By Jonathan Gibbs

There is nothing that brings a husband and wife closer than being forehead to forehead, tearduct to tearduct, whispered prayer to whispered prayer on the non-slippery side of a surgical screen as a team of doctors on the other side work with great, quick urgency to save her life and that of your unborn, but struggling, son. And there is nothing like the knowledge they might not succeed to push you farther away from your hold on your own sanity and your will to keep living in a world without them. To push you violently away from faith.

Monday, August 24 began as one of those late great summer days, a few wispy streaks of cloud brushed thinly across a sky blue sky, a breeze foretelling fall, but promising warmth as Earth and Sun swings closer together. I’m sitting downstairs at my desk, at 8:15 a.m., preparing for our weekly editors meeting in Wakefield. With a list of what I think is going to happen for the coming five days in my notebook, I am about to get up, go upstairs to say goodbye to my three-year-old son, Nathan, my wife, Hillary, who is in her eighth month of pregnancy with our second son, Trevor Miles. With a sense of  well-being and an overwhelming feeling of contentment with my beautiful family and the life I am blessed to possess, I am just about to head south into the promise of a newly-hatched day at the beginning of a newborn week. As I swivel to get up Hillary shuffles into the room from the bathroom door, holding a belly filled with the living expectancy of the next chapter of our lives. The realization she is a climber not a shuffler hits me, a Sword of Damocles of the subconscious slicing the head off my sense of tranquility.

“I think I’m spotting,” she says.

I look at her, drop my gaze to he hem of her robin’s egg blue dress and see one liquid drop fall. Blood. I get that heightened, adrenaline-fueled vision and hearing that slows down the drop so I can observe its physics as it falls: a bottom heavy globoid that smacks the floor like a rifle shot and splatters, throwing parts of itself off to all points.

Oh no. God. God?

My legs are full of Fear; they do not want to walk. My mouth is full of Fear; it does not want to talk.

Get up. Be an adult, at least play the part. Do the job. That was just a dream; this is real life.

I get up.

Hillary says she will call Andrea, our midwife. I call her mother, Joyce. Hillary calmly explains to Andrea she is bleeding and doesn’t feel as if she’s in labor, Her mother hears the taut clarity of my description of what’s happening and says she’ll be here in 15 minutes to watch Nathan. I call our sister-in-law, Susan, to ask for some maxi-pads. She asks a question along the lines of “How bad is it?” I choke on the answer. She says she’ll be right over to drive. Our midwife says to go straight to her office and she’ll call our obstetrician, Dr. Jaffe, and get things moving to get us through Triage at Women and Infants Hospital.

Susan comes over within minutes as does Joyce. By now, a maxi-pad is not adequate to catch the flow of blood  and we switch to a training pant diaper. I call work to explain the change in my plans for the day and try to stay level, flat, efficient and useful. Then we help Hillary into the truck. Susan is a very capable driver with the sensory organs of a schooling fish or migrating starling with the heavy foot of a hooved mammal, which means she got us into East Providence in about ten minutes without hitting anything or being hit. We park and get out, Hillary walking and holding the diaper in place as I help, and its not working. There are rivulets of blood running down her legs, some dried like rivers that can’t find their way to an ocean, and others still glistening, exclamation points on her skin.

Hillary has provided full-time care for her late husband, Scott, who died a body part at a time  over five years from ALS, saw her father taken from pancreatic cancer practically overnight, lost a serious live-in boyfriend in a climbing accident. Last year our entire family suffered along with a nephew, who lost a son who was to have borne the name Myles in the eighth month of pregnancy. Susan was to have been his grandmother. Our son, Trevor, was given the middle name, Miles, to honor him. If there is such a thing as  Karma Court, Hillary – and Susan – deserve  a lenient judgement.

We go to the front desk and tell the receptionist Hillary Gibbs is here for Andrea. Impatience barely concealed, she explains she is doing an intake, as the intakee looks at us as if we were unclean carnival trash. My words, wrapped tight in unfocused desperation and unbridled terror, were not available, as if trapped down a wormhole into a universe in which the only words are growls, howls and strangled bleats. Luckily none escaped my lungs to hiss out between my teeth and tongue. Susan saved the day. “Hillary is bleeding heavily down the backs of her legs and I think she’s scaring your other patients,” she says, leaning over the counter as if confiding a secret beauty tip.

Things move quickly and the three of us are alone in an examination room, waiting for Andrea. She comes in and sees the diaper in which there is, along with a lot of blood, some gleaming material, like calf’s liver. Andrea takes a look at it, then studies Hillary in between the stirrups of the exam chair. She tells her she has only dilated two centimeters and doesn’t appear to be in labor. “I don’t know what I am seeing,” she says. Its is only later it dawns on me that since there are only a handful of possibilities even if one considers the possibilities in movies such as “Rosemary’s Baby,” Andrea is trying to keep us calm.

Then we enter into one of those preludes to a big moment, the looking over the edge of a cliff to see how away is the ground, beneath – what’s the potential damage to be done if the earth onto which we are grasping slips away? We are silent, a holy, Transformational  moment we know will be forever trapped in amber, all mouthing the word, ‘Please.’ Andrea rubs a gelatinous smear onto Hillary’s belly and puts the ultrasound microphone into the jelly. Thump-ump. Thump-ump. It’s fast, too fast; Trevor’s in crisis. but there.

Thank-you, God. God, please stay with us. Please stay with Trevor. 

Andrea tells us she will clear our passage through emergency and make sure I am not the one driving. Susan gets us there in about the time it takes to make an omelet. We go in through the emergency room doors and are helped into an examination room and onto a table. The blood by now is more along the lines of mammal versus car on highway, and my Fear mutates, splits into two and starts to divide by four, eight and sixteen before I shut down that atavistic part of my mind and begin to pray. Hard.

Hillary has remained calm, quiet and tearless throughout. I can’t help but think of The Mona Lisa, a hint of smile on her face as she transfers her strength to her Son. A mother showing her love by facing down and defeating fear with serenity. “Everything’s going to be fine,” I whisper, brushing her hair from her eyes.

Several doctors and nurses circle the bed in a complicated choreography, asking questions in turns, starting an IV and a transfusion line. At the same time another ultrasound is taken, and there is still a heartbeat, but it is slower and fainter now, a heart still shrouded in darkness and running out of time. ‘Things are going to move pretty quickly,” a doctor tells us. “We are going to go upstairs and save your baby’s life.” This said by a 120-pound pregnant woman with a stethoscope around her neck. She seems to me as big and heroic as John Wayne, only she is a real person storming a real beach. “Let’s go, ask your questions on the way,” she tells all of the attendants. “Dr. Jaffe is in the building.”

Upstairs, several nurses and doctors, about seven in all, wheel Hillary into an operating room, and I am told what to expect. Hillary is having a severe abruption of the placenta; it has split and come apart form her uterine wall. There may be a need for a general anaesthesia because she is bleeding profusely and it is not clotting. They would rather use a duramorph injection to take away all sensation from the waist down. “Please save her life,” I say, squeaking wetly.

“We will,” says one of them from behind her blue surgical mask. “Someone will come down and get you into scrubs so you can be with her.”

Another squad of blue-clad nurses and doctors comes marching down the hall, slipper-covered shoes slapping purposefully on the tiled floor. They turn right, crisp as a marching band,  toward the operating room. The Trevor Miles Team. I know the game. I run the stats in my head. He could die from lack of oxygenated blood now that he is no longer hooked up to his mother. Lifeblood. Or he could drown in the blood filling the womb. Deathblood.

Be good for my son. I whisper, unheard, to their backs as they burst through the door and disappear.

A nurse comes and helps me fumble and lurch into some scrubs, like dressing up a large clumsy dog in a paper tablecloth as a party prank. It seems vaguely silly for such a solemn mission. I am led into a room full of steel, chrome and purpose. Our first son was brought into the world gently,  naturally in a room with just us and our midwife, lights turned low and words of murmured encouragement accompanying a truly mystical moment, a timeless and magical ritual dating back to the Day When God was Born. Celine Dion might as well have been there singing while Anne Geddes took photographs. The operating room was lit like the surface of the Moon, uniformly  in its illumination so there were no shadows, no place for fear – or hope – to hide, just bright light to show the facts for science to address. 

But this was not a time for just science; not for me, or for Hillary, or for Trevor. As I leaned in to Hillary, arms spread to wide to either side and tied to a post on the side of the surgical screen facing the door, one arm receiving blood from a bag attached to the top of the screen, and an IV of saline attached to the other, I kiss her forehead and we are head to head. I address her late husband, Scott, whose ashes are scattered in a garden in the front of the house we now live in, and ask for him to help her. The Ghost in the Yard. I address Myles, who I’ve also talked to in our heavily-treed backyard over the past year since he was brought stillborn into the world, one year ago almost to the day. The Angel in the Tree: Myles, please help my son, Miles. We’ll honor who you would have been. We’ll earn this.

As I pray for my wife and Trevor amidst the bustle of the surgery team and the whooshes, and the bleats and the pings of the machinery, I have the thought that this sounds and feels like it is Purgatoy’s Pinball machine we’re in until this situation is resolved to whatever result. I free-associate as I stumble over my prayers and remember Friedrich Nietzsche’s famous posing of the question “Is God dead?” and turn it around for my circumstance of entreaty: “Are the dead God?” My mind stills and I remember to keep it simple, and I ask God to save them, making that timeworn bargain: “Take me instead of them and just give one second to see Hillary and Trevor safe and alive before you put two shiny pennies on my eyes and rake some leaves over my dead body.” Faith doesn’t work that way, I know, but still . .

Hillary looks up at me and asks me how I’m doing. She’s getting sliced from hip to hip at the top of her pelvis so that we can have a second child, and she asks me how I’m doing. (Well, dear, I don’t know about you, but my blood sugar’s a little low about now because I never really had a proper breakfast . .)

I don’t say anything that stupid, breaking my own personal record of always.

And then it happens. Something is lifted over and to the left of the screen, and I see out of the corner of my eyes, a baby. It’s got to be Trevor, I think to myself. It can’t be Trevor, I think to myself, that baby is as white as cigarette ash, and there’s blue in him. He’s not moving. I look away, and I am ashamed at myself. I owe to him to look at him, I tell myself.

But first, I hedge my bets and ask the eyes above a mask on a figure sitting in front of my wife, “Is everything okay?”

“If it wasn’t going to be okay, you wouldn’t be in the room,” he says not unkindly, ending the need for further conversation.

Breaking off from the gravitational pull of terror, I look over to a small, chest-level high table against the wall. Six bodies, twelve arms attached to hands with instruments work like an octopus on my son, inserting a respirator mask over his his face, intubing his hands and working his tiny chest to get it going. They are all working at once, but never get in each others’ way, thanking each other for every act of assistance. “He’s pinking up,” someone says. Time passes. Ice ages come and go, life forms, lineages and chains of species sprout, flourish and die out as we wait. “Okay, we got a breath,” someone says. I watch this application of modern medicine that looks like an impossibly complicated card trick – now you see it, now you don’t – feeling a part of what’s going on but unequal to their abilities and station, like someone selling paintings of Elvis on black velvet outside the Louvre.

“You can come see your son,” someone says gently. I get up like someone granted a stay of execution at one minute past midnight, and know I am all I need to be right now, I am this beautiful baby boy’s father. He’s incredibly small, and yet with a tube down his throat and hunks of metal connected to wires stuck to his heart and belly, he’s as big as the entire Universe to me. I drop a pea pod-sized tear on his forehead and whisper his name “Hi, Trevor, it’s Daddy. Welcome.” And he opens his eyes. As God is my witness – and He was – he opened his eyes.