If You Need Anything, Call.

During a routine doctor visit in the last trimester before Justus was born, the doctors lept out of their normal “Oh look here’s his hand and there’s the nose” spiels into secretive red alert vocabulary.

People in lab coats appeared out of thin air to make grim faces and shake their heads at my ultrasounds.  Nurses were sent scurrying to re-check the numbers.

More gel, more pictures, more gel, more pictures… sorry this is taking so long… and then the verdict: Justus’ stomach wasn’t growing quickly enough.

Really??!! You can tell that??!!

But little-did-I-know they have charts for these things, for exactly how many millimeters unborn babies stomachs are supposed to expand. And Justus was turning out to be a bit of an underdog in the weight department.

(Apparently “skinny” runs in the family?)

Then there was the lay-it-all-out-for-you conversation.

“You won’t make full term. We’ll have to induce labor early.” They explained. And then, as if we were  talking about leaving a turkey in an oven, “but we’re going to wait because we want to keep him in there as long as we can.”

(Let’s get him as cooked as possible.)

(We really prefer babies to be at least medium-rare when they come out.)

The plan? Every single day, they had me drive down to the hospital for something called a bio-physical profile, an ultrasound that measured the baby’s growth (or lack thereof).

These procedures weren’t painful. A bit inconvenient maybe, just because it required the blimp-that-was-me to waddle around parking lots and squeeze behind steering wheels a little more often. But nothing that a smoothie from the lobby couldn’t make right.

There was a tiny bit of stress injected into the picture eventually.

Straight-faced seriousness from the doctor:

“I need you to pack your bag with everything you’d need to stay overnight a few days and bring it every time you come.” He stressed. “Because if the numbers show the baby is losing weight, we will have to deliver immediately. You need to be prepared for that every time you come.”

And so there it was. The suspense of it all. The not knowing from day to day if the baby was okay or if maybe, his  measurements were plummeting to emergency levels, and I would go from sipping smoothie to C-section in five seconds flat.

Each day, when they released me, I walked away the victor. Each next day, when I came back, the suspense started over again.

Even though I mostly felt okay (as okay as you feel when you’re a bloated holding tank for another human being), in the back of my head I knew things were unstable.

That I might not necessarily recognize if my son’s life plunged into jeopardy. And that the day might end with me in a hospital gown hooked up to monitors, rather than at home in my bed.

There, of course, wasn’t much any human could do for me in these circumstances. I talked on the phone more in those weeks, hoping people would have stories of 14 zillion friends whose babies had scrawny stomachs, but still survived to be genius athletes with obscene levels of musical talent. =)

I noticed, in all the networks of friends that surrounded me at the time, that some of the most powerful words were the most  simple ones:

“If you need anything, call.”

People said that over and over to me, more than I’d ever heard those words spoken in any other life experience.

And even though there wasn’t much I could “need” that they could help with, the idea that they were offering open-ended support, asserting that they cared about anything that might come up, felt like a thousand life ropes being thrown to me in the water.

“If you need anything, call” quickly translated to if you need someone to celebrate, we’ll celebrate. But if you end up needing someone to grieve, we’ll do that too.

I think, before this experience, I would’ve  been a little hesitant to make that sort of offer to someone in my own circumstances. I would’ve been afraid to sound trite, knowing there was nothing I could do for the kind of need they faced. But, since then, I’ve noticed, I find myself saying those four words–If you need anything, call–way more than I did before.

Because I realize that they do mean something. That even when when you’re struggling and people can’t remove your struggle, you feel more confident you won’t drown when you can see so many lifelines floating within reach.

So go ahead and add those words to the most powerful phrases in the human language–the only kinds of things you can say when times get really tough and answers evade you. “I love you.” “I’m sorry.” “I’ll stick with you through it.” And “if you need anything, call.”