As I mentioned previously, I recieved a call just before 5 a.m. Friday morning informing me my wife's c-section was infected and had ruptured, so right away I knew our stellar run of luck over the past couple weeks continued to bless us in myriad ways. If I get a call informing me a meteor struck our garage and killed a cat, I'd actually consider that sort of good news/luck because, you know, one less cat.
Thankfully, my father-in-law had been informed of the situation and he arrived at the house just as I finished showering and preparing for the day. While the gout wasn't quite as debilitating as it had been the previous day, I was still opting to hop on one foot rather than put any weight on the swollen club at all. The slightest bump against my toe hurt so bad I could see through time and yell expletives so loud the International Space Station had to filter it all out.
My wife had been in the ER, but they were informed professionals from obstetrics wanted to look at her, so she was being transferred across town to the very same building all this drama began almost exactly one week earlier. I travelled downtown, parked in a nearby ramp, and then did my best foot-dragging Quasimodo impression from the ramp to the hospital building. Once in the hospital, I said "screw it" and commandeered a wheelchair.
I actually arrived at the hospital room before my wife was transported, and she arrived about 10 minutes later sprawled out on an ambulance gurney. A nurse asked to see her ruptured incision and. . .
I consider myself somewhat of an expert when it comes to smells. I can create smells some people consider vile beyond comprehension but, I have to say, an infected and ruptured c-section incision carries with it an odor so pungent with rot, I would rather have been taking in deep snootfuls of a pile of dead puppies.
Doctors quickly concluded they had to open up my wife's incision entirely and drain any infected abscesses, which really helped dispel some of the glamour I may have held regarding being a doctor. Sure, the money is probably excellent, but locating and draining horrid-smelling abcesses probably isn't high on their "can't wait to do this one" list.
On the plus side, my wife required considerable sedation, which meant she would be getting some much-needed sleep. Her maternal instincts have been in overdrive since the twins arrived--and particularly since Finn passed--so telling her to look after herself and get some rest is like telling a chipmunk to fix an atomic clock. So, as the doctors prepped my wife for abscess-cleansing surgery, I dragged myself slowly back to the parking ramp, drove home and managed to get a couple hours of sleep myself before heading back to the neonatal intensive care unit (NICU) to check up on my daughter.
One of the first things they tell you at the NICU is to expect ups and downs. They also told us to expect the first 24-hours to be a kind of honeymoon, since preemie babies typically don't show distress until after the first day. With Finn, the news was pretty much all down, even during the honeymoon period. His lung x-rays immediately showed worrisome signs, and they only got worse and worse until, well. . .
Zoey, on the other hand, has been remarkably stable, although her x-rays have shown cloudiness and, on a couple occasions, a collapse of the upper lobe of her right lung. These things fluctuate considerably, and my wife and I have to remind ourselves the doctors will definitely tell us if there's anything truly warranting concern, as they did when informing us of Finn's condition. We have to take it on faith they're not shielding us from truly bad news.
After checking on Zoey and being assuaged by her condition updates, I went back to the obstetrics hospital to check on my wife. She was still groggy from the medications, but otherwise she felt okay. I was informed I'd have to stay to watch the nurses change her incision dressings because--and this part is key--I'll be expected to change the dressings at least once a day for the next several days. Mind you, this isn't just plopping a band-aid over a boo-boo. This will entail reaching into an open incision and stuffing gauze and other absorbant medical wonders into the wound as if I'm preparing a Thanksgiving turkey. I'll do it, of course. Willingly even. But damn it, I sure as hell don't have to like it.
I returned home, but not before stopping by a grocery store to pick up milk and cranberry juice. My father-in-law used our car last week a few times, so he placed his handicapped placard under the passenger-side visor. Now, I would never have used that placard if I could have walked normally, but I saw the placard, looked at my swollen foot and said "You know what? Screw it!" I'm hoping that small act of moral failing won't doom us to an extension of our current string of bad luck.
Thrown unfairly into all this drama, of course, is our 15-month-old son, Aiden, who up until last week lived a life consisting largely of structure and schedule. All that's been thrown into the toilet for the time being as we rely on a rotating cast of family members to watch and care for him during the day. In the early days of our ordeal, he seemed genuinely confused by the turmoil, but now I suspect he's learning how to play the various characters against each other to obtain what he wants. He's been eating foods and has had access to juice and other drinks my wife and I would never have given him before the Dark Times. . . Before the Empire.
Obviously, the financial questions regarding all of this are many and varied. My wife has excellent health insurance, so she's largely covered, and Zoey should be covered by a tangled Web of government programs and charitable organizations. Because Finn didn't live very long, he didn't qualify for the same assistance as Zoey. It's all very confusing and daunting. I have to sit down with a social worker to hammer out all the details, but that's something we'll do when things settle down a bit and I'm actually able to walk again. Until then, my thinking has basically consisted of "screw it!" Another ambulance ride from the obstetrics hospital to the NICU? Screw it! Whatever! Milk pumping equipment? Screw it! Add it to the tab!
I imagine this is how the government has basically gotten into the deficit and debt mess it's been roiling in. At some point, they got so far behind, actually doing something about it was just plain impossible so politicians just collectively threw up their arms and yelled "SCREW IT! ADD IT TO THE BILL! WHATEVER! IT'S NOT LIKE WE CAN ACTUALLY DO ANYTHING ABOUT IT!"
So, yeah, things continue to unfold in strange and unexpected ways, in an ongoing drama I never remotely thought I'd personally experience. I try to keep a sense of humor when I can, although there are times, particularly at night, when I think of the family of five we'd been making plans for for the last several months, and I just break down, because they were pretty great plans, and it was a pretty great family. Now we exist in a kind of world where we try to make plans day-to-day, assuring ourselves Zoey will come home with us in four months, although in the back of my mind there's a small voice reminding me she might not. I do my best to shoo that voice away, but it's persistant, particularly when I see her tiny self in her incubator.
But then she grips my finger, and I can't imagine her being gone.
The funeral for my son, Finn, was held Wednesday, Jan. 5. I can't say it was some sort of overly emotional experience because--as my wife pointed out--it's hard to get much more emotional than actually holding your child as he dies. So, the funeral was just a small, brief service, much like his body and life. He was later buried at the foot of his great-grandfather's grave.
I had never before had to request the services of a funeral home and, quite frankly, I found the whole experience rather daunting at first. Shortly after Finn died, we were handed a list of local funeral homes and, while the names were familiar to me, I had no direct dealing with any of them, except joking they all "put the FUN back in funeral."
I did, however, remember writing a news article more than ten years ago when I worked at a weekly newspaper in a nearby town of about 5,000 people. In the article, I wrote about how the elder patriarch of the local funeral home was officially handing the family business over to his son. It was a tenuous connection, at best, but it did provide some semblance of familiarity, so I called and asked for their services.
My funeral home choice turned out to be a good decision. They recognized my name, and they remembered the article, so we at least had that level of commonality to work with, which was a relief.
My wife held Finn during the service, and I was struck how different he looked from the wriggling mass I saw removed from wife's abdomen and, later, hooked up to more wires than a switchboard. In those instances though, he was alive, clinging to whatever fine fibers he could find to keep him anchored to this world. His skin had movement and purpose, and his veins were pulsating and alive.
In my wife's lap that morning of the funeral, he looked somehow sculpted or molded, as if someone switched out my son for a wax model of what a 23-week-old fetus is supposed to look like. Indeed, Finn looked, down to almost every detail, like a picture right out of the "A Child is Born" book I thumbed through so much as a child. Except, even days later, I could still see my son peeking out from behind it all. Still, it was as if you could plug him right back into a womb, sync up the umbilical cord and say "okay, we'll see you again in four months."
But, we won't. He's in the cold, hard winter ground now. At least his body is, although I suspect his soul is still sticking around for spring, at least so Finn can be assuaged that my wife and I hadn't planned on raising him in a frozen assland.
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The next morning, the relatively mild case of gout I had been feeling the previous day had blossomed into Audrey II from "Little Shop of Horrors." Every step felt like I was trying to drag my left big toe through the house with a pick-axe embedded into the toe and the floor. Oh, and the pick-axe was dipped in acid and Alien blood, just to round out the mental image.
Considering all the stress I'd been under, coupled with a diet that could only be categorized as "borderline suicidal," I wasn't particularly surprised to develop physical manifestations of the emotions and wear I'd been experiencing over the previous week.
Generally speaking, Thursday, Jan. 6 was a non-day for me, as I spent the time sleeping, drinking copious amounts of water, and dragging myself around the house on my buttocks. Back in college, that would have been considered a fairly successful Sunday afternoon.
My wife, on the other hand, managed to pull herself together and go to the hospital to visit our daughter, Zoey, before the afternoon arrived. She spent the day at the hospital, and then called around 5 p.m. to tell me she would be staying there because Zoey had a tough night ahead of her, ventilator-wise.
Come 5 a.m. the next morning, I received a call informing me my wife's C-section incision was infected and had ruptured. And so began the day that will live in . . . limp-famy. Or something like that.
My father was a sex ed teacher, which meant I had somewhat of a leg up, so to speak, when it came to my understanding of the birds and the bees.
For example, in fifth grade, when my father came to my class to give a one-day sex ed class, I wasn't entirely surprised when he drew a huge phallus on the chalkboard and announced to all in attendance "This. Is the Jolly Green Giant's penis." I'm sure it was one of those lines he used countless times with scores of fifth grade classes before and after mine, but it was probably one of the best ways to capture and hold the attention of thirty otherwise rowdy elementary school students.
Back on the home front, in my father's library, there were several volumes dedicated to the human reproductive system, and no one book consumed my curiosity quite like "A Child is Born." That book amazed me, and not just because it featured pictures of female nipples and a woman in stirrups pushing a human head out of, what I thought at the time was her butthole.
As I grew older I started to understand the images and gestation process much better, although I must admit I was slightly disappointed to learn babies don't get pushed out of buttholes. Growing up is chock full of disappointments like that, I suppose.
Flash forward to college, where I took a handful of entirely useless philosophy classes, but which nevertheless introduced me to the philosophical concept of the "slippery slope," as opposed to those "sticky slopes" I suppose. The slippery slope was particularly applied to the concept of human fertilization and reproduction, and in particular at what point a human becomes a human. The slippery slope was always factored in to keep the philosophical argument going further and further.
In other words, if fertilization was decreed to be "when the egg and the sperm" meet, the slippery slope argument would say "well, what about half a second before that? And, if half a second before that applies, why not a half second before that?" And so on and so on until you found yourself basically arguing masturbating into a sock could theoretically be considered fertilization, philosophically speaking.
In retrospect, I wasted a lot of time and money in those philosophy classes.
Anyway, as bad as those philosophy classes were, they did engender within me a certain crude moral framework when it came to my concept of human fertilization and abortion. I mostly considered abortion to be an acceptable option provided it occurred within the first trimester, and that rough idea held fairly firm for over a decade.
Flash forward to Thursday last week, when my wife went into premature labor at only 23 weeks into gestation. A doctor informed us, medically speaking, 23 weeks is considered sort of a gray area when it comes to the concept of fetus "viability."
If, for example, my wife had been 1,000 miles away from any medical facility and had given birth in the desert, with no hope of medical care, it would have been considered a miscarriage. If, on the other hand, the babies had undergone a C-section but neonatal intensive care hadn't been available, it could have been considered an abortion. However, because neonatal intensive medical care was available, the babies were considered "viable."
I'm not sure, philosophically, what all this potentially meant, but I've been thinking about it off and on over the past week, and I can't honestly say I know what to make of it all.
Certainly, both my son and daughter had access to exactly the same neonatal intensive care, yet my son succumbed after two days while my daughter is still defying the odds. Was she somehow more viable, even though she was born three ounces lighter? What if all of this had happened one day sooner, or one day later? How would the viability have been affected then?
I can't say I know the answer to any of these questions, but it does call into question my somewhat arbitrary rule that abortion is acceptable during the first trimester, because it simply begs for a more thorough explanation and, given the events of a week ago, I honestly don't think I could adequately supply one.
Keeping vigil over a premature baby's ongoing fight for the right to stake a claim to life in our world is a curious exercise, and it's one that's completely different for men and women, or at least that's been my observation in these few days of waiting, hoping and praying.
My wife is glued to the incubator from the minute we arrive in the neonatal infant care unit (NICU) to the absolute second we have to leave. Her motherhood instinct is so strong it's almost as if she's shielded by her own protective incubator that somehow fuses to the baby's and can only be uncoupled by debilitating exhaustion or incessant doctor prodding.
I'm more of a fluttering moth, to use a terribly flawed analogy. I'll come into the NICU, greet my daughter, let her grasp my finger for a few minutes, absorb the appropriate information about her current condition, but then I just can't keep staying there. It's like watching the most compelling dramatic television show you'll ever see in your life--like Twin Peaks--but because you feel you can't do anything to affect the outcome, you feel compelled to walk away and do something else, coming back later to get caught up, touch the story, and then wander off again.
I like exploring the hospital, particularly at night. There's a certain nocturnal rhythm I find deeply relaxing. There's the cleaning crews vacuuming, and the occasional late night pow-wow at a table nearby, from which I can overhear snippets of office politics or mind-numbing presentation analysis.
I also enjoy hunting for banks of soda and snack vending machines, trying to find those particular machines that offer somewhat unique confections, like ice cream bars or garlic and sea salt potato chips. I don't necessarily buy these items, but discovering them gives me an odd feeling of acccomplishment, like I've found a recently-deceased mammoth the tribe could potentially bring back to the camp for a great feast.
Obviously, I also try to hunt down unoccupied public computer stations, where I can sit down and write Facebook missives, or log on to my blog to put down some thoughts that strike me as interesting somehow. For every post I publish here, there are probably eight that remain in non-public "draft" mode, existing only for me and possible further exploration later.
Always foremost in my mind, however, is my daughter and what's transpired so recently to bring me here. She was born so much smaller than her brother, and I'm slightly ashamed to admit, when I first saw them, I thought my boy looked more likely to soldier through the months long ordeal set ahead of them. As it's been, however, my daughter has patiently endured the storm so far while my son yielded the stage to her silent and steady resolve. I don't begrudge this fate, though I certainly don't have to like it; they both deserved to share the stage and shine as bright as they dared dream.
But, that's the "should have" in my mind. Reality has dealt me something far more complex to unravel, something I never thought I'd ever have to confront, and it's something that has me wandering hospital halls while my wife sings songs to and worries over our daughter's every fidget, every machine beep and nurse action.
I'm comfortable getting the positive update, holding my daughter's little hand, calling her "sweetheart," and encouraging her progress, before leaving the room to hunt down a vending machine with bacon and sour cream Tater-Skins.
I don't think this makes me a bad father; just a father who has recently undergone something he doesn't want to experience again unless he absolutely has to.
I knew Finn Patrick Rhodes for almost 50 hours which was, ironically, about how long my wife was in labor with our first son, Aiden. Finn's labor, in comparison, was relatively short at about six hours, only 23 weeks and five days into gestation.
We were told we may only get about 20 minutes to get to know our son, but then he went and lived over two days, which we considered an amazing if nevertheless short gift from him to us.
I like to think Finn was a fighter, and in fact the record clearly shows he was just that. He went far more rounds than the experts thought possible, so I think he's earned a rest, although I still miss him horribly.
His lungs were never really up to the challenge set before him, and an eventual brain bleed probably gave him the cue he was awaiting to leave the ring.
In the end, I was the one who threw in the towel.
My wife and I were summoned from our hospital room at 7:25 p.m. on Jan. 1, and told our son was in deep respiratory and cardiac distress. When we arrived at his incubator, a team of doctors and nurses were huddled around him, trying to save his life.
Even the relatively modest chest compressions of a forefinger and middle finger may just have well have been a sledgehammer to his impossibly tiny chest. Having learned how easily premature babies can bruise, I could only imagine the trauma Finn was experiencing.
Over and over again, my wife was asking, anybody, if we should be allowing this to continue, but ultimately the only people who could answer that for little Finn was us, and after 15 minutes of chest compressions, I implored a stop to the resuscitation efforts, which will very likely go down in my mind as the most controversial call I'll ever make.
Chest compressions stopped and life support was halted; little Finn was placed gently in my wife's arms, and she rocked him as the last few reflexive gasps mimed from his resigned lips.
And then he was gone. . .
My wife and I bathed his impossibly tiny body, put lotion on his bruised and battered skin, and then I dressed him in a white one piece outfit and hat that left him looking far more peaceful and serene than I thought possible after the trauma and heartache of his last few minutes of life.
Somewhere inside, I'm a deeply changed person, although I can't tell you in exactly which ways, but I can feel it beneath my skin as though lightning itself is coursing through my blood. It's heartache and longing and grief, and even joy, love and relief all rolled into an emotion without a name of its own.
Finn Patrick Rhodes, you are loved and you are missed beyond measure; by your mother, your twin sister Zoey, your big brother Aiden, myself and everyone you've touched here and beyond.
I love you.
Dad.
