There have been very few occasions in my life when everything comes to a halt. When suddenly you don’t care about the dishes, or the responsibilities at work, or the color of the sky. Your life is about to change in an unexpected, dramatic and painful way, and you hardly know what to do.

That happened yesterday for about an hour when we sat in the doctor’s office and then made a harried ride to the hospital at speeds exceeding the posted limits. The baby’s fine. Everything’s OK. But she’s in so much trouble. When she’s finally born she is so grounded.

All morning yesterday my wife didn’t feel the baby move. She called the doctor on her lunch break and they had her try a few things to see it would get the baby moving. None of them worked, so we took a quick trip to the doctor’s office. Everything seemed fairly calm until they tried to hear the baby’s heart beat. That funky looking bit of 1970s technology has never failed us before. That rapid thump-thump would echo out over those crackling speakers and we’d smile knowing that was our little baby girl.

But yesterday the crackling speakers gave nothing. The doctor kept moving it around, frowning, and moving it around some more. Finally she gave up and I asked the obvious, “That’s not normal is it? What does that mean?” It wasn’t normal. She was concerned, and was sending us straight to the hospital for an ultrasound to see what was going on. To her credit, she didn’t want to speculate and wanted to take things one step at a time. But in the moment that answer didn’t help at all.

We were crushed. If there’s no heart beat, the resulting conclusion comes pretty quickly. She called the hospital while we tried to keep it together and then we drove off, beginning the quietest and scariest car ride of my life.

I’ve had some low point car rides in my life. The front seat of an ambulance on Thanksgiving evening comes to mind. Worse still was a ride along back country roads in South Dakota on the way to the hospital, and then even worse was the empty-handed ride home. There was a backseat ride to the hospital with a broken leg, but I was only two and can’t distinguish between real memories and something fabricated from stories and photographs. But those pale in comparison. I’ve never received a call from the hospital about a loved one. This was worse than I’ve ever had.

You can imagine all the terrible things that went through my mind if our worst fears were true. My mind would start to tumble down that path and all I could do was pray a simple prayer, a near mantra: “Keep the baby safe.” My mind jumped to the calls we’d have to make, the friends who would hear a broken plea to come and would. I almost lost it when I imagined having to call our parents and form those words. And I went back to that mantra.

We made it the hospital and into the maternity care center, trying not to snap at the nurses when they didn’t immediately jump. One nurse recognized our panic and tried to walk quickly, taking us directly down to get an ultrasound instead of waiting for them to come to us.

They spread the goop, fired up the machine, and we waited those terrible moments for the picture to become clear. And there it was. Movement. Rhythmic. Thump-thump. Thump-thump. Thump-thump. The heartbeat. She’s OK. I almost lost it again.

We spent the next two hours in the hospital while they ran tests to make sure everything was OK. She aced her biophysical test, 8 out of 8, whatever that means. That’s my girl. And we confirmed that she is in fact a girl, which means we won’t have to scramble for a last minute boy’s name.

Apparently she was just in a strange position that didn’t enable the doctor to hear the heartbeat. Apparently she was just lethargic yesterday. But she is in so much trouble for freaking us out like that. This is my rude introduction to what it’s like to be a parent. It wasn’t when we first heard the news and I jumped up and down, it wasn’t when we saw the first ultrasound pictures, it wasn’t when I felt the oddly alien-like kicking through my wife’s stomach. It was when the possibility of losing her became so real.

I know nothing of true loss. I know nothing of what it feels like to lose a child. I know nothing of what it feels like to lose a child before they’re even born, but I know it’s overwhelming. The thought of nine months worth of anticipation being snuffed out is more than I can bear. It’s a wonder that anyone can summon the courage and the strength to try again.

Our baby is due on Sunday. I’ve never thought about the significance of that. A new start. A new beginning. Hope. Life. I’m thankful.