This time my husband and I sat holding hands in the waiting area. We watched from a window in the next room as the X-ray machine swiveled around him, capturing images from numerous angles.Īfter the X-rays, he was taken for an ultrasound. She placed him on a small saddle with his arms above his head while a hard plastic case was fastened around his torso, holding him there like the tiny victim of a stickup. One took Cooper and held him while I removed his clothing, leaving him in his diaper. We followed him down a hall and into a room where two technicians were waiting. Then he draped the stethoscope around his neck and with a quick smile told us he’d like to get some X-rays. We followed him into the elevator and up two floors to his office, where he performed a brief examination, narrowing his eyes as he listened to our son’s heart. The cardiologist, a trim man who looked to be in his early 40s, met us in the hospital lobby. “Just to give a listen,” she said, signing the discharge papers. She said murmurs are common, that nearly half of all newborns have them. On the morning of the third day, as we packed to go home, our pediatrician stopped by to say she was “hearing a little heart murmur.” She suggested we take Cooper to the children’s hospital to see her friend, a pediatric cardiologist. The nurse said he was probably worn out from the procedure.Ĭooper, the day after his birth, October 25, 1982. On the second day, after his circumcision, Cooper stayed in my room and nursed a little and slept, nursed and slept again. The nurse said some babies need encouragement and suggested I uncover his feet. That night Cooper fell asleep partway through his feeding, his mouth working the air for a brief moment before he sank into the crook of my arm. I turned off the television and pushed away the dinner tray. Watching the grainy footage of tearing waves and flailing trees, I felt a wrenching, not of physical origin but something deeper, more terrifying, so that my breath came in short bursts. That evening a report came on about a tropical storm that had hit the coast of Central America. The pediatrician observed that his six-and- a-half-pound birth weight contrasted with that of our first child, Liam, born weighing nearly nine pounds, but she did not appear concerned and made no further comment. He scored high marks on the standard Apgar newborn assessment. He was delivered after eight hours of labor following his first breath, he let out a sharp, lusty cry, his body turning a healthy pink as oxygen moved through his bloodstream. I blink and the world turns sideways beneath me.Ĭooper was born on a Sunday morning in October 1982. I feel a slight weight, as if I am holding a kitten or a bird. I nod, making a chalice of my hands, and he reaches down into the plastic bucket and lifts my son’s heart and lungs out of the water. By age 70, a human heart will have logged upwards of 2.3 billion contractions, taking cues from the electrical impulses that move through it like lightning up a staircase.Įven the heart of a baby who lives just 42 days will pulsate more than 6 million times before its final, fluttering beat. In the course of one day the adult heart will beat more than 86,000 times, in one year more than 31 million times. The heart is also an elegant Gordian knot of one continuous muscle that with each beat contracts and relaxes, pumping blood out and allowing it back in. He unfurled the organ, spreading it out flat, a reminder that while for centuries science has continued to treat the heart as a four-chambered construct, there is an added dimension. More than 40 years ago, Spanish cardiologist Francisco Torrent-Guasp, using his gloved fingers, separated the tissue of a bovine heart at the naturally occurring juncture where the ventricular myocardial band circles around to meet itself. On or around the 23rd day, tracing the path of some invisible template, the multiplying cells begin a right-looping arc, developing in the form of a spiral, as would a rose, or a seashell, or a galaxy. In human gestation, the precursor of the heart, called the heart tube, forms in a region known as the cardiogenic field.
0 kommentar(er)
