REAL-LIFE STORIES; excerpts from my 2017 book, "Twelve Dead Frogs––a Filmmakers Memoir." Starts with my 'breech' birth/"I took the pain from the mother."

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/35987705-twelve-dead-frogs-and-other-stories-a-filmmaker-s-memoir?ac=1&from_search=true&qid=qbv73sVQyQ&rank=1

Jan 13, 2024

Here’s the kick-off story from my book, TWELVE DEAD FROGS AND OTHER STORIES—A Filmmaker’s Memoir (<https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0777FHXX2>). While I don’t remember too much about being born (who does?), I’ve constructed a fantasy-memory, based a bit on what my mother told me. What I most distinctly remember is her saying that the doctor was pretty proud of himself, egotistical even, to have delivered me successfully. Anyway, please enjoy it.

BIRTH REENACTMENT (1944)

At seven months, I am floating around in my mother’s amniotic fluids, still head-up, nowhere near the correct position for normal birth, where the head descends, to lead the baby out the birth canal. Suddenly my mother’s body signals that she is having a premature birth and she is rushed to the hospital. Within minutes she is tranquilized into unconsciousness and rolled by gurney into a delivery room. Her doctor has been called off the golf course and dons his surgeon’s greens, washing his hands while joking with the nurse in attendance about ’the bogey on hole seven.’ Snap, snap, the rubber gloves are secured over his hands. Looking back for a second at the young nurse to laugh at her witty remark – something about how he’ll need to use a nine-iron to scoop me out – he enters the room.

As I’ve said, my young mother, age 28, is out cold. So no chitchat is necessary, no bedside manner for the doctor to worry about. He goes to work, running his hands over her stomach like an auto body repairman sizing up the dent in a Chevy. Yes, there’s some work to be done here, he thinks to himself.

First he makes an incision to open up the vagina as wide as possible (he needs some elbow room there), and goes in with the fingers. It doesn’t take long to confirm that my legs and an arm are down there, near the opening. Inside, I feel the invasion and try to retract my appendages away from the intruder. Finally the probing stops and my heart beat returns to normal. Then comes the metal forceps. With great dexterity the doctor eases the metal jaws into the birth canal and grabs hold of my leg. Ouch! I feel the pain and I contort, furiously kicking at the grip. But it won’t let go. Suddenly I’m being rotated, and there’s nothing I can do about it. Outside in the bright lights of the operating room, the doctor narrates his actions like he’s still out on the fairway – he says it helps both the deliveries and his golf score.

“Driving it home. Yep. Seeing the clubhouse up ahead now.”

Finally the doctor has re-positioned my torso, preparing to drop my head into position. The vise-grip releases, temporarily. I recover, my jaw closing slightly as my silent scream abates.

Then a horrible sensation shocks my skull, as the metal monster latches on. My heart races spasmodically as the pain increases. I feel my face squashing in, eyes popping, ears flattened by the unforgiving claws. I’m dragged, down, down. The doctor, who is an all-around sportsman, now resorts to fishing terms more suited for the finale.

“Reeling in a big one–still got some fight, but think I can land ’em.”My eyes are being squeezed together, forced open through their lids, but I’m still in darkness. Suddenly, at the threshold of pain I emerge, jerked out into the blinding light. The forceps are removed from the sides of my head and I cry furiously while nurses comment on my small size (5 pounds) and condition (black and blue).

As the doctor receives his well-deserved accolades, takes a bow or two, he can’t help recounting the landing of an 80-pounder off the shore of St. Johns the previous month. At any rate, I’m born alive, in Chicago, Illinois, during the latter part of WWII.

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*****

For a Native American baby who experienced such a breech birth, encamped with his family somewhere on the plains (Illinois, Iowa, Nebraska?), he or she would have been at much greater risk of stillbirth. With no sterile environment, no monitoring devices, no incubator or modern medicines, what was his or her life expectancy?

When my mother awoke she asked the nurse, “When am I going to have it?”

Years later, Mom told me that the delivering doctor had a big ego. He let her know that she’d been lucky to have had such a fine physician on-call (hole in one...), because her baby would surely have died if his abilities had been anything short of ’extraordinary.’ She said my father had been confident all along, believing that the birth would indeed be successful. His first marriage had ended disastrously in the 1930s, in a maternity ward somewhere in Europe where both wife and child had died from toxemia poisoning. Possibly his attitude of bravado was an attempt to break the jinx, fortify himself, just in case another horrible tragedy occurred.

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