My husband is currently taking an english class and had to write about a memory. He wrote this paper and then I went back and edited it for him, adding a few details and rearranging things where they flowed a little better. Either way, this is his memory and I was so touched by reading it. I thought you might be too.
A Reflection by Jeremy Ovenshire
I was short of breath, scared, nervous, and trembling. My wife and I had at this point been separated for the first time in four days. “Now if you don’t feel good, don’t hesitate to sit on the floor’ they told me. This did nothing to reassure my feelings.
The bench where I sat could have been pulled from beneath me and I would have never known. The sweat beaded along my forehead and palms and as the desk nurse spoke to me, I gave her the traditional polite smile and nod, pretending to have known what she had said. The clock on the wall ticked and as it did, it seemed like days passed by, everything in my surrounding world running together. A voice brought me back to the present; “Mr. Ovenshire, we’re ready for you now.” I didn’t move. I heard the voice again and without volunteering my muscles, I started moving. Here we go.
They led me into a room that was covered in blue. It seemed so cold, like a walk-in freezer. When I think back on it now, I’m sure it wasn’t quite that cold but anything would seem that cold when a cold sweat had slowly began covering your body. I sat down and the only things that didn’t blur in front of my eyes were my wife and the blue curtain that covered her from the neck down. It had been such a long week and although I was sitting here, knowing that it was happening, it was hard to believe that the moment had finally come.
My wife had called me four days prior while I was at work, telling me that I would need to leave early because her doctor had instructed her that she was to go straight to the hospital. She was eight months pregnant with our first child and during her pregnancy she had developed a gallbladder dysfunction that caused her to itch severely. As miserable as it was for her, the more severe effect was an increased chance of miscarriage during the last three weeks of pregnancy. Needless to say, I was scared shitless.
The first night in the hospital room was unnerving. They gave my wife the first of two steroid shots to help assure that our child’s lungs would be fully developed, explained what would be happening in the next couple of days and mostly just monitored the baby. The second day was easy and we mostly just sat around and rested, although truthfully, I was very close to coming undone.
The third morning they started inducing my wife’s labor. Sixteen hours later she was having contractions but had no signs of progress so they let her eat and sleep and restarted the induction again this morning. She labored for most of the day, the contractions coming hard and fast. At 7:30 p.m. the nurse came into the room, explaining that the doctor found it best to follow through at this point with a c-section. As disappointed as it was, we were both okay with that at this point. Like I said, it had been a long week.
Now it seemed like voices were coming from everywhere, some talking to my wife and others talking to me, but mostly they were just talking to one another. I slowly started to tune them in one by one, like a radio dial turning in my fogged head. It didn’t take me long to realize that they weren’t talking about things of great importance. One mentioned the recent vacation they took and another talked about what she had had for lunch. This upset me. This wasn’t social time to me, this was serious time and I wanted them to be serious!
As the time passed, I was becoming very close to saying something about how I didn’t appreciate the lack of care they were showing for my wife, myself and my child when the doctor in charge started talking about his remote control.
“I got this awesome remote for my television last week,” he said.
“Oh yeah?” one of the nurses replied.
“Yeah, I paid over four hundred dollars for it but you wouldn’t believe the things it does!”
I had had it now. As I opened my mouth to blurt out something that probably would have been completely ridiculous and uncalled for, I heard the faint cry of a baby. Everything up to that point in my life completely stopped and although it’s apparently not possible, I’m sure that time stood still. The lack of concern that I was upset about twenty seconds earlier was completely forgotten and I looked over at my wife and started to cry.
I heard them announce that it was a boy and then called the time at 8:33 p.m. The rest of the night from there was mostly a blur. All of the obvious things happened; they measured and weighed him and I cut the umbilical cord. They cleaned him up and cleaned out his airways and as they sewed my wife back together they finally handed him to me. As I looked down at this small child, swaddled in those hospital pink and blue blankets, I just couldn’t believe that he was mine. Six months later I still look at him from time to time with disbelief that this small miracle is here because of me. I’ve heard people say that you don’t know what love is until you have a child and from my personal experience, there is so much truth in those words.
