I was not part of my sister-in-law’s birth plan and yet
there I stood, holding my brother’s baby’s tiny hand as the nurse pricked the
heel of his flexed foot to take yet another blood sample. “You are strong,
little man,” I said, biting back tears. “You are strong like daddy. You are
going to be fine.”
But I don’t know that any of us really could fully believe
that. Because our sister, Rachel, wasn’t fine, she was never fine. When she was
born, she looked complete and perfect, though small. But her heart never fully
formed in the womb and by the time the doctors discovered her unfinished heart
two months after her birth, it was too late.
Rachel’s memory was the string, connected and vibrating through
my mother, my brother and me in the days after my nephew’s birth: Sometimes
babies die, for no reason at all. Sometimes babies die.
“How could this be happening to us again?” we thought. It’s
one of those irrational human thoughts, as if enduring one loss means we should
be spared anyone else dying for the rest of our lives.
It was not supposed to be like this at all. The baby’s due
date fell a week before my spring break in my Pre-Med coursework. I was supposed
to arrive in D.C. on Sunday and be presented with my week-old nephew, the first
of his generation, and get to snuggle him and with tears in my eyes say, “Well
done!” while shaking my brother’s hand.
Instead Tristan’s birth was a week overdue and 51 hours long.
Sunday morning, I was on the Orange line platform at Roosevelt headed to catch
my flight at Midway when my mother called me to tell me that the baby, only a
few hours old, was having trouble breathing. He was being transferred to the
special nursery on oxygen and antibiotics. The medical team suspected TTN,
transient tachypnea of the newborn, a complication of the long birth involving
excess fluid remaining in his lungs, making it difficult for him to breathe. It
wasn’t serious, reasonably common, and I needn’t worry. But I come from a long
line of overachieving worriers. We go above and beyond when it comes to worry. We
are the first to volunteer to worry when we needn’t. If others aren’t worrying
enough, as community servants, we will worry on their behalf.
So I worried until I arrived at the hospital and made my way
up to the special nursery where I found Tristan in an incubator, wearing a
full-face breathing mask with my brother asleep in a recliner next to him. The
scene was heartbreakingly sweet, despite the newly arisen medical
complications: my baby brother sleeping next to his sleeping baby.
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| Tristan and his dad. March 22, 2015 |
Countless poets and writers have said it more eloquently than I throughout all of time, but I think it bears repeating: love is torture. To love is to have your heart broken again and again by things not going perfectly and painlessly for those that you have the great honor to love. To love is to watch numbers flashing on an oxygen monitor and attempt to will those numbers higher with your mind and a prayer to a God you hope is listening… If you’re being honest, a prayer to a God that you hope exists. To love is to allow yourself to rejoice in the good news that the oxygen levels are stable only to have your heart broken again a day later by the news that the baby, despite being on antibiotics for the TTN, has a fever.
From the way the hospital staff reacted, we could tell it
was a very bad sign. My brother refused to leave Tristan’s side in the
nursery. His wife, my mother and I slept in the postpartum room, awaiting any
news.
A nurse practitioner entered the room and roused us from
sleep. Without any lead up or warning whatsoever, she coldly pronounced, “We’ve
ruled out everything else, so it’s most likely meningitis. We are going to
transfer him to Bethesda to perform a spinal tap and continue treatment.” Now I’ve
not been to medical school yet, although I have been accepted to matriculate
next fall, but I’ve learned enough from shadowing the Doctors Quinn and House
to know that meningitis in infants is a devastating disease and that process of
elimination is not the surest path to diagnostic success.
Attempting to remain calm, I said to the doctor, “Can you please
explain to her what that means?”
Indignantly she went on, “Well, you can get an infection
anywhere in your body and meningitis is an infection in your brain,” which has
to be the absolute worst way to explain meningitis to a woman who has been
awake for 3 days and spent 51 hours pushing an 8 pound human out of her body.
At that point, my brave, stoic sister-in-law fell apart. My
mother held her as she wept and mouthed to me, “Go get Stephen.” I tore down to
the hall to where my brother was holding a hysterical Tristan’s hand as the
nurse attempted to draw yet another blood sample.
“She needs you,” I said.
“I’m not leaving him here alone,” he replied.
“I’ll stay. You go.” I took Tristan’s hand out of my brother’s
and the nurses generously said nothing about breaching the protocol dictating
that only wrist-banded parents be alone in the room with the newborn. So that’s
how I ended up alone with my nephew who was fighting for his life in the primal,
fight-or-flight sense of the phrase. Separated from his mother and surrounded
by wires, he was being restrained, starved and attacked from all sides with
needle after needle. I had never seen something so small in so much pain.
As I held his hand, I experienced a fascinating combination
of fear and love… not for the baby himself, whom I had just met, but for my
brother. I felt depths of love for him previously unknown to me. I didn’t know
I loved him this much. I feared selfishly how much his loss would pain me. How
could I look my brother in the eye if something happened to this baby? What would
I ever say to him if his son died? It wasn’t supposed to be like this.
My brother and his wife appeared in the nursery just as the
mobile NICU team arrived from Bethesda and began preparing Tristan for transport
via ambulance. The doctor leading the transport team approached us and began to
explain their plan to my brother.
I gazed down and read the name embroidered on her coat. It
read, “Dr. God.” G-O-D. I leaned over to my sister-in-law and whispered, “His
doctor’s name is Dr. God…” The doctor could tell we were talking about her and caught
my eye. “Yes it is. It’s my married name and, believe it or not, my
father-in-law is a Reverend.” Reverend God.
She went on, “In order to take the best care of him, we have
to prepare for the worst, in this case, meningitis, but let me assure you, your
baby is not in acute distress. He is alert, hungry and really mad, all of which
are good signs so we are not in a rush. We’re not going to turn on the siren or
the lights. We’re not going to speed and we don’t want you to either.” In fact,
she advised us to delay our arrival until after the spinal tap had been
performed, a procedure probably too traumatic for a parent to witness. Her optimism
and gently commanding demeanor calmed us and everyone stopped needing to choke
back tears.
As they wheeled him down the hall towards the ambulance
dock, I turned to my mother and said, “Mom, he’s in God’s hands now and God is
a woman.”
In Dr. God’s hands, he arrived safely at Bethesda, the
spinal tap came back negative for meningitis despite antibodies in his
bloodwork, his oxygen levels remained stable for days, and his fever never
returned. After 4 days in the NICU, to our relief and disbelief he was sent
home. He was fine.
We’ll never know what happened in Tristan’s tiny body and the
range of possibility is vast. On one end, maybe it was as simple as a faulty
thermometer. Maybe he never had a fever while on the antibiotics in the first
place. On the far other side of the spectrum of possibility: maybe there was a
miracle and my mother’s hysterical prayers for healing in the hospital chapel
were answered as quickly as we could say “Dr. God.”
The truth, of course, is probably somewhere in the middle
where science and the divine intertwine. Perhaps the precautionary antibiotics
already in his system for the TTN fought off whatever other infection briefly
surfaced. Perhaps the little bit of fluid in his lungs saved his life.
We don’t deserve anything and yet we ask for so much. So
whenever something doesn’t go my way in the future or a prayer is left
unanswered, I hope I remember the one big answered prayer we got in March of
2015 when Tristan Walker, the first of his generation, didn’t have meningitis. I’ll
say it again: love is torture and I want to be tortured by my love for that kid
for a lifetime. And with God’s grace, I will be, even if God is just an M.D.
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| Tristan and his dad, wearing noise canceling headphones. September 2015 |
