Going Fast,
I am standing in a holding room, covered from head to toe in surgical scrubs. My heart is pounding so loud that I feel its vibration would shatter my ribcage. There is a doctor in front of me, he is speaking, but I cannot hear a word he is saying. My eyes are focused on the image showing on the television behind his left shoulder.
Johnnie Cochran turns toward the screen and in my doctor’s voice, calmly says,
“If we don’t get them out now, we could lose all three”.
Working Hard For The Dream,
Scoring Goals For The Other Team,
Times Were Bad,
We Were Glad We Got Married.
Five years had passed since we had been married. We would indulge in those things that made young couples happy, going to movies, taking trips and attending gatherings with friends. But still.
The thought of raising a family had often come up. We would lie in bed and daydream of hologram children running from down the hall and jumping onto our bed, begging us to make waffles and eggs before the trip to the zoo. “A boy for you”, she would say and “girl for you” I would reply, tickling her beneath the sheets.
Most of our friends had known the joy of having children, and often invited us to share moments with their families.
Like The Way You Open Up Your Hearts To Each Other,
When You Find A Meeting Of The Minds.
Just As Well Love Was All We Ever Wanted,
It Was All We Ever Had.
“You have to make the decision now” Johnnie Cochran remarked “Every minute we waste is crucial…
Monday Night Football is like a medieval town crier roaming the streets late at night spreading the news of a late night royal birth or that the castle is about to be overtaken within the hour by the enemies to the west, and there’s not a damn thing you can do about it. I can still hear Howard Cossell breaking the news about John Lennon being shot while a game was progress. I can still hear the excitement in Don Merideth’s voice each time the Cowboys scored a touchdown. And I will always remember my wife screaming,
“Honey look!!! It has a plus sign!!!!
Further On In The Game,
Waiting Up Till The Children Came.
Place Your Bets, No Regrets, We Got Married.
We saw the doctor every two weeks and eventually it became a rotation of every other day each checkup would bring smiles and happiness. There were terms that we had never heard about, words we couldn't find in a dictionary, and an uncertainty of what lay ahead,
We were far into woods now with no turning back, The doctor was leading us to safe passage and I for one, was ready to follow him to the gates of Kathmandu if it meant things would turn out on a positive note..
Yet somewhere in between there were complications, far beyond what we expected.
“I know it’s a hard decision son”, I heard Cochran say, “but I know you’ll make the right one”
I looked into the eyes of the doctor that stood before me, and with tears unknowingly flowing, gave him permission to proceed with the operation. In an instant, I had become judge, jury and Heaven forbid, not the executioner. Within a matter of seconds, I was passing a warrant on to the most qualified person in the room, to bring one person I loved back to me safely and two strangers I had never met.
In the room next door, my wife lay on her back, consumed in mortal pain. Her vital organs were starting to shut down one by one. Her kidneys and liver were being shut down, struggling to support the life within. The doctor said that the unborn fetuses were literally “fighting “for their lives to survive, thus putting and extra strain onto the host body.
I watched as my wife body was put upon the table in the operating room. A nurse, from behind a lime green mask asked me if I wanted to wait outside. I quietly shook my head from left to right and proceed to sit on a bench at the end of the table. Holding my wife hand, she slowly drifted away into unconsciousness. I watched as the incision was made, a clean precise cut only a doctor could administer.
Monitors beeped ,heartbeats were heard , trickles of sweat ran down our faces, nurses rotated to assigned places, someone was gently patting my back.
And then it happened.
Do you remember when you thought you heard Santa Clause walking on the roof as you lay in bed on Christmas Eve? Or the day you woke up and discovered the Tooth Fairy stopped being a tight wad and left you five dollars instead of two?
The joy I experience at that moment was overwhelming. There before my eyes and ten others, was my son hanging upside down wrinkled and grey. And like Houdini, totally not satisfied with his last illusion, the doctor pulled out another son.
The world had rolled off my shoulders and was given back to Mr. Atlas...
My wife briefly saw the boys and then passed out. She had given it her all like John Henry beating his hammer to beat the steam engine. She suffered seizures thereafter and remain hospitalized for a good part of a month. The twins remained in ICU for another two months to up their weight. At three pounds each, they were determine to hang tough like their mother.
Nowadays Every Night
Flashes By At The Speed Of Light,
Living Life, Loving Wife,
We Got Married.
I Love The Things That Happen
When We Start To Discover Who We Are
It’s thirteen years later now. I don’t hear Johnnie Cochran channeling through doctors anymore. I don’t have the weight of the world on my shoulder wondering about uncertainty is to come. What I have is a wonderful wife and three kids.
Believe it or not, we went through the same thing five years later.
We Got Married
But that’s another story for another day.
We Got Married - Paul McCartney, Flowers in the Dirt MPL
