The Fighter in Me

The Fighter in Me is From the Fight Inside Him.

It was a warm day in October of 2008.  The remnants of summer were still in the foreground; green leaves still clung to the trees mixed in with the golden ones, the oranges and yellows. The summer air was still warm to the skin, making the soft breeze nostalgic to the heart, wanting summer to stay and wishing winter would take a year off.  I was in the late stages of my pregnancy, more uncomfortable than I had ever been with Braxton-Hicks contractions plaguing my daily life. We had found out a couple weeks prior that my son was breech and upon going in for a version; a manual attempt to turn him in the womb, we found out he was oddly placed inside of me and couldn’t be turned.  I was to spend the weekend on my side, trying to get him to turn on his own.  
It was Saturday, October fourth, and I awoke with horrible contractions.  My fiancé timed them and when we realized that they were only a few minutes apart, we decided to go in to get checked.  
When we arrived at the hospital, they checked me out.  The nurse told me that they scheduled a C-Section for three p.m. that day, which threw us off guard, as we were suspecting to just be sent home.  They informed me that because of my contractions, they wanted to get him out before he tried to come on his own, as he was breech and it would be a very dangerous delivery for him as well as me.  We informed the family and then spent the rest of the morning waiting for three o’clock to come.
When the time came, I was prepared for surgery, and they took my fiancé and I back to the operating room. How ominous and scary those rooms are; cold to the touch, sterile and quiet.  I tried my best to remain calm as they laid me on the cold table.  They set up the dividing screen and prepared for surgery.  My fiancé was right by my side and when they asked me if I was ready, I answered, “Yes,” my voice a silent quiver.  
All I heard next were the voices of doctors talking in their medical tongues.  I didn’t feel anything, just slight tugging and pushing on my belly.  After a long moment of intense anticipation, the doctor peeked over the curtain.
“Your son is about to be born,” he said to Dusty, my fiancé, “would you like to watch?”
Dusty nodded silently and then stood up to watch Gauge come into the world.  
I am squeamish and didn’t care to know of any details of the going on, I was trying hard enough to remain calm and keep my mind from thinking of what they were doing to my body.  Seconds later, I heard the beautiful cries of my newborn baby boy and waited anxiously for the moment he was laid on my chest and I got to kiss him hello.
Dusty sat back down with tears in his eyes, looked at me and said, “He’s beautiful.”
I stifled the tears that were threatening my eyes and waited still for my son to be brought to me.
I had seen one birth before in person but many on the television, as I got accustomed to watching the birthing shows while I was pregnant. In all of them, after the baby was born, with C-sections, they were cleaned and wrapped and then laid on the mother.  With normal births, they laid them on the mother right away, and then cleaned, wrapped and returned.
I waited for what seemed like hours for them to bring me my child.  Finally, the nurse came over with Gauge wrapped up.
“He’s having a hard time breathing,” she said in a monotonic voice.  “We are taking him to the NICU to give him some oxygen.”  She held the little baby up to my face for me to kiss him slightly and then he was taken away.
Dusty chose to go with Gauge and I had to stay so that they could finish putting me back together.  I had no idea what was going on and nothing really dawned on me yet at that point, I think because of a mixture of the medicine and the rush of just giving birth.  After I was all sewn up, they took me into recovery.
I waited in the dark room for hours while the nurses waited for me to be able to feel my feet again.  It was such a strange feeling to look down and not be able to move your legs, scary and unnerving.  The family visited me two by two and I did my best to stay focused and talk to them.  All I was really waiting for was a call from the NICU to find out how much my child weighed and how long he was.  I yearned for the normalcy of just giving birth, the fun statistics, the newborn baby at your side, the family coming in with smiles and flowers.  This had to be some sort of nightmare.  There were no statistics, no newborn baby wrapped up in my arms, no smiles from familiar faces, only sympathetic grins and words of encouragement.  
When I was finally able to feel my legs, the nurse that was catering to me knew how badly I wanted to see my child.  Unable to walk yet, she rolled the hospital bed down the long hall, towards the NICU. 
The Neonatal Intensive Care Unit was down the hall from the women’s care unit.  There was a painting of a baby giraffe that greeted you, next to the keypad to unlock the door.  The nurse scanned her ID and wheeled me in.  I got about five feet into the room and could see a crowd of nurses and doctors by where they told me my baby was.  I couldn’t see him through the crowd and had no idea what was going on.  My nurse left me to go talk to one of his nurses, then returned and began to wheel me out of the room.   
“They’re doing something to help him breathe,” she said as she reversed my bed away from my baby.  “We have to return later.”
It wasn’t until he was three hours old that I got to see him.  He was hooked up to a ventilator, a heart monitor and various other machines.  I couldn’t hold him, only look at him and weep.
The next days were the most treacherous of all the days I have lived. My fiancé and other family returned to work and I stayed at the hospital in a room by myself, down a long hallway away from my baby.  I wasn’t supposed to walk but the wheelchair wasn’t fast enough; I began walking to him the next day.
When I was all alone, checking my email one morning, the Neonatologist that had been overseeing Gauge came to me with my nurse.  She had a look of concern on her face. 
“Devon,” she said with no emotion, “it seems that Gauge is really dependent on the ventilator.  There is a chance that he won’t make it off of it.”
No words can explain the way I felt.  Her words cut into me deeper than any blade ever could.  I fell to my knees and cried, if that is even a word for what I did.  I don’t know how long I bawled for; I just know that it is the worst pain I ever felt.  
Then, something inside of me took over.  I stood up, wiped the tears away and returned to the room.  I let her tell my family the same thing that she had just told me and when she was gone, I looked to my mom and I said, “No.  He is not going to die.  He is going to live and everything will be ok.”
This fight arose in me and I wouldn’t let anyone think negatively about my son. 
Two days later he came off the ventilator.
He remained in the hospital for a month, and I had to go home at night alone without him, but he lived.  There were times that I felt hopeless, but the fighter in me would scream at me when I lost focus and I remembered I was leading him.
The day I took him home from this nightmare was the best day of my life.  He is still weak, diagnosed with Congenital Myopathy, but he lived.  These were the darkest days of my life but we lived through them and without them I wouldn’t be the woman I am today.  Without Gauge, I wouldn’t have been a fighter and without the fighter in me, Gauge would not have been.

Devon Volkel