Raising Blaze Read Free Page B

they all yelled “No!” in unison. The umbilical cord was tightly wrapped twice around the baby’s neck. The doctor had to literally cut it off his throat before pulling him out of me and laying him on my stomach. He had entered the world strangled by his own life-line.
    Blaze was positioned so that his face was turned up to mine. Hiseyes were very dark but wide open and I looked directly into them. They were full of brand-new life and they were gazing right into mine as if to say, “Here I am, it’s me.” I could see his very soul in that moment, shining and silently beckoning to me. My hands went out to him automatically and I cupped them around his small body. “Oh, it’s you ,” I said out loud. “I know you.” And then I started weeping.
    Women talk about falling in love with their newborns. There was all of that for me too and more, because, in that instant, I recognized him. He let me in at that very first moment and I understood completely the connection between the two of us. In doing so, I missed the flurry of activity going on around us. I didn’t notice that Blaze wasn’t making any sound at all. I missed the nurse calling out an Apgar score of 3 (a scale of 1–10 measuring heart rate, respiration, and muscle tone on a newborn—3 being not that far from dead). I never heard anyone say “blue and floppy,” although Maya did, and moved back from the delivery table. All I saw was the life, startled but intelligent and powerful, in his slate-colored eyes. That look was a gift to me, an unbreakable bond between us. My faith in Blaze was born in that very moment.
    I was still weeping tears of joy when the nurse lifted him carefully from me and said gently, “We’ll bring him right back. We’re just going to give him some oxygen. He needs a little jump-start.”
    It was many weeks before I learned what happened to Blaze next. My parents, afraid of sending me into frightened hysterics, waited until then to tell me the following scene: My mother, who was waiting outside the door with my father, realized that the baby had been born when she heard me crying. Those tears were familiar to her. They were both waiting anxiously to be let into the room, but moments later the nurse came out holding the baby and ran across the hall to the neonatal-care unit. My mother, predictably, went into a panic. My father was rather more decisive about things. He strode across the hall after the nurse and walked into the unit capless, maskless, and unscrubbed. Heleaned over Blaze, who was surrounded by doctors and nurses administering oxygen, drawing blood, and requesting a section of the umbilical cord for blood gases.
    My father, who had sworn that, after five children, he was definitely not becoming attached to another (he’d have fun with his grandchild, sure, but no “heavy” attachments), moved through all the doctors and put his finger into Blaze’s tiny hand so that the baby would have somebody from his family touching him. He started speaking to Blaze then with words that have not changed in meaning to this day. “Come on, Blaze,” he said, “get it together. Look at all these other babies; they’re small and red and premature. That’s not you. You don’t belong in here. Your mother’s waiting for you. You’re big and fat and healthy. Come on and breathe now. Come on, Blazicle, breathe.”
    A nurse finally had to physically detach my father from Blaze and push him out of the room, saying, “It’s okay, Mr. Ginsberg, he’s not going to die.”
    When the same nurse came back into my room to get information from me for Blaze’s birth certificate, she gave me an update on his condition.
    “He’ll be fine,” she said. “We’re just trying to get a good, solid cry out of him. Your dad’s in there talking to him.”
    “He is?”
    “Yes,” she said, smiling. “It’s really cute.”
    A team of doctors and nurses blew oxygen on Blaze for several minutes. They poked and prodded him, beginning a