Birthday Story

     On the afternoon of Friday August the 3rd, I was replacing a windshield in the parking lot of Churchill's Cigars, when I received a phone call from the love of my life, Julia. This was "The Call". The call I had been thinking about for 27 weeks and 3 days. Julia's water had broke.
     I was working 30 miles from home, and the hospital was yet another 40 miles from there. Thankfully Julia's mother was visiting and able to pack Julia up and rush her to UCSD-Hillcrest at record pace. I can't even imagine what we would have done without her mother there, thank you again Marilyn.
     I arrived to the hospital a frantic hysterical mess, just to find Julia cool as the other side of the pillow, along with her mother who seemed to be in spirits similar to my own. One of the toughest things about waiting in the hospital is that while I am experiencing the most monumental moment of my life, and feeling the most intense cacophony of emotions, the hospital staff is just experiencing another day on the job. I wanted them to run, not walk and scream, not talk, but like Julia they just came off chill as can be.
     Julia has a great poker face, and although she gave off the appearance of a beautiful, calm, zen goddess, as I sat next to her while the doctors and nurses poked and prodded, she whispered three of the most heartbreaking words I have ever heard,"I am scared". Even now as I type this my eyes well up with tears thinking about her courage and strength through the entire pregnancy. I cannot begin to describe the gratitude and love I feel for the mother of my little twinzies.
     We have been expecting the boys to be early since July 2nd, when we were first hospitalized. We went for a regular appointment and the next thing we knew the doctors were ordering an ambulance to rush Julia to UCSD. Julia has been such a champ, and hung on an entire month longer than the doctors first thought she would be able to.
     Around 8:00 P.M. the night of August 3rd. Julia began to have some pretty intense contractions, and the contraction monitor must have been attached incorrectly because they were not registering on the machine. I ran down the hall to tell the nurse, and in typical medical staff fashion, she calmly tells me that she will be in in a minute to check things out. Hours later the nurse comes back and sees that the monitor is indeed hooked up wrong. Another hour or so later the nurse returns with a doctor. The doctor does a visual examination, at which point she sees Oliver's head, then and only then did the doctor seem to share my sense of urgency regarding the situation.  
      As the medical staff rushed Julia down the hall to the operating room, they briefed me on what would take place. The nurse would bring me an outfit that would cover my head, body, and feet. Next I would join Julia in the O.R. where she would be divided in half by a curtain, her head on one half of the curtain, and her belly on the other half of the curtain, this is what I like to call the business end of the curtain. After they took Julia from the room and I was dressed I waited the longest wait of my life. I stood alone in the room, no bed, just a chair, a fancy machine on a cart, and me, standing in the middle of the room in a blue suit.
     Finally after what must have been about ten minutes, a nurse came in to the room and told me it was time to join Julia. As I wound my way through the maze of hospital halls, I was in a total haze. We arrived at the operating room and all I could see was the business end of Julia. As I walked towards the side of the curtain where Julia was hidden the doctors shouted to the nurse "What is he doing in here? Get him out of here!" And the nurse quickly escorted me back out of the room. When we left the room the nurse explained that the c-section had become an emergency c-section, which means that Julia had to be put completely under anesthesia. The nurse left me just outside of the O.R. next to a wall sized window looking into the room. From my vantage point, I could not see Julia's face, I was left staring smack-dab, square at the business end. As the doctors brought out the tools for baby extraction, and began opening Julia, I had to avert my gaze. After some time a team of doctors came rushing out of the room with Oliver, who was crying the most beautiful cry I have ever heard. The sound of that boy's cry unlocked a part of heart and soul that I had never felt before. There was a place literally in my chest that I had never felt before, now burning with a love I had never before known. Seconds after they rushed Oliver out of the room, the second team of doctors came rushing out, with even more haste than the previous team of doctors. As the second team of doctors emerged with Elliot, the space that was previously filled with the euphoric sounds of Oliver's cries, was now deafened by the silence that clung to Elliot and his team of doctors as they flew by. The part of my heart and soul that had just been opened seconds earlier, was instantly frozen numb by the deafening silence that hung thick and palpable in the air.
     The doctors brought me into a room with the boys and hurriedly shoved a pair of scissors in my hand, and had me trim down the umbilical chords, and hastily whisked me back out of the room, and told me to sit and wait. And that is what I did. I sat and waited.