After scares and ordeals, bringing baby Michael home

Halfway through their first date, Dave realized he’d left a candle burning in his apartment. But he stayed put; the conversation was going too well for him to duck out early. In the end, it was Lizzy who excused herself abruptly from the South Philly Tap Room.

What she didn’t tell Dave until later was that she had to rush home to inject herself with fertility medication; she’d just begun the process of retrieving and freezing her eggs.

“I’m a person who does a lot of research and thinks about things for a long time,” she says. “I wasn’t sure if I wanted children, but I didn’t want the decision taken away from me. I wanted more time.”

Shortly before, she’d decided to take a break from the whole Bumble scene. She’d just bought a house; the egg-freezing process was time-consuming and emotional. Dave was going to be her last date.

“He was nice and cute and smart, but the biggest thing was that I felt so comfortable from the beginning,” she says. And when she finally confided in him about the egg-freezing process — in the end, it failed and Lizzy was diagnosed with polycystic ovary syndrome — his response was perfect: “I really like you, I want kids, and we’ll figure it out together.”

Dave moved into Lizzy’s house in August 2019, about a year after they met. In December of that year, Lizzy made a comment about “if we get married.”

Dave responded: “It’s not if; it’s when, and do you want to go ring-shopping?” Lizzy felt a tidal surge of nervousness. “It’s forever, and how do you know? But I liked our life together. I loved him. I think marriage is … you just have to close your eyes and jump.”

They planned a wedding for July 2020: a traditional ceremony and reception for 150 in Akron, Ohio, where Lizzy’s family lived. The pandemic scotched that idea; instead, they gathered 14 people, including a rabbi and a photographer, at an Airbnb on the Potomac in Stafford, Va.

“I did my own makeup; my sister did my hair. We did everything outside to keep people socially distanced. We had contactless delivery for dinner. My mom made the cake,” Lizzy says. She wore a dress she’d bought off the rack; Dave sported a suit he’d borrowed from a neighbor.

All day, Lizzy worried about the soles of Dave’s shoes — that they were too flimsy, and that when he stepped on the glass, a closing ritual of Jewish weddings, the shards might pierce his skin.

Just after the ceremony, he blurted, “Lizzy, my foot’s bleeding!” Then he began to laugh. The photographer captured their expressions: her shocked relief, his mischievous delight.

Lizzy was conscious of her fertility clock and aware, because of the PCOS diagnosis, that conception might take a while. She became pregnant quickly, but at an 11-week ultrasound, she learned the fetus had stopped growing.

Eight days later, they flew to Seattle — a belated honeymoon after canceling three earlier trips — and drove down the Pacific Coast Highway to San Francisco. Not long after, the two were visiting Dave’s family in Hilton Head, S.C. After a day of wild weather, they walked on the beach and spied a double rainbow arching over the ocean.

That night, Lizzy woke at 2 a.m., ducked into the bathroom and watched a test stick flush bright pink. She slipped back to bed and woke Dave: “I’m pregnant.”

It was a difficult pregnancy: intense nausea, a few miscarriage scares, a diagnosis of placenta previa. Then Lizzy’s water broke — at 31 weeks and six days. At Pennsylvania Hospital, doctors’ goal was to keep the baby in utero as long as possible; for eight days, Lizzy walked the halls and listened to podcasts, waves of anxiety alternating with boredom.

One evening, she began to feel contractions; by 1 a.m., the pain was so ferocious that she screamed. A doctor checked: You’re fully dilated. She called Dave at 1:22 a.m. At 1:39, he dashed into the labor and delivery room. There was blood, a medical team with sober expressions; he feared the baby had died.

Then he heard two heartbeats: his wife’s and a second, rapid pulse. Their son was born at 1:45. “I was in total shock,” Lizzy recalls. “I didn’t even know I was in labor until 15 or 20 minutes before. They’d said he was going to go straight to the NICU, but they handed him to me for a couple of minutes.”

Michael remained in the NICU for 27 days, part of that time with oxygen support. “It was a very long stretch of time,” Dave says. “We were going back and forth every day, sometimes twice, to see him and feed him and get to know him.”

Neighbors started a meal train for the couple; friends dropped off gifts and clothes. Their employers — Lizzy teaches at Widener University and Dave is a professor at Temple — were accommodating. The NICU nurses offered both practical skills and reassuring mantras: “He’s tougher than you think. Don’t look at the monitors; look at him. He’s not sick; he’s early.”

The ordeal, Lizzy says, “made our relationship even stronger. We saw each other cry. We had each other.”

Finally, Michael was ready to come home. A nurse disconnected the monitors; he cried when the adhesive tapes came off. The couple had befriended other parents whose babies weren’t as healthy, who would remain in the NICU for much longer.

“You feel like there should be a graduation,” Lizzy says. Instead, there was the bleat of a monitor. She reflexively glanced up, then realized: Michael was no longer tethered. The alarm wasn’t for her baby.

“We got in the elevator. There were a couple of security guards. [Michael] had been in the world for 27 days and had never been out of that building. We put him in the car and started crying.”