Helicopter Trip

"There's no point in waiting. You can get your clothes back on and go home."

She lay naked under the sheets.

"I may get my clothes back on but I'm not leaving this place," she said. Then somehow getting her dressed didn't seem such a big thing. The doctor authorized a bit more of the medication which should induce the birth and she stayed on the table stretched out under the sheet.

The problem was her adverse reaction to the drug during the first delivery. As a result, she had been given only half the medication and the hours dragged by without much change in the situation. Then she was checked and the nurse said in a gentle British accent, "You remember your breathing, dear."

There was a TV in the room with an inane cowboy movie on which both the doctor and her husband were watching. It had been nearly five hours that she had been there like that and finally she was checked and it looked like he was coming.

"Remember to breathe, dear, yes. Do as I do. . . Huff, huff, huff. . . That's right. Again. . ."

Suddenly she could feel it. She asked for some medicine for pain and she was given some. So it was not an entirely natural birth. But little did she know that she would be giving birth to a nearly eleven pound baby naturally without a C-section.

She breathed as the nurse had her do. She pushed when the doctor told her to push. And there he was. Without a cry. And his Dad cut the cord. They brought him to her so she could see him. He was beautiful. And he wore the standard smile that he would wear throughout his childhood. An exuberant smile that almost never faded. Then they whisked him away to bathe and weigh him, and all.

Within another twenty minutes or so, they had him back beside her so she could feed him. As she held him in her arms, the color didn't seem right. He looked kind of ashen, but she thought it was just she-the process she had just been through and the medicine perhaps, but no the others noticed it too and took him away again. Then they told the parents that he was having respiratory distress. They could treat him there at the hospital or better yet in the intensive care of the Univeristy Medical Center in Baltimore where he would have to be helicoptered.

The first doctor was off to a dinner party and another doctor, a lady doctor, took over. "He left her like this!" she heard the doctor declare. "I've got to get her ready for an immediate D and C."

Things went so quickly at that point. She was put on another table and wheeled somewhere. Before they got the anesthesia mask on her, there was a little glass case with her baby on a pillowy bed.

They had brought him down to see her before taking off in the helicopter.

"My sweetheart," she said as she touched the glass side of the case and he touched the spot too with a wonderful smile on his face.

Learn more about this author, Karan Henley Haugh.
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