The Book of Joy

kangaroo pouch. My wife Leah and I are patrons of a children’s hospital
in Cape Town, and one day we were visiting there, and this massive guy
was carrying around the minutest baby tied to his chest so the baby could
feel his heartbeat, and they said those babies have been shown to do much
better.”
Mpho asked if I still had the picture of my own twin daughters just
after they were born prematurely, when they were in the neonatal
intensive care unit. One of our daughters had had a prolapsed cord, which
was blocking her from descending through the birth canal, and her
heartbeat and oxygen level were plummeting. The obstetrician, as she
was trying to use a vacuum extractor on our daughter’s head, had told
Rachel that she had one more push to get the baby out or they would have
to do an emergency cesarean. Eliana was already in the birth canal, so a
cesarean was no guarantee of a safe delivery.
As a doctor, Rachel knew, as I did, that every second counted, as
Eliana’s oxygen level was getting dangerously low. I’ve never witnessed
anything like the strength Rachel had exhibited as she threw herself
headlong into the pain and wrenched every ounce of maternal will from
her body to push our daughter out. Eliana was born blue, unresponsive,
and not breathing. Her Apgar score was one—out of ten—which meant
she was barely alive.
She was rushed to the crash cart, where the doctors tried to revive her,
and told Rachel to speak to her baby, the voice of the mother having an
almost magical healing effect, even in the high-risk operating room. We
waited for the longest moments of our lives as the doctors tried to bring
her around, preparing to intubate her. And then, in a moment of
unspeakable joy and relief, Eliana sputtered, took her first breath, and
began to cry with life. The rest of us, including the obstetrician, were
weeping tears of joy.
After Eliana’s traumatic birth, the twins were taken to the neonatal
intensive care unit at the hospital. When I walked in shortly after, they
were lying side by side, holding hands.
The importance of love for our survival, which the Dalai Lama was
describing, was not abstract to me, having witnessed the mother love that