Gonna name ‘er Rita?
Nine years ago today, my family and I woke up in the “Green Team” waiting area of BJACH (Bayne Jones Army Community Hospital) at Fort Polk. We’d slept on an air mattress the doctor gave us the night before.
You see, my wife was pregnant with our youngest daughter, a week overdue, actually, and Hurricane Rita was knocking on Louisiana’s door. At the last minute, the BJACH doctors had asked us to camp out at the hospital instead of evacuating. They didn’t like the idea of my wife traveling … we didn’t either.
We deflated the air mattress and grabbed some cafeteria food. Groggy. Sleep was elusive. Our two toddlers played with some toys they’d brought. My parents held down the fort at my house since they’d evacuated our way from the coast of Texas.
We snuck peeks through the windows of the hospital, along with a few other patients, while Rita ripped through the area. And we waited. I never felt unsafe. The hospital was big, and solid, and even though mother nature could have slapped us around, she didn’t. It was a strange day, but finally in the late afternoon, we were cleared to drive home.
Tree branches and power lines littered the roads, but fortunately, the route to our house was relatively clear. We stopped at the DeRidder hospital, which was nearby, and discovered they were open and running on generator power. After all, we still had a small visitor coming.
My parents greeted us and we found our property had only sustained minor fence damage and a few missing shingles. We settled into a powerless, waterless night, thankful for our good luck.
In the early morning hours, as we lay in puddles of sweat, my wife started having contractions. Twenty four hours earlier we had been sleeping in a hospital, praying for contractions since we were already there, but no way, that’d be too easy. No contractions in sight then.
My parents watched the bigger kids while we drove off to the hospital.
A few hours later on September 25th, Jacqueline was born. I like to tell her (and Jax likes to hear) how she was our baby that was “born clean.” Unlike most babies in the world, maybe all babies, Jackie’s body was completely clean immediately after delivery. No trace of the stuff that covers newborns straight from the womb.
There were no flowers or hot meals, and my kids and I took cold showers in my wife’s hospital room since they had running water and our house did not. But, life was perfect. My third child was healthy, born on a Sunday morning like her two siblings.
The next day my wife and I were pushing our newborn through the hospital in one of those little clear baby trays when this bearded guy with a giant smile on his face asked us, “You gonna name ‘er Rita?”
We smiled. No. She was already a Jacqueline. And this was her story.
Happy Birthday Eve to the baby of our house–we love you, Jax!
