Our two oldest daughters, Kathryn and Anna, are teenagers now. Kathryn is 15 and is preparing for her driver’s test in a few months. Anna is 12, almost 13. For the most part, they get along really well for being teenaged sisters. But when they spar, it gets ugly fast. Until Kathryn plays her trump card.
“I saved your life, Anna. Don’t make me wish I hadn’t,” she’ll yell.
To which Anna, having no real response, will roll her eyes, or throw her hands up in the air, and mutter something like, “Oh yeah, right, Kathryn. What does that have to do with anything?”
“Well, I’d have my own room now, for one thing,” Kathryn will quip.
Their arguments are usually over fairly quickly, and are completely normal. They’re girls. They’re teenagers. And they share a room, because Kathryn saved Anna’s life once.
Kathryn was just a couple weeks away from her third birthday the night Anna was born. The delivery had gone remarkably easy, compared to my first. Kathryn had spent most of the day with her grandparents, aunt and uncle, and cousins. Once Anna was finally born at 9:02 p.m., they quickly brought Kathryn down to the hospital to see her new sister.
I can still remember her walking into the delivery room. I was all stitched up by then, and covered by a sheet. Geoff was holding Anna, all bundled up in a baby blanket. Kathryn came in wearing flowered shorts, a t-shirt with a little sweater, and tennis shoes. And, I noticed right away, she was sporting two new bandaids on her knees.
“I fell down on the sidewalk at Aunt Sue’s,” she’d explained to me.
After seeing that I was okay, she looked around the room at all the delivery equipment. Both doctors–the ob-gyn and the pediatrician–were still in the room. Both greeted her, and congratulated her on being a big sister.
Then Geoff carried our new little bundle over to where Kathryn was standing and asked if she wanted to see her new little sister. She’d nodded, somewhat apprehensively. He gently lowered Anna so that Kathryn could see her. He even let her hold Anna for a second. Kathryn had smiled, but still seemed hesitant.
“Our new baby’s all bleedy. And her doesn’t have any arms and legs,” she’d said. Words which have become immortalized in our family.
Geoff started to explain that she does have arms and legs, they were just wrapped up tight in the blankets. Then he asked what she’d meant about Anna being all bleedy. At that, Kathryn pointed to the underside of our new little bundle. The side she alone could see. Geoff turned Anna over in his arms, to find a huge area of the baby blanket, larger than his hand, soaked with blood.
Both doctors immediately stopped what they were doing and took Anna. They unwrapped her quickly to find that her umbilical cord had torn from where it had been cut. It had split in two, down to the skin. Arterial blood was spurting from her little belly.
At the time, I was in that post-birthing euphoria. I recall feeling interested in what was going on. But not particularly concerned. I did notice, however, that these two doctors whom we had known for some time were moving quickly. In fact, though they spoke calmly, I was thinking that I had never seen either of them move quite this quickly before. They took off the clamp, pulled her torn cord up higher, and re-clamped it on the actual skin of Anna’s tummy.
The spurting stopped.
Then the doctors quickly weighed the bloody blankets against two identical, unused blankets, trying to establish how much blood was actually lost.
For me, it wasn’t until early the next morning when our pediatrician, Dr. Dave, came into the hospital room to check on Anna that I realized how serious this might have been.
I told him that I had never known that something like that could even happen. I’d asked him how common it was for the umbilical cord to tear after it had been cut and clamped.
He had looked thoughtful for a second. Then said, “In all my years as a doctor, it’s the first time I’ve ever seen that.”
“So, she could have bled to death,” I pursued, watching him closely.
He nodded, looking at me. “She nearly did. If the nurses would have put a diaper on her before they wrapped her up, she would have bled into the diaper, and none of us would have even known there was a problem.” After a moment’s pause, he added, “You know, as the girls grow up, you can tell them both that Kathryn saved Anna’s life the night she was born.”
I said that we would certainly do that. Then he went on to explain to me that with the amount of blood she lost, we should expect some jaundice.
“She’ll be yellow. People will comment about it, and want to give you advice. Tell them that your doctor is already monitoring it,” he’d smiled.
Anna did turn yellow over the next days. Then she turned orange. But eventually her blood supply got back up to where it was supposed to be. Even her belly button healed just fine.
When Kathryn came in to visit at the hospital that next morning, we unwrapped Anna so that Kathryn could see that she did in fact have arms and legs. She’d seemed relieved at that. We even turned Anna over to show Kathryn that she was no longer “bleedy.” And then we’d explained to her that Anna’s cord had torn and that she had almost died.
“And you saved her life,” Geoff had said, fighting back tears. “If you hadn’t told us she was bloody, we wouldn’t have noticed it in time.”
Kathryn had smiled then. The smile of a child, understanding that she had played an important role in something. Or maybe it was the beginning of an understanding that she would always have a trump card. To hold over her sister’s head. To torture her with when necessary. After all, she had already saved Anna’s life, hadn’t she? For crying out loud, what more could anyone possibly expect?
Post Script: Kathryn recently gave the maid of honor toast at Anna’s wedding reception. She introduced Dr. Dave, and asked him to come up and verify, once and for all, that she really had saved Anna’s life the night Anna was born. And Dr. Dave happily complied.
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