Love, Medicine and Miracles by Bernie S. Siegel

Author:Bernie S. Siegel
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 1986-02-23T16:00:00+00:00

The doctors poke around, look at my x-rays, let me out into the world again. I make it into spring, into May.

We try an induction the last week in May. It goes on for 10 hours, hurts a lot, and accomplishes nothing. They, the ones not in the bed, want to try again tomorrow. Baby and I want to go home. We go, and I tell myself that three or four more weeks won’t kill me! I am happy because, going full term, I can deliver with the midwives. Perhaps the birth, at least, will be beautiful even if the pregnancy was hell.

My college roommate had a baby on June 13, and I guess that I will, too. With amniotic fluid beginning to leak, I go to the hospital to a lovely room with plants and a big double bed. My midwife is good in all ways. The contractions are close and getting stronger, and I begin to lose the fear all women have. I am handling this well. I’m going to enjoy it.

She breaks the bag, and the bed and I are drenched. She says I’m six centimeters, but I watch her face change. I’m pushing the cord out before the baby. I know immediately that he could die—fast. She holds the baby’s head off the cord, pushes him up as I push him down, and I now know what the word agony means. As we race to surgery, I hear them say that the baby’s pulse rate is 60.

Maybe a C-section was a good idea. They spend another hour looking at my insides. They find nothing but insides, and when my husband tells me, I feel a moment of great relief.

The baby is an 8-pound, 1/2-ounce, 21-inch baby boy named Nathan Scott. He is very cute, with brown hair, long dark eyelashes—and a large ventricular septal defect, known among the lucky uninitiated as a heart murmur or hole-in-the-heart. It is congenital. It is serious. It will probably need surgery. It might kill him. And, worst of all for me, it means constant trips to a hospital I hate, trips that leave me exhausted and depressed for days. It means letting my baby be cut up, just like me, for his own good.

Nathan is in congestive heart failure for the first six months of his life. He takes digitalis twice a day. He sweats when he eats. His little bony chest rises and falls much too fast, and his liver and heart are enlarged. He goes into the hospital for awhile. I stay with him, and it causes me nearly to break. His original 50-percent chance of closure drops to 25 percent.

But then, sometime in his seventh month, he begins to improve. (I like to think it was during one of those moments when I was whispering in his little ear, “Nathan, you are going to get well!”)

The doctors are surprised. The EKGs improve. He gains weight. His breathing slows and the liquid swelling leaves his liver.

In May 1979 Nate has his first normal EKG, a better event than a first birthday.

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