. He strode across the hall after the nurse and walked into the unit capless, maskless, and unscrubbed. He leaned over Blaze, who was surrounded by doctors and nurses administering oxygen, drawing blood, and requesting a section of the umbilical cord for blood gases.

  My father, who had sworn that, after five children, he was definitely not becoming attached to another (he’d have fun with his grandchild, sure, but no “heavy” attachments), moved through all the doctors and put his finger into Blaze’s tiny hand so that the baby would have somebody from his family touching him. He started speaking to Blaze then with words that have not changed in meaning to this day. “Come on, Blaze,” he said, “get it together. Look at all these other babies; they’re small and red and premature. That’s not you. You don’t belong in here. Your mother’s waiting for you. You’re big and fat and healthy. Come on and breathe now. Come on, Blazicle, breathe.”

  A nurse finally had to physically detach my father from Blaze and push him out of the room, saying, “It’s okay, Mr. Gin
sberg, he’s not going to die.”

  When the same nurse came back into my room to get information from me for Blaze’s birth certificate, she gave me an update on his condition.

  “He’ll be fine,” she said. “We’re just trying to get a good, solid cry out of him. Your dad’s in there talking to him.”

  “He is?”

  “Yes,” she said, smiling. “It’s really cute.”

  A team of doctors and nurses blew oxygen on Blaze for several minutes. They poked and prodded him, beginning a series of tests for possible infection, but he never did capture enough breath to cry that morning. When they brought him back to me, wrapped up like a burrito in his blanket, he was making little growling noises, his eyes closed firmly against the glare of his new world. He refused to nurse. He refused to do anything but lie in the little Tupperware-like container they set him in, breathing fast and shallow.

  I lifted him out of the Isolette and put him beside me in the bed so I could lie next to him and study his face. His eyes were still shut tight and his miniature brow was slightly furrowed. His tiny mouth was set in an expression I could only have described as disgusted had I not been so entranced by the cuteness of it. He was one pissed-off newborn. When he continued his hunger strike and irregular breathing over the next several hours, his body temperature dropped and a concerned nurse took him away from me again. “We’ll need to do some more tests,” she said.

  A few hours later, I hobbled into the hospital’s elevator and went upstairs to see my son. When I got to the neonatal-care unit, I found a knot of physicians and nurses clustered around Blaze’s crib. I stood there dumbly, until a nurse noticed me and said, “Ginsberg’s mom is here.” The doctors shifted slightly to look at me while I tried to process the fact that the word mom now applied to me. I moved a little closer to the crib and saw that Blaze was lying on his side, held into a fetal position by a couple of nurses.