Three Years Ago Today He Stopped Kicking

Or at least that was the way it felt. See, Riley had a pattern. He was a very mellow fetus but every night at 7, like clockwork, he would kick up a storm for about forty minutes. And that Saturday night, he didn't.
And I began to worry.

The Husband called the doctor on call, a complete stranger who told me to sit in a dark room and wait for a kick.

So I sat and I waited and eventually I felt a light, light flutter.
And I could breathe again.

But it wasn't like it normally was.

And that was the first sign that our baby was in trouble.

Two days later, at my 39 week appointment, my OB asked how things were going. I asked her if she had been notified of our call from that Saturday. She hadn't.
I told her he wasn't moving as much as he had been and that it had been kind of sudden.
So she did an ultrasound and we found he had almost no amniotic fluid.
"I'm sending you to the hospital to be induced right now." my OB told me, "Call your husband, find someone to take your older son and go."

And that is what I did.

And it was pretty much all downhill from there.
What began as an induction quickly turned into an emergency c-section when the baby's heart rate dropped suddenly.

I was whisked into a room and tied to a table with my arms spread out crossways. I remember being terrified that I would fall off the table. They drugged me and poked my torso with pins to make sure I was numb.
"Can you feel this?"

"Can you feel this?"

I don't remember much else. I felt nothing and then I heard him cry. And he sounded just like his older brother did as a newborn with an oddly gruff throaty voice.
My newborn sons both sounded like they'd been drinking whiskey for years.
But I couldn't see him.
And then I forget what happened for awhile.

And then I remember looking back over my shoulder as The Husband stood in the doorway of the operating room holding the baby up for me to see. But his face was covered and I thought that was weird but honestly, I was too drugged up to do anything about it.

And they took the baby away and I laid there being poked and prodded and stitched and sewn as they put me back together again.

I look back on that hour or so as a time of ignorant bliss. I was looking forward to rooming in with my baby and snuggling and loving him to pieces.
But that wasn't what happened.

Instead, we spent four days visiting him in the NICU. Hearing about brain scans and spinal taps and trying to piece together exactly what had happened.

Our son who came out wounded on his precious little face and leg and missing a hand. Our son who had his cord wrapped around his neck multiple times. Our son who had no amniotic fluid. Our son who was born with healed scars on his body.
Our son who almost died.

And none of it matters and all of it matters. But regardless, it all started three years ago today when he stopped kicking.