Half a centimeter never seemed so far. But it was all that stood between Jess delivering the old-fashioned way and her having a C-section. 

Unproductive labor is what they call it when the labor winds to a halt without a baby to show for it. And Jess had stayed stuck at 9 and a half centimeters, shy of the 10 needed, for the last six hours of an agonizing 24-hour labor marathon. To Jess’ credit, she had fought well, had endured two shoddy epidurals that took only partway, as well as a number of medieval-like procedures to help the baby along. But we could no longer sidestep the fact that the baby just wasn’t coming out. 

The ink of our approval signatures on the liability waiver form had barely dried, when one out of a swarm of scrambling nurses chest-passed me a ball of scrubs for me to wear in the operating room and hurried my wife out the door. I trotted alongside Jess’ hospital bed in route to the operating room, where they would spring the baby free, so that we could finally meet our daughter, Ellie.

When the nurse finally waved me into the operating room to see my wife, they had her laid out flat on a stainless steel table, awake and prepped for surgery. She wore a tissue-paper blue cap like mine, and a series of tubes ran out from her to the humming, beeping machines in back. A makeshift curtain blocked Jess’ view of the surgeon’s work. But from my seat beside Jess, I could see as much as I could stomach, if I craned my neck. Exhilarated by a mash-up of fear and excitement, I held Jess’ hand and alternately consoled her and stole glances over the curtain. Jess didn’t hurt.

The procedure itself probably only took ten minutes, but to me it lasted longer than the 40 weeks of pregnancy it took to get here. It especially felt forever when it came time to extract the baby from its cramped little home. The doctor and nurses braced themselves. Their brows furrowed above their surgeon masks, as they put some muscle into it. Behind the curtain, Jess’ upper half jarred sickeningly in sync with the doctor’s digging and wrenching. Dislodging the baby wasn’t as easy as I’d expected. She was in there real good, still holding on as she did before in the delivery room. Jess was still okay, though.

Finally, a nurse appeared with a suction-cup device. It fished beneath the surface of my sight and caught a head, thick with jet black hair. Then followed the attached body, the color of a powdered doughnut. The doctor thrust it onto the operating table. I listened — there was the cry!

I left Jess for just a minute to find out about the baby. Across the room, at the nurse’s station, Ellie lay on her back all sprawled out as if she’d just swum the English Channel. She had her color now and was perfectly healthy. And I confirmed that she was, in fact, a girl, as the ultrasound had said. I would have been happy regardless, as long as the baby was healthy. Nonetheless, I did experience a pinch of relief that Ellie wasn’t an Eddie, because all our baby clothes at home were pink.

When I returned to report on Ellie’s excellent condition, I found Jess crying silently as the doctor sewed her back up. “Are you in pain?” I asked, ”or just emotional?”

She nodded.

“Emotional?” I asked. 

She nodded.

Categories: Life
3 Comments »

Sarah Palin reportedly said that the Earth is only 6,000 years old. Most modern-day scientists and public-school textbooks say the Earth is around 4.6 billion years old. Is Palin’s claim crazy? 

As with many of life’s important questions, I’d like to first look to Saturday Night Live for answers. 

There is an unsettling yet hilarious SNL skit where comedian Will Ferrell, a 37-year-old hairy-chested, mustachioed man is born to an unsuspecting, freaked-out couple in a hospital room. He comes out glazed in sweat, holding his own umbilical cord, stands upright and bellows, “Ah man, it was hot in there.” He then proceeds to thank the doctor (Charlie Sheen) for doing him “a solid” and offers a business handshake to his appalled new guardians, introducing himself as Ted Brogan. Astonishingly, Ted even managed to place a couple of bets in the womb and asks the doctor how his team is doing. 

Ted Brogan, not yet five minutes old, would appear to the average observer as having lived on Earth for nearly forty years. He walked and talked like an adult, and in many ways was already wise to his environment. (He and some other newborn adults end up taking off for Atlantic City. How’d he know about Atlantic City?)

Now imagine meeting Adam in the Bible a minute after his birth. By all appearances, wouldn’t one presume that he was in his mid- to late twenties? Should someone have asked him how old he was right then, wouldn’t he have said, to everyone’s amazement, something like, “Oh, actually, I was just born”?

By Genesis’ account, man wasn’t the only adult-looking newborn at Creation. Plants, fish, birds and land animals, too, fast-forwarded through their infancy years to adulthood. “Then God said, ‘Let the land produce vegetation: seed-bearing plants and trees on land that bear fruit with seed in it.’” (Gen. 1:11) In other words, the very first apple trees appeared wearing apples, ready to go.

Here’s another: ”And God said, ‘Let the water teem with living creatures, and let birds fly above the earth across the expanse of the sky.’” (Gen. 1:20) There’s no mention of eggs or gestation periods or learning to walk. Rather, God made a special exception with the first creatures, to get the ball rolling. All of creation was born mature and already knew how to fly, swim, walk, or, in Ted Brogan’s case, place bets.

I often think about how it’d be to bump into Adam directly after his birth. All our tools of modern Science would reveal that Adam was much older than he actually was. And Science would arrive at this conclusion because, well, the idea of the birth of an adult baby is absurd, which is why the SNL skit works for gaining laughs. Creatures don’t just appear as adults. They need time to develop. They grow in progressive stages, beginning, naturally, as a seed or a cell, as every good elementary-school student knows, and go from there.

But God is good at shortcuts. He doesn’t need to fuss with planting seeds and waiting for them to grow up. God doesn’t even need parents for babies to be born. How’s that for skipping steps? In the beginning, God simply spoke and, poof, the world was filled with adult babies, or ”Ted Brogans,” everywhere: Ted Brogan trees, Ted Brogan livestock, Ted Brogan birds. It would appear to anyone just arriving on the scene that it has been business as usual for billions of years, when in reality the Earth was just born.

Jesus demonstrates with his miracles his knack for cutting out the middleman. For example, when he feeds the five thousand, the fish and bread he multiplies skips the necessary stages of labor that make them fit for human consumption. Rather than wait for Peter to catch and clean the fish or for someone to harvest the wheat and bake it, Jesus delivers the world’s first fast food. Baskets of fish and loaves miraculously appear, fully edible, oven-baked and showing all the signs of time having elapsed in their preparation. Jesus does this with healing diseases too; he bypasses the doctor or the prescription and patches up the person on the spot. No waiting for the antibiotics to kick in.

Since God is a master at creating new things that look old, it isn’t too far-fetched then for a Christian to propose that the age of the Earth itself may be an illusion. It could be only thousands of years old, instead of the billions of years purported by many scientists.

So maybe Palin does know what she’s talking about. Or maybe she’s just a Will Ferrell fan.

Categories: Christianity, Mystery, Science
No Comments »