Ya Llego! (He's finally arrived!)

Well, it was a long time coming, 39 weeks to be somewhat exact (I still have yet to get a firm grip on the due date predicting process) but on August 1, 2009 at 8:53 am, in Torreon, Coahuila, Mexico, our son Miguel Alberto Hennessy Diaz Alvarado was born. It wasn't exactly pretty. I mean, maybe it was pretty as far as Cesarean surgery goes, but from a layman’s perspective it was pretty gruesome. They just sliced her open and yanked him on out of there, no "gootchie, gootchie-goo, are you ready to enter the world, little fella?" Nope, they just grab 'em by the ankles and yank con mucho gusto. Ale had no clue what was going on as her view was blocked from all of the gore. I tried not to look, but when I did, I was reminded of the first ten minutes of Saving Private Ryan. I literally saw her guts oozing out. Not cool. Really, really not cool. (We would learn a week later that her bleeding had been abnormally profuse.) Thankfully, Ale was completely oblivious to the horror show talking place in her abdomen. Why wouldn’t she be? She was locally numbed and mildly jacked up on happy gas. And there were no obvious clues for her. The doctors were goofing around during the operation like they were socializing at an after work happy hour. The anesthesiologist sat off to the side reading a Harry Potter book. (Is this proper procedure?) So, I played along too, telling Ale that “it doesn’t look so bad, and everything is fine.” And meanwhile, on the inside, I was totally freaking out. I tried not to react outwardly—like squeezing the shit out of her hand—which I caught myself doing—and just kept chatting with her to keep her distracted and calm. I was cracking jokes to her like, "hey, while you're in there how bout sucking out some fat, or sewing up my stomach a little tighter, or taking a look for my missing USB..."

But, I don’t want to mislead you; this birthing process hasn't been all fun and games. Some of you have already heard about the insurance disaster that befell us on the road to parenthood. We had reviewed my insurance policy manual from work before we were married and were happy to learn that all we had to do was tell them we were married and "poof!" Ale was covered under my plan. The insurance offered a pretty good maternity package—not enough to cover everything soup to nuts—but enough to make it very bearable, so we decided to get right to work (if you know what I mean!) as soon as we were married, which we did. But, of course, this being Mexico and all, there had to be a glitch somewhere. Such as my school renegotiating the insurance plan over the summer in a way that altered the previous maternity coverage, and not alerting the employees (read: me) to this fact. Yes, (as they would later enjoy pointing out to us) they had put a new insurance manual in every teacher's mailbox at the beginning of the school year; but, it was one of many, many things shoved into my mailbox that first week of school. And I had no reason to believe it wasn't exactly the same manual as the same colored and titled manual I had received a year ago when I started working at ASF. I was very wrong.

It seemed there were many significant policy changes reflected all over the new manual, including this little beauty that had not been in the manual we used to make our decision to get pregnant: "childbirth is covered only after a waiting period of 12 months." Of course, we did not discover this minor point until Ale had been on the policy for six months, just three months before we were due to give birth (I say "we", knowing she did all the work in the pregnancy and birth—if you know what I mean). This was when Human Resources informed Ale that the 9,000 pesos of reimbursement she was seeking for prenatal doctor visits was unavailable to her according to the new insurance policy. She further learned that even though I was an employee in good standing who had been paying into his insurance policy for two years, and was legally married to a woman who had been an officially declared dependant member of my insurance plan for 6 months, we would not be receiving any maternity coverage. ANY COVERAGE. Zero. Zilch, Goose egg. Or as they say down here in Mexico, “nada.”

Sometimes things are so screwed up you just can't even get too upset about them. And in life (and perhaps especially in Mexico), you almost begin to expect this kind of stuff. So, I didn't go postal on anyone, though the urge was there for about two minutes. Our baby was going to be born four months before Ale would be eligible for any maternity coverage and there did not appear to be much we could do about it. We would have surely waited four months if we had known and saved ourselves thousands of dollars. Though I must say now, as I sit here typing and looking over at Miguelito in the crib beside me, I wouldn't trade this particular baby for all the insurance coverage in the world.

Besides, in the end, things got much better for us with regard to the maternity costs. At a meeting I had with the school's director, he and the head of Human Resources, said we were indeed uncovered for childbirth but at least were honest enough to admit it would have been a good idea to have notified the employees that the insurance coverage had changed over the summer. “Note to self for next year,” he said, and actually scribbled a note on a pad, (though it could have been an obscene sketch for all I know, like that guy in The Big Lebowski drew when he pretended to write something down). In a good faith effort he said he would talk to the insurance company and see what he could do. I wasn't expecting much, so I was pleasantly surprised when he came back and said he had talked them into covering 20,000 pesos of the total costs. Not too shabby. Of course, we are waiting to find out how many of the receipts will be accepted when we turn them in. One t left uncrossed or i left un-dotted in standard Mexican bureaucracy is enough to get you a "no podemos aceptar esto”—we can’t accept this.

We definitely appreciated the efforts of my boss in getting us 20,000 pesos of re-imbursement coverage. That was nice for sure; but from our perspective it was the lack of communication on their end that caused us the problem in the first place. It was what happened next that really floored us. It happened at the end of the year party I hosted to honor and celebrate the ASF friends that would be leaving us at the end of the year. The centerpiece of the event was a 17 minute slideshow I put together featuring pictures of us all laughing, playing, traveling, laying on beaches, climbing mountains, rafting rivers, partying, singing, dressing up in costumes, watching bullfights and futbol matches, dancing, and…well, yeah, and drinking little bit along the way. After the slideshow was done, my good friends Jordan and Will unexpectedly jumped up front of the room, busted out a bunch of items and began telling everyone it was time for the drawing of the raffle they had conducted previously at school. WTF? A raffle we would come to find out raised 12,000 pesos for the “Miguelito Birth Fund.” Wow. We were shocked, elated and humbled. I thought of the movie, It’s a Wonderful Life, where Clarence the angel writes to George, the despaired man, “no man is failure who has friends.” It was an overwhelming gift and an awesome display of friendship. We are sincerely indebted to everyone who contributed, especially Jordan who apparently spearheaded the idea.

These two windfalls were great, but they only got us about half way to full maternity coverage, so we decided to do something drastic. We’d have the baby in Torreon, Ale’s home town, a thousand miles north of Mexico City where the hospitals are just as nice--if not nicer--and half the price. And it was also the place where Ale’s cousin had graciously offered to deliver the baby for free. This meant that immediately after coming home from a visit to NJ in early July, Ale would have to head to Torreon and begin the final preparations for D-elivery day. Meanwhile, back in the DF, I took some Spanish classes in the mornings and spend my evenings remodeling the Miguelito’s room and painting the apartment. It was a long time for us to be apart, but we needed to focus on saving money. Any sort of abnormality with the birth and we would be flying without an insurance net. And we remained acutely aware of the loss of income from Ale in the months following the birth.

After three and a half weeks living alone I hit the road in the 1996 Jeep Cherokee that my buddy Will sold us. (Well, he left us the keys to the car when he left for Chicago. He’ll be lucky to see one peso of that money. Sucker!) Driving to Torreon would take about 12 hours—without any sort of complications. My plan was to drive to Zacatecas, a beautiful colonial silver mining town a little over half-way on day one, spend the evening poking around the town and be in Torreon by Friday afternoon to take Ale to the hospital for her scheduled admittance for a C-section by Friday evening. For anyone who’s toured around Mexico on the highways, you know that you often see cars on the side of the road with their hoods propped up and the 16 passengers standing around scratching their heads in the heat. When I see this, I probably think the same thing everyone else does, “Poor bastards; man I’m glad that’s not me.” And for me, I always follow that up with, “What the hell would I do if I were to break down out here in the middle of nowhere? I wouldn't know where to begin."

So you can imagine my utter terror when I felt the truck jerking spastically up a hill and I looked at the dash to see the engine light flashing angrily. By the time I came to a stop, steam was flowing profusely out from under the hood. Will had mentioned something about a coolant leak before he left for Chicago—maybe this is what he meant. I looked around in all directions at the long straight highway and at the unending stretch of Mexican wilderness. Not forest, not desert, just miles of semi-arid terrain, replete with red clay, scrubby trees, cactus, and giant flat mesas in the distance. What I didn’t see was any signs of civilization. FUCK ME. Ale is going to kill me if I die out here and do not make it to the birth of our first son. I suppose I could hitch-hike, but that has its downside in Northern Mexico, where the Narco-traffickers’ second favorite pastime after beheading each other and the police over drug business is kidnapping people who they think have money—like gringos stranded on the side of the road. Or I could try to walk to somewhere across the vast plains, but would I be eaten by wolves or just die of exposure?

OK, so I was overreacting. Just a little. I had seen some signs a while back indicating a call box for highway assistance. I called Ale and told her I was going to wait for the truck to cool down then drive slowly to the next call box station. “That thing is not going to work!” she scolded. “This is Mexico!” But, I had to try. And though the line was slightly garbled, it did work. And get this: a guy in a brand new service truck showed up in less than two minutes and began filling my radiator with water. For free. No lie. I’d like to see you find that sort of service in the U.S.

Salvation. This was going to be a breeze! This elation lasted until I started the car and watched the water flowed out of the bottom of the engine like Niagara Falls. It was obvious that the water pump had died in the heat of the drive.

Now, let me say a word about my communication skills in situations like this. Since I speak English all day at work, all evening at home with my bi-lingual wife, and all weekends with my English speaking gringo and/or bi-lingual Mexican friends—I rarely speak the Spanish outside of ordering food, buying stuff and ordering taxi drivers around. I rarely “have to” speak Spanish, so I usually don’t. (Trust me, I loath myself for this laziness.) Generally speaking, I can make myself generally understood in a multitude of situations. But, what I have trouble with is understanding people who speak quickly, with poor diction, and in colloquial phrases and expressions not found in a Spanish textbook or in technical language unfamiliar to me—which is to say, the way a highway service truck driver talks. So, after we figure out that water isn’t going to fix this problem, he starts laying out my options while I try to follow. What I basically understood was that I had two choices—well, three, if you count dying of exposure—but he was explaining two: 1) call and wait some significant amount of time for a tow truck to take me to Aguascalientes, the next town up the highway, or 2) Let him bumper-push me there. The road service was free, since it is part of the benefits you get from paying the ridiculously high road toll fares in Mexico-the other benefit being not having to dodge giant car-swallowing pot holes. At this moment I realized I would never complain about the toll costs again. Still, I couldn’t quite make out whether the tow would be included or would cost extra. But, before I clarified any further, I quickly decided on the bumper push. The jeep was in pretty good physical shape, except for a slightly bent bumper in the back, so it wouldn’t hurt anything. Shit, maybe this would event help bang it back into place. But, more importantly, I had to get to Aguascalientes in time to find a mechanic who was still open. It was already 6:30 pm.

The bumper push ride was weird, I’ll admit. I felt retarded, like I was pretending to drive down the highway in a soapbox go cart without an engine. And it felt wrong. No way would they ever let a truck bumper-push another car down the right hand lane of a four lane interstate highway for 20 kilometers, complete with tractor trailers passing in the left lane at 80+ miles an hour. (I felt less stupid about how I must have looked when on the way back from Torreon, I witnessed an old beat up pick-up truck from the 70's, with six people in the front and a horse standing tied in the bed, being pushed in the same fashion.) I say 20 kilometers because that’s the best estimate I came up with as we drove—as he drove and I coasted—toward Aguascalientes. Soon after we got started, I saw a sign that said, Aguascalientes, 15 kilometers. Some quick math in my head told me that was about nine miles. Not too close, but not too far. After well over five minutes of being pushed at around 30-40 mph, I figured I must be less than ten kilometers away, making good progress. Until I saw a second sign, Aguascalientes: 14 kilometers. Gotta love Mexico. Once on a trip with Jim Weathers and friends we passed a sign that said: Pachuca 74 kilometers; then in less than a minute later saw another reading, Pachuca 57 kilometers. We all laughed knowing we had just passed through a Mexican time warp.

By the time I was shoved unceremoniously off the highway onto a road within the Aguascalientes city limits, it was after 7 pm. After he gave me directions on where to find some mechanic shops, I offered him 60 Pesos to which he made a sincere an honest gesture of “thanks, but that’s not necessary.” He made it clear once again that the help was free, and I made it clear to him that it was my pleasure to tip him.

I located a strip lined with ratty looking mechanic shops on the outskirts of town, identified by the often hand painted signs on the cement walls. As I drove past I saw, Closed… Closed…Closed. Then, Open—but with three cars in front with their hoods up. Great. This guy was the only one open and he was already busy. If I was going to get this problem solved immediately, he was going to ass rape me for it for sure. Or not. The guy was actually really nice and spoke some passable English. I told him I needed to be in Torreon the next day for my son’s scheduled birth and therefore really needed this repair completed that evening. After he had some discussion with the other guy working there they said they could have it done by 10 pm, but warned against driving out onto the highway that night. After my brief panic on the side of the road, I knew what he was talking about. I’d test drive it that night to make sure the repair had done its job and head out in the morning light. Which is exactly what I did. The repairs went off without a hitch, I picked it up by 10:30 and paid 150 bucks. I’m not sure what it would have cost if I didn’t need a rush job, or if I was able to seek competitive prices from other places, but given the circumstances, it all seemed to be worth it. The mechanic directed me to a very decent hotel for 25 dollars a night and I passed the time waiting for the Jeep by walking around the center of Aguascalientes. It was OK, but nothing too special. Most importantly, when I drove around town for about 30 minutes after I picked up the Jeep (I think the shemale hookers thought I was actually on the prowl) there were no signs of overheating. I was good to go.

The next morning things got off to an auspicious start when outside the hotel I saw a taco stand already open at 9am. I love many, many things about Mexico, and the tacos are definitely up there with the best of the rest at the top of the list. I had three tacos of various types of pork and a fresh squeezed orange juice before I hopped on the freeway and headed north. The further north I drove the more isolated the highway became. This was classic Mexican northern desert terrain. Complete with cacti, rocks, mountains and sky—and little else. I suddenly realized how lucky I was to have broken down where I did the day before. THIS was barren middle-of-no-where. And another thing had changed; I was no longer on a nice toll highway with road service. Break down here and there's not service truck to the rescue. Plus, instead of two lanes heading in each direction in true highway fashion, the road had become two single lanes in opposing directions--with a twist. Each lane had a half a shoulder on each side. When I say half a shoulder I mean just that. There was a dotted line with half a lane on each side of the lane. And beyond that, was a significant drop-off or a ditch. Like much of driving in central Mexico, many parts of the road are often steeply uphill, and many of the cars and trucks are slow, so it is necessary for cars to be able to pass in order to avoid long back-ups of traffic. But, on a simple two lane highway, how can this be done?

Well, in Mexico, it’s done by having the slow cars on both sides of the highway sliding over onto the half-a-shoulder so that a third lane is created in the middle of the road for the passing cars. Pretty ingenious, if this is all the flat road surface with which you have to work. I suppose. (Of course, on the other hand, if you’re going to go to the trouble of building a highway across a mountainous desert, why not go all the way and build four lanes?) So, for the next 150 miles I was passing cars and trucks down this improvised middle lane at 80 miles an hour. This may sound simple enough, but understand that it is a delicate dance that only works if all the dancers are aware of each other and dancing together. If everyone isn’t paying close attention, it can quickly turn into a frightening game of head-on chicken. There were times when I was leisurely scoping out the harsh, but beautiful, landscape when I realized that the oncoming traffic was in a middle lane passing situation, one vehicle half way on the side of the road and the other screaming directly at the front end of my car. Luckily, I always managed to notice this before the deadly, inevitable contact. Or, there were other times when I was passing a slow moving truck in front of me, hoping and praying that the oncoming driver realized he needed to get on the half-shoulder before we sent each other into a fiery inferno. Luckily, they did. Perhaps the worst was passing agiant semi with another 18 wheeler coming the other way. It was like the “you’re going the wrong way” scene from Planes, Trains, and Automobiles. Seriously scary shit.

So, I managed to avoid a catastrophic head-on collision and arrived in Torreon by mid afternoon. By 9 pm Ale and I were settled into our maternity suite, which consisted of surprisingly nice digs. Sort of a clean Best Western feel. While she filled out paperwork and got some tests done and an IV inserted, I headed over to the mall next door to get something to eat.

In between the hospital and the mall was the Terraza Garibaldi restaurant (sort of a Mexican Fridays of sorts, with music blaring 1oxs louder). While I stopped to inquire about the food, I also told him about my impending fatherly status. “Felicidades Cabron!” he congratulated me before telling me they didn’t do food to go. So, I headed into the adjoining mall to get some fast food. Just my luck, everything was already closed. When I explained this to the host on the way back to the hospital, he told me to wait while he talked to the manager. I can only suppose he told him I was at the hospital next door awaiting the birth of my first son, because all of a sudden I was being given the VIP treatment. They didn’t allow people to sit at the bar, but they grabbed a chair from a reserved table and set me up there with a beer and a shot of tequila that the manager made a big show of saying was on the house. I ordered some food and began watching the music videos on the large screens throughout the restaurant, while I sipped by beer and tequilia. The place was totally packed, and the food was taking quite a while, so I ordered a couple more shots of tequilia as I waited. Then something strange began happening. The waiters in the joint were literally falling all over themselves trying to serve me. Sometimes pushing each other out of the way to stand in front of me. "Pick me to wait on you," they seemed to be saying, though it was hard to hear anything with the music blaring. Apparently, they had misinterpreted the managers actions to mean I was someone rich or important. They were clearly unaware that I was just an average guy. And they also did not understand that I was waiting on food to go because they kept coming over and trying to set up a placemat and diningware for me. I literally had to tell five different waiters that I dind’t need their help, as they groveled for a chance to serve me. I could tell that people were watching this and wondering who I was and what was going on. It was a bit surreal to say the least. The buzz I took back to the hotel was just enough to get me to sleep without too much tossing and turning on the not-so-great bed the night before the big day.

The next morning came soon enough and we headed down into the OR for the big event. Ale went in before me and as I was filling out the paper work to be allowed into the surgery, the woman asked me who the doctor was performing the operation. Umm… “Ale’s cousin,"--all I knew at that point,--was probably not going to be enough information. Then somehow my feeble brain remembered her first name, “Marcela!" I said proudly. She gave me a blank stare. When she realized I had nothing else to offer, she asked another woman who stood nearby if she knew a doctor Marcela something, and she replied, “That's Dr. Almaguer.” Just as she was finally getting the answer she needed, this really hot chick came walking down the hall, big black Mexican eyes, bright smile, shapely legs supported by bright turquois-blue high heals that matched her blouse, earings and hairband. I’m doctor Almaguer!” she said, turning toward me, immediately recognizing me the gringo husband she'd heard about. Jesus, I thought, this is the doctor!? Ale told me she was cute, but this was over the top. Thank god she would be covered during the C-section from head to toe with surgical attire or this hot doc would be distracting me in the worst possible way at the worst possible time. Ale’s pretty tolerant about me appreciating women out in the world, but I’m fairly certain that ogling another woman while your wife is giving birth to your son is a absolute and unforgiveable no-no.

Actually, technically speaking, sexy Doctor Marcela was not covered from head to toe—her surgical mask covered only her mouth, leaving her nose exposed. Now, I don’t know much of anything about how to do surgery on pregnant women, but I’m pretty sure that for surgical masks to be effective, they need to be covering both the mouth and the nose. I was also pretty confident that this well dressed and beautiful doctor did not have any serious communicable diseases—you know, like tuberculosis or malaria—but it was the principle of the matter that bugged me. God forbid she sneezed some common cold germs into the open cavern before her, the one containing my wife’s exposed entrails, or into the very first breath of my emerging three kilogram son. I’ll admit, this actually bugged me quite a bit. But, the fact that she was doing this surgergy for free prevented me from saying anything. That, and the fact that my focus was on getting Ale through this traumatic experience as best I could.

As described at the beginning of this narrative, the birth of my son was all somewhat surreal: Harry Potter, comedic doctors, Saving Private Ryan, oblivious Ale, and then they yanked this little naked man from my wife’s stomach. Guero, ("whitey") she said matter of factly as they pulled him up by his ankles--though he looked quite purple to me at that moment. And even though I “knew” that she was pregnant and I had watched her stomach had grow tremendously over the months, it was almost a surprise to see him appear like that. Holy shit! There really IS a baby in there! He wasn’t in front of us for long, the pediatrician gave Ale and I a quick look-see and quickly carted him off to an unseen room in the back.

And then it began. The worrying. Welcome to the worrying. We were parents for all of five minutes and already we were racked with concern. Why did they take him so quickly? Is he OK? What are they doing to him back there? What debilitating and expensive disorder had they discovered? Before Ale was done being sewed up, she demanded I go and check on our son. When I got back there, they doctor was busy jamming a suction probe up his nose and down his throat. “Look” he said reassuringly in broken English, “Five toes and five hands.” Yeah, pal, I get the point; but even as he lifted the tiny hands for me to see I was almost afraid to look—what if he actually did have six fingers and eight toes, or any number of other problems? Ugh.

We spent the next few days watching TV, reading a baby book, allowing Ale to recover from surgery, and waiting for the nurses to drop Miguelito off to us for various stints before taking him back for tests and check-ups. On the third night, they gave him to us for keeps, or so we thought. The next morning, Miguelito recieved a final check-up while we packed. Then, as were waiting for them to hand him over for the last time, they announced that his bilirubin count had jumped from 6 to 10 over the last two days. He was turning yellow with jaundice (which his inexperienced and obviously terrible parents had failed to notice) and he would require another 24 hours in the hospital receiving “photo therapy.” This is a fancy way of saying he needed to lay in a baby tanning bed for a while. He looked pretty weird laid out in all his scrawny glory wearing a pair of eye covers attached to his face with Frankenstein bolt-like Velcro buttons glued to his temples. Before we left the hospital we jumped on the internet and Googled bilirubin, finding to our horror that this relatively normal condition, if extreme, could cause brain damage. BRAIN DAMAGE!? So, the worrying rocketed to a new level. Ale and I were racked with dispair as we headed home from the hospital without our beloved newborn son. That night, Ale’s mother mercifully bought me a bottle of Jack Daniels so I could take the edge of my hysteria and get to sleep. (Have I mentioned that I LOVE my mother-in-law?)

The following day Miguelito was released from the hospital, his photo therapy had brought his bilirubin count down a bit to eight. Apparently the light rays make it easier to break down these naturally produced toxins and get them out of his system through his natural bowel movements. The cause of the problem was the incompatibility of blood types between him and his mother. We learned that, other than exposing him to sunlight, one way to get him to pass these natural toxins is to get him eating lots of breast milk, a natural laxative, and in turn, getting him to shit out these toxins more quickly. So, when we took him home the next day, our immediate concern was getting him sufficient breast milk to cause him regular bowel movements. Problem was, Ale was not yet producing much milk. In fact, she wasn’t yet producing any actual leche at all, only the pre-milk substance called colostrum that precedes milk for several days when mothers are breast feeding. And to make matters worse, this milk is further delayed in women who have Caesarian births. Ugh, again.

So, for the next few days most of our worry revolved around getting our beautiful and perfect child to suckle frequently at the magnificent and enormous breasts of his mother. This was done with limited success, so we needed to supplement his feeding with formula from a bottle. But, the frequent crapping, so famous among the lore of newborns, and the salvation from brain damage that this crapping would bring, remained elusive. A couple of rabbit-like pellets here, some greenish skid-marks there, but no quality dumps. And so, our parental fretting grew. We were sunbathing Miguelito in indirect sun throughout the day in order to help his body process these nasty bilirubins, but he needed to start evacuating his tiny bowels regularly in order to fully ensure he would not be brain damaged and grow into some sort of demented serial killer. Or worse yet, a Dallas Cowboys or Boston Redsocks fan. The stakes were high. So, when two days later, we woke at 2 am to find a mound of squishy shit in his diaper, Ale and I rejoiced over this blessing from the gods. “Yay!!,” we literally screamed as we high-fived each other. And then it hit me like a ton of…shit. People had been telling me that being a parent was going to “change my life in ways that I could not imagine.” Suddenly, I knew what they meant. Here I was, 43 years old, a well educated professional, successful teacher, part time musician, frequent world traveler, lover of good food, drink, movies, music, etc., and the thing that was bringing me a joy beyond all possible comprehension was a pile of steaming poo in my son’s diaper. Yeah, I’d say things have changed.

Days later, we would visit the pediatrician again to learn, despite all our fears and paranoia, that our son was as healthy and normal as any parent could expect. Miguel Alberto Hennessy Diaz Alvarado was doing just fine, even if his mother and father are in for a lifetime of more worry and anxiety. But, especially a lifetime of love!