Ask Me Why I Hurt (20 page)

“What have you got there?” I asked.

“It’s for the firefighters.” The kids pulled markers and pens out of their backpacks to write notes and draw pictures. I returned from the van with a Dixie cup full of extra pens.

“Want to help?” they asked me.

I sat down and started putting my thoughts on the paper.

“What are you writing, Dr. Randy?” one of the girls asked. She had finished a beautiful free-form horse galloping over the desert. The red hills were in the background, with tall cacti. “This horse makes me feel free,” she had written underneath. “I am sorry about what happened.” I was touched. This girl had survived a childhood of severe neglect.

“It’s about how thankful I am for everything in my life,” I told her.

“Including us?” she asked.

“Including you.”

She looked back down at the paper. “I’m going to make another horse.”

Only four days had passed since September 11. It was six-thirty in the morning, and I had spent a quiet but lonely night at home. I was putting a load of laundry into the washer. My phone rang.

“The babies are coming,” my wife said with a gasp. I could barely catch my breath. She handed the phone to her doctor.

“The babies are coming now,” the doctor said.

I was already climbing into my truck. I made it to the hospital in minutes. Amy’s cervix had dilated overnight to the point where birth would happen quickly. Part of my mind went into hyperdrive. I counted the weeks. The twins were only thirty weeks. At thirty weeks, I knew, they probably wouldn’t be able to breathe on their own. They ran risks of such disabilities as cerebral palsy. I thought of Donald on the van, smiling at the pastor. I prayed they would be OK. I ran to Amy’s room and almost went running past her as she was being whisked down the hall on her back, her feet elevated higher than her head. The position was to keep the pressure off the cervix. Everything was happening so fast. The room was in controlled chaos, prepared with two warming Isolettes ready for the twins, my wife on the table, the doctors ready for surgery. I knew they could deliver in seconds if need be.

I felt myself split into separate people: the husband comforting his wife; the doctor paying attention to medical issues; the regular human being completely panicked about the health of his newborns and wife. Everything was happening so quickly. The tent went up between Amy’s belly and her face, so she wouldn’t have to
watch the C-section. There was the incision, with the soft burring sound I knew so well. The doctor reached in and brought out the tiniest human creature I had ever seen. She was so small she might have been a tiny doll. But then I heard the word
girl
, and with joy we all heard my daughter’s tiny, life-affirming gasp. She was breathing. The nurse showed her to Amy and then quickly placed her in an Isolette, the incubator for premature infants that would offer controlled humidity and heat.

My son is next, I thought, watching as they reached in and brought him out. Only this tiny froglike figure was limp and a terrible blue-black-gray color, like the bottom of a sick pond. The limp figure made no sound. I felt a horrible rushing sensation, and the room moved around me. The nurse carried him rapidly away from my wife. Without a word she shoved a tube down his throat and ran him out of the room.

Only a few moments had passed. The doctor had blood on her gloves. Her eyes were grave. Amy was barely coherent. She turned around and called for me. She looked confused. “What happened?” she asked, and I remembered that she couldn’t feel anything and, with the tent, probably had no idea what had happened.

“Your daughter is breathing,” the doctor said. No one said anything about our son.

I ran down to the neonatal intensive care unit. It was a place I had spent many call nights as a physician. I knew all the complications and tragedies that could occur with premature birth. Only now it was different because it was my children. The unit was one gigantic room with close to ninety babies, all lined up in Isolettes. They were wheeling our girl in and showed me where our son was. There was barely room in between each Isolette for the medical equipment. At the far end of the room were movable plastic privacy screens that could be set up around each domed Isolette. There was a hive of activity around my son’s incubator.

“He’s going to be OK,” the nurse said as I ran up. She had a falsely reassuring tone that I was sure I had used as a doctor too. My son was lying on his back on a cloud of white cotton, still gray
in color but with the coming red blossoming on his skin. He was so small he would fit in my palm. An oxygen tube snaked out of his mouth. His body seemed covered with wires. His tiny frog hands looked smaller than my thumb.

“Reed Coleman,” I whispered, amazed.

I went to see my daughter. She had been placed clear across the huge room. Her color was better than her brother’s, but she was also so unbelievably small, her thin legs no bigger than bird bones. She was breathing on her own, the rise and fall of her tiny chest barely perceptible.

“Janie Marie,” I named her.

I ran back and forth between them in a daze. Their rounded, purpled, button eyes were closed, their red lips pursed. I wondered if preemies continued to dream the silent moving dreams they had in the womb. Would they awaken dreaming? Reed coughed, and his face turned purple. I turned to yell for a nurse, but she was there, gently adjusting his tubes. I could only croak a thank-you in response. All that night I walked among my wife, my son, and my daughter. My life seemed confined to this triangle. I hung over the Isolettes, another parent worrying, and through the long night I heard the murmuring of other parents, the whisper of their shoes on the floors, and the quiet advice of the doctors. I stared at my babies, willing them to stay alive. I had planned high schools, colleges, and their entire futures. Now all I cared about was that they might live. In the hours before dawn I bowed my head, and I talked to God. I prayed for Reed and Janie and all the kids on the van.

As night turned to morning, I found out what those plastic privacy screens were for. Quietly a nurse brought one out to put around the baby next to Reed. I watched as the doctors brought in the mother. Her preemie was getting ready to die. I could hear her sitting inside the screen, talking to her baby. Finally they let her take it out and hold it for the first and last time. She wept as she said good-bye.

That could be me, I thought, and worse, that could be Amy.

As the day passed, I felt vastly off center. The outside world was
in chaos after 9/11 and our world on the inside was not much better the first few days after the birth. I went and looked at my babies a dozen times a day, but I felt helpless. I was allowed to hold only Janie. I knew I wasn’t thinking rationally. When the nurses sat down to talk to Amy and me about our expectations, one of the questions was how long we thought the twins would have to stay in the neonatal unit. “Oh, they’ll only be here a week or two,” I responded blithely. I saw one nurse blink. I had to know that such preemies might stay for months. Yet I shut out this fact from myself.

I was deeply concerned about my wife. Her health was bad. The months of forced bed rest, the heavy medications to stop the contractions, the nausea, and the birth all had served to sap her vitality. She was bone thin; her eyes were hollowed. She had gained only twenty pounds out of the fifty she was supposed to gain, and most of this was probably water weight. Her arms and legs were far too thin; her skin tone was flaccid. She had no muscle tone left, from all the bed rest, and was so tired that even raising her hands was hard. All I could do was encourage her to eat.

It took her days to recover her sense of self. She sat up in her bed, sometimes disoriented. I took pictures of the babies and showed them to her. Her father had been in New York when the twins were born and, after 9/11, couldn’t get a flight. He drove all the way to Phoenix and arrived about five days later. My parents came, bearing flowers and cards. For her first visit to see her children, Amy went down the hall in a wheelchair. She looked at her babies. That was when I saw the spark come back.

Finally, in November, Reed and Janie were allowed to come home. Their two months in the neonatal unit were a memory both Amy and I wanted to put behind us as quickly as possible. Amy had spent every day there after her discharge, from morning until eight or nine at night, and I had stopped in frequently, coming
back in the evenings. It was a routine that we were desperate to leave.

But if I thought it would get easier at home, I was wrong. I was blown away by the constant medical care the twins required. Our living room looked like a hospital ward, with apnea monitors and a massive five-foot-tall oxygen tank for Reed. Janie had severe apnea spells, during which she would stop breathing and turn different shades of purple. The episodes were terrifying to watch. Every time I thought about her brain cells dying. Even getting the right clothes was a hassle. It irked Amy’s frugal nature to buy expensive preemie clothes. My aunt Margie came to help out. She was fantastic with the babies, but we couldn’t let many others visit. The risk of infection in preemies was just too high, and we didn’t want them exposed to RSV, an illness sweeping the city that winter. Outings with the babies were not going to be possible for some time, a fact that left Amy isolated.

And I was back on the van. I had taken two weeks off following the birth, but that time was long gone. I was still working more than eighty hours a week. I often came home late to find Amy feeding one of the twins. They took food so slowly that an hour could pass for one feeding.

I invited my parents to babysit early one Sunday morning in December, a few weeks after the twins had come home. They had met the babies in the hospital and had spent time with them, but I was still surprised at how gentle and yet confident my dad was with them. Mom and Dad showed up excited to finally get to babysit. My dad was dressed in pressed casual trousers and a short-sleeve shirt. My mother was wearing a long-skirted dress and her favorite golden cross, which I had given her for Christmas one year when I was a teenager and working at the Golf n’ Stuff. Her shiny brown hair was brushed into a short bob, and she wore a touch of lipstick. I looked like a train wreck, from too much work, junk food, and lack of sleep. Amy had at least brushed her hair. I was losing mine so fast I had started joking about not needing to brush it at all.

“So, you two, off to church,” my father said. Amy and I had made plans to try a nearby church. One of the things I liked about
Amy was that her Quaker faith shared many traits with my Lutheran upbringing. We both were private about our faith and felt communication with God was a personal matter.

“We’re going to the one down the street, Shepherd of the Valley,” I told him.

“I really like the female pastor.” Amy spoke up. “She had twins of her own.”

Amy went into our bedroom to change. She soon came out, with nice loafers and fresh pants. She immediately looked presentable. Mom gave me a jaundiced eye.

“Aren’t you changing?” she asked me pointedly. “You can’t go to church in sweats. At least put on a nice shirt.”

I ran off to hustle into a fresh shirt and clean cargo pants.

Moments later, as Amy and I were shutting the front door behind us, I heard my mom remark, “A tie wouldn’t kill you either.” I heard my dad cooing to Janie and Reed as Amy and I went down our walk. My mom was saying something about breakfast.

Amy giggled. There was a lift in her walk, and she turned her face toward the sun. “Your dad is really good with the babies,” she commented.

“It’s weird because I never would have thought he’d be comfortable with their being so delicate.”

“They won’t be delicate forever,” she said with assurance. I was looking forward to the day we could take the twins out to church as a family.

It was two months after 9/11, and the community was still reeling. It was comforting to hear the female pastor talk about the need for strength and community while around us I saw our neighbors’ faces, still bleak with tragedy. We all were still feeling such a sense of shock, disbelief, and fear that life was beyond our control. I knew that my sense of shock was compounded by the grueling ordeal of the hospital stays and the round-the-clock care the twins required.