Your Man Devine
about your host
Dan Devine writes about basketball for Yahoo at Ball Don't Lie and makes little jokes on Twitter. He's not real sure why he's typing in the third person right now.
This is what he looks like when he's happy.
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2015-08-20
Source: dunksdontlie
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Source: dunksdontlie
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2015-08-18
‘Someone will explain this to you.’
That is a bracing and disconcerting sentence to hear as you hold your hour-old daughter, and watch doctors and nurses rush your fading wife out of the room.
They’re going down to the surgical floor because, yes, there will be blood when a child is born, but holy shit, there should not be that much blood.
You are staying put. You and The Kid. You’re not going anywhere.
To be fair, I don’t suppose there’s anything anyone could have said to me in that situation that would have felt, like, good. I guess the charge nurse could have led with, “This is perfectly natural, don’t worry about a thing.” I don’t think I would have believed her, though. I mean, I was there.
I saw Sara’s face transform from pure bliss when Siobhan first reached her skin to pure horror as the pain just kept getting worse, despite the Motrin, and the Percocet, and the morphine. I heard my wife’s voice quake as she wondered what was wrong, what was keeping her from locking into the first moments of her first child’s life. Why did the contractions feel sharper, harder and more prolonged with the baby out?
I watched the people responsible for the care of my world respond to my wife’s response, first quickly, then urgently. I didn’t understand most of what they were saying and doing, but I understood that they were doing it because they didn’t like what they were seeing. Neither did I.
I saw my wife on fire, in agony, unmoored. I saw doctors and nurses pulling plugs, shifting bed rails, preparing to move. The smiling girl who met me at the door of her dorm room in a paisley-print dress on Valentine’s Day 2003 locked eyes with me and wailed, “Take care of the baby,” as they rolled her out of the birthing suite.
Everyone was leaving, and leaving right fucking now, because whatever was happening was right fucking now-level serious. Everyone but me and my hour-old daughter, because, as it turns out, the people at the hospital don’t just let you go wherever you want with a newborn baby.
As the crisis crew careened out of the room, headed for Somewhere Else to Do Something, Jesus Christ, Please Do Something, the charge nurse trailing the patient looked back and saw me slumped on the couch, a million miles away from a celebratory cigar, a wide-eyed wraith left holding the barely-born bag.
“Someone will explain this to you,” she said.
That wound up being more or less true. After about an hour of holding my newborn daughter on my chest, kissing her forehead and trying to talk her through what was going on – the specifics elude me; all I remember are vague sputterings about the things we can and can’t control, and the people we love and always will – my wife’s doctor and the charge nurse came back.
They told me about a pitch-perfect labor with a traumatic conclusion, about the villainy of jagged tearing and how common swelling can hide dangerous internal bleeding. They told me about initially attributing my wife’s post-partum pain to a piece of the placenta not having detached from the uterine wall, which is apparently fairly common, but wasn’t actually what happened. That’s why the medication they gave her to flush everything only compounded the problem, leaving her bleeding out and having one unending contraction.
They told me more things. The rest mostly blurred together until I heard the word “stable.”
She’d pulled through and was downstairs in recovery, resting after the harrowing ordeal. I could go see her, they said, but I couldn’t bring the baby, because of words like “security” and “risk” and “procedure.” It’s completely reasonable, of course, that you can’t bring a defenseless wisp of a thing into an environment chock full of sick people, but it crumbled me just the same. To be by the side of the person with whom I’d built my life, I had to let go of the one for whom I’d built it. In the moment, the choice seemed unfathomable.
But, y'know, you make the choices you have to make. Siobhan went to the nursery, where people who actually knew what they were doing with babies could make sure she was healthy and would stay that way. I went to the recovery room, to make sure my wife was alive. And then I went to the waiting room, to make sure our families knew that, a few terrifying hours later, we’d entered a pair and would leave a three-piece, as planned.
Siobhan’s first birthday is next week, and I’ve thought often about the charge nurse’s turn of phrase over the past year. I thought about it whenever we’ve hit a rough patch, like the three extra days we stayed in the hospital to let Sara heal, and during stuff like sleep training, bottle training and teething. I’ve thought about it in happier times, too – the first time she rolled herself over, the joy in her eyes when she figured out how to clap her hands, the day she started smiling at me on purpose and not just because she was farting. (That was a big day.)
I’ve read (some of) the baby books and asked (some of) the parenting questions and listened to (some of) the answers, and I’ve been lucky enough to have a bunch of people – grandparents, siblings, friends, pediatricians, colleagues, et al. – who have tried to help me understand what my wife, my daughter and I are going through as we navigate our new world. I’ve been able to put the fear and helplessness I felt in that delivery room behind me, and, sometimes, to just appreciate the beauty and purpose that these two ladies bring to my life.
Even in that appreciation, though, I’ve never felt like I fully understand what any of us are doing. On the contrary: the more parenting reps I get, the less of a bead I think I’ve got on what it all means.
The more I see and experience and learn, the more acutely aware I become of just how little I’ve actually seen, experienced and learned. The more I wish someone actually would explain all this to me, the less likely I think it is that anyone ever will, or even could.
That’s not always a comforting thought. It can leave me feeling disassociated and wracked with anxiety. On good days, though, it can feel exhilarating – like an opportunity to explore, to expand, to just let that which seems inexplicable wash over me. To find meaning in it, and in my life, by facing that vast unknown with my family. With my family.
It is a challenge; it is a responsibility; it is a blessing. And, thanks to the diligence of an awful lot of doctors and nurses, it is a shared experience. I am not alone. What I don’t understand, I can work to grasp and hopefully come to accept, so long as I continue to be theirs and they continue to be mine.
It’s not an easy thing to explain. Someday, though, when Siobhan’s old enough, I’d like to try.
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2015-08-17
Source: awesomenbamoments
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2015-08-05
Source: stupidfuckingquestions
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Source: danteross
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2015-08-04
Source: fucktheory
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Source: ForGIFs.com