Things like the Truth
Page 23
This wasn’t about me in any way. This was Ellen and Sean and Sunny’s date, their production, their magnificence.
In a short time Dr. Ruhe came in and I met and thanked her and she turned to Ellen and said, “Are you ready to get into position and push that baby out?”
“Oh, yes,” Ellen said, and I stood at the back of the room and watched the amazing expertise that the RN and doctor used to position Ellen’s long legs and arms so that she could use her deep muscles to push Sunny out into the light.
It was timeless and amazing. Sean and I sat for awhile on a bench with our backs and arms pressed so tightly against each other we might have been in a rugby scrum.
Finally, at Dr. Ruhe’s urging, first I, and then he moved a little nearer and stood behind the operating table and watched as Ellen pushed and the doctor and nurse coached and praised her and the head would appear about an inch, then go back in, then reappear.
Finally, in one long series of about twenty deeply held breaths and huge efforts on Ellen’s part, the head came all the way out, face up and so quickly you couldn’t count to one the shoulders and long body and longer arms and legs. It was the most amazing thing I have ever witnessed. They handed the long beautiful baby girl to Ellen and she began to croon to her and sing her a song as old as the human race.
Such joy, such love and pleasure all over the room, such never-to-be-forgotten pleasure. As Edna St. Vincent Millay wrote, “A memory, never to be bartered against the hungry days.”
I am definitely the luckiest woman in the world and every now and then I have the luck to be in the exactly right place at the exactly right moment with the exactly right people.
So I would like to end this book with what Peter Brook called “[a] clear, accurate, precise reflection from which we cannot tear our eyes away.”
He was praising the work of William Shakespeare, but I believe you always need the bard in times of great joy or sadness.
Read on if you dare. No one will let me tell them about the dazzling biology I witnessed after Sunny Louise was safely snuggled in her mother’s arms.
The only people who can bear to hear this are women who have witnessed it or done it. Attached to the baby was a huge umbilical cord about two inches in diameter and unbelievably complicated and made of materials I’m certain no one could duplicate in a laboratory. Many blood vessels and arteries and layers of clear materials as soft as silk. Dr. Ruhe told me to touch it. It was amazing, so pliable and wildly beautiful. She pulled it out of Ellen’s body, foot after foot of it. Not at all like the small hard tubular thing I had imagined an umbilical cord to be. It should have a better name, something like miraculous life-giving creation. At the end of the long cord was the placenta, large and flat and many layered and softer than the softest thing I have ever touched, huge and heavy and not at all bloody or useless now that Sunny no longer needed it. Indwelling, you might call it, or Miraculous Creation Baby Carrier.
I didn’t want it to be thrown away or discarded. I liked it so much I wanted to keep it in the room for awhile or send to a place where scientists could recycle it into a new medicine that would cure cancer or tuberculosis or depression or meanness or refusal to understand the wonder of the world of living things.
I moved back while Dr. Ruhe carefully stitched up a place where Sunny’s head had torn a few small places in my precious granddaughter’s body. They were very careful, small stitches that were made with a material which the body will reabsorb as soon as the incredible human immune system sews itself back together with the real stuff it makes for that purpose.
What a day, what a long, wonderful, lucky day. I’m glad I waited until I was eighty years old to view this wonder. I might not have been smart enough to appreciate it when I was younger and not as open to miracles or willing to know one when I was allowed to witness it.
Hooray for Everything,
ELLEN LOUISE GILCHRIST
APRIL 25, 2015