9 Years

Today is my son Marty's ninth birthday. If it was hard to wrap my head around being married for 10-years, its even harder to fathom that.

As he's quick to point out, Marty was born in Los Angeles at Cedars Sinai Hospital. Trust me when I tell you that you don't want to know what that cost my insurance company.

They actually tried to induce labor...for two days. It started innocently enough. I took the day off to go with Amy to what was supposed to be her final ultrasound. Since they were making us do it at a location down the street from the hospital, we decided to hang out in Beverly Hills for a while. We had breakfast sitting next to Judge Judy and her husband, and went to the BH library to vote in the Arnold Schwarzenegger gubernatorial election.

Finally, we went to the ultrasound place to wait. When the technician did the scan, they pointed out that Marty had very little amniotic fluid and left to go call the obstetrician's office. After a while, they came back into the room and said that they were going to send us over to the hospital to be admitted, and then left again.

So, we waited. And waited. And waited. A couple of times I left the room to try to find someone, but never did. We became suspicious, however, when the lights started going out. I yelled, "Hello?" and one of the nurses popped her head around the corner and said, "What are you still doing here? I thought you went over to the hospital?"

Turns out they just assumed that we when they told us that they were going to send us to the hospital, we were just supposed to leave. We, on the other hand, assumed the "going to" part of the sentence meant that there was still something else that we were to wait for.

When we got to the hospital, they did take us right back and get us through admissions, but then because Amy wasn't in labor they took us into a triage room and there we stayed.

They started trying to induce right away of course, telling us that it would probably be a few hours. The next morning, we were still there in the little triage room waiting.

The cool thing about Cedars Sinai is that the late George Burns and Gracie Allen were major donors to the hospital. So, on a closed circuit TV station, they show stuff like "The Burns & Allen Show" and "The Bill Dana Show." OK, so I thought it was far cooler than Amy did, who would've preferred that I just go down the street to the Museum of Television and Radio to satisfy my old sitcom fetish.

Sometime during that second day, I took a walk over to the Beverly Center to try to get some things to kill time. Got an Etch-A-Sketch, a book about Christmas songs, some puzzle books and a couple of other things. Meanwhile, Amy remained hooked up to a bunch of monitors and really wasn't allowed to do anything except lay there.

They would try every so often to induce labor again, but it did not seem to be working the way that they thought it would.

At the close of the second day, Amy was pretty angry...so much so that I didn't even bother complaining about having to sleep on some chair thing again.

The next day, we were still there in our little triage room and had at that point become a cause celeb for the nurses, who really did feel bad for us being stuck there.

As the day dragged on, they were finally taking increased steps to move the labor along, and finally began bringing up the option of a C-section.

Late in the afternoon, the nurses finally seemed happy since labor was actually jump started at last. After having been stuck in our closet for so long, the nurse on duty actually held us there a little longer. They had decided that in reward for our travails, they were going to get us the best birthing room that they could (short of the $10,000 a day birthing suites).

The room that they put us in had a view of the Hollywood Hills and the Hollywood sign. We put our preordained "birth" music in the stereo and...we went back to waiting.

On the plus side, there was more room and a nice view...which it turns out you shouldn't say to a woman that's been strapped to a bed for more than 48 hours.

After another few hours the obstetrician showed up and things actually got into gear. However, the newest delay threw off my son's godmother, who arrived planning on going down to the nursery and looking at a baby through the glass. Instead, she was directed to the room where the action was still going on and popped her head in, not quite prepared for the scene that she saw.

As she stammered, the doctor apparently took that as a cue that she wanted to help. The baby doc instructed me to grab one of Amy's legs and for the godmother to grab the other. Our friend, let's call her Marie, does not have any children and really didn't want the front row view...but coming from a small town in Michigan, she did what the doctor told her to.

Things were going ok, but then Marty's head got stuck. Suddenly, they were pushing and pulling...and then they got this suction cup thing. They attached it to his head, and started yanking. Were this a book, I would describe the horrified look that Marie and I shared, but it would take a couple of paragraphs to do it justice.

When they finally got him out, they put Marty on Amy's stomach and all I remember is hearing her say, "Come on, baby, breath."

Next thing I knew, a SWAT team came rushing into the room and grabbed Marty. They took him across the room to a little station with a heat lamp and they began intubating him. I looked back at Amy who looked weak and was being stitched up and then I looked back at Marty being given what looked like CPR.

I was in the middle of the room kind of spinning around in a terrified daze. All I could think was that this was supposed to be the best day of my life, and it was looking like it was dangerously close to being the worst possible day that I could imagine.

I didn't hear the exchange, but apparently Amy encouraged Marie to go try to get me from my spinning. Marie, who's known me since we were kids and we were now in our 30's, came up next to me, awkwardly put her hand on my arm and said something along the lines of, "I'm sure it'll probably be fine."

Oddly, that helped since that was pretty much the way that I would expect Marie to handle that situation. If she had done something differently, I might have freaked out.

While I still wasn't sure that Amy was ok, the doctors dealing with Marty forced me to come over with them. The crisis was averted, Marty was breathing normally, and they had figured out that I wasn't necessarily doing good. They had me come touch Marty so that I could feel him breathing and forced me to cut the umbilical cord. And, I mean forced. I tried to beg off and they put the scissors in my hand and moved it to where they wanted me to cut.

After that, I got shuffled down to the nursery with Marty. Since he had struggled to breath, they were still watching him closely and I needed to go with him.

When we were down in the nursery, I just more or less stood there not knowing what to do. The nurse came over and told me that I needed to touch and talk to Marty. So, I stood there holding his little hand and saying stupid things like, "Hello, Marty...um, that was kind of exciting, huh?"

Once they were sure that he was ok, they told me that I could go back to where Amy was and they would meet me with Marty at the normal room. I'm sure there's some other name for it, but that's what it was after the triage room and the birthing room.

When I got back to the birthing room, I arrived just in time to find the nurse and Marie picking Amy up off the floor. She had passed out. They make the mother get up and walk to show that she's ok -- and I think go to the bathroom -- but instead she took a step and dropped. So, they made her stay in the birthing room even longer as they worked to make sure that she was stabalized.

Around 11 p.m., they let us go to the other room. As we arrived there, Marie -- who had expected to be at the hospital for about an hour...five hours ago -- took her leave with a simple, "Yeah, I gotta go."

They offered to have Marty hang out in the nursery, but we kept him in the room instead...if for no other reason than that it had taken him so long to actually arrive.

Since we were on the West Coast, had he been born a few hours later, it would've been Halloween in the East...which is really when our families found out about the birth. I stood outside the hospital at about 7:30 a.m. making all of the necessary calls. I also tried to send out a group e-mail...which AOL flagged as spam. At the time, I was working for the short-lived AOL Time Warner. I was standing in the hallways of Cedars Sinai on the phone with a sister company of my own employer, trying to convince them that I was jsut trying to send out a birth announcement and not a link to porn.

On Halloween night, after three days of hospital food -- which, don't get me wrong, if someone is going to force you to eat food from a hospital, pick Cedars -- I wanted to have something else. I had spent the day staring at a Jerry's Famous Deli across the street from the hospital and decided that a nice ham and swiss on rye would do the trick.

As I left the hospital to cross the street, I looked around and noticed all of the people in costumes. In my sleep deprived state, it took a minute for me to put together what day it actually was.

The fact that all of that was nine years ago seems unreal. The fact that the little red-headed baby that I stood in a nursery with is now a red-headed third grader makes me feel a little old.

The fact of the matter though is that ever since those handful of minutes that I stood watching a team of doctors working on him seconds after his birth, there isn't a day that goes by that I don't realize how lucky I am to have Marty.

I'm guessing that I'll never stop feeling that way.