"Shifting Into Baby Mode" or "From One To Sixty in 48 Hours"

A few days ago I was sitting in this very spot, at the dining room table typing away on the laptop staring over at my wife sitting on the couch watching TV. Pretty typical scene at our household only now she has a 5 day old baby in her arms. It's so surreal I almost can't put it into words; but I'll try.

I guess the story really begins last April. I was picking my wife up from the Toronto airport. She and my mom-in-law had just returned from the Dominican Republic after attending my wife's cousin's wedding. I was glad to have her back and I didn't think anything of picking her up, just a typical act carried out by millions of people daily. I didn't think anything of it until I saw her walking down the arrivals ramp with a look on her face that I haven't seen before. It was almost like that of a child who had been caught doing something his parents would not have been proud of. I said to my brother in law, who was picking up my mother in law, "uh oh, she looks like she got caught at customs [not claiming something she should have]." She came up to me with a big hug and a kiss and with tears in her eyes she said "do you still want to be a father?". She had discovered while she was in the Dominican that she was pregnant. I was rendered speechless by emotions of joy.

I won't go too deeply into this part of our story but about a month later we ended up at the hospital and it wasn't the good kind of visit to the hospital. My wife was having terrible cramping and within hours we were told by doctors that we had lost our baby. It was like I'd been hit in the chest with a baseball bat swung by Mark McGuire. I recall leaving my wife at the hospital, at her request, for the night and driving home trying to make sense of it all. If we had been trying for so long to get pregnant and we finally succeeded and then how does it make sense that it was taken away from us? I could barely see the road through my tears. I don't think I had ever been so angry in my entire life. But in the back of my head my inner voice kept repeating over and over that bad things happen to good people and that life owes you nothing. When the time is right you'll try again.

Now I have to explain here that my wife is one in a million. She has the strength of no woman I've ever known and looks at life pretty much the same way I do. You can either dwell on something that will pick you apart and leave you a microscopic piece of the person you once were or you can stand up and say,"I'm not going to go gentle into that goodnight" and grab life by the horns for another ride. She was never one to back down from anything. This was proven in June, about one month after her miscarriage; she was pregnant once again.

The story gets fairly typical for a while. Days turn into weeks, weeks to months and after nine hormone heightened of those months (on March 17th, 2009) my wife greeted me in the kitchen at 5am while I was getting ready for work. For several weeks prior she had been having painful bouts of sleeplessness brought on by pregnancy-related carpal tunnel syndrome so I figured she was just up early again as a result of it. That is until she told me her water broke an hour earlier. She was having what we thought at the time were contractions but she said they were so far apart that I would be better off going to work. We learned later that she was actually timing her cramps and the contractions had yet to begin. I had my cell with me and everyone at work was aware of what was going on so she could reach me one way or another with ease.

Five hours into my day I got "the call" and calmly headed home. We contacted our midwife and she arranged a meeting with us at the very hospital that oversaw her miscarriage. But that was furthest from our minds. We attended the hospital and the midwife ran several and typical tests on my wife then advised us that we could go home and return in the morning to be admitted to hospital. My wife and I are very calm and level-headed people so returning home for a good night's sleep wasn't a big deal. We hoped it would be the last time we slept in a childless home.

At 8am on the 18th of March we checked in to the hospital. Tucked away in a birthing suite we waited for the contractions to begin... and waited... and waited. The midwife carried out a procedure that I won't even pretend I understand that would assist the cervix in dilating and bring on the contractions we were waiting for. It would take a good bit of time so we were given a day pass and sent home for a few hours to rest for the upcoming event.

Before we knew it we were back at the hospital for another "procedure". My wife was hooked up to an i.v. drip of Oxytocin that would rocket her into labor at 60 miles an hour.

Around midnight I reluctantly lied down for a nap. I dozed in and out of a restless sleep catching lazy-eyed glimpses of the midwives examining my wife. At 4am I awoke to find my wife lying in the bed wearing a big smile. For the first time in several hours we were alone in the room. She looked at me and said "It's time to push." I felt my stomach drop to the floor as I bolted from my chair. Everything after that happened in such a blur it's really hard to recall. I remember how methodical everything became. The midwives came into the room and started barking orders (a good kind of bark). I was on barf bucket duty at my wife's side. Everyone in the room was bursting with anticipation and in great spirits. My wife had gone through several hours of painful labor and wisely opted for the Epidural fairy to pay her a visit. High as a kite and numb as a sloth my wife began pushing at 4:30am.

Two hours had passed. TWO HOURS!!! Now here's something for you to think about for a moment. The next time you're sitting in a movie theater watching a feature-length film grab a hold of the sides of the seat, bear down and push like you're having the biggest bowel movement of your life. Now do this for the entire duration of the movie, only then could you have a tiny sense of what my wife was going through. Oh and on your way home you may wanna pick up some hemorrhoid cream.

The midwives could see the baby's head but grew concerned when they realized she was coming sideways through the birth canal. Not enough reason to panic but not the optimal position for the little monkey to come into the world. Imagine passing a football through your bum sideways. There ya go, you've got the mental image? Due to our baby's exit strategy the midwives asked for the assistance of the obstetrician who happened to be on the clock. It was decided that suction would be needed and so a small vacuum was attached gently to her scalp. If you've never seen one of these vacuums before it's not as bad as they sound. It's not like the cleaning lady comes in and attaches a Hoover to her head. It's small and not very threatening looking, just a grip handle, a clear plastic tube and a cap that looks like it could be a speaker for an iPod.

All at once as if it we were all on an Olympic synchronized swimming team, the midwives told my wife to push and the doctor pulled... hard... and I just stood there leaving my finger impressions in the edge of the barf bucket! I couldn't see the baby at this point as I was still standing at the head of the bed. What I could see was the doctor's arm shaking as she pulled on the vacuum, struggling to bring my daughter into the world. She was pulling so hard as her arm muscles twitched. I was half expecting her to put her foot onto the bottom of my wife's pelvis for that added leverage! At one point, and to my horror, the suction cup came off my daughter's head making that "muck" sound. I nearly passed out as I thought the doctor had pulled her head off. The midwives saw the terror in my eyes and came to my immediate rescue with, "oh, no worries that happens all the time."

Anyhoo, with a few more capillary-bursting pushes my daughter was born into the world at 8 pounds 1 ounce. Any amount of manliness I exhibited before her birth flew right out the window. I was reduce to a quivering, sobbing mass of wuss, but I was OK with it because it was the most sincere display of how quickly a man can fall in love with his child. Nothing else in the world mattered to me at that moment. I felt as though I had come to a door at the end of a dark and gloomy alley and on opening it I found sunshine, flowers and rolling green hills. Life was beautiful again and although it happens over and over to millions of men every day, I'm still the richest man in the world!

A few days ago I walked into the hospital a man and left a father.