let me take a picture first

[Tommy Martyn]

It's March 17th 2000 lunchtime or approaching. Last night I had my best togs (Clothes) on and was waiting for my wife to get out the shower and get dressed so we could have our last meal in a restaurant before the baby arrives. Tracy is eight months and one week pregnant. She comes out of the shower and mentions that, although she has the famously loopy pregnancy brain, she dried the inside of her leg off and then found it was wet and dried it off all over again.

We exchange glances. We are due to meet friends downtown who are driving in from a long way off. We call the hospital and they say come on in to be safe. Thank god for cell phones. We cancel with our friends en route. They go on to a nice seafood meal and we head for the maternity ward. Within two minutes of our first meeting with a doctor, we are told that although we came in as a duo we are leaving as a trio. They find the most humiliating garment on earth for my wife and pull out a campbed for me, with the advice to get as much sleep as I can, because that's it for the next six months.

In the small hours Tracy wakes me and tells me the contractions are quicker and uncomfortable. The doctors come in and mesure her dilation, give the first of the painkillers and tell me to get back to sleep seeing as I won't be sleeping for the next six months etc ha ha ha.

Next time I awake it is because of the grunting. Tracy is starting to be really uncomfortable and it is time for the epidural. Everything is proceeding to plan - if you don't count the fact that it is the early am Sunday morning and this was meant to be the start of my last great childless hangover. From here on in the pregnancy proceeds like clockwork. The contractions get bigger and closer. The hole (or dilation as they call it) gets bigger.

The nurse comes infor the umpteenth time to do the blood pressure/ heartrate / time and duration of contraction thing and this time pulls face. She calls back up. The back up calls a second opinion. Within a few minutes there a gang of people in a small room passing opinions in jargon and an agreement is reached. They start making manouvres with the bed. A nurse comes in with set of scrubs. "Put these on," she says to me.

After this comes a fraught time for me in the operating room. The short version is that Henry (my son) is brought out, after much deliberation, c section. This decision was made very,very late on. What this means is that he went all the way down the birth canal and then got pulled back out. Now, nobody really prepares you for this moment. The anesthesiologist (sp) tapped me on the arm ( I was at the head of the operating table) and told me he's coming out. Because of his time in the canal his head was twice the length from top to bottom of a normal human head. The nurses and doctors laughed and told me I had a little cone head. As I have told many people before I scanned their eyes (they were wearing masks) to see if they were glancing at one another as if to say, "it's a freak." For a moment I felt sick to my stomach. Within half an hour his head was normal and I only had to be concerned about the violent shaking of my wife as she went into shock form the blood loss - but that's another story.

I'm telling you this because today I was reading andrewsullivan.com. The gay conservative guy. We don't agree about a lot but he is bright and always worth a look. He had a link to story about a heartwarming event. A strange thing for an overtly political blog. I took a look and it was a story about a young girl who had been born without a face. Some local kids had done a fundraiser for her and got caught up in her plight. We have all seen pictures of freaks. There are people out there who suffer in ways that we can never comprehend. I am always slightly angry at the usual mass media angles on these stories where papers do a story about the "real meaning of christmas" while cashing in on the freak value. The article had a further link on the little girl. It was a repot from when she was born. The story had pictures of her parents, the baby and a description the syndrome. There was even an x-ray of the bone structure of her face. She has forty missing bones.

Although shocked and saddened by this, I read on in a detached way. The story described how the parents, from the pre-natal scans, were expecting something like a hare lip. When she was born the nurses whisked her away for trreatment to another room. The father came to see her. They asked him did he want to show her to the mother. I can't remember the exact quote but he said something along the lines of, let me take a picture to prepare her for the shock. I thought back to that moment when I thought Henry was a conehead. I though of these parents all excited about the birth of their daughter. I wept. I wept like a big fucking girl.

[mccutcheon]

Isn't March 17th your birthday? Or St. Patrick's Day? Or is it Henry's birthday?

That is very sad. You should also be happy your boy and girl are fine. I have never forgot the time in PHX when we were driving and we passed a children's hospital and you said, "The saddest institution on earth." That has always stuck with me.

By the way, crybabies make me sick.

[marky]

Could you please just picture my face slackjawed? Good god, how the hell did I miss THIS thread Tommy? There's so much here to reply to I can't even start. I don't know where to begin. There's a lot of coincidences here. No, I'm just plain speechless for the moment.

[martino]

good topic, great posting tommy.

and i agree with marky (as i always do, except for when he talks about music too much): where to start?

(well actually i already have started, and i started idiodically: with billy idol, who should have called his big hit "head without a brain". but i digress in an awful manner).


so many things come to mind when i think about the faceless girl (who, of course, is not faceless: she merely has a boneless face, which, when you remember pictures of WW1 veterans, is an altogether different matter...).

the first thing i thought of, and this created for me a pleasurable christmas spirit, is the christian goodness of those christian people in florida who are doing what they can to show that they accept and even love that child, even though she is horribly different. to be quite honest, if i had a disfigured child, i would rather have her in the company of christian nurses than with secular professionals. the christians, they are terrible fuckups when it comes to war and politics, but they sure have the right instincts in regards to disabled children.

in these times of american war and imperialism i often find it difficult to be better than cynical when people say they believe in g*d. when people do what they can for the disadvantaged my cynicism gets the slightest bit smaller, and that makes me glad.


the next thing that came to mind was a disturbing book i read last year, "autobiography of a face" by lucy grealy. grealy was disfigured by facial cancer and spent lots of her adolescent and adult life trying to make her life worth living nonetheless. she screwed around interestingly and tried things out but ultimately she gave up and killed herself. not exactly a story that makes you think everything in life is worth the pain.

finally, and most importantly tommy, your personal words made me remember those days in 1990 when my wife was pregnant and i too had my worries of how life would be if we had a pinhead, a spazz, a conehead or a mongo. as it happens my daughter is now 14 and to me she is, like some kind of mary poppins, practically perfect in every way. an acquaintance had a baby daughter who is beautiful but has remained very small and never moves and never says a word, even at 8. i count my blessings when i think of it but mostly i try to forget and hope this has not just been some winning streak that will run out one of these days.

[Tommy Martyn]

man, I hope the pax never goes away, because there is so much I want to say under this post alone. I have mentioned it elsewhere but we are here only under the good graces of the Swedish Sloth. I thank him again

[mccutcheon]

You love it but don't know it and then it is gone and you miss it and it was never really anything but than again it was something...something that made Tommy, Marky, Amanda, Brett, Kim and McCutcheon all meet in Seattle and have a brunch and drinks....and more