Journal 95

It has not been a good night. Sometimes life sucks. Gretchen finally delivered her baby at four in the morning. I have never been so glad. I don’t think I could have taken one more hour of Gretchen crying and screaming. Poor Gretchen pushing that baby out was an impossible task. There was an enormous amount of blood.

Gretchen fell asleep almost immediately after the baby’s delivery. I’m not even sure she knows he is a boy. Hemy helped me clean the baby up and tuck him in bed next to Gretchen. He is an adorable baby boy. He is small, not much bigger than a doll. I tried to let Marty know that his baby boy was born but I couldn’t wake him. His fever was through the roof again. Tony told me to leave him alone. Marty didn’t need to expose his baby to the illness.

After Hemy, Tony and I cleaned up Gretchen we decided to try to make Cecelia more comfortable before we tried to get some needed sleep. Cecelia had been lying in birthing fluid for hours. We had been ignoring her, not on purpose but Gretchen needed our help more. Cecelia hadn’t made hardly any sounds in hours. Hemy and I grabbed some clean blankets and towels and began to clean up the bed Cecelia was sleeping on. Cecelia was very unresponsive except for a couple of moans and groans. Cecelia was sicker than we had realized.

Hemy was attempting to put clean towels under Cecelia’s bottom when I heard Hemy say “Oh shit” in a panicky way. The baby’s head was halfway out. I tried slapping Cecelia awake to get her to push. I didn’t help. I tried pinching her arm and yelling at her to push. Nothing was helping.

Tony pushed me out of the way and lifted Cecelia to her knees. Tony said gravity would help. Why does he know these things? Hemy grabbed the baby’s head and gave it a pull. The baby slid out easily. He was small. I think he was too small. We tried to get him to breathe forever. His little body just lay there. He never took the first breath. We wrapped him in a blanket and set him aside.