Orion Has Landed

Creating new life can mean a close brush with death. Today all are healthy again, and our baby boy is a joy.

The birth itself went well, by the standards of such events. (Nobody who has ever witnessed one would call it "smooth," much less "painless.") Our baby boy was born perfectly healthy—and large, and hungry—shortly before his due date. We named him Orion.

Big sister Stella came to the hospital with her grandparents the next day to meet him. An unusually tight-lipped two-year-old, she rarely spoke at the time, despite understanding seemingly everything we said. But that day she wouldn't stop murmuring "Baby." Once in the hospital room, she insisted on holding him in her arms, then on pointing from his tiny button nose to her own and everyone else's.

Nina and Baby Ori returned home the next day. A week later, we visited a local studio for a first photoshoot of our new family of four.

In hindsight, it was almost the last.

Nina and Orion (photo by Janis Jean Photography)

That week, Nina underwent a follow-up procedure on her midwife's recommendation. (Such are the horrors of socialized medicine: in Germany, everyone gets unlimited, free in-home midwife visits after a birth.) The nurse who delivered Orion, her doctor concurred, seemed not to have removed a few last pieces of the placenta. The operation generated more complications so, to be safe, I drove Nina to the hospital, baby in tow. She settled in, with staff watching over her, and I returned home for the night.

Nina woke me at dawn with a confused phone call, summoning me back to the hospital. I arrived to find her in the Critical Care unit, sans baby, slurring her words and unable to complete a sentence or recall basic vocabulary either in English or her native German. What's more, her vision was spotty and she had trouble hearing me.

The doctors had been obliged to operate overnight, they explained to me. For reasons they didn't understand, her body had begun losing blood rapidly. By the time they stabilized her, they had given her enough transfusions to replace all the blood in her body, and then some. But now it was fine, they reassured me.

By this point, three years into our "temporary" stay in Germany, my German skills should have been better. But after taking a six-week intro course then picking up some more on my own, I had found excuses aplenty not to pursue it further. Vocabulary about emergency gynecological surgery was decidedly not in my wheelhouse.

With my limited vocabulary, I fumbled to thank the doctors for their work but also to explain that no, my wife with two master's degrees who now could hardly speak was not OK.

While they mulled this over and Nina slept, I trudged up to the Obstetrics unit in search of Baby Ori. I found him there on a cooing nurse's arm, happily devouring a bottle. As I filled out the necessary paperwork to reclaim him, he wiggled off a sock. A passing nurse kindly stooped to pick it up and hand it to me. It was the same nurse who had delivered him ten days earlier. Delightful now as then, she smiled without any sign of recognition then turned and continued down the hallway.

All smiles, all the time

In the days that followed, Nina was transferred to the city's main hospital, shuffled between the Gynecology and Neurology units, repeatedly probed by their doctors alongside ear and eye specialists, and finally pronounced to have contracted an infection of the brain lining. (How? From where? We never learned, and simply never will.) A heavy battery of antibiotics and antivirals followed. In the end, she was obliged to lay in the hospital for three weeks.

Those weeks were grueling. Without her parents' help, I'm not sure how we would have survived them. (Thank you again, Carla and Johannes!)

Stella stayed full-time with her Oma and Opa while I took the lead in caring for Baby Ori—who thankfully proved just as enthusiastic about baby formula as he had been about breastmilk. While juggling the little one and my work, I also drove into town each afternoon to spend time at Nina's bedside. Some days I brought Ori along so he could snuggle with his mother.

As the medicine brought Nina back from the precipice, we pieced together what had happened, realizing how close she had come to death. We shed more than a few tears on that hospital bed before she was finally discharged.

By that time, Nina had also begun to notice that she was shedding hair. As she recuperated at her parents' in the following weeks, she lost more still. The cause was yet another unsolvable mystery, though presumably the stress from some combination of the operations, the infection, the drugs, and the emotional trauma of it all. A few weeks after coming home, she gave up and asked me to buzz it all off.

Hanging with daddy and his funny friends (photo by Amine Djalane / Shadow Studio)

That was six months ago.

Since then, Nina has fully returned to her once-sharp self. Her hearing and eyesight have almost fully recovered. To Ori's delight, her breastmilk spontaneously returned. And her former waves of long brown hair have begun re-growing.

We've both continued processing the events of last spring in our own way, at our own pace.

But for better or worse, we haven't had too much time to sit around pondering, thanks to the fact that we now have two energetic, curious children in our lives.

From the start, it was undeniable that we had hit the baby jackpot with Ori.

While we had found raising Stella from infant to toddler to be manageable, if sometimes challenging, it was a cakewalk compared to the stories our bleary-eyed friends recounted. Ori is another level entirely.

He reliably sleeps through the night, every night. In over eight months, we have never needed to rock him to sleep. He barely ever cries. Since the first moment, a few weeks into his time in my care, when I coaxed his first smile out of him, he hasn't stopped grinning at anyone and everyone he sees. I have never met a happier baby.

Physically, he also bears a striking resemblance to his sister. Their almost identical face shapes consistently fool all the facial recognition algorithms, not to mention close family members. Nina enjoys dressing Orion in old outfits of Stella's and sending side-by-side photos around the family WhatsApp group, straining everyone's ability to identify who's who.

Continuing the celestial trend we started with Stella, Orion is named after the constellation, itself named after the famed hunter of Greek mythology. Bursting with smiles every waking moment, our Ori is no ferocious hunter today. But that wasn't why we chose the name.

In addition to fitting our criteria of being pronounceable in English, German, and French, the name is also universal in another sense. For thousands of years, humans have looked at the night sky and let their imaginations run wild connecting disparate dots to one another and to their earthly fables. The bright celestial stick figure we know as Orion has been recognized and named in practically every world culture, from Babylon (Sipa'zi'an'na, "the true shepherd") to ancient Egypt (Sah, "father of the gods"), the Arabs (al-Djebbar, "the giant") to the Chinese (Shen, "three stars") to the Lakota (Tayamnicankhu, "the bison"). It appears in the Bible, Homer's Iliad and Odyssey, Virgil's Aeneid, the Rigveda, and other ancient texts. His name connects him to humanity's timeless and universal fascination with the world around us, as well as to its modern expression through space exploration.

To his big sister, for now he is simply "O-wee." We are very lucky to have him, and to have one another.

Brother-sister photoshoot at Halloween