The Photo That Left The New Mother Out
To understand why that button mattered more than anything I could have said myself, you have to go back about eleven hours, to before any of this, to the room where it actually happened.
I had been in labor since two in the morning, the slow kind, the kind where you walk the halls holding the IV pole like a dance partner and tell yourself this is fine, women do this every day. Tanner walked every lap with me, counting tile squares out loud to make me laugh between contractions, bringing me ice chips in a paper cup like it was the most important job in the building. Around nine I texted my mother that it would probably be hours yet, go ahead and finish your errands, I’ll call you when it’s close. That text is the one I keep thinking about, how sure I was that there was still plenty of time.
By mid morning I was far enough along that they broke my water and started watching the monitor close.
Around eleven, the nurse’s face changed. She did not say anything scary. She just got quieter and pressed the call button herself and said, calmly, that she wanted Dr. Ramos to come take a look at the strip.
Late decelerations, they call it. Every time I had a contraction, my daughter’s heart rate dropped and took too long climbing back up. Dr. Ramos came in, watched two contractions on the monitor without saying a word, and then said we were going to the operating room now, not in a few minutes, now.
Tanner had been holding my hand through every contraction since two that morning. He started gowning up to come back with me, the way we had planned at our birth class, the way the pamphlet promised. A nurse stopped him at the double doors.
“We’re putting her under general,” she told him. “It’s faster than a spinal and we don’t have time to wait for a spinal to take. You can’t come back for general anesthesia. I’m sorry. We need you to wait right here.”
I do not remember much of the next part because I was unconscious for it, but Tanner has told it to me enough times that I carry it like my own memory. He stood in that hallway outside the operating room doors for eleven minutes, by the clock on the wall, not knowing if either one of us was all right, because nobody comes out to update a husband mid emergency. The first sound either of us heard was not each other. It was a nurse coming through swinging doors to tell him it was a girl and she was breathing on her own, and Tanner has said more than once since that those eleven minutes in that hallway, not knowing, were the worst of his life, worse than anything that came after, including everything I am about to tell you.