Summer Storms

(not my picture!)

Last night I drove home in the dark watching a thunderstorm. It was such a beautiful drive that I actually drove more slowly than usual, enjoying the night and the darkness and the intermittent swish of the wipers and the flashes of light.

Some time after I got home I thought I heard heavy rain; when I went out onto the screened porch I realized it was the strong winds that I was hearing. There was still only a little bit of rain and still occasional flashes of lightning, and I stood out there for a minute enjoying it all.

As I was getting ready for bed I noticed that the storm had moved closer. The wind had died down, the rain was heavier, and the lightning was more frequent and accompanied by thunder. I was thrilled—I think it's a treat to have a storm to watch as I fall asleep.

Normally we snuggle on Russ's side of the bed before separating to our own sides to sleep. I would so love to be a snuggle sleeper, but I have enough problems getting to sleep when I'm just dealing with my own self. If I'm touching Russ I'm way too aware of his breathing and any movements or sounds that he makes to ever relax enough to fall asleep. So we snuggle and then go to our separate corners.

Last night he scooted over to my side of the bed and we snuggled up and watched the show outside the window. Crashing and banging and pouring rain—it was magnificant. At one point I got up to check on Rachel, expecting that the storm would have woken her up already, but she was still sweetly asleep. (How is it that sleeping children are so beautiful?) A huge flash of lightning just a minute later changed that. It was so bright it was much brighter than day, and the accompanying clap of thunder rattled the house. When Rachel came in whimpering I invited her to snuggle up with us and enjoy the show. At first she was scared, but after a few minutes she started finding things that were interesting about each different flash of lightning. Our favorites were the ones that light up the sky but still showed clearly the outline of all of the trees and leaves.

Within about 15 minutes the storm had moved far enough away that the lightning wasn't as bright and the thunder wasn't as loud. Finally Rachel decided that she was ready to go back to her own bed, and she gave me a kiss and ran back to her room. Russ had fallen asleep and was breathing loudly (but lovingly) in my ear, and so I pushed him back over to his side of the bed.

As I lay there waiting for sleep I couldn't help but be reminded of another summer storm, one that was an answer to an unspoken but frantic prayer.

When I was 29 weeks (and 2 days) pregnant with the triplets, my water broke. It was very early and very unexpected. And VERY scary. When we got to the hospital (via ambulance) they assured me that they would be able to stop my labor and that I would just get to say in the hospital a couple more weeks on antibiotics while waiting for the babies to mature a little more. They gave me first one drug and then another (through first one method of administration and then another) but nothing stopped my labor. I was having enough contractions and in enough pain that the whole thing was kind of hazy.

What I do remember clearly is the doctor coming into my room and telling us that it looked like they weren't going to be able to stop my labor, and that we needed to decide if we wanted our babies to be born in Charlottesville, VA, or Fayetteville, NC. We were baffled. What on earth were they talking about?

They explained, and for a moment I felt like a modern-day Mary. Essentially, there was no room in the Inn. Or rather, no room in the Duke NICU. The Fayetteville NICU was the only one in the state in that moment with 3 NICU beds available, and Charlottesville VA was the next closest place.

Russ and I agreed that lacking any other criteria to judge by, Fayetteville was closer (2 hours away) and so we made that choice. Then he got in his car and started driving as they put me into the Life Flight helicopter for the flight to Fayetteville.

Lest this flight to Fayetteville seem too relaxing, let me point out that the first question the doctor asked the Life Flight EMS guy when he came up was "How many minutes until you can have her in the OR in Fayetteville?" The EMS guy told the doctor that it would take 34 minutes, and the doctor decided that we probably had that much time.

I don't remember the helicoptor flight. When people ask what it's like flying in one, I say I don't know. All I remember is knowing with a certainty that I was in transition on that helicoptor. The EMS guy had asked me to put my thumb up in the air when I was having a contraction, and both he & I were all too aware that I was having too many contractions, too close together, and that they were lasting too long.

I'd not planned to experience labor with the triplets. I was going to gestate them a healthy (and uncomfortable) amount, and then I was going to have a nice scheduled c-section. None of this labor pain for me. Instead there I was in the helicopter, experiencing all sorts of unbearable pain by myself.

Normally when a patient is in the Life Flight helicoptor the gurney is put in feet first, and they're able to communicate with the EMS people on board. Because my head was not the "business end," as they so delicately phrased it, they put me in head first. The pilot was on the other side of a large piece of plexiglass, so I was all alone.

I had taken different child-birth classes before I had Cindy Lynn and Jason, and I didn't have any pain medicine when I had Jason and Josh, so I wasn't a novice at childbirth. I had never been very good at most of the "distract yourself from the pain" methods, though, and I had never done it all alone. In fact most of my previous success in enduring painful contractions had probably been because I held on to Russ so tightly that it literally transferred the pain from my uterus to his arms!

Oddly enough, that time in the helicoptor was the one time in my life that visualizing as a way to lessen pain really worked. I visualized myself in Cherry Grove, NC—a place that we used to go for family reunions. I visualized myself floating in the warm and very salty water of the canal behind the house, visualized the hazy humid air and the beauty of all of the different houses. I'm not sure why this was the image that came to mind — possibly because I had just missed a family reunion there the month before, and Russ had taken the kids for a few days and sent a beautiful picture of the canal to me. Whatever the reason, every time a contraction started I put my thumb back into the air and thought of the warm water of the canal.

This is the picture that Russ sent to me.

After we had been in the helicoptor for about 15 minutes (time for approximately 200 contractions, I'm sure!) there was a bit of a commotion. The pilot and the EMS guy talked back and forth, and then the EMS guy leaned over and yelled to me that a line of thunder showers had just moved in over Fayetteville, and that we were going to have to land in the next county and drive 30 minutes through the pouring rain to Fayetteville.

I said that I didn't think so.

The EMS guy radioed the doctor, who made the EMS guy check my cervix, an ordeal that he has probably still not recovered from 8.75 years later. (He apologized to me repeatedly.) He later told me that after checking my cervix he told the doctor "I don't know how to measure this, but I know a head when I feel it," whereupon the doctor told him to tell the pilot to turn around and fly back to Duke.

I have never been happier. The moments not occupied trying to ignore the unbearable pain of my contractions had been filled with the awareness that I was about to go and give birth to extremely premature triplets without my husband there, in a place 2 hours away from my home and my other three children. I could not fathom how we were going to handle the months ahead in those circumstances. I knew that I was not going to be able to drive for a few weeks, and that I was going to want to be with both sets of kids. I didn't see how we were going to manage having triplets born 11 weeks early, and I certainly didn't know how we were going to do it like this.

I'll spare you all of the gory details; suffice it to say that we flew back to Duke, they called Russ and told him to come back to Duke, and he got there just as they were starting to deliver the babies. (He claims that I didn't need him at that point because I was so in love with the anesthesia man, and it's true, I did love that anesthesia man. But I always need Russ. Even if he doesn't dispense good drugs.)

I have always been grateful for that summer storm, and when we have those late afternoon storms in the summer I think of what it meant for me that day. It meant that I could deliver my babies with Russ there, and it meant that I could be at home with my big kids during the day and then drive 20 minutes to the hospital and spend every evening with my really little kids. It made a difficult situation much more bearable.

Rachel--2 days old

When my babies were still very little someone in my triplet support group who had had a traumatic and very early delivery said that on her triplet's first birthday she had experienced post-traumatic stress disorder. It made perfect sense to me that her body & mind might revisit that trauma on the anniversary, and I was ready to have a little PTSD of my own as August of 2001 approached.

Instead of PTSD, though, I experienced almost a magnified awareness of the miracles that we had experienced that day, and I had a profound and deep sense of gratitude at the gifts of a loving Heavenly Father.

Including a well timed thunderstorm...


PS--sorry this got so long...I actually only intended to tell about last night's storm when I started writing!