A few months back, my wife had to switch doctors. She’d been with the same physician for years, so losing them halfway through her first pregnancy was a little bit of a disappointment. But it wasn’t the end of the world. The new doctor was a very experienced, businesslike woman who radiated confidence. Some people might want a warm and fuzzy bedside manner during a pregnancy, but it was good to have someone with a steady hand on the tiller (so to speak). So we made the change and continued on course.

Two weeks ago, we saw doubt and concern on our doctor’s face for the first time. It was a Friday, one of our weekly appointments. Our routine was pretty well nailed down at this point: On the days when we had an appointment, I would stay home and work for a few hours in the morning before we’d go to the doctor’s office. The doctor would examine my wife — an activity that seemed akin to dowsing as it appeared to involve nothing more than laying her hands at various angles on Keeley’s belly and asking how she was feeling. Once we’d answered and asked a few questions, my wife and I would head off to lunch together and talk about all the things we needed to get done before the baby was born.

As I said, routine.

Except for this one Friday a few weeks back.

I’d been staying up late that week to get Assam & Darjeeling ready for publication, working every night until about 3AM. I was pretty pleased to have finished up the Kindle version of the book and I’d made some progress on an iPad version as well. In addition, I’d been doing some good work on a new Jee story that night and I was looking forward to finishing it over the coming weekend. To celebrate, I’d made my self a fairly stiff drink and settled in to read for a while before bed. Honestly, I was spoiling myself a bit. I knew I wouldn’t get many chances for this sort of thing once the baby was born.

And, after all, I didn’t have to get up too early in the morning. I could always take a nap after the appointment. And there was the weekend when I could catch up on any sleep and work I’d missed out on. So I felt a little more tired than usual the next morning, but not debilitatingly so. Just a bit blurry around the edges.

I got a lot sharper during our appointment, when I saw the doctor pause with her hands on my wife’s stomach. Up until this point, the woman had been following a routine of her own. But something shifted somehow and I understood that I was no longer looking at her face.

I was looking at a mask, the thing you put on when you don’t want people to see what’s really there.

She made a few more measurements with her hands — a few more than usual, pressing a little harder than usual — and then she went over and leafed through my wife’s charts . . . something she had never done before.

I don’t remember the exact words she used, but the gist is that she suspected the baby was breech. This wasn’t too much of a shock, really. She’d mentioned it during a few previous appointments and, with three weeks to go, there was plenty of time to sort things out.

Only, uncharacteristically, she seemed unsure. She asked if we had time to stick around and do an extra ultrasound, just to be sure.

Ultrasounds are a lot of fun and the only plans we had were to get lunch afterward and, hopefully, take a nap together that afternoon. So, yeah, we could stick around.

The doctor sent us off with a nurse while she interrupted someone’s lunch break, so they could come confirm the baby’s position.

Once we were done, the technician sent us back off with the nurse again. “Okay,” she said to us out in the hallway, “I’m going to go get the doctor to come and talk with you. Based on the ultrasound, the baby is breech. Also, there’s zero amniotic fluid in there. So that means you’re going to have a C-section. And you’re going to have it today.”

Oh. My.

We had to sit for a while and wait for the doctor to come back to talk with us. She told us what we’d already figured out: That we were very, very lucky.

We were lucky that our appointment had been moved up from later in the afternoon, lucky that the doctor hadn’t been able to confirm the position of the baby, lucky that she’d ordered an extra ultrasound, lucky that we’d decided to skip lunch to do it . . . lucky that they’d checked in on our little girl before we’d gone another three weeks.

There are a lot of things that could be the source of the missing amniotic fluid but what mattered most was that the baby needed to come out as soon as possible. With nothing to protect her, the risks were very real. It’s never a great thing to hear your doctor say the word “stillborn”. No matter how many times she says the word “lucky”, you’re going to have trouble forgetting that she said the other word too.

We went to the hospital straight from the doctor’s office.

I called my wife’s parents once we were settled in, monitors keeping watch over my wife and our baby.

“What are you doing tonight?” I asked when I called her father. He said he didn’t have any plans. I asked if he wanted to drop by and hold his granddaughter three weeks early. They were there within the hour.

I called my parents as well. My father prayed.

I’m not very good at very many things, but my mind moves pretty fast and I do pretty well in a crisis. Also, my wife tells me that I look pretty good in scrubs.

A little while later, I tried to ignore a Caesarean going on over left my shoulder so I comfort my very frightened wife while we waited for our daughter was born.

But, in all honesty, it felt more like a rescue than a birth.

And so . . . at around 7:30PM, someone over my shoulder said “Do you want to see her?”

We did.

Her mother named her after the Greek word for wisdom. And I’d like to think that there must have been an owl whispering in the doctor’s ear that afternoon, sent from Athena to nudge us all in the right direction to make sure that ultrasound happened.

It did. And now we have Sophie.