an update about a baby and a hospital

or, the dream of perpetual motion

Well, it’s been over a month so I suppose I should update everyone on our hospital adventure.

If you don’t know what I’m talking about, you can read this.

So what has the last month looked like for me?

Well, it’s been slippery. That’s maybe the best way to put it. The days last forever yet slip through my fingers like the tendrils of ghosts.

Chelsea arrived in the hospital on February 21st, just shy of 32 weeks pregnant. My days became split between three places: my parents’ house where our three year old was living, our Minneapolis house that we were moving out of, and the hospital.

Since we needed to be out of the house on March 6th and the two weeks of packing we had planned to prepare for the move disappeared, I hired movers, which was a good call. Chelsea’s mom also arrived from Tennessee to help out, which was tremendously helpful.

Many of you also reached out. I very much appreciate this. I know I didn’t take any of you up on your help, but that was mostly because I couldn’t think of what you could help me do other than simply say, Uh, can you do everything?

And that seemed a bit unreasonable to me. But family was tremendously helpful, so I actually didn’t need that much additional help. Unless, like, you could have given me more hours in the day or shifted the landscape so my house, the hospital, and my parents’ house were all on the same block.

But, again, I deeply appreciate all the kindness.

Chelsea was well taken care of in the hospital. In a strange way, it was sort of a nice way to wind down her pregnancy. I mean, obviously it’s not what we had planned and not what we wanted and not something I would recommend for anyone else! But the way she was removed from her own life also meant that the stress of moving, of work, of just life in general was stripped from her. To her credit, she was able to find peace in this loss of agency. Or, rather, she became a different kind of agent in her life who only had to focus on her pregnancy and the child that would follow.

We were hoping to have the baby stay in until week 34, but he had other plans. Exactly a week after Chelsea was admitted, he decided to make his move.

Chelsea had a feeling all day that something was off. So when I left in the afternoon to spend time with our son, she did her best to relax, but by 10pm, she called me to have me come back. Just in case.

Chelsea was having contractions so they called the doctor who asked her what her pain level was. Chelsea, wincing, said 4. So the doctor sort of shrugged like that was pretty normal. Then she did a cervix check at Chelsea’s request and found that Chelsea was barely dilated.

“This baby is probably not coming tonight.”

Good news! Chelsea kept having contractions but kept reporting her pain at about a 4, which seemed low, given how she winced and had to breathe through them and squeeze my hand tightly.

They gave her some sleeping medication to try to let her sleep through it. After two hours of contractions which seemed to be growing in frequency and pain but which Chelsea consistently described as a 4, they added some morphine to her IV to see if that would help her sleep.

During this whole time, I sat on the chair beside her and tried to doze. The doctor said the baby wasn’t coming so I figured this would all pass. When Chelsea had a contraction, I’d lean over and rub her back, half-asleep.

About an hour later, Chelsea had to go to the bathroom. After finishing, she nearly collapsed in pain on the bathroom floor, so we pulled the emergency cord. Several nurses were there almost immediately and Chelsea told them she was probably at a 5 or 6.

Dear Reader, she was not at a 5 or 6. She had not been at a 4.

When I asked her later why she kept reporting her pain so low, she told me that she thought it could be a lot worse.

Which, I mean, fair enough! Probably that’s true. But, uh, it was pretty bad!

When the doctor came back and checked her cervix while Chelsea struggled to breathe through another contraction, she said, “This baby’s coming basically right now.”

Chelsea than said, “I’m feeling like I need to push.”

The doctor was like, “Please don’t.”

Because the baby was still a day shy of 33 weeks, he was going to be delivered in the OR. Which meant we raced through the halls and I got to wear a gown and doctor type clothes.

Because Chelsea was so far along, there was no time for an epidural. This is somewhat ironic because for her first birth, she wanted to go unmedicated. However, almost as soon as we got to the hospital, she demanded that epidural. This time, with the full knowledge that she wanted and planned on having an epidural, she was going to go without.

Even so, this was a much more relaxed labor and birth. It was a pretty chill time! Which is about the opposite experience of our first son’s birth. That was hours of madness and chaos.

After about half an hour of pushing, she held our son in her arms while he wailed his existence into the room.

I followed him to the NICU where he would be for the next few days. Then I returned to Chelsea and we both slept for a bit.

Of course, our life being as hectic as it was, a few hours later I needed to leave the hospital to go to the county court to track down a document we needed for our closing only to discover that said document did not, in fact, exist. So then I had to go back to my Minneapolis house to provide a few different documents. All of them insufficient. I went back to the hospital then and Chelsea had to go into her mortgage account to request different documents, which were sort of the right ones.

Then we went to the NICU together where our new son was hooked up to machines.

I’ve had many people ask me about this.

While seeing your newborn connected to hoses and wires and machines is distressing and definitely the least desirable outcome after a birth, we also had a full week to prepare for this. We knew he was probably going to need help breathing and eating and so on.

And so it wasn’t pain or despair or anything that I saw when I looked at him, so skinny, so tiny, so frail, so cyborgly machined.

I just saw him. Our son.

Because I’m the type who doesn’t share my children’s faces or names on the internet, I’ll just call our sons F (the elder) and J (the newborn). If you follow my wife on instagram, it’s possible that you’ll see more of them.

J was so tiny. Such a contrast to F, who was born with rolls on his rolls.

But he was here. He was alive and well, all things considered.

The next few days were a bit of a blur. Because of Covid, only Chelsea and me were allowed to see J, which did make things quite a bit more difficult.

Two days after J was born, I had to oversee the packing and moving of my house into storage. Then I was, once again, bouncing between the hospital and my parents’ house. There was still work to be done at our Minneapolis house before we moved out, but I spent the days after almost everything was moved bouncing between only two locations: the hospital and my parents’ house.

During all this, F adapted well. His whole life was turned upside down one night while he slept. He went over a week without being allowed to see his mother. And then when he finally got to see mom again, she had to leave for big chunks of every day to go see his little brother, who he was not allowed to see. Not to mention that dad was constantly leaving for hours at a time.

Chelsea worked on pumping and building up her milk supply, which went very well. J was too young to feed, and so he was on donor breast milk for the most part until Chelsea could catch up on his demand. This happened very quickly, which we’re very thankful for. Or I should say I’m very thankful.

Chelsea had to do the work. I just kind of sat there and said encouraging words, gave back rubs, etc.

Being a dad is both easier and more difficult than people tend to assume. Easy because, yeah, we can’t pick up the slack for certain things that only mom can provide. But there is a profound absurdity to the uselessness. We become, by necessity, supporting players in all of this. No longer active agents in our life but just a body to assist mom or baby to the extent that we can.

That Sunday, a few friends helped us finish packing, moving, and cleaning our Minneapolis house. Then I took Chelsea back to the hospital where she was going to spend the night. I had to return to the Minneapolis house to finish cleaning. And, of course, things being what they are, I got rear-ended while waiting to turn onto my street.

This is still not fully resolved as I made some apparent miscalculations during this car crash. Fortunately, no one was hurt and my car was still drivable. But the insurance that the other person gave me seems to not actually exist. I didn’t call the cops for a number of reasons when the crash happened. I also didn’t take pictures of her license or car or plates.

I’ve never been in an accident. I knew there were things I needed to do, but I was a bit preoccupied. Anyrate, maybe I’ll write more about this depending on how it turns out.

Anyrate, the days blurred past us. Every day, J grew stronger. Every day, my life grew less scattered, though we still bounced between the hospital and my parents’ house. Split in half between our two sons. Never able to be fully with one or the other, always worrying about the other while we were with one of them.

J is now nearly a month old. His due date is still almost a month away.

We found a house to move into. We’re moving in the week of his due date. While we’ve been scattered between locations, too little butter on too much bread, we’ve also had to fill out forms, track down documentation, which is often a bureaucratic nightmare, which is the foundation of a bleak absurdist comedy.

The Covid protocols changed and J was finally able to meet my parents. And F met J for the first time. It will be the highlight of my year, I think.

He was only allowed one visit. He’s asked several times to come with us to the hospital to meet J. He doesn’t understand why he can’t.

Our hearts keep beating, discovering new ways to hurt, to feel love. We are continually expanding and contracting. Our love blooms and grows. Our lives shaped by one hospital room and a home that is not ours.

But J is doing very well. He was moved from the NICU to the SCN after a few days. He breathes on his own. His feeding tube was removed today. It’s the first time I’ve seen his whole face since those first minutes after he was born.

I don’t know what to tell you about such an experience. I have no words for this. Nothing in life prepares you to see your son’s face for the first time twice.

If he continues to do well and improve, he may be back home as soon as Monday.

But, yes, it’s been an interesting time in life.

As for how the newsletter’s been doing—looks like I’ve been posting things of less interest! Which is too bad, but, like I said, these were the essays I had ready to go at the time. I have some things in the pipeline now that will hopefully spark a bit more joy.

Expect more talk of books and movies and games. I don’t really want to write about politics, but I never can seem to stop, so there’ll probably be some more of that as well.

Anyway, things are going well here. Life will likely be chaotic for some time to come. I’m guessing May will be when life begins to resemble something like normal again. By then we’ll be in our new house and hopefully settled into the new reality of having two young children.