Finally, after several weeks, I was implanted, and after that I had to go home and lie down with my feet up for two weeks before I could find out if I was pregnant. There were no guarantees, and I knew many women went through fertility treatments for years without success. Those few days after I was implanted were agonizing. Not surprisingly, I had another little talk with God.
“If You’re real,” I said, “then I will be pregnant.”
Just one day shy of two weeks, I couldn’t wait any longer. They wanted me to go to the clinic to take the pregnancy test, so they could be there to counsel me if it was negative. But I just couldn’t delay it another second. I got a home pregnancy test and locked myself in the bathroom. I looked at the strip and waited for a symbol to emerge.
And then it did—a small, simple plus sign.
I called my fertility doctor and asked if a positive result on a pregnancy test could be wrong. He told me there were no false positives, only false negatives. That was it, then—I was pregnant.
I was pregnant!
A bit later Virgil found me in the living room, and casually I told him, “Oh, we’re pregnant”—as if I were talking about a bag of groceries I’d left on the counter. I have this thing where I sort of shut down when I get too excited—I guess it’s some kind of defense mechanism. There are plenty of times when I lose my cool, but other times, when you might expect me to be jumping out of my skin, I’m completely calm and collected, in a world of my own. This, strangely, was one of those times. Virgil, on the other hand, lost it. He hugged me and kissed me and told me he loved me and said, “I’m so, so happy.”
A few days later I talked to God again.
“If it’s twins,” I said, “then I’ll know You’re real.”
AFTER A BLOOD test confirmed I was pregnant, we went in for an ultrasound. The nurse tilted the monitor so we could get a better look at the miracle inside me. After a minute or two, she spotted something and said, “Okay, there’s your baby.” My heart sank for a moment, but then I was grateful that at least one of the embryos had made it. And then the nurse said, “Wait—there’s baby number two.” I covered my face with my hands and started crying.
Virgil looked at the nurse and said, “Okay, you can stop counting now.”
The next bargain I made with God was about the gender of my babies. “If it’s a boy and a girl, then I will know You’re real.” At fifteen weeks, an ultrasound showed I was having a boy and a girl. Incredibly, my bargaining with God wasn’t over. “If one has green eyes and the other has blue eyes, then I’ll know You’re real.” I know, ridiculous, right? Somewhere along the line, I even asked God to help me find an affordable van with low miles and a DVD player for the kids. The first car dealer told me we would never find one that met our price. At the second lot, we found it.
“Come on, Virgil, that’s just a coincidence,” I said. “People get deals on cars all the time.”
“God is answering your prayers, and you still don’t believe it’s Him,” Virgil said.
When I told a friend of mine how receptive God seemed to be to my prayers, she said, “Would you mind asking God for a couple of things for me? ’Cause I’ve never seen anyone ask for stuff and get it like you do.”
And still, what I wanted most of all I didn’t have. What I wanted most of all was to believe.
And then, when I was just twenty-five weeks along, I felt a sudden, blinding burst of pain in my stomach.
VIRGIL RUSHED ME to the doctor, who told us my body was trying to go into labor. He gave me a shot of terbutaline to stop my contractions. It did the trick, and the doctor prescribed bed rest and sent us home. For the next month I lay around, caught up on all my TV shows, and watched my tiny babies move around in my tummy. Everything was fine, until the day Virgil started retiling the kitchen floor. Before he started he asked, “Honey, are you sure you’re okay? This is going to take a while.” I assured him I was fine and told him to get to work. He slipped on his kneepads and began digging up grout.
Well, no sooner had he flipped his first tile than I said, “Uh, I think I need to go to the hospital.” I’d been fighting off mild cramps earlier, but they just got stronger and more frequent, until one of them felt like I’d been kicked by a soccer player. “Crystal, I just started tiling!” said Virgil, but he didn’t waste another second getting me to the hospital.
The doctors monitored me for a while, then let me go home again. But that very night, while Virgil was at Walmart picking up some tiling materials, I collapsed in the bathroom with the worst pain I’ve ever experienced. This didn’t feel like a cramp or a contraction—this felt like something was seriously wrong. I called Virgil, and he raced home and drove us to the emergency room at close to 100 miles per hour. In the ER one of my waters broke. I was only twenty-nine weeks along.
My doctor called for an ambulance and sent us to the Oklahoma University Medical Center in Oklahoma City. Virgil couldn’t ride in the ambulance with me, so he followed closely in the new Uplander van I’d prayed for. The pain was getting worse, and the paramedic sitting beside me in the ambulance kept talking to me in a soft, low voice to try to keep me calm.
“All I need is something for the pain,” I told him. “Please give me something for the pain.”
“I’m sorry. We don’t have any pain meds in the ambulance,” he said.
“What kind of ambulance doesn’t have something for pain?!” I screamed.
The ride to Oklahoma City was endless. We hit road construction a couple of times and had to be detoured. Then we took a wrong turn somewhere. At one point I remember yelling, “I’m going to have these babies right here!” The ambulance guys were sweet and kept assuring me I was okay. “How many babies have you delivered,” I yelled out, “because you’re going to deliver mine.” The paramedic closest to me said, “I helped deliver one baby.”
“None,” said the driver, “cause I drive fast.”
Still, traffic is traffic, and we were still a ways from the hospital. The pain cascading through my body was only getting worse. I heard my cell phone ring, and it was Virgil, calling from the van behind us. He told me he loved me and that everything was going to be okay. I wished I could believe him, but I knew something was terribly wrong with me.
Then my cell phone rang again. With the pain ripping away at my insides, I managed a faint hello. It was a friend of mine calling to chat.
“You’re not going to believe the day I’m having,” she said.
For some reason, I listened to her tell me about her day. Maybe I was shutting down, like I do in moments of emotional crisis. I think she got a parking ticket, or maybe her dry cleaning was lost. After a few minutes I finally said, “Okay, well, I’m in an ambulance, so I gotta go.”
We finally made it to the hospital and in to see a doctor. He immediately put me on a magnesium drip to slow down the contractions. I was dilated only one centimeter, not the ten I needed to be to deliver my babies. The doctor said he wanted to keep me in the hospital for at least six weeks, so I could reach the thirty-five-week mark. That meant Virgil would have to take time off from work, but what else could we do? I got my mother to watch the children, and we settled in for the long haul.
Yet no matter what the doctors did, the pain just wouldn’t go away. It only got more and more intense. I kept telling everyone, “Something is wrong, something is wrong,” but the doctors kept saying it was just premature labor. It got to the point where after every single contraction I’d scream at the top of my lungs. I remember Virgil’s utter frustration and him laying his head on my stomach one night and just weeping. He kept badgering the doctors to find out what was wrong and so did I, but nothing anyone did made the pain go away.
Finally, one of the contractions was so horrible, I screamed until I couldn’t scream anymore. My mother, who was visiting, watched the color drain from my face. Then she looked at the floor beneath my bed.
It was covered in blood.
Nurses and doctors scrambled into the room.
Someone yelled a Code something. I saw Virgil slipping on scrubs before they wheeled me out of the room. I remember hearing someone say, “Knock her out,” and I remember the mask coming down on my face, and then I don’t remember anything else.
The next thing I knew, I was back in my hospital room, and Virgil was standing over me. I was groggy and confused, and it took me a moment to realize I didn’t know if my babies had made it or not. I looked at Virgil’s face for any sign of grief or panic. I couldn’t bring myself to ask the question.
“Everything is okay,” Virgil said. “The babies are here. They’re really little, but they’re here.”
THERE HAD BEEN something wrong with me after all. The pain I felt wasn’t only contractions. I’d had a placental abruption, which meant the placental lining was ripping away from my uterus. The doctors figured they had plenty of time before I actually delivered, because I was still dilated only two centimeters when they checked. But I went from two to ten in under an hour, and those little babies were coming. Doctors panicked when they couldn’t pick up one of the fetuses’ heartbeats on a monitor and rushed me into surgery. The babies were delivered by cesarian section.
When Virgil said they were little, he wasn’t kidding. The boy, who we named Micah, was only three pounds, and the girl, Willow, was just two pounds. When babies are born, they get an Apgar score, which gives you an idea of their health and vitality on a scale of zero to ten—with zero being all but dead. Willow was given a six. Micah got a one.
The curse of my family: our babies come out fragile.
They put our babies in separate incubators in the neonatal intensive care unit, or the NICU. It was only two babies per room, and they had a round-the-clock nurse. The second night they were there, we heard a loud siren go off in the hospital. Virgil and I looked at each other; we knew what the siren meant. It was a tornado warning. Tornados come out of nowhere in Oklahoma, and sometimes you have only a few minutes to find a safe place. We could hear the rain begin to crash against the windows. We had no idea what the hospital’s tornado plans were, so we rushed to the NICU. The babies there were among the most vulnerable patients in the whole hospital, so the policy was not to move them unless it was absolutely necessary.
But then the sound of the rain outside grew louder, and all of a sudden water began leaking from the ceiling right onto Willow’s incubator. Six nurses rushed in, frantically unplugged the incubators, and moved them to a drier spot. “This has never happened before,” one of the nurses told us, and Virgil and I looked at each other and for some reason started to laugh. Like I said, we do that a lot in my family—laugh instead of cry. Our tiny twins were vulnerable enough without a tornado thrown into the mix. And yet here it was, raining inside the NICU. What else could we do besides laugh? Eventually the tornado moved on, the rain stopped, and the NICU went back to normal.
The very first time I laid eyes on the twins was a moment I’ll never forget. It was a mixture of joy and horror at how small and fragile they were. My twins weren’t any bigger than a flip-flop, and yet they were each hooked up to a million tubes and wires. They were so tiny, the smallest diapers available for preemies were still too big for them, and the diapers had to be rolled up and doubled over so they wouldn’t swallow the twins whole. Both Micah and Willow had these minuscule blood pressure cuffs around their tiny wrists—cuffs so small they might not even fit around my pinky. Worst of all, the twins showed no signs of life. They didn’t cry or wiggle or move their hands or legs at all. Their eyes never opened, and they didn’t make a sound. We weren’t allowed to hold them, but we could put our hands through a tube into the incubator and touch them that way. A nurse told us, “Just touch, don’t rub, because if you rub you could rip their skin off.”
The next few days were a nightmare. I begged the doctors and nurses to give us a prognosis, but no one would tell us anything concrete. I was looking for any little scrap of hope, but hospital staffers were careful to give us none. We heard things like, “We can’t predict” and “It’s too early to say” over and over again. Specialists came in and out, and still we had no answers. And so we looked for solace in even the tiniest sign of progress. “The first twenty-four hours are an important hurdle,” one doctor told us, and we found great comfort in the fact that our twins made it to day two. A nurse assured us she’d seen even smaller babies in the NICU, and that made me feel a little better, even though I couldn’t imagine babies coming any smaller than mine.
The area around the NICU became the center of our world. I still hadn’t fully recovered from the pregnancy, so it was important for me to get rest. Still, I tried to be in and around the NICU as much as possible. Virgil and I occasionally snuck out to shower and grab a few hours’ sleep in my brother’s home in Oklahoma City where we were staying, but for the most part, we set up camp in the NICU. We weren’t the only anxious parents there, and we got to know some other people who were also going through this ordeal. We’d see parents and relatives in the waiting room rubbing their tired eyes just like us, and we’d watch them get their scrubs on so they could go in and see their children.
Sometime during our second week, we saw a whole family go in together. We knew that if more than two people were going in to see a baby at once, it meant the baby was dying. They were crying and hugging each other, and I burst into tears just watching them make the short, sad shuffle into the room to say good-bye.
And that’s when it hit me, right there in the NICU—I am waiting my turn.
The thought filled me with grief and sorrow, but I couldn’t banish it from my brain. JP’s accident had not been my punishment. No, this was to be my punishment. How long would it be before I, too, was pulling on my scrubs and shuffling in with my weeping family to say good-bye to my children? A day? Two days? A week?
And in that moment, ironically, my belief in God was stronger than it had ever been. Finally He seemed real to me—finally I believed. Yes, God exists, I thought. And He is a punishing God.
Around that time, both Virgil and I stopped praying for the twins to survive. In the early days, we both prayed constantly: Virgil in his quiet way and me in my unsure way. But then, we both stopped, for very different reasons. Virgil stopped because he decided to turn the whole situation over to God. “I give this all to You,” he told God around the second week. “Thy will be done.”
Me? I stopped because I was tired of my conversations with God. At first I’d begged Him to spare my babies, but before long I resorted to threats. “If You take one of my babies, I will hate You forever,” I said. “I will never, ever speak to You again.” And then, after I had my realization in the NICU, the threats seemed pointless to me. God was going to do what God was going to do.
FOR THE FIRST twelve days we didn’t get to hold Micah and Willow. We could reach into the incubators and help change their diapers or swap out their bedding, but that was it. Sometimes they barely seemed alive in their sterile incubators: no smiles, no sounds, nothing. Just two pale, tiny creatures, clinging to life.
Then, on day thirteen, a nurse came into the NICU and said, “Okay, are you ready for kangaroo time?”
The nurse explained the babies were strong enough for a little kangaroo care. That’s when preemies are put on their mother or father’s chest, skin to skin, for an hour or two. It’s meant to give the child a sense of warmth and closeness with the parent, which is thought to help the baby but which definitely helps the parent. Neither Virgil nor I were expecting it, and we were happily shocked.
We sat in reclining chairs and waited for the nurse to bring the twins over. First she laid Micah on Virgil’s chest. Then she took Willow out of her incubator and brought her to me. Just before she laid her on me, I panicked.
“I can’t do it,” I said. “She’s too small. Please, I can’t do it.”
“It’s okay,” the nurse said. “Just give it a try.”
She laid this little wisp of a thing on my upper chest, close to my neck. I gently put a hand on her tiny back—the firs
t time I ever held my daughter skin to skin. I couldn’t believe I was finally holding one of my babies, and I wiped tears off my face so they wouldn’t fall on Willow. I held her for two hours like that, watching her body rise and fall with my every breath. She didn’t do much besides sleep and maybe twitch here and there, but that was okay with me. I had her now, and during kangaroo time the terrible fear in my gut subsided.
It’s true Willow didn’t do much while I held her; she never even fully opened her eyes. But at one point, she did open them a teeny bit. And when she did, I took a quick look at her eyes; I did the same with Micah when I held him later that day.
And that’s how I discovered that Willow had green eyes and Micah’s eyes were blue.
THE QUESTION
IN HEAVEN, ALONGSIDE GOD, ALL THE QUESTIONS I HAD for Him no longer needed answers. How could He abide evil in this world? Why was He such a punishing God? In His presence, I knew in an instant that God’s plan for us is perfect, even when bad things happen and we don’t understand why.
But I did have one question I felt compelled to ask, and as soon as I found myself in God’s presence, I asked it: Why didn’t I do more for You?
It wasn’t a question as we know it; it was something that passed between us in that effortless, instant way. The same ease and fullness of communication I experienced with my angels was there with God, too. And because of that channel connecting us and allowing things to pass between us—and infusing me with more and more and more of His love—I felt humbled, and I felt compelled to address this shortcoming from my time on Earth. And I didn’t just ask the question, like I might ask someone for the time—no, this was more of a profound and absolute surrendering of myself, a wrenching and overpowering admission of inadequacy. As if I were crying and throwing myself at His feet and pleading, with every fiber of my being, “Why? Why? Why didn’t I do more for You? Why didn’t I accomplish more in Your name? Why didn’t I talk more about You? Why didn’t I do what You asked me to do?”
Waking Up in Heaven: A True Story of Brokenness, Heaven, and Life Again Page 14