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dad again: Notes on fatherhood.

The HospitalDaddy gets a guilt trip.

By Michael Lewis
Updated Friday, April 6, 2007, at 2:46 PM ET

This article is part of an ongoing series by Michael Lewis about the birth of his third child. Click here to read the other entries in the series. Michael Lewis first began his "Dad Again" column after the birth of his second daughter, Dixie, in 2002. Click here to read about that delivery.

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Walker's nurse Kim Click image to expand.

Forty minutes later the patient is soothed and sleeping again when in charges a nurse. "Where's Mama?" she asks, loudly. Walker wakes up and begins to cry. The nurse tsks tsks around him until he is inconsolable and then finally says, "There should be more fathers like you." "There are!" I want to say, but before I can, she's gone, and I'm working to get him back to sleep.

Thirty minutes later the courier bangs on the door, with the bill, waking him all over again. And so it goes, for the next 24 hours. Bill collectors, nurses, doctors, interns, floor cleaners, linen changers: As soon as he's recovered from one of their visits and fallen back to sleep, another bursts into the room and disturbs him all over again. Each time he wakes, he cries, and each time he cries, he generates mucus, and each time he generates mucus, he begins to wheeze and his radar-gun readings plummet. The odd thing about this is that the doctors all admit that there is nothing they can do for him. He's in the hospital only so he can be near an artificial respirator. But the hospital seems only to increase the likelihood that he'll need an artificial respirator. Such is the state of our health-care system: They keep you from dying, but somehow leave you feeling you're getting the raw end of the deal. Asking politely for peace and quiet does no good; the nurses change every four minutes, and the new one never has any idea what the old one did or didn't do. After the 15th time he's awakened, I decide that it's time for a show of paternal authority. I make a sign:

PLEASE DO NOT DISTURB.
I'M SLEEPING.
THANK YOU.
WALKER.

The "Please do not disturb" sign Click image to expand.

I tape it to one side of the door, and drag the chair that doubles as a bed against the other, so that no can enter without climbing over it, and me. Then I hunker down, like some Montana survivalist, and wait for the enemy. The first assault comes about 10 o'clock that night: a new nurse.

"Can I help you?" I say curtly.

"I just want to look at him."

"Why?"

"We're supposed to," she says—which is to say that even she knows she serves no good purpose other than to collect evidence for any future lawsuit.

"Nope," I say.

And she leaves!

Walker with oxygen tubes Click image to expand.

I repel several more assaults until, finally, word must spread that there's a total asshole guarding the little boy in Room 5426, because we find ourselves well and truly alone. I change his diapers and feed him and suction the mucus from his nose. I notice for the first time that he has my hands and feet. I study the little heart-shaped birthmark on the back of his head. I discover that if I hold him to my chest and hum against the back of his neck, he falls right to sleep. Tabitha comes and offers to take over, but the truth is I don't want to leave: He feels like my jurisdiction. After every new child, I learn the same lesson, grudgingly: If you want to feel the way you're meant to feel about the new baby, you need to do the grunt work. It's only in caring for a thing that you become attached to it.

And he gets better, and better. On the third day, he's hitting 100 on the radar gun, and seems almost himself. At 6 o'clock that morning, an intern—a student who is there for no reason other than to satisfy his curiosity—catches me off guard in the bathroom. But I hear a stir. I bound out to discover this child-doctor bent over my son, preparing to apply cold metal to sleeping flesh.

"What do you think you're doing?" I snap at him.

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Michael Lewis' most recent book is The Blind Side.
Photographs from Tabitha Soren.
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