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I recently attended a workshop that focused partly on the concept of gratitude.  If the sound of that already makes you want to vomit, I hear you. When I saw the item on the agenda, I groaned so loud that I had to apologize to the person sitting next to me.  

But something got to me that day, and now I’m here, typing an essay with “Gratitude” in the heading.  Because I’m either ignorant or possibly a narcissistic jerk, I haven’t properly thanked the people who have stepped up for me over the years.

Of course, my wife, kids and parents are at the top of that list.  But they know how I feel (I hope), and no one wants to read about how much I appreciate the fact that my wife doesn’t kill me when I forget to take the garbage out.  Which happens weekly, by the way, including this morning.

So, I decided that from time to time, I’d write some stories of thanks, post them here, and (when possible) reach out to the subjects to make sure they see it. Thanks for indulging me (see, this gratitude thing is working out already!).

—

“Follow me to see your babies.”

The nurse stood in the doorway of the operating room, pointing towards the exit.  I looked to my wife, sweaty and exhausted after just delivering twins. She gave me a nod of approval, so I kissed her on the forehead, told her I loved her and followed the nurse out the door.

—-

They like to call it a “difficult” pregnancy, like a “cozy” home no bigger than a closet, or a “spirited” child that’s really more of an asshole.  My wife and I (yes, we’re in this together) struggled to get pregnant, finally resorting to in vitro fertilization that required me to shoot needles into my wife’s backside far more regularly than my marriage contract required.  But we considered ourselves blessed when we learned that she was pregnant with twins, and virtually erupted in cheers when the doctors told us that our family would remain in balance: we were having a boy and a girl.

My wife is just a tick over five feet tall, and I wondered exactly where these kids were supposed to be stored for nine months. And indeed, she started to grow out of her stylish pants pretty much immediately.  Small mom, two babies; there was nowhere left to go but OUT. In the third month of pregnancy, the normally surly commuters of New York City started to give up their seats on the bus to her. She was going to get big, and fast.

But trouble started brewing after about 5 months.  At 21 weeks, she began to have contractions and raced to the emergency room.  Scared and confused, we spent the day in the hospital not knowing what had gone wrong, and frantically tried to ask questions of anyone showing a hospital badge on their chests (the janitor emptying the garbage in her room was nice but not particularly helpful).  

After running multiple examinations and tests, a resident doctor we hadn’t seen before sat down at the foot of my wife’s bed.

“Well, here’s what’s going to happen,” he dispassionately exclaimed.  “It looks like you’re going to give birth today, and they’re probably not going to make it.  And if they do, they’ll likely be born with severe complications such as (list of morbid illnesses that I have conveniently blocked out of my memory).”  As our jaws dropped to the sterile hospital floor, he finished.  “But hey, we have excellent doctors here, and you’ll be in good hands.”  

And then he left.

After my wife finished crying enough tears to flood the Hudson River, I walked out of the room for a moment and found the doctor near the nurse’s stand.  I can’t remember the exact words I used, but the gist was definitely made clear: “I don’t know who taught you bedside manner at medical school, but you’ve got a lot to learn about how to treat patients in distress. Now find me another fucking doctor, a real one who has talked to actual patients before, and I don’t ever want to see you walk through that room’s door again.”   

And then I left.

Ultimately, thank goodness, he was wrong.  They were able to control my wife’s contractions, but made it clear that the dangers of premature birth were real.  My wife was put on strict bed rest, not the stay-at-home-and-take-it-easy kind but the don’t-move-unless-you-have-to-pee kind.  I even built a small kitchen in our tiny apartment bedroom, so she could reach into a mini-fridge to grab something to eat or drink.  Despite the bedrest, she was in and out of the hospital for weeks. My life for months followed a Bermuda triangle of destinations: home-work-hospital, home-hospital-work, etc.

But the weeks began to pass, as did important milestones in our babies’ developments. First 24 weeks, then 28 (the crucial one, they told us, for their survival), then 30 and 32.  Each week felt like a blessing, markers on a marathon whose finish line was starting to become visible for the first time.

Finally, at 34 weeks, her water broke for real.  After a long and ironic wait for the contractions to increase, they moved us into the operating room (for high risk pregnancies) and our kids were born within 20 minutes of each other.

But we didn’t really see them.  As soon as each were born, they were whisked out of the operating room and into parts unknown in the hospital.  Other than the fact that they were born alive and breathing, we didn’t know much about what they (or we) were facing.  The doctor who delivered them said everything was fine… but that moment where the new parents cradle their newborn child?  We didn’t get that.

And now the nurse was calling me to meet my kids.

—-

I can’t remember how I got to the NICU (the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit), but I do remember the moment I walked through their doors.  It looked like there were rows and rows of incubators, some of them decorated with little drawings around the namecards. My consciousness-drained brain seemed to imagine these rows going on forever, thousands of babies filling the room.  Someone saw my lost gaze and quickly directed me to an area in the middle of the room.

There, I saw them.  These two small creatures, lying virtually naked in their covered boxes save for diapers that looked no bigger than a tissue.  Tiny cables were hooked up to them, running to monitors making sounds and drawing lines and providing data that I couldn’t make sense of.  I looked closer, down at one of the incubators…my son’s chest seemed to cave in after each breath, and his skin appeared pale and washed out.  I turned to the other and saw dark blood-red bruises covering my daughter’s eyes, and she squirmed in seeming discomfort. And they were so small.  So very small.

For the first time, I faced the real idea that I wasn’t going to be walking out of the hospital as a father.  I gasped as I thought of what I would tell my wife, waiting patiently in a room somewhere in this god-forsaken place.  How would I tell her that after all this time, and all this hard work, we might not have found our family after all?

Just then, I felt a hand on my shoulder.

A nurse I had never met, one that worked exclusively in the NICU, was standing right beside me.  She had seen me walk in, and must have recognized the look that was slowly forming on my face. She turned me towards her, looked into my eyes, and spoke.

“Listen to me.  I know how you must feel being in this room, and seeing your children in here with you.  You’ve just become a father, and can’t bear the idea that something must be wrong for them to be in here.  I know you’re having trouble focusing right now, but I want you to take a moment and look at the babies sitting just to the right and left of yours.”

I turned my head.  To the right of my son, I saw the tiniest human being I had ever seen, couldn’t have been more than a couple of pounds.  Turning again to my left, I saw another one, even smaller.

The nurse continued.

“Those babies were born weeks earlier than yours, and are fighting through issues much more complicated than what your kids have ahead of you.  And those tiny babies? They’re going to make it. It’s going to take a while, but they’re going to be fine.”

In the moment right as tears started to form in my eyes, she finished.   “So you see, what I’m trying to tell you is this: you have nothing to worry about.  Go treasure the sight of your children. Everything is going to be OK.” She patted me on the arm, smiled, and left to tend to her work.  And I took a deep breath for the first time all day.

And things were ultimately OK.  It took over a week, but we soon brought our kids home to begin Life 2.0 as a family.  Things haven’t always been easy, but those first trying hours were a lesson to me. We’ll have our battles, but we’ll get through them.

—

I don’t know the name of that nurse.  In that moment, I was too focused on myself and my babies to really think about who else was present.

But I’ve never forgotten her.  Unlike that resident weeks before, she gave me (a man she had never met and had no personal connection with) what I most needed and couldn’t find on my own: comfort, hope, and reassurance.  In a moment of complete disruption, she helped me see the big picture and find my balance again.

There were probably dozens of doctors and nurses who were crucial to ensuring the health of my kids in those early weeks, and they deserve all the thanks and credit in the world.   But sometimes the little things matter too.  Sometimes the people that see us at our weakest end up helping us find our strength. And the ones that deserve the most thanks may never receive it.  I wish I could go back to that moment, and let her know how much her support meant to me that day. That likely won’t happen. But hopefully, stories have powers beyond their pages, and she can somehow sense that a man she barely met will always remember her.
I love hearing thoughts from readers, feel free to reach out to me at michael@toolazytowriteabook.com.  You can also join my mailing list on the desktop version of this site, or follow my Facebook page here.