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A few days before we were scheduled to deploy, I went to the doctor to see about getting a cyst in my neck removed. Inside his examining room, he numbed the area around it with a local anesthesia, then they stuck a needle in my neck to suction the material out.
I think. I don’t actually know, because as soon as the needle went in, I passed out with a seizure. When I came to, I was out flat on the examining table, my feet where my head should have been.
I had no other ill effects, not from the seizure or the procedure. No one really could figure out why I’d reacted the way I did. As far as anyone could tell, I was fine.
But there was a problem—a seizure is grounds for being medically discharged from the Navy. Luckily, there was a corpsman whom I’d served with in the room. He persuaded the doctor not to include the seizure in his report, or to write what happened in a way that wouldn’t affect my deployment or my career. (I’m not sure which.) I never heard anything about it again.
B ut what the seizure did do was keep me from getting to Taya. While I’d been passing out, she had been having a routine pregnancy checkup. It was about three weeks before our daughter was due and days before I was supposed to deploy. The checkup included an ultrasound, and when the technician looked away from the screen, my wife realized something was wrong.
“I have a feeling you’re having this baby right away,” was the most the technician would say before getting up and fetching the doctor.
The baby had her umbilical cord around her neck. She was also breached and the amount of amniotic fluid—liquid that nourishes and protects the developing infant—was low.
“We’ll do a C-section,” said the doc. “Don’t worry. We’ll get this baby out tomorrow. You’ll be fine.”
Taya had called me several times. By the time I came to, she was already at the hospital.
We spent a nervous night together. The next morning, the doctors performed a C-section. As they were working, they hit some kind of artery and splashed blood all over the place. I was deathly afraid for my wife. I felt real fear. Worse.
M aybe it was a touch of what she’d gone through every moment of my deployment. It was a terrible hopelessness and despair.
A hard thing to admit, let alone stomach.
O ur daughter was fine. I took her and held her. I’d been as distant toward her as I had been toward our son before he was born; now, holding her, I started to feel real warmth and love.
Taya looked at me strangely when I tried to hand her the baby.
“Don’t you want to hold her?” I asked.
“No,” she said.
God, I thought, she’s rejecting our daughter. I have to leave and she’s not even bonding.
A few moments later, Taya reached out and took her.
Thank God.
Two days later, I deployed.
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