Just after Damon left, they came in and checked me again. My bleeding wasn't slowing down quickly enough, said the nice female doctor who had delivered Noah wearing only one and a half gloves, and she wanted to give me more medication (I had already gotten a shot of pitocin after delivery). So I got the medication and then answered a zillion questions about whether my chest was hurting or if I was dizzy or short of breath or anything.

Just before the doctor left, I suddenly felt like my ears were jammed with cotton. I tried to tell her that, but whatever I said didn't explain it correctly, and she left.

Then I felt really, really drunk. My head started pounding, I lost my peripheral vision and I started having trouble talking. My mom zipped out of the room to get a nurse.

When they came back in, I was passed out and apparently so pale that even my lips were white.

I was hemorrhaging.

The next hour or so is pretty fuzzy for me. I remember that I was having a fairly pleasant dream when an awful smell invaded the scene -- which was the ammonia packet they had cracked under my nose to wake me up. I found out later it was the third packet they had used; I didn't respond to the first two at all.

I remember asking if I could just go back to sleep, because that's all I wanted to do, and three people yelled "NO!" simultaneously.

I remember that my mom was beside my bed the whole time, rubbing my head and talking to me.

I remember seeing the nurse who had yelled at me during delivery on her knees on the floor, holding my left arm and jamming an IV line into me. She wasn't even wearing gloves because there wasn't time to put them on. I remember her later standing by my feet and, when somebody offered her a pair of gloves, she said, "I'm so covered in blood now that it really doesn't matter."

I remember an anesthesiologist telling me they needed to give me sedatives on top of the narcotics so that the doctors could work on me. I remember somebody saying that my uterus had filled with clots and that they had to get them out to stop the bleeding.

And I remember a lot of pain when they cleaned out those clots. I cried, I tried to wriggle away and I begged them to stop hurting me.

And I remember thinking at one point that I didn't want to die, especially not on my son's birthday, and especially not when his birthday was on Christmas.

They saved me. The attending physician, Dr. MacNeill -- the one I'm in love with, remember? -- told me several hours later as they moved me to a new room: "I think you were in Purgatory for a while there, kiddo. I didn't know if we were going to wake you up."

That scared the holy crap out of me.

But I'm fine. Turns out I was -- and still am -- pretty anemic, so I've been on megadoses of iron since that day. I'm finally starting to feel slightly normal, which for me is, of course, nowhere near the actual definition of normal.

About a week before I had Noah, my staff members were teasing me, asking me if I would name the baby Jesus if he were born on Christmas. I told them that I thought "The Messiah Gulli" was an odd name that would get him beat up on the playground and that, in the history of the world, I was probably in the bottom 10 of God's list of women to be chosen for an immaculate conception (which this was not, trust me).

But here's what we'll talk about for the rest of Noah's life: He was born on Christmas. When we got to where he was going to be born, there was no room for us. He has a biblical name. And his daddy's a carpenter.

I don't mean to be sappy here, but I honestly feel as though we got more than our fair share of miracles this Christmas.