Profiles in Fatherhood

From the Argus (SD) Leader

Published December 30, 2011:

Police responded to a report of a reckless driver during Thursday morning rush hour and found a suspected drunken driver with an 11-month-old boy in his lap on North Cliff Avenue.

Ahamgkari Subash, 26, was stopped near East 52nd Street and North Cliff after a passerby called in to report an erratic driver just after 8 a.m., according to Det. Sean Kooistra of the Sioux Falls Police Department.

A breath test put Subash’s blood alcohol content at .10. The legal limit to drive is .08. He was arrested on charges of DUI, no seatbelt and failure to use a child restraint system.

New Year's Resolutions

Why not, eh? Everyone else is doing them. Here are my New Year's Resolutions for 2012:

1. Have baby. This one should be taken care of a little over halfway through the year.

2. Do not vomit in the delivery room. This one isn't just a matter of timing, it's going to take an act of God to not vomit, faint, perspire at an alarming rate, act like an idiot in general.

3. Lose 25 pounds. I could do 30 pushups right now, if you wanted me to. But until waiters stop referring to me as "Fat Jesus," "Moonface," or "Tell-A-Tubby;" or immigration officials stop doing cavity searches for Zebra Cakes, it's time to get it together for the baby.

4. Wear a tie, to pretty much everything.

5. Avoid strangulation by Kami.

6. Come up with (entirely legal) ways to pay for this baby. Any inquiries as to syndication, publication, or book-dealification can be submitted to jamesyasko (at) gmail.com

An annotated picture of an 11-week old baby

Note: Don't roll your cursor over each underlined label. It doesn't work like that here.

So, basically, the baby is an inch-and-half long, and is almost fully formed. I find it odd that BabyCenter says that 1.5" is about the size of a fig, as if anyone actually knows how big a fig is just off the top of their head. Other things that are 1.5":

-The length from your finger tip to halfway between your middle knuckle and the knuckle you break if you get in a fight.
-About three-quarters the width of an iPhone.
-About the height of one White Castle.

Fixed.

This, from BabyCenter.com:
To minimize your exposure to methylmercury, the Food and Drug Administration advises that you completely avoid shark, swordfish, king mackerel, and tilefish (also called golden or white snapper). The agency says that pregnant women can safely eat up to 12 ounces (about two servings) a week of other cooked commercially caught fish. However, this should include no more than 6 ounces of albacore ("white") tuna or tuna steaks, which contain more mercury than canned light tuna. Some experts think this threshold is too high and recommend limiting tuna consumption to no more than 6 ounces of canned light tuna and avoiding other tuna altogether.

Also, never eat any fish caught by family or friends without first checking with local health advisories to make sure the fish isn't from waters with unsafe levels of mercury and other pollutants. Finally, avoid raw or undercooked fish (including uncooked smoked or pickled fish) when you're pregnant. It may harbor bacteria or parasites that could make you sick and possibly affect your developing baby.

Yeah, how about just saying no to fish? If any of you jerks tries to give us some sullied river-caught fish, I will destroy you. This seems like an awful lot of advisories, and how many women think, "Gah! Now I can't eat sharks!? This baby is cramping my style! HUH? No king mackerel!? This baby better be worth it!"

Refer to the picture. "Beano," as I like to refer to the little thing, has a couple of telling features. Skin, for one. A bone. One, apparently. Also, it's upside-down. That can't be terribly comfortable.

The Vomiting. Oh Sweet Lord, The Vomiting

The Vomiting began about seven weeks ago. Kami says that you can tell a man coined the term "Morning Sickness," because that's the only time a man sees it. Kami has Morning, Late Morning, Early Afternoon, Late Afternoon, Evening, and Night Sickness. It's starting to taper off, but sweet mercy, it's been a rough seven weeks.

I'm not the kind of guy who pukes when he sees someone else hork all over the place, but while Kami's experience has made me a touch out of sorts, she has learned how to manage it.

That was not always the case. Because if we went out for dinner, I might as well have taken a $10-bill and just thrown it in the toilet. Sometimes The Vomiting came an hour after eating, sometimes it came mid-bite. But make no mistake, always it came. Every time.

So Kami start nibbling - eating 18-20 small meals a day, and by "small meals," I mean "a bite of an apple," "three green beans," or "a teaspoon of peanut butter." These things she was able to keep down.

When our Scottie, Angus, gets sick, he'll sit there, look at you, and then just...open his mouth and let the kibbles fly. While Angus - who is fairly anti-social and a little raggedy looking - is more my dog (Gunther, who is all sunshine and rainbows and hugs for everyone, is Kami's), Kami has graduated to the Angus School of Vomiting. She'll just be sitting on the couch, get up, and yack.

Kami eats the way she wants the baby to eat, and has only gained about two pounds through this point in the first trimester (I, however, think it's a license to just eat whatever I want). But here are some things that I've learned, food-wise, from the first eleven weeks:

1. Get her whatever she wants. If Kami can keep it down, that's a worthy investment. Kroger had Lucky Charms for $2/box (in the nine years we've been together Kami has never eaten Lucky Charms), but I've bought five boxes of Lucky Charms over the past five weeks. I've eaten probably three of these boxes, but that's neither here nor there. Publix had buy one/get one Pebbles, of both the Fruity and Cocoa variety. I housed the Cocoa Pebbles, so I should probably go back to Publix. If she can keep it down, that's just food that she didn't rent.

2. What I want to eat is totally irrelevant. Many of you have seen me in person. Some of you, it's been a while. I'm not exactly at Peak Physical Condition (but for those of you who haven't seen me since we've moved to Nashville, I'm in better shape than I was). Still, whenever I watch Vampire Diaries Jason Statham movies, I feel self-conscious. But whatever sounds good to Kami is good enough for me. I can find something I'll eat anywhere we go. Sometimes it's Indian food, sometimes it's Burger King. It doesn't matter.

3. Make your own freaking dinner. If Kami wants a can of green beans for dinner, by God you warm that nuclear winter-ready food on the stove, and don't complain about what you're supposed to eat. Once again, it doesn't matter.

4. Fetch. Kami has started having go-cups. One glass of water with ice, two ice-free glasses of water, by her side. Constantly. If one of those glasses of water is empty, take fourteen seconds and fill it up.

5. Clean the kitchen. Always. I've started treating Kami like she's carrying the Dalai Lama in her womb - I don't want her picking anything up, including her own purse, which weighs 142 pounds. A guy wearing an Affliction shirt saw me holding Kami's purse in Walgreen's, and gave me the implied "Nice purse, guy" lip sneer. So I jumped on his shoulders, and bit him on the nose while screaming "I got her pregnant, you walking steroid! And you're here in Walgreen's? Looking at backne medication! HA HA HA (chomp)." Sort of. The returned gesture was more of an implied (or, actually, stated) middle finger. Anyhow, I clean the kitchen like my grandmother, because a clean kitchen keeps her blood pressure down.

All of these things sort of irritate Kami, because she is an independent woman. She sort of hates it when I get up and get her more water, or try to defer the dinner decision to her. But I like it.

Week 11, Day 1

The due date is July 17, 2012. This, by my calculations, gives me about five months with the little one before the Mayans come and screw our crap up. But that'll be a fun few months.

Today we met with the doctor who will actually be delivering the baby - Dr. Smallwood (Pause). And that dude is a saint. After our 30-minute appointment, I told Kami, "Hey, if you left me for Dr. Smallwood, I wouldn't be happy, but I'd get it."

Due to events previously mentioned, every doctor's visit is an event. We were seeing a doctor closer to where we live, but he doesn't deliver babies anymore, so we checked with our ridiculous insurance company, cross-checked their list with friends of ours who have successfully gotten a child out of their uterus, and came across our new doctor at Baptist Hospital in Nashville.

So this was our third overall appointment. The first doctor was a nice enough guy. He didn't like Kami's shoes (THIS IS ABSOLUTELY TRUE - HE TOLD HER AS MUCH), was a little understated, not very emotional. Which is fine. But we now approach the visit to the Lady Doctor with a sense of dread, akin to going through airport security, and realizing you have a bear trap in your coat pocket.

That first visit was not a big deal. They asked us how we knew we were pregnant (the magic pee stick told us so), asked us some other questions (Note: It's not a good idea to say to the nurse with your wife in the room, "Under the doctor-client privilege, you can't tell my wife I'm here, right?"), took a whole bunch of blood, and sent us on our way.

The next visit was Ultrasound Day, a lot like Truck Day in baseball. Truck Day is the day where baseball teams load up their trucks for Spring Training and drive off to Florida. It's the one semi that I have not wanted to flip off. But ultimately Truck Day just means that something big is coming, it's a reason to get excited, but there's a lot that has to happen between now and then.

They confirmed that she was pregnant (all hail the prophetic power of magic pee stick), and had her Porky Pig it (shirt, no pants) on the table for the ultrasound. I want to be the wholly supportive, sympathetic husband and father-to-be. We had never enjoyed a successful ultrasound. So when the good doctor inserted the, uh, thing into, uh, Kami, the images were basically the same: Negative uterine space, but there were other elements we had not seen before. The Yolk Sac, for instance. The Yolk Sac attaches to the embryo, and provides nourishment to (according to Wikipedia, the most reliable source of information on earth) "bony fishes, sharks, reptiles, birds, and primitive mammals."

"Awesome." I thought. "We're at least having a shark."

But then we saw the flickering of the heart-beat, which incidentally looks a lot like when you're playing Call of Duty, and your guys have that thing on their uniforms that tell you not to shoot them. (Maybe I've got some work to do on this Father thing). When I saw that, I burst into tears, or at least a severe ragweed field, and hugged my bottomless wife.

Today, there was no ultrasound, but the Good Doctor did bring out a Fetal Doppler machine - a device that can externally hear the goings-on of Kami's uterus and can also tell you the precise times that the storm will hit the towns you've never heard of.

The Good Doctor said that, if you hear the heartbeat after ten weeks, the chances of anything going wrong drops down to about 4%, so this would be huge. Also, they can hear the heartbeat of a baby at 11 weeks about 75% of the time. So we proceeded.

The Good Doctor swirled that thing around - with me holding my breath - for what felt like ten minutes. I couldn't breathe, move, think, other than to say "comeoncomeoncomeoncomeon" over and over again. It probably actually only took him about a minute and a half, but we heard a noise not unlike a high-pitched helicopter rotor, and the Good Doctor say, "Bingo."

Now, watch this video:


When I heard the baby's heartbeat, I made a sound very similar to the sound I made when Brian Bogusevic hit the walk-off granny against the Cubs in August 2011, which I was watching on television.

After that visit, they took us in to the room where they tell you about finances. Which is a story that I need to tell another day, because the juxtaposition of Baby Heartbeat and This Is How Much It Will Cost does not need to be in the same post, just as it did not need to be in the same doctor visit.

An introduction

So I successfully pro-created. Over the past six years, our problem hasn't been getting pregnant, it's been staying pregnant. Actually, it's been both. Kami and I have been trying (or at least not not-trying) to get pregnant for about six years now. It happened a few times before, such as:

Pregnancy #1: February 2008 - Kami miscarried at about eight weeks.

Pregnancy #2: July 2008 - Kami miscarried at about four weeks.

These two events were so abrupt and sudden that I - personally - wasn't prepared for it. Kami felt awful - physically and emotionally - as is to be completely expected and understood.

Pregnancy #3: December 2008. This one was brutal. We found out in early November that Kami was pregnant, and immediately started making all sorts of parenty plans. We told my parents, and my dad was pretty sick at the time (spoiler alert: He's okay) In the second week of December, we went to New York City for a wedding with all of Kami's family, and told them that we were pregnant - which is always a risky proposition. But there was something off. I didn't catch it at the time, but Kami's coloring was all wrong. She looked a little grey, and a lot tired.

At the time, we lived in Cooperstown, New York, where I was the Manager of Visitor Education at the Baseball Hall of Fame, in charge of school visits and videoconferences for the Hall's Education Department. Kami called me on the morning of December 15, about 10 minutes before I was to deliver an education program, and I could tell something was wrong in her voice, and then she told me to come home.

Arranging to have the other guy take the videoconference, I ran home (literally, Home was only a block and a half from Work), and Kami was as white as a sheet. She had taken a bath, passed out, and then called me with this feeling that something was totally wrong.

So off we went to the hospital in Cooperstown, which was about six blocks away from the house. As we progressed through the previous six weeks, Kami got her tests done at all the pre-determined times, and we couldn't get a straight answer from the doctor(s) about what was happening with her hormone levels, because they were way too low for as far along as she was. We heard everything from "Are you sure you're pregnant?" (which, a quick glance at that handy little clipboard would have been able to answer) to "Maybe you're just not that far along."

In one instance, a nurse took us into a room full of baby cribs (with no babies in them, or this would have been ultra-sinister instead of just a douchy thing to do) and said, "There's a possibility you're in the process of having a miscarriage, so you might want to start thinking about that." Anyhow, no one at Bassett seemed to be terribly bothered by the fact that something was not right with Kami's pregnancy, including the ultrasound guy - who creepily resembled Ben Linus from Lost - who, in the middle of our last ultrasound, poked around in Kami's innards and said, "Yeah....I don't think you're pregnant. At least not anymore."

All in all, these are terrible things to say to anyone. So we knew there was a chance that something was wrong, which was complicated by the fact that nobody at the hospital seemed to want to talk about it.

So we arrive at the hospital, go to the ER, and...wait. Kami is writhing in pain, and (fill in your own awful ER experience here). We wait, and wait, Kami is in bad shape. Another horrifically painful ultrasound with Ben Linus, who had the emotional capacity of a drain blocker, and they tell us that Kami needs to go into surgery, because the pregnancy is ectopic.

Before they take her back to surgery, a nurse asks if Kami needs to use the bathroom, she says yes, tries to stand up, and then goes into a sort of unconscious/seizure episode that ranks up there with The Sixth Sense as The Most Terrifying Thing I've Ever Seen. They take her back.

So I'm standing there, it's about 6:00pm, and I'm wondering what to do, since the doctor said it would take a couple of hours. You have to understand that I had (and, to some extent, still have) a numb-nuts' understanding of anatomy, in general, and an even lesser set of knowledge of the female anatomy. I know the important bits. (JEEBUS. Eyes, heart, butt, etc. Collective heads out of the proverbial gutter, people). But I had no earthly idea as to what was happening to Kami, what they were doing to her, what was wrong in the first place.

I like to think that My Lord And Savior Jesus Christ placed the Veil of Knowledge over my eyes to help me remain a complete and utter mouth-breather during this point, because I didn't panic, until a couple of days after it all took place, because I didn't know any better. So what did I do while the doctors gave my wife of (at that point) five-and-a-half years three units of blood, replacing the blood she lost while bleeding internally over the previous week from her fallopian tube exploding when the ectopic (meaning, the baby never made it to the uterus, it attached to the tube) grew too big?

I went to Fookin John (not kidding, that's the name of the place. It's excellent.) and ordered some sesame chicken. Then I took Gunther and Angus for a walk. I was so calm that a normal person would have seen my actions and thought I was a serial killer. I just didn't know. When I got back to the hospital, our best friends Lucas & Melissa were there, and we sat in the waiting room watching Monday Night Football. They knew what was happening, but mercifully decided not to shake me by my collar and yell at me, "Hey, idiot! Put the chicken down, because your wife might not make it through this!"

The doctor came out, and everything was as fine as could be expected. They apparently had to tip her over on her side while she was under the anesthetic, to pour the blood out of her midsection. It was an ordeal. Then they wouldn't let me stay in the room with her overnight. -1, Bassett.

I went home, slept for a few hours, and went back early the next morning. I took some work with me, because I knew they were going to give her morphine. I worked in the chair. Cleveland State beat Syracuse on a buzzer-beater. And Kami woke up.

She went home later that day, after her mother had flown in from Texas, and we tried to do what was best for her. She slept on the couch, because she couldn't walk up the stairs (luckily, there was the coldest indoor bathroom on the planet). So I slept on an air mattress in front of her in case she needed water, or anything else. That first night, if I remember correctly, it was a few degrees shy of Absolute Zero, and I didn't think about being on the floor of an old house, and didn't bring enough blankets with me. I was so cold, that I slept with a pillow over my head to trap the heat. Crazy thing is, it worked, and I still sleep with a pillow over my head. Would-be murderers take note.

Ultimately, I felt guilty because, if I had to choose between a baby and Kami, I'm taking Kami every time. I was broken up, sad, depressed, all of that - but I was just happy to still have my wife with me. Once I did a little reading and figured out just how close it came to that not being the case, I wanted to scream.

The doctor - who was great, and just about the only competent physician we dealt with at that time - told us that she had lost her left fallopian tube, but there was no reason that she wouldn't be able to get pregnant again. Which, despite, our watching ovulation cycles, and counting days, and whatnot ("Oh man! Unprotected sex? Again?") did not happen for two years and nine months.

But now it has.

First Time Father

Oh, hello. I'm James. I'm married to Kami. You can read about our other exploits over here, but this one is all about me - which is something Kami could probably say is a mindset I've had to work very hard to overcome naturally. You see, Kami is pregnant, with our baby due sometime around the middle of July. And this blog, friends, is about my experiences with a pregnant wife (the focus will be shifting come the middle of July). Have a seat, won't you?