Day 15 - First Week (finally!): Part One

Before talking about our first week with the kids, let me encapsulate to you what it was like for me. One night, Emma was crying for mommy's booby (as I have been for the past 9 months). I scooped Emma up and placed her next to Lisa in bed. I went back to sleep.

But not for long.

I opened up my eyes and noticed nobody next to me. I freaked out. What happened? I just put Emma down! Oh crap! There's a swaddled baby next to me. Did I roll over Emma? Shake shake shake! Oh wait...that's just the bed sheets. Where is everyone? Oh crap! There's a swaddled baby at the bottom of the bed! Shake shake shake! Oh wait...those are Lisa's pajama bottoms. I trip my way over to the crib to finally see Lisa on the love seat feeding the kids. Relief.

You see, the first week was this blur of forgetfulness, the inability to focus, I think I'll warm up a chicken tamale for lunch, and forgetfulness. So many things happened so fast I'm not too sure where to start. How about at the beginning...

I place my penis inside Lisa's vagina and...OUCH! Lisa just hit me. Instead let me start with the birth of the kiddies on September 21st.

After years of watching movies and sitcoms about child birth, I must say a c-section birth is some what disappointing. Actually I must give credit where credit is due because Lisa made this same analogy years ago. Except substitute "child birth" with "sex" and "c-section birth" with "having sex with me."

This isn't to say that seeing your kids for the first time isn't a great moment, but everything leading up to that moment is nothing like the stuff you see on TLC or the Discovery Channel. Every time I've seen those shows I keep on thinking "Oh geez...that baby ain't gonna make it" because that's the way they produce those shows. There's always a doctor saying something like "If she doesn't push now, both her and the baby are going to explode." And of course when the show returns from commercial, there's no explosion. There's never any explosion...sigh.

Lisa entered the O.R. (that means 'operating room' not 'ovary room' as I initially thought) to get prepped with her spinal anesthesia. A local anesthetic is administered before a long needle is inserted into the spinal cord. Once inside the spinal cord, the anesthesia and morphine gets shot in and mixes immediately with the spinal fluid. It is quite similar to how I administered myself absinthe and a mojito, and it mixed immediately with my sanity.

As the nurse escorted me to the O.R., I was determined not to look at the actual c-section. There are two things that I hate: Nazis and blood (though not necessarily in that order). As I entered the room, I saw Lisa's gigantic belly all prepped for surgery. Her stomach was matted by that generic light blue surgery paper which made it look like an incomplete Magritte painting; imagine the bowler hat giving birth to twins and you get the idea.

I took my front row seat and the nurse explained the dividing curtain separating Lisa's body: the side with Lisa's head is not sterile and the other side is sterile. I slouched as low as I could so I wouldn't catch a glimpse of Lisa's intestines spilling out over her cooch. Our anesthesiologist was with us in the not sterile universe. She was a very chatty woman named Dr. Kuong. As I looked around the brightly lit room, I realized the sterile side was full of white people and the not sterile side had the Asians. I was prepared to give up all my worldly possessions and get shipped off to Manzanar.


Right away, Dr. Kuong, myself, and Lisa's head started having random conversations about anything. Honestly, I don't really remember much of our talk because it was at this moment I was the most nervous. After 37 weeks, this was it. It really is true that everything else is thrown out the window and the only thing you care about is that your wife and kids come out of this healthy. I did think about that 50" LCD television set as I glanced at all of the monitors, but it was only for a second.

The one thing I remember before Emma came out is that one of the doctors took her forearm and basically did a pro wrestling move on Lisa's stomach. In order for the kids to come out, strong pressure needs to be applied to the top of Lisa's stomach to push the kids out of the incision. Similar to getting that last dollop of toothpaste out of the tube.

Before you know it, the room was filled with crying; it was Emma. I wasn't too sure what to do so I think I just gave Lisa a goofy smile. For a long time. Probably too long cause a nurse called out to me and said, "Hey. Don't you want to see your daughter?" I think she called me a doofus, but everything was a blur. I walked over to see this chalky, bloody little thing crying her little lungs out. As a dutiful Japanese, I took a few pictures with her in the V for victory pose and sat back down.Then a minute later, the room was filled with crying again; it was Andrew. I was numb with how fast everything was happening. I went through the exact same motions as I did the first time around for lack of originality. And before you know it the nurses were handing me both babies at the same time swaddled up like E.T. in his bike basket. I thought it was crazy they wanted me to hold them because I've never enjoyed holding newborns in the first place. But then a demented thought took over me: I guess if I dropped them, an operating room with two doctors is as good a place as any.

It took maybe another thirty minutes before the doctors were finished stitching Lisa. Everyone congratulated us, and pretty soon a standing room only event became a room with the Ichikawa family and two nurses. This was the moment when I saw the bloody aftermath of the c-section. There was a pool of blood on the gurney that cascaded into another pool of blood on the floor; it was like the Guinness Book's record for world worst period.

Over the next few hours, Lisa stayed in the recovery room while I watched our kids go through the normal newborn protocol procedures in the nursery. During this entire time, I was never able to really take in all that happened to us. Even to this day, it's all still very surreal and difficult to describe. I will say this much: everything that people told me over the past 8-9 months about becoming a parent that made no sense to me...makes absolute sense to me now. I never understood how something that people described as being difficult, tiring, life-altering, and often times miserable could be a good thing. Well, it just is. And you just won't understand until you have kids.

Oh wait. By saying "it just is," I meant that having children is difficult, tiring, life-altering, and often times miserable, and you can never understand how it could be a good thing. Does that make more sense now? Didn't want you to think I was getting all sentimental.

I'll do one more (shorter) post about our first week at home. Fun stuff like excrement explosions and penis mutilation.