Chapter Fifteen
I wasn’t awake for any of this. I’m reconstructing it the way I reconstruct any surgery I didn’t perform myself: from the chart, from the team, from the people who were there.
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She wrote it on a sticky note and pressed it to the anesthesiologist’s cart, where I would see it the moment I opened my eyes, because I had made someone promise.
Wife — fetal heart rate concern — OR on standby — stable for now.
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I don’t remember any of this happening. I want to be honest about that, because it would be easy, telling this story, to give myself a kind of awareness I didn’t have. I was unconscious. My body was open on a table. Machines were breathing for me.
Somewhere, my son’s heart rate was dipping and recovering, dipping and recovering, like a swimmer surfacing for air.
I knew none of it.
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I want to tell you that’s the worst part. It isn’t.
The worst part is that if I had known—if someone could have woken me at 7:52 and told me my wife might need an emergency delivery three floors down—I don’t know, even now, what I would have done with that information from a table with my abdomen open and packed with gauze.
There was no good version of that moment. There was only the version that happened.
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At 8:05, Dr. Okafor closed my first incision.
At 8:20, three floors below, Dr. Anand made a decision of her own.