Of Awe and Alien Autopsies

A descriptive narrative telling of the night my son was born.

       My son, Eddie, was born on a cold night in January, just over five years ago. Like typical parents expecting a new child, we had prepared long in advance for his arrival. The nursery was decorated, and toy elephants and bears artfully arranged. Diapers had been bought, and the hospital bag was waiting to go. After all of the waiting and planning, the time finally came. It was a night of esoteric meaning, and a night I’ll never forget.
       

       It had been nearly thirty-six hours since we arrived at the old naval hospital. Since Jen had dilated to only four centimeters by this time, the doctor decided that a c-section would be necessary to prevent any further complications with the birth.

 
       Shortly after the doctor gave her word, two uniformed corpsmen came into our room to take Jen off for anesthesia. After a brief goodbye, she was taken away and I was left alone for a time, unnerved and worried about what was to come next.

       

       Eventually I was taken to a dim locker room near the surgical suite. The flickering florescent lights gave a ghastly appearance to the baby blue disposable scrubs I was given to don. I quickly dressed, first the paper pants, then the top. Stretchy, gossamer shoe covers came next, followed by a ridiculous, and yes also blue, surgical cap. All of this went over the digitalized green of my Marine Corps camouflage, making me appear to have been half eaten by a very large smurf.

       

       The corpsmen lead me down a long shining corridor, which I was told was the way to the operating room. Doors, empathic to the desires of their wards, opened automatically throughout the passage adding to the already otherworldly situation.

       

       Finally the doors reluctantly gave up their game, and presented us the operating room. I really wasn’t prepared for what I saw next. There, on a gleaming table of steel, lay my wife, gruesome and dry. A blue shield of paper bisected her body at the neck preventing her from viewing the surgeon’s craft.

       

       They asked me to stand beside her, and from my vantage I could just see over the billowing blue bulwark. The surgeon’s knife was an edge of grisly anticipation, and I watched raptor-like as she made her first deft slice. I watched in utter astonishment as layers of white skin and red viscera were dissected. The sick smell of blood mingled with the smell of steel, and even I had a moment or two of nausea. My stomach turned, not from the careful carnage but from the ever mounting anticipation of the moment. My eyes were the surgeon’s blades, and unbeknownst to me, my hands absently comforted my wife.

       

       Finally there was a triumphant pop and then a wet cry. The doctor lifted my son into the unsympathetic light. His perfect form was alien, and even covered in the life of his mother he was beautiful. He had been stuck head first in the birth canal for the long hours preceding the operation and now his unearthly cone of a head was the evidence of that long fought endeavor. The whole of it reminded me of a classified recording of an alien autopsy; all of it grainy and uncertain except for the wonderfully fascinating creature before me.

       

       I was asked to come around the curtain, and I eagerly complied. A pair of shining scissors was giving to me, and I cut the cord. The doctor handed my son to the nurse, and asked him to get the child cleaned up. He beckoned me to follow, and we both went to the far corner of the room where lay a small table, which was also ever-present steel. My son, alien in his form, was bathed and swaddled, and gingerly placed into my quivering arms. At that very moment I knew love; love all consuming, all devouring. Time stopped dead, and all of creation imploded into one single, solitary moment of awesome awareness. I knew what it was to be God at that climactic moment of cosmic creation. I had seen what I had made, and it was good.

       

       He looked at me with his beautiful eyes, the color of a wispy summer sky, streaked with cloud. Within a few weeks they would turn a deep brown like my own, but that temporal blue will be forever engraved in my memory. I held him to my chest, blue eyes against blue scrubs, and knew that my life would never be the same again.

       

       A gentle hand on my arm reminded me that I had to hand my boy back to the nurse. They had to take him to a different room to perform the standard auditory and nervous tests. I followed along enraptured, all the while stuck dumb by the magnitude of the experience. The tests were simple, and soon over, and I was soon holding my son once more. They lead us back to the post-operative recovery room and I introduced my little boy to his still groggy mother.

       The night passed, and we all went home within a day or two. Life changed, and new routines quickly overran the old. I went home changed as well; a new creature in the light of my experiences. In one night the eyes of a newborn child had transformed me into man, god, and terrified, exultant father.