Deliver Me

In 1996 I wanted kids. Several. Immediately. After one miscarriage I had not been able to get pregnant, and was told that with the mild bleeding disorder that ran through my family I had a high chance of not being able to carry a child. All my friends were getting pregnant and giving birth to pretty, healthy babies with ease. My fury with God, who I had, along with my husband, committed to serve in an inner city intentional community, was ruining my life.

While my friends were having baby showers, I was at Cook County Hospital getting my tubes cleared.

Thanks a lot, God.

My religious commitment only ran so deep. I guess I felt He owed me, after all the things I had given up, mostly things that were bad for me, like my crazy family and getting high with strange men in trailer parks. Or I felt like He owed me because I thrown myself into working with the homeless, particularly elderly homeless, with a fervor, seeing myself as selfless, but looking back I guess frantic activity was the best way of not thinking about stuff that made me want to get high in trailer parks, like my family.

Over a decade of being a Christian , and this was it for me as far as personal growth.

So, the day I took a pregnancy test to make sure it was safe to take yet another round of hormones that made me want burn down the public library, and there were two lines, I was thrown. I called our doctor, a very attentive guy with a ponytail who had been amazingly patient with my threats and demands. (At one point he put his hand on my husband’s shoulder and gave him a look of sympathy. This offended me so much I paged him repeatedly at 3 a.m. the following morning and punched in a made up number.)

“Well,” he said,” now that you are pregnant, we have to keep you that way.”

And so it began. Nine months of bed rest, vomiting, bleeding, scares, and finally the docs just put me in the hospital for the duration.

It is hard to describe what Cook County was like in the nineties. Suffice it to say I was Dr. Chronopoulos’ only patient that was not an inmate in Cook County Jail. The other ladies on my floor were either homeless or from rehab. Actually, that did not bother me as much as the endless medical students and doctors coming in to prod me and talk about me like I was a show on the Discovery Channel. I had three weeks to go and I was not, as they say,

a happy mommy.

The ladies there helped me pass the time by inviting me to watch slasher films and crank call poor Dr. Chronopoulos, who was very handsome and was so nice he gave all his patients his home pager. We would take turns waddling down to the pay phone and paging him and when he would call back everyone would cat call him from the lounge. He always returned his pages, though, and he never got mad.

His best friend, another resident of Greek descent with equally good looks and a very nice disposition would come up to see me on the floor. I liked Dr. Michael but it was hard not to make cynical cracks about fraternities and trust funds when he and Dr. Chronopoulos were around. The truth was, Cook County was the place to do your residency, and you only got in if you were good. They were so kind to me. I think they knew I was scared.

Finally, thank God, my water broke. No turning back. I was so overdue I looked like a Volkswagen and I felt positively postal. Dr. Chronopoulos showed up in the wee hours of the morning to deliver my baby, kindly ignoring the threats coming from my spinning head and working with my absolute refusal to push. And my baby was out. I held out my arms, but a lot of people were in the room and they were all working on him. A boy. The room was silent.

Dr. Chronopoulos jumped up on the table and started shoving his fist into my belly. I protested but he told me to be quiet and do what he said. Apparently I was hemorrhaging. And I had not heard a single sound from across the room.

 Later that night, back on the ward, the nurse woke me up to take my vitals. “How is my baby?” I asked, and she patted my shoulder. “Just another opportunity for God to do a miracle,” she said.

Yeah, I thought. Please God. Just this one more thing. A miracle. My belly felt like wading pool at the end of the summer, deflated and sad, and there was no baby,

He had been taken to the NICU across the street.

No baby.

The next day Don and Dr. Chronopoulos showed up with a wheelchair. Let’s go, they said, and I put my pillow over my head and sang “Guantanamaro”, pretending I was at Burger King.

“Rebecca,” said Dr. Chronopoulos in my ear. “Let’s go see your baby.”

I let myself be bundled into the chair and pushed through the massive underground tunnels that connect the buildings of the County Medical complex. When we arrived at the NICU I looked at my husband. “I can’t,” I said. I was so scared to see my baby; afraid he would be in pain, afraid to love someone who would die. I just couldn’t.

“Is he hooked up to tubes?” I asked. The NICU doc who had joined us laughed. “He was, but he pulled the vent tube out and started breathing on his own.”

“Really?” All the doctors were standing around, smiling.

“Really,” said my husband. And I got up, and walked over to the isolette, and there he was, looking so peaceful, so wise, like he knew the answers to all the things that troubled my heart, and we pressed out faces against the plastic, my husband and I, and we named him Sage.

 Dr. Chronopoulos gets a picture of Sage every year, and so does Dr. Michael. Dr. Michael has a private practice out in the suburbs and he delivered my next two babies. He has threatened to leave the country if I get pregnant again.

Dr. Chronopoulos works at a big hospital in the suburbs, with a successful private practice, and I hear his patients love him, and that he has children of his own. I hope he is enjoying fatherhood, and that his answering service weeds out all the crazies who try to call him at three a.m. for absolutely no good reason at all.

 Happy Birthday Sage.

I came alive the day you were born.