My stomach clenched for the first time as the reading on the fetal heartbeat monitor dropped by half. I winced as our doctor let go of the forceps and shook his head in frustration. None of this was in our birth plan. I squeezed my barely conscious wife’s hand harder, tightening instinctively with the stress. The doctor instructed the medical team to prepare for an emergency c-section as I was unceremoniously escorted out of the operating room back into the hallway.
A nurse deposited me into a stray desk chair before rushing off to attend to my wife and unborn child. I watched nurses sprint into and out of the surgery, wondering each time if this meant something had gone wrong. The otherwise silent hallway, populated by a handful of bored hospital staff, mocked me: “There are emergencies here every day. Yours is nothing special”.
All the energy I had focused into supporting my wife poured into thinking about what might happen. I knew that c-sections are statistically very safe, but also that a low heartbeat indicates distress — danger — in the baby. The small but very real possibility that I might lose my wife, our daughter, or both, invaded my imagination and refused to let go. I know now what it means when people say “the walls closed in around me”. There came a clear sense of the world shrinking, of a future where I was separated from everyone else by some numbed out void growing within me, of conversations and laughter muted forever.
I alternated between frantically Googling for a comforting statistic and praying, trying to find a toehold of hope. Then, from out of nowhere, a scene from Anatomy of a Fall popped into my head. This is a quote:
Earlier, the doctor called it a tragic situation. I very quickly refused to see it that way. I never saw Daniel as handicapped. I wanted to protect him from that perception. As soon as you pigeonhole a child that way, you condemn him to not imagining his life as his own; whereas in fact he should feel it’s the best life because it’s his own.
- Sandra, Anatomy of a Fall (2023)
In the movie, it’s a sharp contrast to Sandra’s husband, who responds to their child’s handicap by giving up on life. Absurd as this is, these fake characters in a fictional story spoke directly to me: I could choose my response. Yes, something terrible might occur. Yes, it might break me. Yes, it might leave lasting damage. But I could refuse to stay broken if I ended up a widowed father or a childless husband. The shrinking force burst, and I re-engaged with reality.
The anxiety did not subside until the moment I re-entered the operating room, the same moment that they laid my healthy, crying baby girl into a warmed bassinet. But the despair, that numbing void, it never consumed me, and I stayed ready to meet that moment. I rushed to her side and calmed her with my voice as the doctors finished suturing her mother. Who can know how important it was for her, but it means everything to me that my daughter didn’t spend her first moments in this world alone. I might have missed that chance, wallowing in the hallway, if I hadn’t found some resolve.
Within my mind, the birth of my daughter played out as a series of vignettes. What started as a heartwarming family origin story morphed into a tense medical drama. I briefly assumed the role of a despondent man — a ghost wandering lamely through a broken life. And then a German mother from a indie film came to my side and pushed me out of my own head. The last chapter of that night was objectively boring: two deliriously tired parents struggling to feed their newborn in a hospital room. But it was real, and it was exhilarating, and I was fully present.
Explosions in a bad-yet-fun action movie and plot twists in a beach read are like empty calories. But art, at its best, is a window that expands our view of life. Every once in a while, if we’re lucky, we find something that gives us joy or strength or an empathetic taste of pain that we wouldn’t otherwise experience. And it nourishes us. I see the joy in my daughter’s eyes as she becomes more and more fascinated by the world around her, and I can’t help but wonder, what terrible and beautiful stories will she tell herself?