The Elephant to Hollywood - Michael Caine [69]
I couldn’t wait to get home and be with Shakira again and we spent an idyllic spring and early summer at the Mill House getting ready for the baby, due in July. I was determined to play my part in events and prided myself on the way I had thoroughly prepared mentally for what was to come. Even so I was taken aback when I arrived at the clinic with Shakira in early labour to be handed not only a set of scrubs, but also a pair of white rubber waders. Waders? There would be so much blood I might need waders?
The labour lasted twelve hours. In the end, although I dutifully donned the waders, I stayed up near Shakira’s head, pushing when she did, so enthusiastically that I thought I might give myself a hernia. We heaved together on cue until the obstetrician gave a sudden cry – ‘the head!’ – picked up some scissors which he waved menacingly in the air and then plunged them into Shakira’s nether regions. At this point I was nearly sick – on my waders, this time, rather than my shoes – but then I saw his triumphant expression and the lock of black hair he held up between his fingers. ‘Nearly there!’ he said encouragingly and with a few more heaves, our daughter was born.
While the baby was taken away to be weighed and measured, I knelt by Shakira’s bed, covering her with kisses. When a nurse brought the baby back again, we held her between us, marvelling at how perfect she was. Eventually I was sent home so that my wife and daughter could rest – but I was on such a high I went straight round to Dennis’s place to tell him the news. One glass of wine led to another, and I was just beginning to relax when the phone rang. Dennis picked it up. ‘It’s for you, Michael,’ he said. My heart started pounding. The only person who knew where I was going was Shakira. I took the receiver. ‘I’m afraid there’s a bit of a problem,’ said Dr Bourne. ‘We’ve had to move the baby to the intensive care unit at King’s College Hospital. I think you should come here right away.’
I have no recollection of how I got to the hospital, but I will always remember walking into that intensive care unit. There must have been about thirty incubators, each with its own tiny inhabitant. ‘I don’t understand,’ I said to Dr Bourne, trying to keep the fear out of my voice. ‘She wasn’t premature – and she was 6 pounds 12 oz.’ It wasn’t her size, he explained. A sharp-eyed night nurse had been doing her rounds and noticed that our daughter was struggling to breathe; she had called Dr Bourne and he saw at once that her lungs had collapsed. She had cried lustily at birth, so there had been no reason to suspect this might happen and there was, he assured me, a seventy per cent chance of survival. Those seem like good enough odds in a bar room brawl, but to a new father standing by an incubator, gazing at all the tubes and wires attached to his tiny daughter’s body and watching the monitor bleep with each beat of her heart, they seemed very frightening indeed.
Perhaps the worst thing of all was being able to do nothing. The doctors and nurses – who were wonderful – flitted from incubator to incubator, calmly reading gauges, taking temperatures, adjusting drips. I just stood there, helplessly. Eventually a kind nurse showed me how to wash my hands with antiseptic soap and then pointed out a little hole in the side of our baby’s incubator. My hands were too big to fit, but I did manage to slip a finger through and touch the little hand nearest to me. To my astonishment, the baby uncurled her hand and slowly curled it again round my finger. Her grip was so powerful that I felt sure that this was a life