June 21 and 22, 1978

June 21, 2006

Twenty-eight years ago today I was in Fairbanks Memorial Hospital, Fairbanks, Alaska. I had gone to the hospital early in the day, in labor with my second child.

Mel and I were living outside of Fairbanks, off of Goldstream Road at the time. We had been renting the walk-in basement apartment of a home in North Pole, a few miles southeast of Fairbanks, while the owners were on an extended vacation “outside” (the Lower Forty-eight). After their return, we had moved into a little shack of a cabin, one of the few places around Fairbanks that we could afford to rent. The “cabin” was about 15 miles outside of town, had electricity, but no running water and no phone. We had only one car.

Kara was just 14 months old and we had been quite concerned about Kara and me being alone out at the cabin during the day while Mel was at work. With no phone, and this was way before the time of cell phones, I could not call anyone if I went into labor. The baby was overdue, possibly by as much as three weeks. With only the one car, the solution was for me to spend my days in Fairbanks at Mel’s parents home, waiting while he was at work. This was actually good for both me and for Kara as she got to spend a lot of time with her grandparents and with her aunts and uncles who were still living at home during the months of May and June, 1978.

I went into mild labor early in the morning of the 21st, before Mel needed to leave for work. So, we packed up everything, took Kara to Grandma and Grandpa’s, and me to the hospital.

The day was endless. My labor did not progress. I lay there in the hospital bed, with waves of contractions, sometimes mild, sometimes strong, but never really “doing” anything. Finally, my doctor sent me home with the instructions to have a couple beers and try to get some sleep. Her idea was that probably the following day, Baby would arrive and I needed to get some rest. I responded that I didn’t drink beer, nor any alcohol for that matter, so she gave me a prescription for Valium.

We did not want to go back over to the grandparents house because we knew it would be hard for Kara to see us and then for us to leave without her. Mel called his twin brother, Ralph, and asked him if he’d like to go to a movie with us while we waited. We met at the theater, I took a Valium, and we went in to see The Turning Point. I sat between Mel and Ralph. I have very little memory of the movie, just memories of ‘floating’ feelings with occasional feelings of pain in my belly as the contractions came and went. After the movie, Mel and I headed on home, back out of town.

Sometime in the middle of the early morning hours, I awoke with very sharp contractions. I was still under the influence of that one Valium pill and was more than a little dizzy and woozy. I woke Mel up, told him I needed to get to the hospital as soon as possible, but that I needed to go to the bathroom first.

I’ve written before about our outhouse, so won’t go into detail here about that. I just could not bring myself to use it at that time. I was afraid that the urge to pee was really the urge to push and deliver and no way was I going to take a chance of having my baby in that outhouse! So, I went out into the blueberry bushes. There were a couple of other cabins in the vicinity and on June 22, the second longest day of the year, there was almost full sunlight even at 2:00 or 3:00 in the morning! But the bushes had grown pretty high by that time of the summer and I figured that no one else was awake that time of the morning. Out to the bushes I went. It’s funny to me now, that this is one of my strongest memories of that day – being out there in the blueberry bushes at 2 or 3 o’clock in the morning!

We arrived at the hospital probably 45 minutes later. I spent the rest of the morning there, slowly getting the Valium 100% out of my system, labor increasing in strength. Finally at 10:45 am, our first son was born. Peter. He was also under the after effects of the Valium as well as having the cord wrapped around his neck and tied in a “true knot.” His first apgar test was very low, a 5 if I remember correctly. The second one was better at 7, but still lower than it should have been. My doctor had realized too late that the cord was around his neck – he was already in the birth canal when his heart rate slowed way down. Otherwise, he would have been born c-section. She assured me that she thought he would be fine and she was correct.

Now, twenty-eight years later, I remember those two days as if they were in a dream. While Peter was in grade school it was determined that he had a very slight speech impediment and problems with fine motor control, probably due to that cord wrapped around his neck slightly cutting of the blood supply to his brain during delivery. Mel and I were given some exercises for him to do, one of which was picking up buttons one by one, so he could practice those fine motor skills. Instead, I gave him some embroidery thread, a needle, a pillowcase and his choice of subject and he learned to embroider. He was very proud of his first pillowcase – his very own that he used for several years. From there he progressed to doing some plastic canvas and regular cross-stitch as he grew older. Now, this young man with “fine motor skills problems” can keyboard at an incredible rate, with very good accuracy. When I listen to him type, it’s somewhat like listening to a machine gun burst. Brrrrrrrrrrrr brrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr brrrrrrrrrr. He is also very musical, loving both to write and to play music. He is a deep thinker, an apologist for the Christian faith, and a very good writer.

I had no idea what the future held as I lay there in that hospital bed, twenty-eight years ago today … half a world away …