“Right weight, wrong number.”
“Excuse me?” I said to the man in scrubs.
“Remember last night,” the doctor continued, “when I told you that I thought we had a five-pound baby on the way, despite your wife delivering 10 weeks early?”
“Uh-huh,” I grunted, confused.
“Well, turned out to be 2 two-and-a-half pounders. Your wife just had twins, two tiny baby girls. Congratulations!”
My jaw dropped, my mouth undoubtedly forming a wordless WTF, but Dr. Scrubs kept talking.
“Your wife’s fine. So are the babies, but the next twenty-four hours are key. The good news is, your pediatrician has had smaller ones than this survive.”
Five minutes earlier, I had been sleepily reading a magazine in the waiting room. It was 1969, the tail end of the good old days when expectant fathers got the boy/girl news after the fact. The waiting process was a mix of anxiety and excitement, boredom and butterflies, and idyllic thoughts of the future. Suddenly, all of that was interrupted by the harsh reality of survival. »Read More