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Farmer of Life A month before my due date, my friend Sheila gave me a book called Birth Without Fear. It explains how a woman can avoid the medical establishment’s routine insistence on pain medication by using visualization to calm fear during labor and birth. I devoured the book, appreciating its feminist perspective while simultaneously acknowledging that its ideals of a non-medical birth could never actually apply to me. Because I have juvenile (Type 1) diabetes, my pregnancy was considered to be high-risk, which meant that my last eight months had been filled with extra ultrasounds and monitoring, culminating at week 30 with thrice-weekly visits to the hospital to be attached to a fetal monitor to make sure the baby wasn’t in danger of becoming stillborn. While many of my friends talked glowingly about their natural birth experiences, preferences for midwife practices, and decisions to deliver at birthing centers over hospitals (or even at home), I sighed and sucked up the hospital smells that were an inevitable part of my pregnancy. But I was simply grateful to be pregnant. Just a generation ago, the outcome for diabetic mothers wasn’t good—a much higher risk of birth defects and stillborn babies for us than for mothers without diabetes. But new technology in blood glucose monitoring and insulin deliver devices meant that with determination, women like me could deliver healthy babies. My pregnancy required me to frequently test my blood sugar and monitor what I ate, along with the doctor and hospital visits. The good news was that at thirty-four weeks, all signs pointed to a healthy baby boy growing inside me. During week 35, I started feeling extremely uncomfortable. My ankles swelled up quickly, making it hard to stand. My high-risk doctors said everything looked fine, though, and I continued to go to work and do as much as I could at home to finish getting ready. When I hit week 36, though, my ankles swelled so much I couldn’t even put on my husband’s enormous shoes, and I started to feel dizzy whenever I stood up. I went in to the hospital on a Friday morning to get hooked up to the fetal monitor and when the nurse took my blood pressure, she got a funny look on her face. “Just sit here a second,” she said, as if I could move anywhere fast. One of the high-risk ob-gyns came in to check me out and re-take my blood pressure. “Go home, relax, enjoy the weekend,” he said. “Your blood pressure is higher than we’d like to see, so we’re going to induce you first thing Monday morning. Make sure to count kicks per minute from time to time. If you don’t feel enough kicking, call us immediately.” We had already picked out his name—George Chaim. George was for my maternal grandfather, George Auerbach, a Holocaust survivor who had died when I was a little girl. I can remember my grandfather’s hands, how he used to take me on slow walks, stopping to pick up pebbles, branches, or other treasures we’d find along the road. I didn’t know him for long, but I can still recall my grandfather’s love for me. Chaim, the baby’s middle name, means “life” in Hebrew and is symbolized by the number 18. Chaim Ganz was my husband Fred’s great-uncle; he jumped out of a train en route for Aushwitz and escaped with partisans to the land of Israel. He was an Orthodox rabbi who lost his first family in Europe and whose second wife never had children, meaning that his name was never carried on. In Jewish tradition, memory is passed down by keeping family names alive. My grandfather, a secular Jew who struggled with faith in humanity, was a lover of nature. A baby name book told me that George means “farmer” in Greek, so fitting for my grandfather. I wanted my baby boy to be blessed with the incredible spirits of both of these strong men: a farmer of life. Friday night we ate an early dinner, and I fell asleep by nine. As I was drifting off, I realized that I hadn’t done my kick-counting, but felt too tired to wake myself back up. The next thing I knew, the January sun was beaming into our bedroom windows; it was 8 o’clock in the morning, and I traipsed downstairs to get something to eat. I made a bowl of oatmeal and sat in the quiet house. Usually, as I ate, my baby would get activated from the sugar and do all kinds of acrobats. This morning, nothing. Not a kick. I called to my husband, who called the doctor. He grabbed the bags, pulled up the car, drove over icy roads to drop me off at the emergency room entrance. From my oatmeal on, everything was a blur, until laying there, connected to the fetal monitor, the doctor told us that they needed to get the baby out NOW, and I would be prepped for a C-section. Overnight my blood pressure had gone higher, and now it was high enough to mean danger for the baby. With nurses, residents, and medical students hovering around us, my husband and I held hands. I was numbed through a spinal and felt spacey as they opened me up. It was January 18th, 2003, I was at the end of my 36th week. The next thing I knew, a baby was crying. They were holding my little Georgie. They brought him close to me so I could quickly kiss him but then it was clear that something was not right because as one doctor sewed me up, another spoke with my husband, and they rushed George away. Babies born to diabetic mothers can be born with hypoglycemia (low blood sugar), a condition that usually reverses within a few hours or even a few days. Because the mother’s blood sugar may be higher than normal, the baby makes extra insulin to regulate the sugar. When the extra sugar source is taken away, it takes the baby’s body some time to adapt and make less insulin. I hadn’t thought that my baby would have this problem, because I had worked so hard to keep my blood sugars in the near normal range during my pregnancy. But in fact, George was born with very low blood sugar and was whisked away to the NICU where he was put on a feeding tube and monitors. All of the pregnancy books that I had read spoke of the importance of mother-child bonding during the first 24 hours of the baby’s life, and I had imagined cradling my baby in my bed and teaching him to nurse. But George Chaim was in an oxygen tent in the NICU (his lungs, because he was early, also needed some help), and I was drugged out on pain meds., just trying to comprehend what was happening. My amazing husband was the one who was there in the NICU, holding Georgie’s little hands. In the next couple of days, I started recovering from the C-section and was able to walk slowly down the hall from my room to be with George. He was doing better, out of the oxygen tent, but still being fed intravenously. The first time I could sit in a chair beside him and watch him sleep, I wept. A nurse swaddled him in blankets and put him in my arms. I kissed his puffy cheeks and thanked God for my little miracle. Progress was slow. His blood sugars would stay even for a few hours, then drop dangerously low. He was off the IV and being fed through a tube in his nose. A lactation consultant came to talk with me about trying to start nursing him. We sat in the middle of the NICU, with babies in incubators connected to tubes all around us, lights glaring and alarms beeping, and worried parents coming in and out, and I took out my breast and held it to Georgie’s lips and tried all of the holds the consultant was showing me, but he didn’t suckle. We repeated this scene every couple of hours, but nothing. The nurses in the NICU would sit me in a rocker with George, and give me a bottle for him. We rocked and he began to drink. We couldn’t take him home until he’d take a certain amount of ounces per feeding, to make sure his blood sugar wouldn’t drop. Together, we rocked, and I sang to him about all of the people who loved him. Every feeding went better, and I waited for each four-hour finger prick of blood to know if his condition was improving. But his sugars were still swinging low, the NICU doctors explaining that his hypoglycemia was more severe than what they usually saw. Wednesday came, the day for my discharge, and George wasn’t ready to go home with us. I woke up crying; I didn’t want to go back to the house without my baby, that wasn’t the plan. I had done all I could to make a healthy baby. Now we were stuck in some kind of crazy purgatory, and I felt like a huge failure. I was sitting on my hospital bed sobbing, when the woman who cleans the rooms in the maternity ward came in. “What you crying for?” she asked in an African accent. I told her I was going home today without my baby. “Don’t you worry,” she said. “God is a good God, you get your baby home with you.” I nodded, weeping. Her words were the kindest ones I’d heard since George was born. Family and friends kept telling me everything would be okay, George would be home with us soon. They meant well, but their wishes felt hollow; nothing like this had happened with their births. Doctors explained the medical details to us, but their language went over my head. My mind and body were a mess of hormones and medication, and I struggled to complete thoughts. “God is a good God,” I repeated to myself, a new mantra that I could understand, a simple, straightforward statement of faith. God is a good God, those were words I could hold onto; I surrendered completely to them. God is a good God. We stayed at the NICU all day, holding and singing to Georgie and watching his blood sugar readings. When my thoughts strayed, I went back to her words, “God is a good God, God is a good God.” When we walked through the icy parking lot at 10 o’clock, after the NICU nurses insisted we leave, I thought, “God is a good God.” When I walked into the house without my baby, “God is a good God.” Thursday, Georgie started to do better and by Friday we thought we might be able to bring him home. But NICU doctors are cautious—rightfully so—and so we had to spend the weekend going back and forth between home and hospital, until finally Monday morning, we wrapped him in new clothes and a snow suit and brought our baby home. The doctors explained to us that George was alive because we called them first thing Saturday morning; my placenta had started to fail when they took him out. He was born on January 18th—18 is “life” in Hebrew, Chaim, the middle name we had selected for him. On the Judaic calendar, it was the holiday of Tu B’Shvat, the New Year of the Trees. Sixteenth century Jewish mystics created a special ritual to be performed on that day, drinking four glasses of wine—one pure white, the second white with a drop of red, the third red with a drop of white, and the fourth pure red—to symbolize nature’s pattern of transforming the darkness of winter into the light of spring. They also created a tree metaphor associated with Tu B’Shvat that I have often clung to during hard times—that our relationship to God is like an inverted tree. The roots grow in heaven, but the branches stretch down to earth for us to hold onto. There were many divine branches that brought my baby from heaven to earth: the amazing doctors and nurses at the hospital, the prayers of our family and friends, and our own intuition and quick action. My birth experience was not an ideal one, not made for the books, and definitely not one where I was in the driver’s seat. But looking back, that was okay. During Georgie’s birth and first ten days of life, I learned more than ever before in my life that much as we plan, we ultimately don’t have total control of what happens to us. “Shit happens,” the head NICU doctor told me, shrugging his shoulders, when I asked him why he thought George had such severe hypoglycemia when my blood sugar readings had been so well-controlled during my pregnancy. “Shit happens,” is what he said. I held onto that expression, too, during my dark moments as a new mom, when I blamed myself for not being able to nurse Georgie successfully. “Shit happens, and God is a good God,” I sang to my little boy, as I rocked him with his bottle. Maybe it wasn’t the most eloquent theology to welcome him into the world with, but chronic lack of sleep doesn’t always make for great poetry. Shit happens, but God is a good God, my little miracle farmer of life, Tu B’Shvat baby. You are home with me now, heaven-sent miracle. I bundled him into his snow suit and walked with him in the winter sun, knowing spring would come.
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