Authors: Melissa Gilbert
At the hospital, they put me in a room and gave me an IV of magnesium sulfate to slow down the labor. The doctor came in and said they needed to keep the baby in me for at least a day, and in the course of that day they were going to give me three steroid injections to speed up development of the baby’s lungs. They also put me in bed in the Trendelenburg position, but turned on my side, with my feet higher than my head, to remove as much stress as possible from my uterus.
Bruce and I called everyone and told them what was going on, and that we were in a holding pattern. The magnesium sulfate gave me a wicked headache, which wasn’t fun. It also made my lips puff up, which I didn’t mind. Around 1:00 p.m., I sent Bruce home to go for a run, pick up some of my stuff, and come back around dinnertime. My mother, Sandy, and my midwife, Sage, took his place. Sandy put makeup on me, saying I’d thank her later when I looked at pictures. It was also very comforting feeling her hands on my face.
A while later the doctor did another ultrasound, which showed that I had lost all my amniotic fluid. The head of the neonatal intensive care unit, Dr. Paul Hinkes, came in and explained that he wanted my doctors to do a C-section as soon as possible. Keeping the baby in me any longer, he said, posed numerous risks. He pointed out that Michael’s heart rate was dropping, and he also cautioned that his lungs weren’t going to be able to breathe on their own, so he’d have to be hooked up to a ventilator. Then he ran down a list of things that might be wrong with him after they got him out, such as a cerebral hemorrhage, blindness, a perforated intestine, or a hole in his heart.
At the time, none of these horrible things registered in me. They would later, for sure. But I didn’t hear a word after he said “If he makes it through the first twenty-four hours, it’s good. If he makes it through the next twenty-four hours, it’s better. And if he makes it through the next twenty-four hours, we’ll be okay.” I just wanted to get him out. I said as much over and over. “Let’s get him out.”
By then it was four o’clock. Bruce rushed back to the hospital and got into surgical scrubs. On my way to the OR the nurses were kind enough to stop the gurney so I could see my mom and Sandy one more time. We all kissed one another, crying and repeating that everything was going to be fine. As I was wheeled into the operating room, I started to panic a little. Bruce put his mouth right next to my ear and kept whispering, “It’s okay, baby. Everything’s going to be okay.” Both partners from my ob-gyn office, Dr. Ambe-Crain and Dr. Taylor, performed my C-section. There was also a respiratory therapist, a neonatologist, and the NICU nurse in the room. I’d had an epidural and was awake through the surgery. As with Dakota’s birth, the doctor asked if I felt the first cut. I said no, and she said, “Okay, then, here we go.”
With Bruce holding my hand, I listened to the doctors exchange procedural small talk. Then I heard one of them say, “Here he is.” The other said, “Oh my goodness, isn’t that silly.” I asked what was happening and someone said he had reached his little hand out of the incision. Then it got very quiet, too quiet. I heard whispering, and then I began to get scared.
“What’s going on?” I asked.
My doctor walked to the side of my head so I could see her and explained it was hard to get him out. There was no lubrication, she said, and he was hiding from them. She warned, “He might be a little bruised, but we’ll get him out.” Though it seemed like an hour had passed, it was only several minutes later that I heard them say, “He’s out.” I waited to hear him cry. I knew he would be okay if he cried; it would mean that he could breathe.
Sure enough, I heard a cry. It was barely audible, but it was the first glimmer of hope that things would be all right.
They whisked him to the side of the room and put him in an open incubator, where they began to work on him with practiced precision and determination. From where I was lying, I could only see his foot—one little blue foot sticking out from all the activity. Then his foot turned pink and I thought,
Okay, he’s getting oxygen
. I heard another little cry, and the people in the operating room cheered.
“He looks so tiny,” I said.
“He looks beautiful,” Bruce replied.
They quickly put a breathing tube into his lungs and brought him to where I could see him. He was the tiniest thing, like a little bird that fell out of a nest. At just twenty-eight weeks, he already had a head full of blond hair. He also had Bruce’s profile, his exact nose. He was unmistakably a Boxleitner. My God, he was so beautiful. He was also pink, and I heaved a sigh of relief. He certainly wasn’t out of danger, but I had a feeling that he was going to pull through.
Bruce didn’t know where to go. He wanted to stay with me, but ultimately, we decided he should go to the NICU with Michael. I told Bruce to watch him and take pictures while I was sewed up and taken to recovery. After a little bit, the neonatologist came in and reported that Michael was a fighter, but not out of danger. I gave him a steely look and said, “It’s not going to happen. Nothing bad is going to happen.”
I barely slept that night, and in the morning I called friends and relatives with the latest news before it hit the tabloids. I didn’t want a repeat of what had happened ten years earlier when I had my appendectomy and it was reported in a dozen different ways by the media. As I later joked to
People
magazine, “I think my internal organs actually got higher ratings than my face.”
After breakfast, I was taken to the NICU for my first visit with Michael. I was shocked by the way the tiny infants were laid out in open beds—Michael, in particular, reminded me of the frogs we dissected in high school. He was lying with his arms and legs spread out and attached to various lifelines. One line went right into his belly button and into his heart cavity. He had a pulse oximeter light on his foot, measuring his blood’s oxygen level. He had one IV here, one there. A wire attached to the top of his head monitored his body temperature. He was the exact antithesis of the baby whose welcome to the world is a cozy swaddle in a warm blanket. It almost struck me as barbaric. And yet he was so serene, so peaceful. When I talked to him, he turned toward me and gave me a little peek out of his eyes. That’s how he got his nickname, Peeker. I thought,
Okay, you’re going to make it
.
Fortunately, Michael’s next few days were unremarkable for a preemie, though there was nothing unremarkable about them for Bruce and me. Bruce has since confided that he refused to let himself become too attached to Michael in those first few days in case something happened. He didn’t want to care in case our son died. He also later admitted that he had actually feared losing both of us on the operating table.
I was a focused soldier. On October 8, two days after giving birth, I was able to sort of hold Michael for the first time, along with the padding from his bed. The next day he was taken off the ventilator. On the tenth I went home, which was excruciatingly hard. Leaving my child behind, despite knowing he needed to be at the hospital, was gut-wrenching. My days fell into a blurry, methodical schedule. I got up, pumped breast milk, got Dakota off to school, went to the hospital, watched Michael, went back home, pumped some more, had lunch, checked in with Bruce, picked Dakota up from school, got homework started, pumped again, fixed dinner, spent two more hours at the hospital with Michael, came home, pumped one last time, and passed out. I was never as happy as the day I was actually able to hold him without the mattress pad.
We weren’t out of the woods, though. Nine days after he was born, I showed up at the hospital and Michael had two big tubes up his nose. He’d been put on a CPAP, a special kind of ventilator, after having had trouble breathing the night before. They had to force air into his lungs because he’d been working too hard to breathe. I was assured he wasn’t as uncomfortable as he looked, but I saw that and fell apart.
I was a jumble of emotions I couldn’t begin to figure out. Walking in and out of the NICU every day with other parents worrying about their child’s condition was a strange experience. We shared our love and fear in a communal silence that was like a fragile crystal bubble. It was as if we didn’t want to shatter the status quo by talking. Monitors beeped, lights flashed, parents whispered to doctors and nurses, and in between all of us prayed.
If bad thoughts crept into my head, I would write out dosage charts for Michael’s medications or I would make detailed lists of things I had to do. I had never been so purposeful.
One day I was at the hospital kangarooing with Michael—meaning I held him against my bare chest, with blankets on the outside, a practice adopted from Third World countries where modern NICUs weren’t readily available. The idea was the mother’s body would regulate the baby’s temperature. Suddenly his temperature dropped and the two nurses monitoring his vital signs came over.
One nurse reached out for Michael and said it was time to put him back in his heated Isolette. Then the other, seeing the look on my face, said, “Let’s wait. Give her ten minutes.” Within a few minutes, Michael’s temperature regulated again. Then they took my temperature. It was 101. My body had heated up in order to provide him necessary warmth.
I was aware that thirty-one years earlier I wasn’t held like that, nor was I wanted, but dammit, my kid was—and I just wanted to get him home.
M
ichael thrived. On October 17, he received his first taste of breast milk through a tube in his nose. Six days later, he fed from a bottle. During this time friends and family would visit. His brothers made drawings and cards that I taped around his Isolette. My grandfather came to visit, took one look at the tiny boy, and said, “What’s he doing in that thing? He looks like he should be sleeping in a hollowed-out melon.” Things were not only on course but a little bit ahead of schedule. I felt like I took my first deep breath in nearly a month. I wanted to know when I could take him home.
I pestered the doctors and nurses with questions, showed them that I knew all of his medications and doses, and had home nurses and special lights for his jaundice all lined up to care for him at home.
On November 15, Bruce and I were finishing breakfast and talking about the day ahead when the doctor called and said we could bring Michael home. I screamed. Bruce canceled whatever appointments he had and we hurried to the hospital. Normally they don’t let babies leave the hospital until they weigh five pounds; Michael was only four and a half. But I knew if I could get him home, tuck him into my bed, dim the lights, feed him whenever he wanted to eat (every two hours, it turned out), and just love him up all day and night, he would do well. And that’s exactly what happened.
Once I got him home, he blossomed. A nurse came every other day and assessed him, and I took him to the pediatrician once a week. On his first visit, he was in the seventh percentile for weight, if that. By Christmas, he weighed about ten pounds and was in the eighty-fifth percentile. The doctor marveled; I beamed. My little guy was an early overachiever, just like I’d been.
So much attention had been given to Michael that I wanted to get Dakota a special present for Christmas. When I asked what he wanted, Dakota said he wanted his dad and me to get along. Bo and I had had little to do with each other since I filed the lawsuit, and what interaction we did have was fraught with strain and tension stemming from the fact that I knew he had fabricated the story for the
National Enquirer,
which I held responsible for creating the stress that had caused Michael’s premature birth.
But for Dakota’s sake, I called Bo and invited him over to talk. Because nothing in my life ever happened the way I expected it to, he and Bruce hit it off immediately and I was pushed out of the equation. Their bromance robbed me of a chance to unload on him. And despite my considerable resentment, I dropped him out of the lawsuit without any satisfaction for the suffering he’d inflicted.
I continued to pursue my claims against the
Enquirer,
though. I wasn’t about to quit that fight. For me, the issue was no longer about restitution for what they did to my reputation and me; it was about the fact that their disregard for both the facts and human decency had nearly killed my kid.
I felt like David fighting Goliath. As the lawsuit moved forward, the tabloid’s attorneys pulled my medical records, starting from my first gynecological checkup when I was eighteen. They were threatening to use some of that information against me in court. I saw their gambit; they wanted me to meditate on the threat of not just public embarrassment but downright mortification. They couldn’t have tried any harder to make the situation more ugly.
I tried to focus on the good stuff. At Michael’s one-year checkup, I was told that I didn’t have to bring him in once a month anymore. The doctor said he might still be a couple months behind developmentally, but he would catch up soon enough. To celebrate the good news, we threw a first-birthday bash for all of our family and friends who had prayed along with us for the past twelve months. Just before everyone arrived, though, I fell apart in our bedroom.
Bruce came in and found me curled up on the bed, crying and unable to catch my breath. When he asked what was wrong, I told him that I was suddenly and unexpectedly overcome by thoughts of all the things that could have gone wrong with Michael—the heart problems, the bleeding in the brain, the drama of those first twenty-four hours, everything. It was a delayed reaction to the worry I had kept bottled up for the past twelve months. The dam just burst.
I was feeling things and I didn’t like it. That’s when an occasional glass of wine turned into two at five in the afternoon. Three glasses was even better. My drinking escalated from there.
The lawsuit wasn’t quite finished. At one point, after I won a small pretrial motion, I received a call from Screen Actors Guild president Richard Masur. He explained the union was working diligently on privacy legislation to curb the tabloids and paparazzi, and in exchange for speaking up on my plight, he offered me support from their government relations office and legal department. To thank Richard, I said, “Let me know if there’s anything I can do for you.” He would eventually take me up on that offer.