American Sniper - Boekje Pienter

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I had no other ill effects, not from the seizure or the procedure. No
one really could figure out why I’d reacted the way I did. As far as anyone
could tell, I was fine.
But there was a problem—a seizure is grounds for being medically
discharged from the Navy. Luckily, there was a corpsman whom I’d
served with in the room. He persuaded the doctor not to include the
seizure in his report, or to write what happened in a way that wouldn’t
affect my deployment or my career. (I’m not sure which.) I never
heard anything about it again.
But what the seizure did do was keep me from getting to Taya. While
I’d been passing out, she had been having a routine pregnancy
checkup. It was about three weeks before our daughter was due and
days before I was supposed to deploy. The checkup included an ultrasound,
and when the technician looked away from the screen, my wife
realized something was wrong.
“I have a feeling you’re having this baby right away,” was the most
the technician would say before getting up and fetching the doctor.
The baby had her umbilical cord around her neck. She was also
breached and the amount of amniotic fluid—liquid that nourishes and
protects the developing infant—was low.
“We’ll do a C-section,” said the doc. “Don’t worry. We’ll get this
baby out tomorrow. You’ll be fine.”
Taya had called me several times. By the time I came to, she was
already at the hospital.
We spent a nervous night together. The next morning, the doctors
performed a C-section. As they were working, they hit some kind of