- I needed her to survive.
And I left that hospital without knowing
if she was gonna live or die.
I was never one of those people
who felt like I had to have a kid.
And when we found out that Valerie was pregnant,
we immediately jumped into action.
Ya know, we started doing all this research,
and we found a midwife that we really liked.
And we all collaborated on a birth plan.
And we were gonna do this hippy dippy water birth
at a birthing center.
And a typical pregnancy lasts 40 weeks,
but my wife got diagnosed
with something called pre-eclampsia,
which basically means that she's allergic to being pregnant
and her case was severe.
And at 24 weeks and 5 days into the pregnancy,
my daughter Rain was born via emergency c-section
in order to save Valerie's life.
I saw the surgeons hand Rain off to this group
of other eagerly awaiting doctors
who hooked her up to a bunch of machines
just to keep her alive
and that was the first time that I ever saw her.
I just caught the quickest glimpse of her
as they were handing her off
and she was so small.
And she was just over a pound.
And she was limp, and she was lifeless.
I just remember she was so quiet.
And I remember thinking to myself
how is she possibly going to survive the night.
And she did survive the night.
And the next morning, Valerie was out of danger as well.
And we started talking to the NICU doctors
about the plan for Rain.
They said flat out a million things could go wrong
but they said they were committed
to getting her through this
and they told us that her recovery could have a lot
of peaks and valleys but hopefully
over time it would trend slowly upwards.
And you know, before we knew it,
she was alive a couple of days,
and then she'd survived a couple of weeks.
Then a couple of months and
we were feeling better about things
and it seemed like were starting to get control of things.
And Valerie and I did whatever we could do to help.
Ya know, we were at Rain's bedside.
I read to her every day.
You know, I read her Treasure Island
and Call of the Wild, and Tom Sawyer,
and all those books were way less child friendly
than I remember them being when I first read them.
I loved reading to her every day.
I felt like we were getting to share these special moments.
And I felt like I was helping her.
And I felt like a good dad for the first time.
And then all of a sudden, she developed a lung infection
and everything went haywire.
And the doctors gave her a blood transfusion.
And they gave her steroids and antibiotics
and nothing was working.
She just
she got progressively sicker throughout the day.
And around midnight, the doctor came to us
and she said, I wanna try one more thing.
And then she looked at us and she said,
if this doesn't work we're out of ideas.
And she told us that we should go home
and try to get some rest
because we wouldn't know anything until the morning.
And as I was packing my things up
and saying good bye to Rain,
I realized that this might be the last time
I was gonna be able to do this.
And I just got hit with this overwhelming
sense of guilt because I thought about all the times
in my life that I had talked to people
and said that I didn't want to have kids
and I hated myself for ever having those thoughts.
Because it was so clear to me
I just wanted more time with her.
And I left that hospital without knowing
if she was going to live or die.
After a sleepless night,
Valerie and I came back to the hospital
and we saw the doctor
and she just she looked exhausted
and leary-eyed and she saw us
and she smiled.
She came over and she told us that
you know Rain responded really well to the treatment.
And she was out of the woods for now.
I just wanted to laugh, and cry,
and puke, and pass out all at the same time.
I had never felt anything like it.
I didn't know what to do.
That was one day in the NICU.
And my family and I survived 149 more of them
before Rain was finally able to come home.
And she recently turned four.
And I'm a full-time stay at home dad now.
And I'm always just reminded of how thankful I am
to have one more day with this amazing kid
that I never knew I always needed.