Breathe Part Two: Breathing for a Baby

May 31, 2014  As I ponder paint chips on our master bedroom walls—pastels, blues, whites, pale green, I recall the walls of the room where I birthed my first child. It was a wash of pale green, peeled and cracked on the concrete surface. The bed was small and, in the early 1980's, it had not a blink or beep from microchipped, diagnostic devices. 

This simple room was in a simple, sacred mission hospital upon the steep Himalayan foothills above Tansen, Nepal. There an American family on furlough let us use their apartment before our baby’s due date.

Away from the heat of the southern flat lands, we felt we were on a second honeymoon, smooching as the baby jiggled my belly. We enjoyed meals in the guesthouse and with families who were in our language class. We meandered foot trodden trails to stunning rural vistas.

Foothills near Tansen

After one afternoon trek, my labor started. My Irish midwife, Barbara, moved into our apartment. Just as we settled to sleep, around 10 p.m., it was time to hurry to the delivery room. I wore my own flannel gown as MBH carried a crocheted blanket my mom made. Then we met Nepali nurse, Vishnu, in a white cap and uniform green sari who helped us through the night.

Birth pangs ebbed and roared like tidal waves against the shore. I drifted in and out of sleepiness. Minute by minute, hour after hour MBH seemed always beside me, modeling the breath patterns he studied in the pregnancy book.  Slow breaths led to puffed pants, then slowed to deep cleansing breaths. In and out, in and out hour by hour, minute by minute, seconds by seconds.

We breathed in sync, MBH and I. As my pangs intensified, so did our breathing patterns, despite jagged spurts and contractions. My old diary reminds me that between breaths I also raved and ranted to give up the natural process with light meds. Thank God for God, Nurse Vishnu, Midwife Barbara, and dear MBH cheering me to carry on.

“It’s one less pain,” Barbara assured me often, in soothing Celtic tones. She nudged Andy to message my arm and move me into more comfortable positions. When dawn cracked, transition finally came, along with the delivery room staff. And finally entered the Doctor, an Aussie missionary, who spent then same night with a boy cut by a sickle, an operation on a four-day old baby, a predawn cesarean birth, and a patient who, in naive panic, mangled his IV tubes.

Dr. Geoff was there for me when it was time to bear down... once more and again. In my weariness I could not see that baby’s head had to be turned for the birth. I also couldn’t hear a baby’s wail.
Finally, at 5:25 a.m. Dr. G delivered my quiet baby, praying joyfully heaven’s blessings over us.

He quickly handed my baby to Dr. Sylvia, the German pediatrician. Her back to me, she cleared the mucus from our baby’s lungs. Her breaths via a tube blew the away the blue tinge in his skin. Then she turned to settle the baby in my arms.

His hair curled black. His fat cheeks were lively rosy. So handsome cute was and is he!

With many breaths my firstborn came to be alive and healthy. Thank God!

Thirty some years later this cheeky son would breathe with me via cellular devices... To be cont’d