August 4, 2002

 mfinley.com   

"Paula Kelly"

Rachel and I drank wine with friends in their cabin. She had spent the day acting as YMCA camp nurse, and had a story to tell.

"I met Paula Kelly's daughter today," she said. "She's going on a wilderness trip just like Jon," our son. "It was so surprising to see her grown up and beautiful."

I know I had heard the name Paula Kelly before, but I could not place it.

"I took Jon to see her when he was a week old," she reminded me. Then it all came back. Jonathan is our second child, and our first birth was a spectacular in-the-home-event. Daniele nearly high-fived me when she slipped out after 25 hours of contractions, and I caught her in my trembling hands. We expected as spectacular a showing from Jon, even though his would be a hospital birth.

But it didn't turn out that way. The baby who had seemed so active all through pregnancy was strangely quite during the four hour delivery. When he finally plopped out into my hands, he was gray and lifeless. It was like catching an underfilled bag of onions.

I quickly handed the baby to the nurses to revive, and went to the washroom, to scrape the cold waxy vernix from my forearms and hands onto brown paper towels, and to regain my composure.

The room seemed to fade away from me, as the baby was suctioned and a heartbeat restored. A voice stated that he was unable to move his limbs. I glanced at Rachel. She was taking note of all the she saw, and she was alarmed.

I accompanied the nurses as we moved the little boy to an intensive care station, where I hovered over him for the next 90 minutes, praying in a half-assed way that my son be OK, and I would do this or that, I would be a better man.

Rachel later told me that while I was away from her, a pediatrician named Inman visited her. "The nurses gave your baby an Apgar score of  3,5, but I downgraded it to 3,4," he said. An Apgar score measures the liveliness of newly birthed babies. "We're concerned that he may have sustained brain damage. We'd like you to spend the night here for observation."

Stunned, we slept the night, and in the morning took the quiet baby to our home. Rachel was worried. "The baby wouldn't nurse for five days. He didn't get any colostrum, and I was full to bursting, thinking about what Inman said. I looked at Jon for some sign he was an OK, healthy baby. But I didn't get anything from him."

After a week, she booked an appointment with a different pediatrician, a Dr. Paula Kelly. She took Jon and his sister Daniele to the appointment. From the first, Dr. Kelly, who was herself pregnant, spoke encouragingly. 

"Apgars don't predict how a baby will do," she said, "unless the baby has a seizure, and seizures can be a predictor of future problems. But Jonathan didn't have any seizures."

Rachel was worn out, so Dr. Kelly changed Jonathan's diaper while they talked. Then, she took Daniele to the bathroom, and had a talk with her while she pooped. When she came back, she proclaimed that Daniele, 4, was a verbal prodigy. "She's amazing," the doctor said. We never learned what went on in that little conversation.

And that was it. Rachel left the clinic feeling new hope for her only son. When she got home she told me the great news about Jon, and how wonderful Paula Kelly had been to her. I nodded, in the way that I do, and forgot the name for fourteen years.

Oh, over the years, we still have wondered, whenever Jon blinked the wrong way, or had a facial tick, or couldn't seem to pay attention in school, or asked "What?" every time we said something to him, if that hard birth had taken something from him. Never mind that every 14-year-old boy since Jesus has acted pretty much the same way he does.

And then today, as Rachel did health screening for the kids heading out on wilderness adventures, she came to Kelly Walters, and Rachel remembered Paula was married to a man named Walters.

"Kelly's shy but she has lovely cartwheeling eyes," she said. "Meeting someone you knew only as an infant, suddenly grown in front of you -- it's extraordinary. I can't help think what a gift she is to her mother, and what a gift her mother was to me."

mfinley.com 
_{COPYRIGHT (c) 2002
by MICHAEL FINLEY}