A New Life, 21 Years Later

Today is my son’s 21st birthday. He’s a super kid; a better man than I am in many ways. I was reminded today that his entrance into this world was somewhat difficult. I’d forgotten.

I can’t believe I’d forgotten.

In a past blogging life, I’d written an article about it.

The above picture was one I took during his week-long stay in the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit. It was a lifetime ago. 21 years of life, to be exact. It was about 24 Jeffs ago. So much has changed.

But not how proud I am of this kid. That grows by the day.

So, for today’s article, I’m cheating a little. I want to share his birth story with you. The story is almost as it was when I wrote it in 2008. There were just a few edits I couldn’t help but make. Also, my wife read it and corrected some of the facts my memory had jumbled.

In the editing I also removed a slew of pictures and videos. If you’d like to see them or my first ever blog, you can do so by following this link.

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I recently posted this picture in one of my albums on Facebook. It is one of my all time favorites, and it is by far the best picture I've ever taken. A few people have commented on the picture and I figured that since there's a story with it too, I thought this might be a good time to tell it.

Joy and I have never really "decided" to get pregnant. We were thinking about it and decided to kind of let nature take its course. Nature found the course within two weeks of us deciding to give nature its freedom. I was pretty excited. Joy was a bit unsure, as she really likes to plan everything. All of the sudden, when she was pregnant, she began to realize not everything is plan-able. Like when her friend Melissa came over and found the positive pregnancy test in our next to the TV in our bedroom. Then again, maybe she didn't really "find" it- perhaps that was planned.

We had been pregnant before. In April of 1998 Joy began to wonder if she was pregnant because she had been feeling funny in a new way. She went to the doctor and found out that she was pregnant four and a half months into our marriage. I was naive and thrilled. Joy was neither. There were tears of fear. "How are we going to handle a baby," she asked me? I didn't know but I wasn't too concerned. A few days later we were in the emergency room experiencing a miscarriage. We didn't know how to feel. Joy had begun to warm up to the idea, and I had begun to look at things realistically. At any rate, we had been aware of the pregnancy for about 2 weeks when it ended. We've always wondered what that child would have been like but felt that we weren't ready for a baby at that time, so that took a little of the pain out of the loss. This time around, we were both sure of our desire to have a child.

It was April of 2002, and we were excited. We began to wonder what sex the baby was, and Joy insisted that we find out as soon as we could so she could plan for the arrival.

For some reason that escapes me today, Joy went to visit her parents in MD for a week or two. I was back in MA preparing for new student orientation at the college where I worked. She called me one night with concerning news.

"Jeff, I think it’s happening again," she said through tears.

"What's happening again," I asked?

"I'm bleeding pretty bad."

"Oh. You are? How bad?"

"Pretty bad. It's pretty steady..."

Joy was at her parents’ home in Maryland and I remember that it was pretty early in the morning when she called. I didn't know what to say. I was hundreds of miles away and just wanted to be with her. How do you hold your wife from that far away?

Joy went to see a doctor the next day. I was waiting with the phone by my side for an update. Based on how Joy was describing things, it wasn't good. I was already preparing for the worst. I was trying to decide how we would handle this. Would we have a burial? I mean, there would be remains. It was tough- painful just to consider.

When the phone call the news on the other side of the line sounded like a miracle. They still heard a heartbeat! And even more, the doctor had accidently told Joy it was a boy!

It would be the first boy in our branch of the Scott family tree. There was just my brother and me to carry on the family name, so this was a bit of a relief- to have the pressure off.

Eventually we learned a blood vessel between the uterine wall and the placenta had ruptured and caused the bleed. There was no idea how much blood Joy lost or if it had affected the baby, but the doctors seemed optimistic. The result of the bleed was a golf-ball sized blood clot. While it didn't sound pretty, it wasn't something all that uncommon. But they also said that from that point on, Joy was considered a "high risk" pregnancy. She took it easy for the next few weeks and eventually the bleeding turned to spotting and became less of a concern.

A couple of months later she began to experience preterm labor. It was October, and as much as we wanted to meet our son, now named Joshua Charles, the doctor told us it was too early to let him be born. Joy was placed on bed rest and spent some time in the hospital. When we returned home, she spent quite a bit of time in bed. Most of that time was working on the phone and on computer, but I guess technically, she was in bed.

On January 18, 2003, we went over to the home of some friends for dinner. Joy’s pregnancy-belly was rather large by that time and was due in about two weeks. While we were eating, we all joked about whether or not there was something in the roast beef that might make Joy go into labor. Apparently, there was. As we got into the car Joy looked at me and said "Jeff, I think my water just broke. Yeah, I'm sure it did!" When we got home, I called the doctor and she told us to head in to the hospital to be sure.

I'm told that it is normal for the husband to start freaking out at that point. However, this isn't what happened. It was Joy who went into an absolute frenzy. Mrs. "I have it all planned out" began to yell orders and was a little bit freaked out. I just stood there and watched. It was classic. I wanted to take it all in. I think I was even laughing at her. Eventually she took a wrong step and kicked a fireplace grate that was waiting to go down to storage. The painful strike to her shin was enough of a distraction to slow her down. As I consoled her, I pointed out how she was acting and we both had a good laugh. Off to the hospital.

The nurses at Tufts New England Medical Center confirmed that A) her water had broken, and B) I was not beating her. With these two important facts in hand, they put us into a room. The only problem was, she wasn't in labor. They gave us the choice of starting labor with pitocin or going to bed and seeing if it started naturally. We chose to try to sleep (and give time for Joy’s parents to drive up from MD). We had the TV turned on to Rocky III. At one point, a TV journalist in the movie asked Mr. T if he had any predictions for "the fight". "Pain" was his answer. (Thanks to the beauty of Youtube, I found the clip.) Joy and I both laughed because we thought that it might be an appropriate answer for us too.

 Off to sleep...or not.

With all of the anticipation we didn't really sleep all that well. Nor did Joy's labor begin. When we woke up, Joy started the meds to begin labor and we were off. I don't remember how long labor was, I only remember that it began slowly and Joy was of the mind to tough it out without any medication. She decided later that there was no way she was going to go through this without meds! The anesthesiologist came in, kicked me out, and gave Joy an epidural. I was not happy with him for kicking me out of the room. I had never heard of that before. But I left anyways.

The delivery was difficult for Joy for a few different reasons. First, she was really tired. She hadn't slept much the night before, then she had taken some nausea medicine to counteract the side-effects of the pitosin. Unfortunately, she had an allergy to the nausea meds and starting itching uncontrollably. This led to benedryl, which of course made her even more sleepy. Second, Joy could no longer feel anything due to the epidural and couldn't tell where or when to push. Third, the sweet over-night nurse end her shift and was replaced with a not-as-sweet nurse with a strong personality and no-nonsense demeanor. She was a bit more difficult to work with and kind of made Joy feel like it was her fault that the delivery was taking so long. At one point saying, “You aren’t doing it right, just forget it.” However, it was evident that this nurse was on the ball and could tell when things were taking longer than they should have. Baby Joshua eventually crowned but remained crowned for an extended period of time. This nurse then began to get visibly frustrated with the doctor (and resident, and medical student) and wondered when he was going to take the necessary steps to speed up the process. Eventually he did and Joshua was born! It was a very exciting moment for all in the room. My excitement was full of joy. The doctor's and everyone else's excitement was full of concern for the baby. I didn't even notice that Josh wasn't pink and screaming. He was whitish gray turning blue. The doctor hurried me through the cord-cutting process and rushed Joshua to the receiving table where about 6 members of the medical staff were waiting for him. They began to work feverishly to get him to breath. They did everything they could- rub-downs, little spankings, cleared his airway, and eventually a shot in the leg to get him to breath.

Joy got to hold him for about 20 seconds before they rushed him to the neonatal intensive care unit (NICU). When he was finally in the NICU, they placed him under an oxygen hood as. He began to gain strength and was screaming by the time I got up to the NICU for a short visit. It certainly wasn't the birth experience we were hoping for. Joy was a mess, and I had no clue what was going on. As far as I knew it was normal. Well, I understood that rushing a baby out of the delivery room to the NICU is not normal. But I was sure it had happened before.

It wasn’t long before Josh was acting like a healthy little baby boy. They told us that he would probably have to stay in the NICU for about 24 hours, but he was in Joy's room by that evening and we were on our way home in two days. All seemed well! I returned to work and Joy began to settle in with Josh. She took some announcement pictures to send out to our friends. These included some of the only pictures you'll ever see of Josh with a pacifier. He never really liked them.

New parents that we were, we didn’t notice that Josh was jaundiced. In our defense, we never had another baby to compare him. Also, the lighting in our apartment wasn't the best and we couldn't really tell. However, when we took him in for his first check-up with his new pediatrician, we could tell in the brighter light. We knew even before the doctor told us that we were going back to the hospital. When we got there, we were told Josh had a bilirubin level of 19. That's very high. The medical staff said that we were right on the border of blood transfusion levels. Fortunately, it never came to that.

They put this ugly mask on Joshua and placed him under some really bright, warm lights for what they call phototherapy. We were disappointed that we couldn't hold him often, and we all wanted to be the one to hold him for feedings. For obvious reasons, Joy had the opportunity to do this more than the rest of us, but we all got our turn.

There was a lot of down-time in the hospital. After all, he was simply laying there under lights. It's not like we were playing with him. So, I began to play with our camera instead. I don't have a lot of knowledge about lighting or anything like that, but the camera automatically adjusted to make up for the bright lights of the "jaundice machine." I was able to take some fantastic pictures including the one of Joy looking over her baby boy. I feel like that picture is the kind that tells a silent story. The kind of story that only the person looking at the picture knows. We could probably give that picture to a group of writers, and they'd be able to come up with some great stories about what the circumstances may have been surrounding the picture. In fact, by simply telling the actual story, I may be detracting from the picture.

The fact is, even with his high levels of jaundice, Josh was probably the healthiest baby in the NICU. There were some very sick and very little babies in that wing of the hospital. There were parents in there that were hurting much more than us. There were babies whose 5-plus month-long stay in the NICU made our little 1-week sojourn look like some sort of weird vacation. Hey, Josh was laying around getting phototherapy for crying out loud! We actually had it pretty good, and we knew it. We were fortunate, and not everybody there was as fortunate as we were. We knew that some of the little ones there were fighting for their lives, and the parents were helpless. We had the nerve to complain that we were missing the NFL playoffs. Yes, Joy too. After a week-long stay we returned home for good.

Josh has grown in every way since that time almost 12 years ago. He was able to meet his great-grandpa Nease before he passed away. He also met his great-grandma Scott and “mama,” his great-grandma Poole.

So, as you can see, Joshua has turned out just fine. He's tall for his age, very smart, has a GREAT imagination (thanks to Auntie Merritt and friends for this video), and he is a terrific big brother. His little sister, Jordan, adores him. She is however, another story for another day.