I cried like a baby when I learned I was going to be father some ten years ago. I didn’t cry tears of pride; I cried the tears you get when you are scared to death. I was 19 and married. I live in Oklahoma, so it’s not that rare, although she was no relation, so we are ahead of the curve in that aspect. My first thought was, what am I going to tell my dad?

The news of the pregnancy was the beginning of a strange new adventure in my life. I had dropped out of college and was working at a family owned grocery store for minimum wage. I was getting married and really had no clue about life or bills.

I got a job making more money at a hog farm. I was a fish out of water, that isn’t quite right; I was a fish in a fryer. I had no clue about hogs. This was a place where they bred, helped birthed, castrated, killed, and probably a few other things to pigs that I have blocked out. They pretty much made me the hose man. I washed the stalls and the houses.

Now the guys who worked at the hog farm were a mixture of Aggies and burn outs. I was somewhere in between the two, but leaned more to the burn out side of things.Somedays we would sit around all day and look for four leaf clovers. Yeah, when I say burn outs, I am talking hardcore. One day I was washing a house and the automated feeder didn’t turn off. Feed was spilling everywhere. I made a snap decision to not turn off the pressure hose, but instead put into a hole where a gate rod usually was. Bad idea. I took two steps toward the switch, when the hose shot up and hit me right in the face.

Lucky for me it was a cold October, and I was wearing a heavy coat. I covered my head and screamed like a contestant on the Price is Right, just not as happy. I was rescued by a burn out named Pepper. Thank God I survived. I couldn’t imagine what my obituary would have looked like if Pepper had failed.

My left eye was completely swelled shut. I wanted to go to sleep so badly. I drove home holding my right eye open. While this was happening with me, my wife was going through her own problems. It turned out that being pregnant was somewhat of an allergy for my wife. She was sick, like exorcist vomiting sick. She was having nurses come in twice a day to give her fluid through an IV.

I come inside the house and it’s dark. She asks how my day was and I tell her not bad considering I thought I had shot my eye out with a pressure hose. Then the nausea I had been feeling turned into full fledged puking. My wife called my mom, who took me to the ER. Making a long story short, I had shredded my retina and had a concussion. This was the first month we knew we were pregnant.

The next trimester was a little bit different. We both got better, and we had our first ultrasound. We had no idea what to expect. The doctor squirted the blue junk on my wife’s belly and began. He asked which one we wanted to do first. We told him we didn’t have any preference. We both thought there must be two different types of ultrasounds that they did. He asked if we wanted him to do the right or the left one. Again, we had no clue what he was talking about. You’re the doc, is what I told him. It was at this point that I think he realized he was going way over our heads. So he looked me in the eye and said, ok there are two babies in here, the right one or the left one first? It was at this point that my eyes welled up and I thought, what am I going to tell my dad?