Lets mix in some fatherly perspective.

One of things about having a baby is that in reality it's rather easy for a guy. Hell, it's so easy you can manage it without even realizing you managed it, which certainly isn't the case for women. This creates a somewhat odd situation for a husband with a pregnant wife. Theoretically if you're busy there's very little practical value you add to the vast majority of operations - basically your role is 100% support.

Alas, to know how your wife wants you to support her, you'd have to understand exactly how your wife works... when under hormonal conditions you've never before encountered her in. Uh-oh. In any case my personal approach was to just be there as much as plausible without compromising the whole reason for our year in Oxford.

This approach ended up with me staying with Liz from roughly 11am on the 17th of November to nearly 6am on the 18th of November. The whole thing was fairly surreal. It was really boring without really getting boring. What I mean by this is that nothing interesting happened during 95% of the time, but on the other hand I never really had a chance to pick up my book and kill some time, nor did I feel a burning need to do so. I'm still rather unclear how the heck I remained interested in the two graphs (baby heartbeat + contraction status) for such a long period without clawing my eyes out. Also for the idiots out the

re: do NOT try home birth, you are really, really risking brain damage to your child (for example we would not have realized that Liz leaning left during contractions was strangling the baby, causing a massive drop in heart rate...). Oh it's a small risk, but considering it's an avoidable risk it's hard to imagine what one is thinking when taking it.

The birth itself was a prolonged process, and once we entered the theatre it again moved to the realm of the surreal. I had to take this "looking over my own shoulder" approach to the whole issue or I'd have felt sick pretty fast. Lets just say while I generally love Tom Cruise as an actor, hunger was not what I felt when I saw the placenta floating in some fluids...

Liz was like... completely out of it at this point, with perhaps 10 people in the room. She's not really realizing it either, but her contractions have stopped pretty much 100%, and one of the doctors is doing stuff with a suction cup and pliers (forceps?) that look WAY too big for a fragile baby. I recall running the numbers in my head and concluding that the baby's spine must be really nice and flexible for there to be no risk of simply snapping her neck using those things (next night I did end up having a quasi-nightmare about the doctor popping the babys head off with the forceps...).

After Ella finally came out, Liz seemed ready to faint, mostly due to the drugs and sheer exhaustion. When I went to check out how Ella was doing, I could immediately see the medical personnel looking... if not alarmed, at least somewhat unhappy. Poor Ella's breathing sounded quite labored, with a strange rattle. That combined with th

e bruises, blueish tinted skin and the rather coneish head made her remind me of Gollum (I'll apologize to her later, but that's the truth!). It's very hard to explain what one feels at that point. Theoretically, The Miracle has just happened, but what you're left with is a wife that looks like she'd be put out of her misery were she an animal and a baby that's just... odd. Maybe it was me being kind of out of it at this point two (I had the whole "looking at it from behind my own shoulder" to keep me from feinting/puking/whatever), but it just felt really quite unreal. Of course my endless curiosity had me asking way too many questions, and the personnel listed all the viable issues with Ella:

1. Liquid in lungs
2. Infection
3. Structural lung damage
4. Structural heart damage

I remember walking to Liz after hearing the news, pondering what exactly to do. Liz was exhausted and the odds really were very good that nothing was wrong... but on the other hand despite the drugs she's going to have been realizing that I had a long discussion with a doctor of some sort, and that the baby had not been brought to her yet. Still, she was so exhausted and I didn't want to add worry to that. Alas, my feet made the decision for me as I arrived while caught in this struggle, which just got a "what's wrong?" question out of Liz. After a few more seconds of me figuring out the problem the doctor jumped i

n, giving her the same version that I got. Lets just say that that was NOT what I had in mind - at least the bloody structural damages could have been left out.

Things really came in to focus when me and Liz were in the recovery room and we got left alone with a promise to get updated ASAP... the time was 2:15am. We're a wee bit short on topics at this point, but the only point of conversation is not good and won't get any better by talking. We made a slight mistake by informing parts of the family at this point - in the end what I wanted most was Liz falling asleep, and extra communication certainly

 wasn't helping (the mistake was mine). Fortunately Liz fell asleep around 3am. Thank god I had something to read (Thud! by Terry Pratchett, good thing it was one of our favorite books)... unfortunately I ran out of book a few minutes after Liz fell asleep, and from 3:10 to 4:55 I ended up being alone and having only one topic to think about. I was consoling myself with the fact that the two primary suspects should be pretty easy to check for - liquid in lungs would show up easily and inflated white cell count could hardly be missed. 

Why this took 2 hours kind of escapes me, but despite the incredibly good odds, they were the longest 2 hours of my life.

It's certainly very strange being afraid for your child. I mean I love my parents, Liz etc, but none of these are helpless, which makes a huge difference. They can call for me if there's trouble, they can make decisions themselves if there's trouble etc. The list 

of things they can manage is massive, while my poor daughter couldn't even breathe properly on her own! Especially with a life as blessed as mine, I had never encountered anything as scary as this was.

Finally, a young nurse came to fetch me.

Turns out pretty much everything was fine. Or well, not fine, but there had been some liquid in her lungs AND she had a raised white cell count. Also, her breathing had improved drastically with the lung flushing alone. There was absolutely no reason to suspect structural damage anymore, so to me this was "all clear" even though Ella remained in the intensive care unit (ICU). I also got to look at her now that she was rather mor

e human looking in the ICU, which made things a lot more "real" somehow. Can't really quite explain. On a curious note they had also taken some sort of

 picture of her where she actually looked really adorable, if extremely irate (considering what had happened to her, I could certainly sympathize).

This was enough for me and I went to wake up Liz to tell her the good news. After that, I could finally head home... it was getting kind of late, and I wanted to calm down everyone who our earlier communications had given brain damage to.  

Picture showing the time I left the hospital in the morning.