Kate’s Birth Story

When Kate was finally born, after a couple of days of off-and-on labor for Nancy, we soon learned that she had a blood clot on her brain. A nurse, Sarah Brown, whom we will never forget, noticed that Kate was having trouble breathing. A few tests and pictures later, there was the picture: the whole back half of her brain was covered with it. I stared at it and thought, how am I going to take Nancy home to a house full of baby furniture and no baby?

It was affecting her “reptile” functions, the breathing, for instance. There was no danger to her cognitive functions, for now. But she couldn’t breathe. They gave us a choice: Let her stay in a little plastic box that helped her breathe, and wait a couple of weeks to see if the clot drained away on its own, or have surgery to try to remove it. In years since, I wonder how we made the decision to have surgery, which seems now to be the much riskier plan.

It may have been a matter of not wanting her to live through two weeks of living in a plastic box. It may have been something a little selfish: We couldn’t possibly have put up with the stress of waiting to see, day after day, how much of the clot had drained away. Meanwhile, we could only hold her briefly, and the blood clot made her face lopsided. Nancy and I are not gamblers, so there was nothing of that to it.

We met the pediatric neurosurgeon—I don’t even know how to put those words together to this day—on the day of the surgery, a day after she was born. His name is Dr. Timothy Steege. I was frantic, and Nancy probably was too, though typically she wouldn’t show it. I told the surgeon, “I was diagnosed last year with Leiden’s Factor V Gene Mutation, which makes me susceptible to blood clots. I had deep vein thrombosis in my calf. Could that mean anything?”

He laughed at me! Laughed! “Oh, that’s something strange they made up since I graduated from med school,” he said.

I thought, this is who I want operating on my kid: he’s like a fighter pilot.

Then he said, “I’m going to be operating on an eggshell in a hole the size of a dime.” Believe me, I remember this, word for word. “I’ll be happy if I can drain fifty percent of it.”

We nodded. I was still thinking that she’d probably die.

He finally performed the operation that night at 9:30. He’d been operating on people’s brains all day. This fact didn’t make me feel any better.

Nancy and I didn’t know what to do. We wandered around Swedish Hospital and found a chapel and went in. I’m a thoroughgoing atheist, and I won’t speak for Nancy at that point, but being there felt empty and a little strange. We headed back to Nancy’s room.

Nearly there, we heard a nurse tell two parents, “He’s perfect. Congratulations.”

That made us feel miserable. Why not us? Earlier in the day, we’d heard a doctor, the wife, in fact, of the man who had delivered Kate, tell a nurse, “They’re such nice people, it’s awful that something like this happened to them.”

Back in our room, I can’t recall what conversation we had. Suddenly Dr. Steege came through the door: “We got nearly all of it,” he said. Nancy threw herself into his arms.

Kate was there another nine days. Her face softened into what it looks like today, perfectly normal. A neurologist said that she might have seizures till she was ten, and she might have a little trouble with gross motor skills. That wife of the doc who delivered Kate said she’d be a skater, “as she’s skated right through this.”

We took her home on a very cold, misty January night. We had a pass to get us onto the ferry despite the crowd. At that we were panicked: she wasn’t supposed to lie in the car seat for longer than an hour or so.

Then we got her home, settled her into a crib, and thought, “This is it? Now we just have to feed her and change her diapers and watch her? That’s easy!” What a relief.

She never had any seizures. Problems with gross motor skills? One softball coach said she was the best player on the island.

Every year, I’d send Dr. Steege a holiday card. He never answered. This year, when Kate graduated high school, I wrote him again and told him what had become of her. He replied very graciously. I wrote him about how people talked about the miracle of birth, but I subscribe to the miracle of pediatric neurosurgery.

Some time a number of years back, we told Kate her story. She took it in stride—skated through it, if you will. We pointed out the scar on the back of her neck, and she said she thought everyone had one. She was a Harry Potter devotee, so we clumsily tried to tie them together as she was young enough to buy at least a tenuous connection.

A kid at school recoiled and said it freaked him out—this was middle school at best, he can be forgiven, and he’s still an immature moron with a horrible mother. Kate will run into those people, but I bet they’ll be rare. This generation isn’t as overtly horrible as mine.

Kate, as I’ve noted, is not forthcoming. She hasn’t said a word about it since, at least not to me—she talks to Nancy a lot more. I wonder if it frightens her. Nothing bad can happen about it again, but I’d be nervous, if I were she. We were. Once, when she was a baby, we stupidly placed her on a sofa facing us to take a picture of her. She tried to find her way toward us and did a somersault off of the sofa onto her head. We were scared to death, but, of course, all was well. When she performs a header in a soccer game, I think of it.

It’s now 18 years in the past, and I wonder how it will affect her. Will she go to therapy about it? When will she tell her boyfriends about it? Only when he kisses the back of her neck and sees the scar? How will he react?

Does everyone else have something like this? I don’t. How do people live with such traumatic events? Is that what post-traumatic stress disorder is about?

How defining will it be for her? As she has no memory of it, does it even matter to her? I guess I could ask her, but right now asking Kate anything can be downright dangerous. She never mentions it. Nancy thinks that because she has no memory of it, and it passed before she could have any, it doesn’t really affect her. I hope that’s true. If that’s the case, then she really did skate through a life-threatening event.