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Emily was connected to all kinds of sensors and things, which beeped terribly and made noises when she moved. Then once, Emily got a strange look on her face, and blinked hard, as if swallowing something big. The nurse looked up at the readings and said, “Oh, look! You had a contraction!”. Emily asked, “Does this mean I can go through a normal birth now?” Her demeanor immediately changed, and she said, simply, “No.”

So, we continued to wait.

We waited a long time for the operating room to open up for her c-section. We were bumped twice by other, more urgent cases. I took some comfort in this: our state must not be that serious or we would be the ones bumping others out of the room. They gave me an operating room getup to wear, and I put this on. When it finally came time for us to be seen, after carefully negotiating Emily’s bulky operating bed out of the room into the hallway, our nurses promptly switched into crazy, E-R mode. They ran down the hallway full speed, yelling all the way: “Look out! Clear the way!” Emily had white knuckles all the way in. I did too, and I wasn’t even hanging on to anything. Once they had burst through the swinging doors, normalcy returned again. I was told to wait outside the operating room while they got everything ready.

Eventually they let me in to the operating room. Emily was lying there on the wheeled-in operating table with a gaggle of medical people gathered around her midsection. They had a specific place for me to stand, near Emily’s head, with specific instructions about where I could go and what I could and could not do. I wasn’t sure what to expect: I had seen some bloody things before, but I didn’t know how I would react to seeing my wife cut open before me. I noticed there was a little stool behind me. My instruction sheet said, “If you feel nauseous, take a step backward and sit down.”

Dr. Jenson was there, standing on the other side of Emily’s head. He walked me through the operation, telling me more or less what was going on as it happened. He was a godsend. I watched some of the operation, but it was pretty troubling. Thankfully, Emily was awake but smiling the whole time, completely oblivious to anything going wrong around her. They used some kind of electric cauterizing tool that made the room smell really bad. At one point, someone actually did say the classic ER line, “get me a clamp: I’ve got a pumper here!” (blood squirting from Emily’s body).

Then they brought out an object that I can only describe as the crowbar of life: a gigantic, flat piece of metal in the general shape of a nail-puller. They wedged it down into the cavity they had opened in Emily, and leaned on it with terrible force. They pulled and pushed and moved it around — it was a violent, crazy picture. I could not fathom that a baby could withstand such force. I took a step backward and sat on my stool.

After a moment, I heard Dr. Jensen’s voice. He was pointing for me to look at what was happening. He was smiling. I stood up and peered over the blue tarp to see the macabre sight of my son’s head sticking out of my wife’s body like some kind of growth. It was looking straight at me. How bizarre.

Then with another great pull, the baby was out. They let me cut the umbilical cord, which was flat and pale and thin. The doctor said that it was good we went with the C-section, because of this. I was amazed that there wasn’t any blood to speak of. The baby was pink and apparently covered with mucous, but he was not bloody. He let out a pitiful cry, and they whisked him off to the incubator table.

I said something to Emily; I don’t remember what. We were both pretty relieved and happy. Dr. Jensen was filling in the boxes on a stack of papers that looked like statistical readings. When he saw me watching him he stopped for a second and said, as if nervously, “You don’t suppose anyone is going to read these, do you?” He looked back at the stack and said, distractedly, “Maybe I should check my spelling…” Everything he was writing were numbers.

I was invited to come see my son. The nurse had apparently cleaned the mucous off of him. I had my camera with me, so I took the first picture of my son at two minutes old. He was perfect. The nurse weighed him, verified his vitals and such. She wrapped him in a blanket and let me take him back to his mother. He was beautiful.

As I came back to Emily, she had this large pink organ on her chest, connected to the hole in her midsection. My mind was racing: what could that be? Too big to be the heart. The stomach? Was it… her liver? It was huge. Why was it on her chest? The doctor was rubbing it down with something. I didn’t know what to do. I brought little baby Benjamin over behind the blue tarp, where Emily’s head was, still smiling and happy to see me, and introduced her to her son. It was a wonderful moment. I decided not to trouble her with the big pink thing on her chest.

Later on the doctor told me the mysterious organ was her uterus, and they were putting some chemical on it so that it would contract back into the pre-childbirth shape. They let me carry baby Benjamin out into the receiving area, to show him to the family who were there: my father and mother-in-law. I was a proud daddy.

Benjamin John Dickerson was brought into this world on March 29th, 2006, at 8:34 PM. He weighed in at 7 lbs 8oz and was 18-1/2″ long. His apgar score was all 9′s, which blew his daddy’s scores away. But then, Daddy wasn’t breathing when he was born.