Rose Nylund and the gurdeneurethburgii

I’d seen Betty White on “Golden Girls” — one of the best shows ever. I’d grown to understand her comedic role on the show: clueless, aloof, thinking everyone ought to understand her references to St. Olaf and whatever nine-syllable Norse word she of course remembered because the gurdeneurethburgii is such a common concern among the lesser Borgen of the Norse carpenters union. How anyone didn’t know that was a mystery to her.

Golden Girls occupied a particular niche in American comedy. Many shows had the occasional older female character, or an older female cast member with a limited role; Golden Girls told four older women to do their thing, and they did it iconically:

Each of the four stars received an Emmy Award, making it one of only four sitcoms in the award’s history to achieve this.

People who long ago memorized every Golden Girls script have written about the show in greater depth than I’ve done here. I doubt I’ve seen every episode, which is a pity, but I’ve seen enough to have a sense for how the show made people feel:

Safe. Understood. Loved. Like the fifth Golden Girl.

A few decades after I found the show, I found myself in the hospital with my wife and newborn daughter. She’d just been delivered via emergency caesarian section, and I was both 1) exhausted after being awake through sixteen hours of labor and 2) unable to sleep because what if something happens and I’m not awake to get a nurse?

We’d been trying to have a child for almost four years. I wasn’t interested in losing that child and then learning we couldn’t have another. And I was still in What Noise Did My Child Just Make And Is She Dying? mode. (The baby book we had started each section in the sudden noise section with “your baby is probably fine. Check these basic things to be sure.” This is because if your baby gurgles and you look in a book to find out about it, you’re 100 percent worried your baby’s face is about to turn blue.)

So, exhausted and sleepless. I needed to do something, and I didn’t have the mental energy to read the baby book. Fortunately, our hospital suite came with a television. I turned it on, muted it immediately, then turned up the volume deliberate click after deliberate click — each time checking to ensure the wife and our baby were still asleep — until I could hear enough.

But the show I’d found was boring. And since midnight had passed us a few hours ago, I suspected I wasn’t going to find much. So I hunted until I found the Game Show Network.

And there, as a personality on The Match Game, was a brown-haired woman who was a delight and a half. A few seconds in, I realized I was watching Betty White from fifty years earlier.

I watched the show for hours. And when we had our next child, I watched the show again. And the same for our third child. Each time, Betty comforted and entertained me through a night nobody expected me to sleep through. How could I? The wife had just been through An Ordeal, and I was expected to alert to the presence of any concern. (The hospital had placed a fridge nearby for the new parents. It was full of juice and other things that constitute packaged fruit sugar. I probably had eight apple juices that first night. Nobody complained.)

We were heading home with our third child when we got bad news: She’d failed the car seat challenge.

Again.

I was furious, but my anger wasn’t about to help, so I buried it and listened as the nurse said our child had had at least two seizures. Accordingly, the hospital would be transporting her to a larger facility with people who were trained to tend to her, since a neonatal intensive care unit isn’t the best place for this kind of thing.

So I watched as three people in special gear put my seven-pound daughter in some device I’d never seen and loaded her into an ambulance.

An ambulance. My newborn child was being taken from one hospital to another in an ambulance.

In forty years of living, I have been assaulted, threatened by powerful people, operated on, sent hundreds of miles away from home, abandoned and led to think I was about to die. But watching those people load my newborn into an ambulance to go to a second hospital was the second most powerless I have ever felt.

All I could do was stand there and let other people do something I knew nothing about. If they messed up, I wouldn’t know — I wasn’t trained on this. And they certainly weren’t going to tell me — telling some untrained civilian that you just messed up whatever precaution is a great way to cause panic and potentially kill someone.

So I stood there, hands behind my back, so I could doubly not accidentally interfere.

The medical humans loaded my newborn into the ambulance like they were placing a grain of rice in a pot of water to boil. The vehicle was so impossibly massive, and she was so impossibly not.

Were they not afraid she’d slide around in there? Even a little? This was a girl who couldn’t reliably breathe if she was a little elevated. One hill and that’d be it!

Once they were all in, the wife was wheeled in.

I did not feel better. The wife doesn’t have the upper body strength required to keep a cart from flying all over the place, and what’s worse, she’d just had major surgery. She wasn’t even supposed to be walking.

The ambulance left the hospital, sirens going. I followed in my car. At each light, I worried that we’d get separated. I’d been given a map to the new hospital, but it was so big that it rivaled college campuses, and its twists and turns and levels and buildings and parking decks (merciful heavens, the parking decks) would surely annihilate my every wearied effort to find where they had put my child.

At last a massive building appeared on our right. I had grown up in this area, but not this corner of this area, and this hospital had not been so massive or notable when I lived a few miles away, as a six-year-old being driven places rather than driving to or from them.

I was lost in my own backyard. All I knew how to do was get on a highway that would likely be less forgiving even than the hospital I had no knowledge of beyond a photocopied map, and instructions given by a nurse whose expertise with the area meant she thought anyone should be able to understand “simple” instructions for navigating this maze:

That might look simple to you. Try having a child, getting three hours of sleep a night, subsisting on juice, being told your child is sick, and then deciphering that. It might as well have been proto-indo-european translated into double-ancient cyrillic.

At a light on a bridge (oh dear god a bridge what if it collapses I know these politicians don’t value infrastructure), the ambulance driver turned right. I turned right as well. And then I knew I had to park. In the blue parking deck. And go up several flights to where they would be caring for my newborn until she was well enough to go home.

The hospital she’d been born in is one level. This new hospital was something like thirteen levels — or, in scared and tired parent, 45,607,304 levels. The parking deck might as well have been a black hole. I took mental note of where I’d parked and hoped I might ever find the vehicle before I died trying.

We went up in an elevator, to the seventh floor, and past a desk, and past a number of rooms, and then finally to a room that made the ambulance seem cosy.

This room had been prepared for anything a newborn might need — but not via blankets and knit caps. Via machines.

Tons of machines. I didn’t know what they did, and the nurse tending to my newborn daughter was busily applying cream to her behind while said newborn daughter wailed like she was being flayed.

I knew the treatment was for her own good. But I also knew she loathed it. And I knew time I spent asking questions that didn’t matter (“What’s this machine you’re not using do?” “[Something we don’t need to be doing.]”) was time the nurse wouldn’t be able to spend focusing on the sick newborn.

Who’d had two seizures.

And had enough wires entering and exiting her to qualify as 34 percent cyborg. I still have pictures of her appearing to be flipping off the world at the tender age of six days old.

The nurse explained some things, most of which I would have understood in any other situation but none of which I understood in the haze and terror of that week. Then a doctor came in and explained more things, and I understood even less.

We wanted to know when we could take our newborn daughter home.

They didn’t know. They didn’t know what was wrong with her, and the things they did know about couldn’t be fixed immediately, and so here she had to wait, seven pounds of my heart in a plastic quasi-bassinet, enough machines near her that despite the room’s size, only about four feet of space were provided for parents to look at what-hell-is-this-I-must-now-exist-through-as-my-newborn-suffers.

In the back of the room, near the window, were some chairs, a large ledge and a television.

I found the Game Show Network.

I found Betty White.

And I felt safe. Understood. Loved. Like the fifth Golden Girl. Because no way would Rose Nylund understand half of what the medical humans had just said. And she wouldn’t need to, either. She’d whisk me away from there and invite me to have some tea and talk about St. Olaf. And she’d tell me a story about some horribly sick baby she’d heard of there, and how the gurdeneurethburgii was the problem then too, and how a carpenter fixed the problem with his murgerdernerferbur — which any old doctor ought to have seven of! Why, they sell them in seven-packs in St. Olaf. And that product is called the … oh, why can’t she remember it? It’s on the tip of her tongue.

And then Dorothy would say, “The seven-pack?”

“Yes, Dorothy, I’m talking about the seven-pack. As opposed to the Sven Pack, which, let me tell you, don’t — ”

“No, Rose. Is the seven-pack called a seven-pack?”

“… yes! And oh, what a scene Sven Pack caused when he tried to buy a sick-pack. They were banned, you know. Six-packs and eight packs.”

Whereupon Blanche would rue “any society that bans a six-pack. Oh, the nerve. Why, just thinking about it gives me — ”

“Svenorrhea,” Dorothy would quip.

SCENE

<3