BFD

I tend to think people get the kids they deserve.  Or, put another way, I tend to think people get children specifically meant to teach them a needed lesson or lessons about life.  Based on purely anecdotal evidence, it sure seems like children often provide challenges which are oddly specific opportunities for their parents to grow.  For example, a hyper-masculine dad ends up with an effeminate son, or a mother who never takes medicine because she thinks she’s invincible might have a daughter who suffers a severe childhood illness, or maybe a dad who mocked people with disabilities ends up with a son with Cerebral Palsy. Some parents learn the lessons their children can teach them and some don’t.  In my family, my mom was the smartest person in every single room she entered prior to my birth; my brilliance is a challenge to her intellectual superiority, which is a big source of pride for my mom. My dad was an athlete to whom sports matter more than anything; my relative ineptitude at sports and visual disability are challenges to his sense of pride in his own physicality. Because of this theory, my biggest concern upon learning my wife was pregnant was whether the baby would have albinism because I had not really considered my albinism’s impact on my life.

I’d just finished the math, figuring out we had the cash to both move and get married in the same weekend when my wife handed me the pregnancy test she’d taken as a minor precaution, “There’s no way I’m pregnant.  It’ll relieve my anxiety,” she said.  The word YES was bigger and clearer than anything I’ve ever seen in my life.  The relief of our financial stability lasted less than two seconds before my mind became plagued with uncertainty and fear. Based on my relationship history and theories about the types of kids people get, I was certain our first child would be a girl. Raising a daughter seemed like the next logical step in completing my journey from misogynist to feminist.  I was also willing to bet I’d have a child with albinism.  At one point, I caught some of my wife’s anxiety and convinced myself we were having conjoined twin girls with albinism. We’d know more after the sonogram, which I thought we were getting immediately since 100% of my experience with sonograms comes from the television show FRIENDS.   

            As it turned out, we didn’t see anything at our first sonogram because our baby was the size of a seed.  We heard one loud, thundering heartbeat though, banging like a drumroll, building anticipation for a moment which was still eight months away. It wasn’t until 4 months in that we actually saw The Happiest Accident in grainy shades of black and white. The doctors said we were having a baby girl and she was developing perfectly. The geneticist explained if my wife didn’t have the albinism gene, we would 100% not have a daughter with albinism.  However, if my wife carried the albinism gene too, our daughter had a 50/50 chance of being born with albinism. There is presently no test for the albinism gene, we had to wait. Anticipation is jet fuel for anxiety, so I knew I needed a project.   

            As a DeWitt, I’m predisposed to convert anxiety into work, so I set out to write this blog with the intention of figuring out how much of my identity is encompassed by myalbinism. It’s been as fun an illuminating as I’d hoped. As I continued to write entries and think about my own battles with albinism and my upbringing and the challenges it afforded, both related to my albinism and not, my fears regarding my daughter’s pigmentation began to wane. The truth of the matter is my experiences as a person with albinism aren’t that big of a deal, at least not as an adult. I have limitations because of my vision, but everyone has limitations because of their physicality. I know almost no one who can dunk a basketball.  My psychological issues come not from an absence of pigment, but from my parents’ other genetic shortcomings and predispositions and, to a small extent, from their responses to my albinism, as well as their responses to the other challenges of parenthood.  That to say, were I born without albinism, I’d still be plenty fucked up.  My spiritual issues stem from the human condition.  If I had full vision and pigmentation, I’d still have frustrations, limitations and I’d still be mocked at times because these are basic human experiences which all of us share because sometimes people are dicks. After writing this blog and hearing from so many of you, I’ve come to understand my albinism doesn’t make me as unique as I always thought it did. I’m not an individual snowflake, I’m not even particularly special. In that regard, this blog has provided both humility and tremendous existential relief. 

            As the due date got closer, my wife’s pregnancy got more complicated. There were issues with her blood sugar, there were issues with her blood pressure.  We went to the hospital several times before our due date because she was having contractions or her blood pressure was too high.  Her pregnancy became dangerous enough we had to stop using the midwife model and go see an OB-GYN.  It was a hard moment when one of the midwives we’d never met before told us we could not come back to the group. It was like breaking up with someone via a surrogate, which is a great business idea by the way, a surrogate for dumping people. The OB practice was two men and two women and they couldn’t tell us which doctor would deliver the baby. The women were articulate, polished and sharp.  Both men were aloof, one never tied his left shoe and you could smell the other’s cologne from thirty feet away. Anxieties mounted to the point writing a blog could no longer calm them.      

            I went to every appointment during my wife’s pregnancy except one on a Monday at which she was supposed to be there 15 minutes for a routine blood pressure check.  Of course, it was the one appointment I didn’t go to where things became urgent.  I was on an elliptical trainer at the gym, getting a cardio session in before heading to school to begin the first week of Spring Quarter classes when my wife called and said her blood pressure was high and the OB wouldn’t let her leave the hospital.  I had to grab all our things and meet her there.  I got off the elliptical, came home, showered, packed up and took my first ever Lyft to the hospital.

            At the hospital, my wife was in a gown but we had to wait for her to be admitted.  The plan was to medically induce labor.  The nurses said it would take at least a day and probably two or three days, but that we’d be staying at the hospital the whole time. I had to cancel my entire first week of classes.  They moved us to our room, a lavish space with all the medical equipment my wife would need and a roll away bed for me. Honestly, the room our child was to be born in was much nicer than the room in the bed and breakfast in Northern Michigan in which she was conceived.  The doctors gave my wife the induction drug and we waited.  Neither of us slept.  We listened to FRIENDS episodes on our phone and I went to get us Au Bon Pain because the small eatery I hadn’t seen since I lived in Boston 17 years ago was the only non-hospital food near the hospital. At about 3am, they gave her another course of drugs.  At 9am, they started talking about administering an epidural because things were getting close.  The epidural lady, some relic of the byzantine era, administered it and there were immediately complications.  My wife felt half her body go cold and numb and she started bleeding. She stood up and there were huge chunks of blood and tissue under her. Another nurse couldn’t find the fetal heart rate but didn’t want to announce it and make everyone panic, but she struggled to hide her anxiety at not being able to find a pulse. Based on the amount of blood and tissue my wife lost, the decision was made to do an emergency C-section.  Within a minute, Dr. Cologne rushed my wife out of our room and into the OR, leaving me behind.  I tried to follow and was told I couldn’t go in without scrubs.  “Then get me some fucking scrubs,” I hissed, calmly letting the staff know my wardrobe requirements. 

            Once I was scrubbed in, I still couldn’t enter the OR because things were too hectic.  I paced in the hall, crying, listening, trying to remember to breathe.  In a room next to ours, a nurse stuck her head out and said, “I need someone to catch.” For a moment, because of my scrubs and glasses, she looked at me incredulously like ‘doc, get the hell in here!’ Most of the nurses and medical staff on the floor were in with my wife.  If this were a movie, I’d have gone over and helped deliver someone else’s baby.  I thought about it for a moment.  But this isn’t a movie and I was too concerned with my wife and her emergency surgery to bother trying to be someone else’s hero. Other nurses rushed to help. 

            When they finally let me into the OR there were probably a dozen people in the small room and there was so much blood on the floor I almost passed out.  I saw a baby being wiped down by nurses, screaming, a tuft of dark hair on her head. I immediately turned to my wife, who had four different people probing around her abdomen.  She was vomiting and sweaty, but she was breathing. I squeezed her hand and told her she was doing great and that the baby was healthy.  We both cried. The doctors didn’t have time to do an instrument count before surgery, so after sewing my wife up, they had to do an X Ray to make sure they didn’t leave anything like forceps or a scalpel inside her body. The doctors gave me our baby but they wouldn’t let me leave the OR because there was too much blood on the floor and they thought I’d slip and fall. Eventually they mopped up and let me take the baby out of the room and she immediately crapped on my arm. She had hairy shoulders so I knew she was mine. 

            Shortly, my wife was wheeled in to join us.  She was cold from the blood loss so they packed her with blankets. It would be a full two weeks before anyone acknowledged there are very few genuine emergencies in obstetrics, and my wife had just survived one. My wife’s placenta had ruptured- that’s what all the bloody tissue was from.  All told, it was seven minutes from the administering of the epidural to the removal of the baby, who is perfect.  My wife was recovering well.  And I wasn’t scared of being a dad anymore.  In fact, I wasn’t scared of anything.  It was like shock treatment. Nothing will ever be scarier than being in that hallway, not knowing what was happening with my wife and daughter. I made it through that, I can make it through anything.

            We still had no idea how dangerous my wife’s experience had been when they moved us to recovery and the itch to go home started to grow.  Recovery was a nightmare because all day long nurses and other medical staff kept popping into the room because they needed different things from mom or baby.  One nurse who weighed the baby wanted to touch my white hair.  I remember thinking it was a good thing we were in a hospital because I was gonna rip this dummy’s head clean off.  But I just smiled and stooped down so she could touch it. Another nurse had to take blood from our baby’s feet.  She poked her with a needle and dabbed blood on a piece of paper while our baby screamed bloody murder.  I glared at the nurse and she assured me “it’s for a state form,” which was the wrong argument to make to a former libertarian and a guy who still thinks the state can go fuck itself in its present form.  I fantasized about cutting the nurse into pieces and hiding her in the bio-medical waste bag in the recovery room bathroom but before I could club her and drag her back there, she finished taking my baby’s blood for the government and generously let me assuage my screaming, two-day-old daughter. After the bloodletting they allowed us to leave. Don’t tell the hospital but my wife drove herself home.  See, her car has too many blind spots for me to drive it safely.  We’d later learn her blood pressure issue, preeclampsia, meant she was at risk for seizures.  She wasn’t supposed to drive for six weeks.  Oops.  My wife is a badass, that’s a big part of why she’s my wife. 

            When we brought our baby into our apartment, the shift in my identity was almost instantaneous. If my identity were a pie chart, it’d be 100% Dad. Nothing else mattered. There was no room for my albinism. For a moment, there was no other me.  In the 15 weeks I’ve been a Dad, parts of me have returned because I quickly recognized the need for an identity which has facets. I’m a husband, I’m a father, I’m a writer, I’m a professor, I’m a labor leader, I’m a jogger, I’m a wise-ass, I’m a lover and a fighter, and yeah, I’m a person with albinism. But my albinism is a small sliver of the pie chart of my identity, and it grows smaller every day Beatrix Fiona DeWitt gets bigger.  She’s the BFD, my albinism isn’t.