Angel Kisses

 
I went into labor on Labor Day.

The holiday that traditionally defines the end of summer was about to redefine my life.  By midnight contractions were coming close together.  The doctor could not be reached, but the answering service advised me:  “Get to the hospital.”

Almost two weeks past my due date, my husband and I were ready.  The hour-long drive to the hospital took on the extra seriousness that travel takes in the lonely, dark hours of the night. I timed my contractions by the glowing blue digits of the dashboard clock, reassuring myself that this was no false alarm.  My husband and I did not speak.  He concentrated on driving and kept his thoughts to himself.  My own mind was stirring with both concern and excitement.

It had been a long nine months.  This pregnancy followed a painful miscarriage.  While delighted with another pregnancy, life had not been easy.  I suffered from serious anemia; the low-iron fatigue was complicated by repeated travel from Ohio to California where my father was dying of cancer.  In between trips, the old pipes in our home blew out and all of the plumbing had to be replaced.  Both my life and my home had been torn apart, but, at last, a wonderful new chapter was about to begin.

We arrived at the hospital where I was assigned to a labor room and placed on monitors.  The hours ticked by with no increase in the intensity or frequency of contractions.  Drugs were added to an IV in an effort to move things along.  One-by-one signs appeared that a baby was on the way and so did the signs that it was a baby in distress.  The decision was made to proceed with a cesarean delivery.  A nurse anesthetist began the epidural.  Almost immediately I felt a strange, intolerable heaviness from my lower back to my toes.  I focused all of my energy on holding my body together.  Tingling and discomfort moved up my spine, through my neck, and to the back of my head. 

In the delivery room I struggled to maintain consciousness.  My mind began to register that something was terribly wrong.  “I should care about this but I can’t,” I thought.  It was like someone had thrown a switch in my head that separated my emotions from the reality of the emergency taking place.  I was more apathetic observer than participant.

At 3:12 PM my daughter, Emily, was born.  She was wrapped in a blanket and handed to her father who turned Emily’s tiny, red face toward me as the staff whisked both father and daughter from the room.  The doctors finished their work.  My eyes next opened somewhere in a hospital corridor, and then I was out again.  The next moment of awareness came as a young nurse approached my bed in the recovery room.  I could see her face coming closer.  “Something is wrong with me,” I said.  “I’m all wet.”

The nurse lifted my covers.  I heard her cry out, “Oh, my God!” and I faded again.  When next I came to consciousness my obstetrician was standing at my bedside yelling, “Where’s the father?!”  Fourteen pairs of legs surrounded my bed, each connected to a pair of hands working on some separate part of my body.  Blood was pouring out of me and onto the cart, dripping down to form a puddle on the floor.

“Fifty-over- thirty,” a woman’s voice called out my blood pressure.  I was shaking with cold.  In his desperate haste to get blood into me, the young technician preparing the transfusion had by-passed the blood warmer.  “This is how dead feels,” I said to myself.  “I am going to die,” became my last terrified thought, and then a sweeping sensation lifted me backwards off the bed. I transcended the room completely oblivious to the lifesaving efforts and drama being played out on the bed below.

My entire life passed before me--not like the play of a videotape on fast forward as I had always imagined, but an overwhelming sense of my entire life presented in the capsule of a nanosecond.  I felt comforted, but the comfort did not last.  A vision followed:  my baby daughter, no longer a newborn, looking straight over her daddy’s shoulder and into my eyes as her father carried her away from me.  The depth of sorrow her eyes conveyed was unbearable. I prayed: “Please, God.  I have to make it back.  She cannot grow up in that kind of sorrow.”  In answer, a commanding presence, not really a voice or an image, pressed me:  “Choose!”

The rest of that very long day is recorded in my memory as a series of snapshots taken in brief moments of consciousness:  procedure rooms, doctors behind glass walls, strange other voices, my own voice screaming in pain.  The next day was not much better as I came to consciousness in the intensive care unit not sure if I would live.

My husband went between the hospital nursery and the ICU bringing instant Polaroid snapshots of our daughter.  Each time a new photo was taped to my bedrail, my husband gave me an update on the babies leaving the nursery for the neonatal intensive care unit at the nearby children’s hospital.  Despite my confused and agitated state, I thanked God that it was me and not my child struggling for life.

After a couple of days in intensive care, I was moved to a regular post-partum room.  Still tied to multiple IVs, I was a virtual prisoner of tubes.  In addition to being extremely weak, I could barely open my eyes or flex my fingers due to swelling from the copious amounts of life-saving fluid I had received.  As soon as I was settled into my bed, a nurse appeared with my daughter in her arms.  When she placed Emily into my lap, I immediately noticed two large red marks—one on the center of Emily’s forehead and the other at the nape of her neck.  “Angel kisses,” the nurse stated as she reassured me that these marks were innocent and would likely fade in time.

Our room soon filled with the balloons, flowers, and cards that had been waiting for my step-down from the ICU.  So many prayers and good wishes!  I received multiple copies of one particular greeting card.  Each copy came from someone different and unknown to the others.  The message:  “For His angels will watch over you and guard you in all your ways” (Psalm 91:11).  That psalm became my mantra in the following days and months of recovery, an antidote to fear and discouragement.

I have faced many hard times since Labor Day 1990, but none so terrifying.  In each instance it seems a guardian angel has been nearby continuing to watch over me.  And the baby whose sorrow saved me is now an exceptional young woman of great competence and deep goodness.  Others tell me so.  Of course, I know this.  She is the gift of an angel with the kisses to prove it.

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