My Best NCAA Final Memory

In 2001 the NCAA final was played on April 2nd, when Arizona went up against Duke's power house.  Why do I know this? Because I was busy trying to bring a human being into the world. 

Cubby was due on April 9th, and Hubbster declared early on that he would be born during the NCAA final.  Saying "all first babies are late," I declared he would come after.  Sad to say, a case of pre-eclampsia meant an induction, and more onerously, that Hubbster was right.

So there we were, 20 hours into some hard labor for me (a fact I relish reminding Cubby on his birthday) where I alternately told Hubbster his breath smelled too strongly of coffee, then said it was too minty.  I'd cursed him and his male kind, and I think I'd begged him to get a butter knife and I'd get this baby out.  The TV was turned to the game in an effort to give Hubbster some relief from my crazies.  I may or may not have flung a magazine at the TV at one point.  Really, I didn't get any air under it, as I was mid-contraction, so it looked like it dropped and could go either way. At some point the doc decided an epidural was mine, mine, mine!

The epidural doc who walked in was a bear of a man.  I yelled at him to get the lead out.  He got.  As he's about to do his thing with the needle, and I'm curled into a ball, he asked if anyone had watched the game, because he was an Arizona alum and had a few bucks on it.  From my near fetal position, I admonished him to focus.  He did, and I finally got a nap, after I'd professed my undying love for him.  For about an hour.  Then the lights went on, and they said Cubby's heart tones were bad. I needed an immediate c-section.

Scary as it was, this team sprang into action, and within maybe two minutes I was in an operating room.  As Cubby was taken out of me, with the umbilical cord wrapped around his neck and ankle, he wasn't breathing.  Hubbster rushed off with the nurses and Cubby, and I was left to still be worked on.  That bear of an Arizona alum held my hand the whole time, reassuring me that it would all be okay, and I don't even know his name.

In the end, it WAS all okay.  Cubby turned 12 yesterday, and there's almost no trace of that tiny little baby who gave us such a scare that day.  There is ONE spot.  They'd attached a fetal monitor to Cubby's scalp. In the effort to get him out NOW, they kind of ripped it out, creating a bit of a scab they assured me would go away.  It never did.  When his hair is short, there's a scar about the size of a dime in the shape of a heart on the side of his head.  It disappears soon enough, but I kind of like the first week into a fresh haircut when I can see it on the side of his head. 

I look at that spot and think of my little baby.