The Rest of the Story: Zacharie Christian

A number of you have asked for follow-up information on how Zacharie fared after his little ambulance excursion to another hospital. Others of you haven’t even heard about all the extra excitement that accompanied Zacharie’s birth and his first 36 hours of life. So I will use this opportunity to catch you up on all that has transpired, as well as to tell you how the Lord ministered to us as a family and to me personally during those moments of uncertainty.

On Tuesday, December 15, I was becoming more certain that the birth of our third child was imminent. I had experienced some contractions on the previous Sunday that I had thought might be the onset of labor, but then things had settled down again on Monday, my first day of exams at the university. Even as the labor activity gradually began to increase after Tuesday morning’s exam, we continued with all our other week’s activities, thinking it was useless to stop everything until we knew for sure if the time had come. Tim was busy doing quite a bit of running around from bank to government office, back to bank, etc., trying to get things in order for the purchase of a van. Through all the busyness of recent weeks, we had talked frequently of going into downtown Bordeaux to visit the annual Christmas market, something of which I have fond memories from years gone by and which I didn’t want to miss during this year’s season. That evening being our first free night on which we could have considered it (and, I admit—I was wondering if it might be our last opportunity for this year, as well), we decided to bundle up and take the tram into town. The evening was enjoyable. We didn’t stay long, just long enough to enjoy some of the sights, sounds and smells of Christmas in the city. The contractions did increase in intensity as we walked, but were still quite manageable that entire time. We arrived back at home around 8:30, right at the kids’ bedtime.

By 9 p.m. the contractions were much more frequent and harder to bear, and it seemed that our trip to the hospital was imminent. After passing another few hours at home making final preparations for the children at home and for our hospital stay, we finally left for the hospital sometime after 12:30 on Wednesday morning. The short drive to the hospital was so intense for me that Tim was actually stopping the car for every contraction to try to make the pain less difficult to endure. I was certain that I must be entering the final stage of labor and was remembering all the stories I had ever heard about babies being born in cars, in parking lots, etc., when we arrived at the hospital a few minutes before 1 a.m. on Wednesday, December 16.

On a side note, it has been interesting to compare the differences between French and American hospitals when it comes to delivering babies. Neither one exactly fits into a neat, little stereotype. Each one just has its own peculiarities of strictness. With the births of my other two children, I was immediately seated in a wheelchair when I checked in at the front desk and ushered by a hospital staff member up to the maternity floor. This time, when I really could have used the wheelchair, none was offered! But it was a small hospital (a private clinic, actually), and I am grateful to say there was an elevator! ;)

I was led to some sort of a triage room on the same hallway as the delivery rooms for the hospital midwives to assess my state. The midwife that checked me in told me that I had not advanced as much as I had anticipated. That pronouncement was certainly not the end of the story, however, as within another 10 minutes or so I was holding little Zacharie Christian in my arms, never having made it to the delivery room and having yet to see my doctor! All in all, I only spent about 20 minutes at the hospital before Zacharie was born at 1:09 a.m. (It was Tim’s watch that served us the official time, as everything was too hurried-scurried for the nurses to follow their normal routine.) Tim and I sat there for the next few minutes, waiting for the hospital staff to catch up on all their other duties before finishing up with us, and just marveling at how the Lord had worked out everything in relationship to this birth.

It does seem, however, that there were some consequences that Zacharie had to bear because of his rapid delivery. For his first several hours of breathing the outside air, he made a funny, wheezing sound with every breath he drew. I asked the pediatrician about the noise when he came in to examine him about 9 a.m., when Zacharie was 8 hours old. The pediatrician assured me that that noise was quite normal, particularly for a baby who had been through a rapid delivery and may therefore have had some extra fluid in his lungs that had not yet been able to drain out. He expected that the noise would lessen and Zacharie would begin breathing more easily as the day went on. His response put me completely at ease, and I didn’t worry any more about the noisy breathing, until another nurse came in to check on Zacharie a few hours later who was very disturbed by his breathing. She unbuttoned his outfit (no small task, since he was dressed in about four different layers—that’s another part of the French way that was different for me! ;-) and showed me how his chest was heaving. She said she wanted to take him to the nursery for a few hours, placing him in the incubator for more constant surveillance. Again, I didn’t really worry, since she assured me that this measure was just to be sure he was OK, and that she would probably be bringing him back to me in a couple of hours. I sent Tim a text message with the update, as he was at McDonald’s at that moment with our other kids who were on lunch break from school. After Tim returned Micaiah and Miriam to school and came back to the hospital about an hour later, we walked down the hallway together to the nursery to see our newborn son. At this point, the same, kind nurse who had taken him back for observation informed us that Zacharie’s breathing really didn’t seem to be getting any better—in fact, it was worse. She had called the pediatrician to come and he had ordered a series of blood tests to check for infection. Thus—almost imperceptibly—began my worrying.

That afternoon was filled with several more hours of little visits to the nursery like that, with a few more meetings with the pediatrician and the nurse, but with little more information given other than the fact that Zacharie’s breathing was not improving as they had thought it should, and therefore the pediatrician wanted to send him to another hospital which was better equipped to deal with newborn health issues such as this. They continually assured us that whatever the source, the problem was most likely not a serious one, but given Zacharie’s young age they wanted to figure out what was causing the respiratory distress immediately so that they could begin the proper treatment. Even though I did take heart from those repeated assurances, it was still very difficult to watch my little baby struggle to breathe within my sight and yet just out of my reach, and to know that in a few short hours he would be taken out of my sight as well, taken somewhere where I couldn’t follow. The crew of five ambulance personnel that came a few hours later to transfer Zacharie was very kind, but also somewhat intimidating in all its gear and with all the various heart and oxygen monitors they taped all over Zacharie’s little body.

Little did we realize when we chose the name Zacharie (meaning, “Yahweh remembers”) just how quickly his name would take on even more significance for us. During those 18 hours of “enforced quiet time” (I was in the hospital after having had my baby but had no baby to care for!), I did have a lot of time to meditate on what God was doing, a privilege rarely granted to a mom in the hours just after she gives birth. I also listened to several sermons and was able to do some reading and meditating on Scriptures like Isaiah 62:6-7: “You who remind the LORD [zachar], take no rest for yourselves and give Him no rest until He establishes Jerusalem and makes it a praise in the earth.”

I wrote this in my journal on the second morning of my hospital stay, just a few hours before Zacharie was returned to me:

God has used these last 24 hours to remind me of my need to remind Him¸ and has so encouraged me in illustrating the fact that, truly, “Yahweh remembers”. My heart is full as I have just this morning been told that my precious little Zacharie seems to be doing much better and should soon be returned to me. Layton Talbert (in a sermon found here) says that what Isaiah 62:6-7 is saying is this: “You who are reminding the LORD, give Him no rest until He fulfills that which He has promised!” God wants me to ask!!!

The end of the Zacharie story is that an x-ray showed no fluid trapped in his lungs, which could have required a procedure under general anesthesia to drain, and multiple blood tests revealed no sort of infection, which would have required antibiotics. As that second night wore on, Zacharie’s breathing gradually improved to the point that the medical personnel at the other hospital saw no reason to keep him under surveillance any longer. Thus, at 36 hours old, my baby was returned to me, and we were able to pick right up where we left off.

So when people have asked what the original problem was, the answer is we really don’t know exactly. The best human explanation we have been given is that the problem was somehow related to his rapid delivery, and it eventually worked itself out. But on another level, as children of a Heavenly Father who wants His children to ask Him for those things which He has promised, I’m sure you can affirm with me that the ultimate answer is: “Yahweh remembers.” We are grateful for this vivid illustration in our lives, grateful for you who have beseeched Yahweh along with us, and are already seeking to apply that which we have learned to every category of life as issues arise (such as our present housing need in which we are waiting to see how God will work).

And as you can imagine, we were especially grateful to have our whole family—all five of us—together at home last week to celebrate the wonder of an even more amazing birth, that of our dear Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ.