Andrea was finally asleep, recovering from the previous day’s excitement — otherwise known as a 26-hour labor followed by an emergency C-section. About ten hours after our little princess made her dramatic debut, the doctor walked into the room.
Andrea’s eyes snapped open.
Her first words were not “How am I?” or “Is everything stitched back together?”
They were:
“When can I go see my baby?”
The doctor paused — visibly startled by this immediate and aggressive return to consciousness — and then gently explained that Andrea would need three to five days to recover. He talked about lifting restrictions, moving slowly, protecting the stitches, and allowing her body time to heal.
While he spoke, I wasn’t watching him.
I was watching Andrea.
She had that look. The one where calculations are being made. Not about recovery — about escape. Andrea wasn’t listening for medical advice; she was determining the earliest possible release time from this facility so she could be reunited with our baby.
For the next three days, I lived on the road. I’d drive to Mercy Methodist in South Sacramento to check on my wife, then make the 30-mile drive to Mercy San Juan, where Alex was in the Neonatal ICU.
My first visit to the NICU involved being scrubbed, bathed, masked, and gowned like I was about to assist in surgery. Somewhere down the hall, I heard a baby crying. It didn’t sound like a baby. It sounded more like a donkey braying.
I called out in a sing-song voice,
“Ally Ally Acts infree, won’t you come out to play with me?”
The crying stopped.
As I rounded the corner with a nurse escort, there she was — my little angel. Apparently, she had decided she did not care for the feeding process and was aggressively knocking the bottle away. She did, however, accept the bottle from me.
The nurses asked if I’d sung to her in utero.
I told them yes — that song and many others I made up along the way.
I stayed for at least two feedings before heading back to Andrea.
On the third day, when I arrived at Mercy Methodist, Andrea was already awake and waiting. The moment I walked in, she sat up and said,
“Help me get dressed. We’re leaving.”
As we were getting ready, nurses and the doctor entered the room and strongly objected. The doctor insisted Andrea needed more time to recuperate.
Andrea looked at him and asked,
“Have you ever had your guts cut open and sewn back together?”
The doctor, clearly unprepared for this line of questioning, replied,
“Well… no.”
Andrea’s response was immediate and fierce:
“Then you don’t know. I’ll be signing myself out.”
Forty minutes later, we arrived at Mercy San Juan and were reunited with our little princess.
We couldn’t take her home yet — she was still too small and needed to gain weight. By then, Alex had decided she no longer required me specifically to eat, which was both reassuring and mildly insulting.
Before we were allowed to bring her home on day five, Andrea and I had to take a baby CPR class and present an approved infant car seat — proving, at least on paper, that we were minimally qualified to transport a human being.
And just like that, the family was finally together.
Parenthood doesn’t begin when you have answers. It begins when you realize you don’t — and proceed anyway.
More reflections to come. I’m sure there are still buttons I haven’t learned to avoid.
