This week my "baby" will turn twenty. He is in his second year of college, and he wants to direct movies. Here he is at the local car show. This picture was taken a couple of weeks ago.
But when I think back to this week in 1996, the dominating emotion was not joy, but fear. We had lost our first baby in March of 1995. Intellectually I knew it wasn't my fault, but emotionally, the term "cervical incompetance" had left me feeling that I had done something awful to cause it.
When we became pregnant again, the doctors said they could stitch up my cervix and that way the baby would be able to make it to term. In June, they performed a cerclage, a procedure that stitched up my cervix like pulling tight a drawstring.
At the end of September, my doctor said that he would be able to remove the stitches when I reached the 32nd week and he would be able to survive on his own. My husband and I both breathed a sigh of relief.
A few days later, I was at my parents' house. My husband was working the night shift and he didnt want me to be alone out in the country half an hour or more from the nearest hospital.
When I went into labor, they rushed me to the hospital.By the time my husband arrived, they had decided that the best thing to do would be to send me to Morristown, New Jersey, where they have an excellent neo-natal intensive care unit or NICU.
Memories of that night are jumbled. I remember listening to the ambulance driver making small talk with my husband while I lay on the gurney in the back, praying that my son would be all right. "Don't die." I kept saying to him between prayers. Over and over.
Morristown is where the doctor who performed the cerclage had her practice, so I at least had a doctor who was familiar with the case. We spent several days in the hospital while they tried to stop labor. Finally they said I could go home but that I would have to spend the next eleven or twelves weeks in bed.
Then my water broke.
"No way to stop it now," my doctor said. "We are going to have to let you deliver."
The plan was to induce labor the next day. Someone had other plans. Labor pains started late in the evening and my son arrived at 1:22 AM. Despite the fear, delivery was easy. In fact, by the time they realized that it was actually labor, and not just cramps, his head was in the birth canal.
According to my husband, the baby literally popped out and flew accross the bed like veggies from a salad shooter.
At birth, our little bundle of joy weighed 2 lbs. 11 oz. (1.2 kg) and was only 14" (35.56 cm) long. The family joke is that he didn't begin to cry until the nurse picked him up and took him away from the mirror. It was a good, healthy cry!
The fear wasn't over, but we had hope. He was in the hospital for weeks before we could bring him home. Appropriately enough, he came home the Friday before Thanksgiving. Even then, he weighed only 4.5 pounds (just over 2 kg!)
By his original due date, December 22nd, he was the size of a full-term baby. When we took him Christmas shopping, we had people coming up to say, "Oh, look, a newborn! What is he, a couple of days old?"
And I would reply, "No, he's almost three months old."
Sometimes I think they didn't believe me.
By the time my son was a year old, the developmental delays had pretty much disappered. The picture below was taken on his first Halloween, when he was just over a year old.
Here he is when we went to the NY Ren Faire. He was eleven and insisted that he had to go as Altair. My husband made the costume.
This one was taken in 2012, when I was working at Google. I brought him to work with me and we spent the day at the Google offices in New York City. This picture was taken in the lobby.
This picture was taken when he was in the local production of Guys and Dolls, playing Nathan Detroit.
Who is Irene P. Smith? I am an author, programmer, and web designer. A former Contributing Editor to PC Techniques Magazine, I have written about computers and programming since 1989, and began publishing fiction in 2003. My home is in New York State, along the Delaware River, where I live with my husband and son.
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