Eric Yuan
WHEN MILO MCCABE’S DAUGHTER WAS BORN, HE COULD SEE SHE had 10 fingers, 10 toes and dark swirls of hair; he could hear her piercing cry. But he couldn’t make out the color of her eyes and, heartbreakingly, he couldn’t hold her. He was watching over Zoom.
McCabe had never considered not being in the delivery room. But in early April, he fell ill with COVID-19 and was rushed to a hospital in Southern California. When his wife Roxanne went into labor more than a week later at the same hospital, he was still there—but could barely get out of bed.
A video call was the next best thing: they wanted to see each other’s faces, record the proceedings and stay on for hours for free without technical glitches. So they chose Zoom—a platform that they, like most of the world, had barely used previously but that now seemed to be everywhere.
“I remember going through contractions and hearing his voice saying, ‘You’re doing good, babe,’ every few minutes,” Roxanne says. “I would turn to look at the video on my left, as if he was going to go somewhere—but he wasn’t going anywhere.” They were together for almost 11 hours before Emberly Anne emerged into the world. “It wasn’t how I anticipated your coming-out party, kid,” McCabe says eight months later, looking down at the daughter in his arms.
