Ack! My lack of wordpress-fu resulted in the original post deliquescing into dev/null, and I’m not sure how to get it back. So here it is again.
I really hadn’t expected Beth to make her appearance so soon. Statistically speaking, as a reasonably well-nourished under-35 Caucasian primigravida with a singleton pregnancy, living in the US and receiving prenatal care, every demographic category into which I could be squeezed increased my likelihood of having The Pregnancy That Never Ends. Physically, I felt great. I hadn’t even sunk into the traditional last-week-of-pregnancy despair, in which I would be so desperate to get the kid out that I would try any cockamamie induction technique endorsed by random crackpots on the internet. Even the midwife said she would be surprised if Beth showed any signs of vacating the premises before Father’s Day.
So with that reassurance, I did the single thing that guaranteed I would go into labor immediately: I agreed to have out-of-town friends stay at our place for the week of the 3d-10th June.
Around midnight on the 3rd, J decided that he’d turn in for the night. I wasn’t terribly tired, and I was in the middle of Left For Dead, a memoir by Beck Weathers. The poor bastard tried to climb Mount Everest and went blind from the effects of altitude during his ascent. Promising to return, the guides left him behind to help the rest of the team reach the summit. They never came back, so Weathers followed members of another expedition team on their descent. The group got lost and wandered in a blizzard for eight hours before anyone found them. The guide deemed the unconscious Weathers past saving, and left him on the side of the mountain. Around nine the next morning, the expedition doctor came out, peeled a three-inch-thick carapace of ice (his own frozen breath!) from Weathers’ face, discovered that he was still breathing, and decided that taking him back for medical treatment would just delay the inevitable. At four in the afternoon, Weathers regained consciousness and hiked back in to camp. The guides put him in a tent all alone and gave him some liquids and oxygen, assuming that he would die before the next morning. In the middle of the night, his tent collapsed. The expedition was leaving camp when another member looked in the tent to see if they had left anything important, and discovered that Weathers was still alive. The group discussed the situation and reluctantly decided to try to get him down the mountain if he could walk under his own power; otherwise, they would have to leave him. He managed to rappel and down-climb to Base Camp, where the medevac helicopter that had been called for him left with a different hypothermia victim instead (…and on and on in that vein for another 200 pages). He’s remarkably un-self-pitying for a guy who lost both hands, some toes, and his nose to frostbite.
Anyway, while I was lying on the sofa, I noticed that my abdomen was tightening periodically. It didn’t actually feel like anything, and I probably wouldn’t have noticed if the book hadn’t bobbled every time my stomach got hard. I wandered into J’s office and grabbed his watch; although I was entirely sure that this wasn’t labor, I thought I would time the “contractions” purely in the spirit of scientific inquiry. They were four minutes apart, and lasted about 45 seconds to a minute each, and were still completely painless.
Timing couldn’t hold my attention for long, so I put down the watch and turned back to Weathers’ woes. I didn’t want Beth to take this as a cue to turn breech or transverse again, so I got on my hands and knees and started waggling my posterior while I read.
Around 3:30 in the morning, I started feeling something. It didn’t hurt, but a pins-and-needles sensation started at my fundus and swept down slowly through my abdomen with every contraction. I found that I couldn’t stay on my hands and knees through a contraction, so I leaned over the back of the sofa with each one. About this time, I started thinking that a bath would feel really good, but I became rather irrationally convinced that running water would wake everyone in the house for no good reason. We’d run to the hospital, sit in the triage area for an hour or two, learn it was a false alarm, and everyone would come home tired and disappointed. So I kept moving from the floor to the sofa, being as quiet as I could.
I couldn’t forget, though, that the labor rooms at the hospital had nice big whirlpool tubs. As contraction after contraction rolled in, I became absolutely fixated on the idea of sitting in a whirlpool tub. Ten minutes in it, I was convinced, would stop these irritating false contractions so that I could go to bed and get some sleep before everyone showed up. Maybe I’d even have time to pick up K’s birthday present! So I called the nurse consultation line and described the pattern of my contractions.
“Uh huh,” the nurse said skeptically. “And you say this is your first pregnancy? Have you had any contractions before this?”
“Well, no. I mean, I’ve had painless ones, the Braxton-Hicks, but these are the first ones that felt like anything.”
“You aren’t in labor. You say you’re up and walking around, and you’re talking just fine through your contractions. Drink some more water and lie on your side, and they’ll probably go away in an hour or so.”
“Are you sure? They’re a minute long, three minutes apart, and they’ve been going on since about midnight.” Thinking about the hospital tub, I added, mendaciously, “And they’re starting to hurt quite a bit.”
She sighed. “Just drink the water, okay? Call me back when the contractions are closer to 90 seconds long, or if your water breaks.”
I was horribly, crushingly disappointed. Not because I wouldn’t be seeing the kiddo that day – I was perfectly content to let her inhabit my uterus as long as she needed to – but because the nurse wouldn’t let me use the hospital tub, and I had irrationally decided that I couldn’t use my own tub until 6:00 am, when J’s alarm clock would go off. Perhaps if I had called her back and explained that it was critically important that I sit in the tub, and not just any tub, but the one in the hospital, she would have recognized the peculiar illogic of a person in labor.
Instead, I got out the CD of hula music that my friend A had given me, and set it to play very, very quietly while I hula-danced around the living room. Remembering that a mantra is said to help in labor, I started murmuring “Open. Open. Out. Out.” at the peaks of the contractions, which still didn’t hurt terribly much.
Towards 5:30, I started watching the clock with fierce intensity as I swayed in place. Only 29 more minutes until I can get in the shower… Only 28… I was falling asleep standing up between contractions, and would wake up every two or three minutes to find myself draped over the back of the sofa.
At 5:55 I called the consultation nurse back and said, “Hey! It’s me again! I still have the contractions, and they’re 90 seconds long!” In reality I had no idea how long they were, since I had lost J’s watch some hours before.
She heaved another sigh. “Well, I suppose you can come in to get checked out then. Just don’t get your hopes up. If you’re not in labor, you’ll have to go back home.”
I was thinking, “Die! Die!”, but said, “Okay then! We’ll see you there!”
Just at that moment came the sweetest sound I’d ever heard in my life: J slapping his snooze button and cutting off the BBC News anchor in midsentence! I vaulted the sofa, ran to the bathroom, jumped in the shower, and cranked it up.
For the first three minutes, the shower felt absolutely amazing, and I never wanted to leave it. The next contraction was qualitatively different from those that had come before, and by that I mean “really truly unbelievably horrific.” It felt as if I’d dropped the bar on myself while doing a bench press, and then rolled it from my sternum to my pelvis. I sank to my knees and started making noises like a wounded walrus.
J came skidding into the bathroom seconds later. “What’s wrong? Are you hurt? Did you fall?”
“No,” I panted, “I’m fine! I think I’m in labor, but the nurse says probably not, and I want to go to the hospital.”
“Oh, good,” he said, relaxing. “Is there time for me to grab a shower and some toast?”
I threw up on his feet.
“All right, then. I’ll get you some clothes and we’ll go.”
Getting to the car took a while, since with every contraction I had to stop and kneel on the ground and then haul my bulk back up. Once in the car, I discovered that I couldn’t sit through them – I had to unbuckle my seatbelt and half-stand, bracing my feet in the footwell and arching my back.
Of course, we got stuck behind the longest, slowest freight train in the history of railroading. I had to get out of the car and stand, chanting, “Out! Out! Out!” until it passed. The advantage of using “Out!” for your mantra is that it sounds an awful lot like “OW!”
I must have looked suitably haggard – dripping wet, braless, missing a sandal – as we entered the hospital, because a receptionist ran to get a wheelchair. I brushed her off, irritated, and just asked where the elevators were. (n.b.: I had volunteered at this hospital for over a year, and had been there the previous week to fill out preadmission forms, but at that moment I couldn’t remember where the elevator was. I wasn’t even sure that there was an elevator.) She grabbed my arm, ran with us to the elevator, and punched the buttons.
She must have called the nurses on the labor floor, because they were waiting when the elevator doors opened. They steered me into the nearest room with no silly questions about whether I was really in labor or not.
The admissions nurse came in and told me, in the singsong cadences you might use with a particularly slow three-year-old, that she needed to check my dilation and hook up the external monitor to track the fetus’ heartbeat for twenty minutes.
She checked and announced, with some surprise, that I was six to seven centimeters dilated, fully effaced, and possessed of a bulging bag of waters. I was almost done with the active phase of labor. I was a bit preoccupied at the moment, so this didn’t actually register.
She hooked up the little ultrasound transducers that measured the fetal heartbeat and contractions. In the meantime, she said, she needed to ask me some questions. Stupid questions. Unbelievably irrelevant questions. Did I have any special food preferences? What was my preferred learning style – audio, visual, manual or some combination of the three? Would I like the front desk to patch phone calls through to my room?
In between contractions that were now less than two minutes apart and 90 seconds long, meaning that I got a break of about 30 seconds between them, I said that I didn’t give a rat’s ass about any of the above, and that these questions might possibly have been better asked during our leisurely morning of filling out preadmission forms the week before. She stopped talking to me, and instead directed her questions to J, which I found even more irritating. At this point, I put on my perma-scowl, which I would wear until the kid was born.
After the twenty minutes were up and we were assured that the fetus looked fine, I tore off the transducers and raced to the whirlpool tub, leaving a trail of discarded clothing in my wake. Here I encountered the first real problem of labor – I could no longer sit at all. I had to stand up and grip the shower curtain rod or J’s shoulders. And my contractions weren’t letting up! So the only parts of me that benefited from the lovely warm rushing water were my feet. I was so disappointed by this turn of events I started to cry.
“I want the epidural,” I sobbed. “I can’t stand up for another six hours! I’m tired and I can’t even sit in the water! Get the anesthesiologist, please!”
In retrospect, what I should have wailed was, “I’m in transition (the very last bit before the pushing begins). Tell me it’s almost over, please!”
The anesthesiologist popped in at once and introduced himself, and I asked him to make with the needles immediately. He instructed me to sit on the table, grip my knees, and curl my spine. I explained that I couldn’t sit. He explained that if I didn’t sit, inserting the needle would hurt like the dickens. I explained that this argument didn’t move me because I already hurt like the dickens. Finally, I sat and curled up, and he punched the needle and threaded the epidural in the 20 or so seconds between contractions. Immediately my feet started to tingle.
The midwife bustled in at that point, asked how I was doing, explained that she would stay with me throughout labor, and gloved up for a cervical check.
“Oh dear,” she said. “You’re entirely dilated, except for a little lip of cervix on the left side.”
“What?”
“Yes. You’re at 10 centimeters, and I can feel the baby’s head through the caul.”
“So this epidural1 was pretty much useless then?”
“Well, I suppose it’ll numb you while you push.”
I didn’t come into this with a fixed idea of what made a “successful birth experience”, but I am a big weenie when it comes to needles and blood in general. The fact that I had gotten a large-bore needle in my spine (!!!) between my vertebrae (!!!) for no reason at all (!!!) made my skin crawl. Imagining the epidural catheter slithering back out of my vertebral column made me feel sick to my stomach, and the image wouldn’t stop playing in my head. It was in glorious, full-colour, IMAX-level detail.
On the other hand, the epidural itself gave me a lovely tingly feeling. I could see a big market for social/recreational use if they could only get over the whole needle in your spine (!!!) bit.
Just then, my water broke, and it was a tarry black fluid. This was meconium, the contents of the fetal bowel; the fact that Beth had already expelled so much of it indicated fetal distress. This cheery bit of news snapped me out of the epidural-catheter reverie right quick, I tell you. The midwife called for the pediatrician, who set up a cart with a warmer in the corner of the room.
Because I couldn’t push until that last stubborn lip of cervix was gone, we took advantage of the time to phone our parents to say that, hey, we were probably going to produce a grandkid sometime this morning. We got their answering machines.
When I got the go-ahead to push, J held my hand. I could feel my hipbones moving apart as the kid twisted out. Once her head was out, the midwife shouted at me to stop pushing. Beth had a few loops of umbilical cord around her neck, which accounted for all the meconium. Once they were untwisted, I pushed again and her entire body came flopping out bonelessly. J said it reminded him of a rubber chicken. They snipped her cord, and took her to the corner to have her airway suctioned. Once she was okayed by the pediatrician, they brought her back to us.
She came out perfectly healthy and lovely!
And then of course there were laughs and crying and unwrapping and marveling at her hair and her enormous feet (longer than my index finger!) and her odd-looking umbilical stump. And that was that.
1 It cost $1200, or roughly $30 per minute of labor.
