My thanks to the fantastic Liz Hoover Moore for inspiring me to finally post the rest of this. For installments One and Two, see:
Chapter One
AND
Chapter Two
I’m hooked up to the monitor again, sometime in the middle of the morning. The kind nurse on that shift allows me to stay in the rocking chair. I watch the contract-o-meter rise and fall, up to 70 and beyond, down to 5. An endless pink sheet prints out the history of my pain and the vibrancy of the fetus. His heartbeat sinks and rises as he turns within, swims deeper away from the constricting bands. Depending on how I sit or move, the level of the contract-o-meter’s readout changes. Sometimes the pain is deep but the contract-o-meter doesn’t register it. I want to jar the needle so that it shows the jagged peak I feel, not some pudding-shaped lump that suggests a bad hair day rather than a fierce pain. It should jump and shimmy like I’m telling wild lies, damn it! Then I will get the epidural…yes, the epidural that I have all-too-suddenly decided I must have, and have now. It’s 5:30 a.m.
I grip husband’s knees and tell him of my epidural desires. I have a thin sense of shame but the pain supercedes it. No one gives you any medals anyway, damn it. He understands. He calls the nurse station.
Doctor H. arrives for a status check.
“Great progress!” she announces brightly. “You’re now at two centimeters.”
She has got to be kidding.
TWO centimeters, after an entire night of pain—pain, mind you, that I had decided to withstand like a hero. If I’ve hit a two on the pain scale on the way to ten, then I consign myself to eternal cowardice.
But Doctor H. smiles sadly. “I’m afraid it’s just too soon for the epidural. We like you to be at least a four.”
She decides to give me another dose of the misoprostrol to “speed things along,” and offers me a Stadol drip in the IV so that I can sleep for a couple of hours. Stadol is something like Demerol, and I’ve been told to avoid it. Rumor has it that you can still feel the pain, but you’re doped up and goofy. The promise of sleep is too tempting, however, because I know I’ll need my energy soon enough. How many hours away that might be is still unknown. I accept the Stadol.
Of course, it takes at least an hour for someone to arrive to administer the stuff. Evil Nurse drops by with a surgical mask around her neck to inform me that she’s been at a delivery and “that’s more important than you; you’ll have to wait.” I’m so desperate for help that I actually thank her. Hey, Evil Nurse, thanks for stopping by!
The next thing I remember, a bearded male doctor appears in my field of vision. I see him upside down. He looks like a youthful Santa Claus. My husband later suggests that he is creepy and beady-eyed, but to me he is a kindly gentleman, a lovely dapper fellow. He is the drug pusher, the savior. He carries a needle of potion, and an unknown nurse fumbles with the IV while I thrash on the bed. The fumbling goes on for an impossibly long time. Then the Santa Claus doctor is leaning over me, suggesting that I will soon drift away. I think I see my husband on the couch. I think inexplicably of white paper, tumbling in the wind. I sink beneath a softness that obscures the pain.
I next wake up into darkness and think that I am alone. Lying on my side, I search for my husband’s presence on the couch, but I don’t see him. Although we’re deeper into the morning, the room seems darker. And I have hit a ten on the pain scale. The problem is, I think it’s a ten at the time, but it’s only going to get worse. In retrospect, I’d call it an eight. They have a chart on the wall for non-native speakers, with cartoon faces expressing varying levels of pain. “Tiene un terrible dolor!” says the face under the number ten, which is weeping copiously. I can still speak, so I don’t think I earn a ten.
I call to husband and he tilts upright from the couch, with a sputter like someone caught sleeping under an office desk.
“Should I call the nurse?” he asks, bending over me. My glasses are wedged in a crevice between the mattress and the bed frame. My fingers pick at them—maybe if I can see sharp edges I can tame the pain. It’s so fierce and so incessant that I can’t catch a breath. (Already I have forgotten it; it seems dull now, like cotton wool.) My only sane thought is that this is an absurd outrage. How completely over the top! I really don’t think it needs to hurt this much to be effective, and Mother Nature has made a very bad error.
“Yes, call the nurse.” Maybe I’ve made it to four centimeters now, and I can have the epidural. That’s all I’m counting on.
Right around then—but it might have been a while still—Doctor H2 arrives for her morning rounds. Again, I see her upside down, a dark and kindly shape framed by light. She goes to check my cervix, and I don’t feel a thing. I don’t remember how she gets there or where her hands go or anything.
“Well,” she says, like she’s been told a good secret. “You’re at nine centimeters. You’re going to be ready to push in a few minutes.”
“Epidural?” I might have croaked. At least I did so silently. But I know the painful answer. The window of opportunity for the epidural has closed for good. By the time an anesthesiologist is alerted and arrives, the baby will be breathing his first breath. Ouch, au natural! That’s not what I intended—it’s sort of like twisting a 180 degree turn while canoeing through a particularly rough set of rapids. Best to just turn your head downriver, plunge your paddle in, and stern your way through backwards. I’ve done that. It worked then.
Almost immediately a panoply of nurses rushes in and out of the room; I sense wheeled things being pushed hither and thither. There’s a general bustle right outside my range of vision. I can focus on a circle in front of me about two feet in diameter. Beyond that it’s all a blur.
That’s when Nurse Helene arrives. I meet her at an odd juncture of pain and anticipation, and I don’t have any idea what she really looks like until the next day. She’s more a voice and a presence. That, and a bulbous nose shaped like a root vegetable. She’s there suddenly, fussing around me.
Nurse Helene’s personality falls somewhere between a Nazi and Mother Teresa. It’s okay to love her, because she changes your disposable underwear and super-industrial phonebook-sized maxi pads after delivery—as many times as they need to be changed. A droplet of blood on the bed padding? Underwear change. Shift in room temperature? Underwear change! Patient looking fidgety? Change the undies. I was eternally grateful for her administrations to my nether regions.
But then, she had a bad habit of putting her face close enough for me to count chin hairs and nattering away in a know-it-all fashion. And she had a really, really bad habit of grabbing me under the chin like an irate grandmother while she lectured and blithered at me. This earns her a bus ticket to Hades in my book.
The next few minutes—or maybe it’s an hour—pass rapidly. I feel an intense pelvic pressure and tell Nurse Helene I have to go to the bathroom, but it’s hard to even make it there. She tosses a blue hospital chuck on the floor and bids me to squat there and take care of business. (Some scraplet of dignity prevents this horrifying outcome.) I don’t know where to go or how to arrange myself to accommodate the pain. In a creeping effort to escape it I crawl up on the bed on all fours and scream. Yes, this is a ten. Tiene un terrible dolor!
“Screaming like that won’t do anybody any good,” chides Nurse Helene. I can’t see her because I can’t even lift my head. And I definitely can’t connect my fist with her chin, as I’d like, considering I can’t see her. Instead, I scream even louder. She tucks her head in close to me, like a bird, and squawks at me to quiet down. Bony fingers reach out and grab me by my chin. Ack! My response is to scream even more furiously. In fact, I consciously decide to scream as loud as I possibly can. A small part of me thinks uncharitably: “Get an earful of this, you motherfucker nurse!” I hope everyone down the hall can hear me. I hope those women at one centimeter are quaking in their laundry-thinned nighties. Nurse Helene backs away with a “tsk”ing sort of sound.
Doctor H2 decides to nip my operatic performance in the bud by asking me to get in pushing position. I lean back on the bed. She breaks my water; a hot rush. It happens very fast. The doctor takes my right foot and plants it on her hip. She directs Husband to take the left foot and do the same. For a second a “Who, me?” expression flits over his face, but he quickly does as asked. So much for any ideas of him staying up near my head while the “action” happens discreetly below.
Doctor Halpern explains that when a contraction comes on, I’m going to push. Okay, good. I feel the first one rising, like a wave in a dark sea. It starts somewhere deep in my back and hums its way to the top. Then I start to push. I get about three good pushes per contraction.
For some stupid reason they want me to hold my breath during the pushes, but this is so counterintuitive I don’t get it at first. I want to puff out. They shake their heads. No. I keep trying, but I still think it’s impossibly stupid.
Nurse Helene’s face appears about an inch in front of mine. At this distance I can’t get a read on her features; she’s mostly nose. I see beady eyes glittering above the nose. And then—everyone’s worst nightmare—she starts to count to 10! This seems so clichéd that it should be funny, but its not. It’s very bad indeed. I wish fervently that this nurse would descend down a chute into the bowels of the earth, where she would be prodded repeatedly with hot devilish sporks dipped in acid.
I’m very bitter about the counting nurse, but my hands are busy gripping the bedrails and I don’t have the energy to throttle her. I keep trying the moronic breath-holding technique, and at some point I finally catch on. (It’s quite strange how, when in pain and in the presence of medical professionals, one will accept such directives.) For some reason it seems to help. The doctor announces that the baby’s head is actually in sight.
Showing posts with label labor. Show all posts
Showing posts with label labor. Show all posts
Thursday, December 11, 2008
Thursday, July 17, 2008
The Eviction of the First Son: Chapter Two
Once at the hospital, we take the elevator to the maternity ward on the sixth floor. A phalanx of blue-clad nurses greets us from behind a desk; we are checked in and shown to a room almost immediately. It’s nice to go through this process without a speck of pain. Other items missed from the checklist: the old question of when to head to the hospital, the anguish of potholes.
A nurse opens a cupboard and chooses a gown for me, from among a collection of well-washed garments with strings at the neck still knotted tight. We find a knot that she can pick apart with her fingernails. I am told to take everything off. I slip on the gown, my abdomen still swollen and taut (or, as my mother has deemed it, “rather bulgy”). I have now become hospital fodder; the extensive collection of loose and comfortable clothes that I brought (for some ambitious reason) will remain unworn—at least until I leave. The nurse bids me lie in bed and expertly hooks me up to a fetal heart and contract-o-meter. In almost the same smooth movement she flicks on the television and adjusts the volume.
Within the next 15 minutes, a parade of people enter the room one after another: an eyeglassed administrator to collect my insurance card and address, a nurse waggling a flat, disposable thermometer, another nurse to insert a heparin lock in the back of my left hand, yet another to fuss with the monitor, several others who enter and exit without immediate purpose, and one or two more random vitals-checkers. (In fact, my vitals will be taken throughout the next 48 hours as if someone’s fortune rode on the minute fluctuations of my temperature.)
I’m lying on the bed. I recall the Space Mountain ride at Disneyworld: once the car passes the entrance, it drops precipitously into darkness. I inspect the heparin lock on the back of my hand. The vein bulges grossly, pinioned under clear tape.
A young blonde doctor enters and introduces herself as Doctor H. She’s carrying a small blue pill case and inside it are two small pills intended to jumpstart my labor. The drug my doctor has ordered is Misoprostrol, otherwise known as Cytotec. It’s a drug intended for stomach ulcers, not labor. A drug I am leery of, but that I will try despite my reservations.
Doctor Hayley pokes the pill high up into my cervix (oofh!) and there deposits it. Now there is no going back. She tells me I need to lie still for one hour, at which point I’ll be released from the constant monitor and free to move about. A show about the Wright Brothers is on Channel 13 and we watch it, but I remember barely anything about it now. I think it may have had something to do with flight.
By 10:00 p.m. no one has come to release me from the monitor. I’m on my back and I expect some pain might be around the bend. I don’t wish to be on my back with pain around the bend; it makes me nervous and cranky. Nurse number 686 in the long procession of unknown nurses enters. She fails to introduce herself. I note immediately the serious cast to her face. Her lips purse when I ask her to remove the monitor.
“You need to lie there for two hours,” she informs me.
“The doctor said one.”
“I’m afraid it’s two.”
“Well then, it’s been almost two.”
“Has it?” she says. “Well, if you wish to ambulate, I can unhook you. Once you are done ambulating and you lie down to rest, you will need to be on the monitor.”
Ambulate? I just want to use the bathroom, maybe sit in a chair! But I’ll play her game.
“I’d like to ambulate, yes.”
If the past is any judge, this new nurse will quietly disappear and will be replaced with strange nurse number 687 shortly. So it’s likely I won’t need to obey her anyway.
She washes her hands at the sink and I take one last stab at arguing. “By the way, my doctor said that I wouldn’t need to be hooked up to the monitor while lying down. Only for half an hour, she said.”
“No,” says the nurse, expressionless. “Unless you are ambulating, you need to be hooked up to a monitor at all times. This is an induction. It’s a medical procedure. We need to make sure the baby is okay. At all times.”
This is exactly the reason why I wanted to avoid an induction in the first place. This nurse is clearly evil. Regardless, she releases me around 10:15 and I proceed to “ambulate” until she leaves the room. Then I sit down on the vinyl couch with husband. We are both silent, depressed. There’s something about this place that reminds me of a stark college dorm room at the lower end of the housing lottery; the kind of room where you spend a lonely year reading and writing bad poetry. The city outside is dark, and the fluorescent lights over the bed are dim. It’s terribly silent.
Doctor H will be back around 12:30 to check my progress. We wait. Eventually, husband pulls out the side of the couch to assemble a type of bed, albeit one for a stumpy-legged gnome. He fashions a pillow out of a pair of sweaters and curls up unhappily. I wait and read, alert to any subtle pains. There’s something there underneath the familiar Braxton Hicks tightenings, like a disturbance under the water, more sensed than felt. The sensation grows to a tangible cramping. And then to a point where I can say “this doesn’t feel good.” But it’s not too bad, either.
Evil Nurse returns, accompanied soon after by Doctor H.
“Progress!” the doctor announces re: the cervix. “It’s working; the miso has thinned it out quite a bit.”
Of course, I had hoped for a painless dilation to seven, but who can complain after three weeks at one centimeter? The doctor says she wants to monitor the contractions for a while. Evil Nurse is pleased; she rewards me with a supercilious little smile that says, “I am in charge here.”
They affix the stretchy bands that hold the monitor in place around my abdomen. Evil Nurse asks if I would like any pain medication. This surprises me; these pains are quite manageable. It gives me that pitifully optimistic stab of hope that all those crying women throughout history were wimps. If this is what requires pain medication, then my tolerance is greater than I had ever imagined! I refuse the pain medication and she duly notes it on my chart (I sneak a look later, after she’s gone).
Then they leave me. Husband drifts back to sleep on his makeshift bed. The pain starts to arrive, piece by piece. I had often asked others “what do labor pains feel like?” and the perennial and frustrating answer was either “you can’t miss them” or “you will know,” statements always punctuated with multiple screamers (!!!) when seen in print. I persisted. No really, what do they feel like? Like really bad menstrual cramps, people would say. Okay, there’s a start. Like menstrual cramps times forty, one person offers. But how much does that hurt? The mathematics do not seem to help. I’ve been determined all along to describe them and I knew that I, too, would forget. I would become a “you will know” veteran. So in the midst of it, I pull out my journal and write the following:
“Hospital. 2:56 a.m. Pain is god’s blood pressure cuff, tightening into knots at the top, then a flare, a bloom, an apron of pain along the bottom. Was thinking in paired words: moonstone sea, ocean bayberry, wound wrathmot. At first could float like a golden leaf upon Allagash Lake wave. Then tried fixating my attention on the ceiling. I walked. A ribbon of wet blood ran down my leg into my sock. I thought: I am a king. I am a warrior. I thought: I walk in the shadowed lands without fear; this cannot hold me. But words don’t make any sense, in the end. They are so much metallic clatter.”
That’s what I wrote and it’s not much good either. Pain means the loss of pronouns, a staccato rhythm, compressed verbiage. Maybe pain is poetry. This is the last thing I wrote before I died. (Because, it seems, this pain walks too finely close to death. But that is not such a bad thing. Memento mori; you are alive. You were a long shot. A strange chance brought you here.)
I will say this: There is a certain inherent rhythm underneath the anguish, as if women are tuned to intangible metronomes. I know this because I can hear another laboring woman crying out along the hall in exactly the same tempo. One-two-three-four-five and on, slow and steady, like something rising up and cascading over the top of a dark wall. The noise is more like the crying of a dumb animal than anything else.
In the room is a wooden rocker-glider. It is the best and most magnificent thing in the history of human invention. It tops automobiles, telephones, air conditioners, radio towers, pacemakers, penicillin. I rock, rest, rock, rest. Sometimes the rests descend into a valley of blessed normalcy, and other times they sink only slightly below the level of true badness. I deem this quite unfair.
I listen to music through headphones: “Two steps around the room, once around the block, I’ll be your future boy.” At some point I remember to pinch the nodules taped inside my ears. They have absolutely no effect. I begin to suspect that I was duped. Ever optimistic, I leave the beads in place. Maybe when the pain gets really bad, they’ll work. That’s bloody likely.
A nurse opens a cupboard and chooses a gown for me, from among a collection of well-washed garments with strings at the neck still knotted tight. We find a knot that she can pick apart with her fingernails. I am told to take everything off. I slip on the gown, my abdomen still swollen and taut (or, as my mother has deemed it, “rather bulgy”). I have now become hospital fodder; the extensive collection of loose and comfortable clothes that I brought (for some ambitious reason) will remain unworn—at least until I leave. The nurse bids me lie in bed and expertly hooks me up to a fetal heart and contract-o-meter. In almost the same smooth movement she flicks on the television and adjusts the volume.
Within the next 15 minutes, a parade of people enter the room one after another: an eyeglassed administrator to collect my insurance card and address, a nurse waggling a flat, disposable thermometer, another nurse to insert a heparin lock in the back of my left hand, yet another to fuss with the monitor, several others who enter and exit without immediate purpose, and one or two more random vitals-checkers. (In fact, my vitals will be taken throughout the next 48 hours as if someone’s fortune rode on the minute fluctuations of my temperature.)
I’m lying on the bed. I recall the Space Mountain ride at Disneyworld: once the car passes the entrance, it drops precipitously into darkness. I inspect the heparin lock on the back of my hand. The vein bulges grossly, pinioned under clear tape.
A young blonde doctor enters and introduces herself as Doctor H. She’s carrying a small blue pill case and inside it are two small pills intended to jumpstart my labor. The drug my doctor has ordered is Misoprostrol, otherwise known as Cytotec. It’s a drug intended for stomach ulcers, not labor. A drug I am leery of, but that I will try despite my reservations.
Doctor Hayley pokes the pill high up into my cervix (oofh!) and there deposits it. Now there is no going back. She tells me I need to lie still for one hour, at which point I’ll be released from the constant monitor and free to move about. A show about the Wright Brothers is on Channel 13 and we watch it, but I remember barely anything about it now. I think it may have had something to do with flight.
By 10:00 p.m. no one has come to release me from the monitor. I’m on my back and I expect some pain might be around the bend. I don’t wish to be on my back with pain around the bend; it makes me nervous and cranky. Nurse number 686 in the long procession of unknown nurses enters. She fails to introduce herself. I note immediately the serious cast to her face. Her lips purse when I ask her to remove the monitor.
“You need to lie there for two hours,” she informs me.
“The doctor said one.”
“I’m afraid it’s two.”
“Well then, it’s been almost two.”
“Has it?” she says. “Well, if you wish to ambulate, I can unhook you. Once you are done ambulating and you lie down to rest, you will need to be on the monitor.”
Ambulate? I just want to use the bathroom, maybe sit in a chair! But I’ll play her game.
“I’d like to ambulate, yes.”
If the past is any judge, this new nurse will quietly disappear and will be replaced with strange nurse number 687 shortly. So it’s likely I won’t need to obey her anyway.
She washes her hands at the sink and I take one last stab at arguing. “By the way, my doctor said that I wouldn’t need to be hooked up to the monitor while lying down. Only for half an hour, she said.”
“No,” says the nurse, expressionless. “Unless you are ambulating, you need to be hooked up to a monitor at all times. This is an induction. It’s a medical procedure. We need to make sure the baby is okay. At all times.”
This is exactly the reason why I wanted to avoid an induction in the first place. This nurse is clearly evil. Regardless, she releases me around 10:15 and I proceed to “ambulate” until she leaves the room. Then I sit down on the vinyl couch with husband. We are both silent, depressed. There’s something about this place that reminds me of a stark college dorm room at the lower end of the housing lottery; the kind of room where you spend a lonely year reading and writing bad poetry. The city outside is dark, and the fluorescent lights over the bed are dim. It’s terribly silent.
Doctor H will be back around 12:30 to check my progress. We wait. Eventually, husband pulls out the side of the couch to assemble a type of bed, albeit one for a stumpy-legged gnome. He fashions a pillow out of a pair of sweaters and curls up unhappily. I wait and read, alert to any subtle pains. There’s something there underneath the familiar Braxton Hicks tightenings, like a disturbance under the water, more sensed than felt. The sensation grows to a tangible cramping. And then to a point where I can say “this doesn’t feel good.” But it’s not too bad, either.
Evil Nurse returns, accompanied soon after by Doctor H.
“Progress!” the doctor announces re: the cervix. “It’s working; the miso has thinned it out quite a bit.”
Of course, I had hoped for a painless dilation to seven, but who can complain after three weeks at one centimeter? The doctor says she wants to monitor the contractions for a while. Evil Nurse is pleased; she rewards me with a supercilious little smile that says, “I am in charge here.”
They affix the stretchy bands that hold the monitor in place around my abdomen. Evil Nurse asks if I would like any pain medication. This surprises me; these pains are quite manageable. It gives me that pitifully optimistic stab of hope that all those crying women throughout history were wimps. If this is what requires pain medication, then my tolerance is greater than I had ever imagined! I refuse the pain medication and she duly notes it on my chart (I sneak a look later, after she’s gone).
Then they leave me. Husband drifts back to sleep on his makeshift bed. The pain starts to arrive, piece by piece. I had often asked others “what do labor pains feel like?” and the perennial and frustrating answer was either “you can’t miss them” or “you will know,” statements always punctuated with multiple screamers (!!!) when seen in print. I persisted. No really, what do they feel like? Like really bad menstrual cramps, people would say. Okay, there’s a start. Like menstrual cramps times forty, one person offers. But how much does that hurt? The mathematics do not seem to help. I’ve been determined all along to describe them and I knew that I, too, would forget. I would become a “you will know” veteran. So in the midst of it, I pull out my journal and write the following:
“Hospital. 2:56 a.m. Pain is god’s blood pressure cuff, tightening into knots at the top, then a flare, a bloom, an apron of pain along the bottom. Was thinking in paired words: moonstone sea, ocean bayberry, wound wrathmot. At first could float like a golden leaf upon Allagash Lake wave. Then tried fixating my attention on the ceiling. I walked. A ribbon of wet blood ran down my leg into my sock. I thought: I am a king. I am a warrior. I thought: I walk in the shadowed lands without fear; this cannot hold me. But words don’t make any sense, in the end. They are so much metallic clatter.”
That’s what I wrote and it’s not much good either. Pain means the loss of pronouns, a staccato rhythm, compressed verbiage. Maybe pain is poetry. This is the last thing I wrote before I died. (Because, it seems, this pain walks too finely close to death. But that is not such a bad thing. Memento mori; you are alive. You were a long shot. A strange chance brought you here.)
I will say this: There is a certain inherent rhythm underneath the anguish, as if women are tuned to intangible metronomes. I know this because I can hear another laboring woman crying out along the hall in exactly the same tempo. One-two-three-four-five and on, slow and steady, like something rising up and cascading over the top of a dark wall. The noise is more like the crying of a dumb animal than anything else.
In the room is a wooden rocker-glider. It is the best and most magnificent thing in the history of human invention. It tops automobiles, telephones, air conditioners, radio towers, pacemakers, penicillin. I rock, rest, rock, rest. Sometimes the rests descend into a valley of blessed normalcy, and other times they sink only slightly below the level of true badness. I deem this quite unfair.
I listen to music through headphones: “Two steps around the room, once around the block, I’ll be your future boy.” At some point I remember to pinch the nodules taped inside my ears. They have absolutely no effect. I begin to suspect that I was duped. Ever optimistic, I leave the beads in place. Maybe when the pain gets really bad, they’ll work. That’s bloody likely.
Sunday, June 22, 2008
The Eviction of the First Son: Chapter One
Ok, I realize that with a newborn on site my blog entries have become embarrassingly thin. So I'm going to offer up for your entertainment something rather old: The birth story of my first son, delivered in installments. Just like sons # 2 and # 3, he was late. He was the latest of all. (FYI: Comments will get the next installment to appear faster, thou lurkers who like to contact me via my Yahoo account.) Herewith, Part One.
My son’s due date is October 31st, my own birthday, the day I will turn 35. This slim fortuity has prevented my pregnancy being classified with the insulting term “senile gravida,” and kept at bay offers of amniocentesis and genetic counseling. Because I intend to be a young mother (a vibrant 34) and not an old, haggard mother (a dreary 35), I am convinced he will arrive on time. In my ideal plan, he will arrive at 12:01 a.m. on my birthday so we can be home in time to dress the baby in his Halloween costume, invite some good friends over to party, toast one another with icy-cold martinis…you know, the kinds of things one does in postpartum recovery. I begin my maternity leave two weeks prior to my due date, on October 17th. Coworkers look on; the office busybody (“Oooh, I’m surprised there’s room on the elevator for anyone else!”) raises her eyebrows as if he’ll burst forth before I reach home.
But baby’s due date comes and goes. I spend Halloween night handing out candy on the stoop, dressed in an unspeakable orange wig as a big, fat pumpkin. One week later, the baby’s empty-handed grandmother catches a return flight back home to Georgia. We head in for one non-stress test and amniotic fluid check, then another. Each time the nurse reports that the baby is “perfectly happy.” We decide that he is quite stubborn, and I predict that his teen years will be spent indoors listening to mope rock with the shades drawn.
I take Evening Primrose Oil to “ripen the cervix” and drink Red Raspberry Leaf tea to “tone the uterus.” I hear that walking spurs on labor, so I plod around the neighborhood, gazing at the lame and embarrassing items that people decide to sell at Brooklyn stoop sales. Sometimes I get sharp pains in the cervical region, as if baby is sticking me with a penknife. I go home and the pains subside. I hike back out again, this time to the pool to swim. The baby and I are at one, smooth through the water. A shrewish old lady slits her eyes at my belly. She warns me that my water might break in the pool, and I wouldn’t even know it. So stay on dry land, missy! Maybe the old bird is right. I go home and wait, but labor fails to begin.
I try acupuncture. The first thin needles go into the meaty, fat part between thumb and forefinger, which the acupuncturist pinches in a raised hump to get a better grip on it. He places the needle, and then taps it in gently as if he’s securing a nail with a hammer. Then he gives it a small flex and twist; as this happens, my fingers grasp involuntarily. A small arc of electricity flares up through my wrist. He places a needle a few finger widths above each anklebone; two more needles go in somewhere halfway up the shins. When one of these is inserted and twisted into place, a shocking, electric stab shoots through the sole of my left foot into the air, and is gone. The baby kicks within, jolted.
The acupuncturist also applies tiny balls, no bigger than grains of sand, to four specific meridian points within each ear. Each ball rests inside a small, sticky square, and they are pressed tightly in place. The balls, he says, are to alleviate pain during labor. All I have to do is press them and—pain be gone! This is exciting news.
He returns every ten minutes. With a quick twist of the needles in my hands, hot little jolts fire up my arms. With my eyes shut, I imagine that he’s turning the knob on a faucet of electromagnetic liquid, and the faucet—fat as an inch across—is juicing this stuff directly into my veins. My second, ring, and pinky fingers begin to go numb. The color of the ceiling is a warm, buttery yellow. I tilt my head, first left, then right, to tip tears out onto the pillow.
I think: Perhaps the baby stays within because I want him there. He and I are friends; we go places together. He’s a second, fond heartbeat, a coiled spring. I shall not let him go, because winter is coming.
Finally, the acupuncturist extracts the needles. As each comes out I feel a jittery pinch. He presses each site with moist gauze.
“Where is hospital?” he asks. “Hospital close by?”
“Why? Do I need to go straight there now?”
“Baby tonight maybe,” he says.
I go home and finish packing my hospital bag, then wait. A week later, the baby still hasn’t come. It’s not that I think the acupuncture was a fraud. Rather, I think that this baby and I have outwitted it in our apparent quest to stay together.
After eleven days have passed since the due date with nary a cervical dilation, the doctor finally suggests eviction. We agree to check in to the hospital (NYU Downtown) that night, a Tuesday. The date is November 11th. As the day wears on, I feel like I am preparing for my last meal. The hospital, once benign, is now death’s foyer. I contemplate calling the doctor and telling her I have changed my mind. But the call is never placed. Inaction forces the decision, and by 7:00 p.m. husband and I are in the car on the way to the hospital. As we pull out from the parking space, a stray branch catches on the undercarriage of the car and creaks alarmingly, and I think all at once: The car will break down, and no cabs will be available, and I can go home and never go into labor at all and never suffer any pain whatsoever but at the same time I will cease being pregnant and the baby will magically appear. But the branch is released, and we are released, flung out toward our inevitable destination.
My son’s due date is October 31st, my own birthday, the day I will turn 35. This slim fortuity has prevented my pregnancy being classified with the insulting term “senile gravida,” and kept at bay offers of amniocentesis and genetic counseling. Because I intend to be a young mother (a vibrant 34) and not an old, haggard mother (a dreary 35), I am convinced he will arrive on time. In my ideal plan, he will arrive at 12:01 a.m. on my birthday so we can be home in time to dress the baby in his Halloween costume, invite some good friends over to party, toast one another with icy-cold martinis…you know, the kinds of things one does in postpartum recovery. I begin my maternity leave two weeks prior to my due date, on October 17th. Coworkers look on; the office busybody (“Oooh, I’m surprised there’s room on the elevator for anyone else!”) raises her eyebrows as if he’ll burst forth before I reach home.
But baby’s due date comes and goes. I spend Halloween night handing out candy on the stoop, dressed in an unspeakable orange wig as a big, fat pumpkin. One week later, the baby’s empty-handed grandmother catches a return flight back home to Georgia. We head in for one non-stress test and amniotic fluid check, then another. Each time the nurse reports that the baby is “perfectly happy.” We decide that he is quite stubborn, and I predict that his teen years will be spent indoors listening to mope rock with the shades drawn.
I take Evening Primrose Oil to “ripen the cervix” and drink Red Raspberry Leaf tea to “tone the uterus.” I hear that walking spurs on labor, so I plod around the neighborhood, gazing at the lame and embarrassing items that people decide to sell at Brooklyn stoop sales. Sometimes I get sharp pains in the cervical region, as if baby is sticking me with a penknife. I go home and the pains subside. I hike back out again, this time to the pool to swim. The baby and I are at one, smooth through the water. A shrewish old lady slits her eyes at my belly. She warns me that my water might break in the pool, and I wouldn’t even know it. So stay on dry land, missy! Maybe the old bird is right. I go home and wait, but labor fails to begin.
I try acupuncture. The first thin needles go into the meaty, fat part between thumb and forefinger, which the acupuncturist pinches in a raised hump to get a better grip on it. He places the needle, and then taps it in gently as if he’s securing a nail with a hammer. Then he gives it a small flex and twist; as this happens, my fingers grasp involuntarily. A small arc of electricity flares up through my wrist. He places a needle a few finger widths above each anklebone; two more needles go in somewhere halfway up the shins. When one of these is inserted and twisted into place, a shocking, electric stab shoots through the sole of my left foot into the air, and is gone. The baby kicks within, jolted.
The acupuncturist also applies tiny balls, no bigger than grains of sand, to four specific meridian points within each ear. Each ball rests inside a small, sticky square, and they are pressed tightly in place. The balls, he says, are to alleviate pain during labor. All I have to do is press them and—pain be gone! This is exciting news.
He returns every ten minutes. With a quick twist of the needles in my hands, hot little jolts fire up my arms. With my eyes shut, I imagine that he’s turning the knob on a faucet of electromagnetic liquid, and the faucet—fat as an inch across—is juicing this stuff directly into my veins. My second, ring, and pinky fingers begin to go numb. The color of the ceiling is a warm, buttery yellow. I tilt my head, first left, then right, to tip tears out onto the pillow.
I think: Perhaps the baby stays within because I want him there. He and I are friends; we go places together. He’s a second, fond heartbeat, a coiled spring. I shall not let him go, because winter is coming.
Finally, the acupuncturist extracts the needles. As each comes out I feel a jittery pinch. He presses each site with moist gauze.
“Where is hospital?” he asks. “Hospital close by?”
“Why? Do I need to go straight there now?”
“Baby tonight maybe,” he says.
I go home and finish packing my hospital bag, then wait. A week later, the baby still hasn’t come. It’s not that I think the acupuncture was a fraud. Rather, I think that this baby and I have outwitted it in our apparent quest to stay together.
After eleven days have passed since the due date with nary a cervical dilation, the doctor finally suggests eviction. We agree to check in to the hospital (NYU Downtown) that night, a Tuesday. The date is November 11th. As the day wears on, I feel like I am preparing for my last meal. The hospital, once benign, is now death’s foyer. I contemplate calling the doctor and telling her I have changed my mind. But the call is never placed. Inaction forces the decision, and by 7:00 p.m. husband and I are in the car on the way to the hospital. As we pull out from the parking space, a stray branch catches on the undercarriage of the car and creaks alarmingly, and I think all at once: The car will break down, and no cabs will be available, and I can go home and never go into labor at all and never suffer any pain whatsoever but at the same time I will cease being pregnant and the baby will magically appear. But the branch is released, and we are released, flung out toward our inevitable destination.
Tuesday, May 27, 2008
Greenwich, My Love
The story of the birth! (At a later date, I will post the story of son # 1's birth--which was downright medieval in comparison. Think flickering fluorescent lights, leering horse-faced nurses, and a breakfast consisting of a boiled egg and a sticky bun...that sort of thing. Plus a carrot-studded meatloaf of a frightful demeanor and consistency.)
This time, I was in Greenwich Hospital. The foyer includes tinkling water and a player piano, and the gift shop sells golfing togs so that patients can exit the hospital doors and head straight to the links with their IV bags attached. The hallways are pleasantly lit, carpeted, and adorned with paintings--of better quality that one might find in many major hotel chains.
I was scheduled to be induced, as all three of my boys have held on to their environs like barnacles. (And at least two of my three OBs have made a cringeworthy crack about babies not wanting to exit a place where they have "womb service.") Induction is good for several reasons, the first being that there is no crack of dawn drive to the hospital while one is in pain. The other is that you can schedule other children for a trip to IHOP with the babysitter, well in advance.
I'll keep the story short and to the point:
Check-in time: 8 a.m. My nurse, Terry, is delightful.
Attempt to break amniotic sac: 9 a.m. (failed)
Pitocin drip: 10 a.m.
Pain/suffering felt to a mild degree: 11 a.m.
Pain/suffering increases: 11:30 a.m. I am informed that the epidural man will not be available during the hours of 1-2 p.m. due to a prior commitment. Recommendation is to book the service now. I do so.
Epidural man arrives: 12:30. Randomly, while inserting a needle into my spine, he asks if I've done a lot of hiking. Yes, I happen to have hiked a lot. White Mountains in NH? Sure, you bet. (How did he know this? I'll never know. Maybe my back bears the telltale signs of having carried a 40 lb frame pack. Either way, I like the epidural man. He is cool! The doctor mentions that he wears a Rolex. I think one of his patients must have given him that Rolex, as thanks.)
Epidural in place: 1:00 p.m.
Husband and OB discuss cars: 1:00-3:00 p.m. I realize that if I were in pain during this time I would have thrown a brick at both of them. Because I am not in pain, I lie there idly and listen to them talk about "suicide doors" and other items of interest to car aficionados. The doctor shares photos of his favorite car.
At some point I suggested that I felt a wee bit of pressure and they checked and, sure enough, that baby is on his way out. And out he comes, after three meager pushes, at 3:11 p.m. He is purple, even down to his tiny purple fingernails, and vaguely out of sorts. As I hold him, wrapped against my chest, he turns from purple to pink and blinks his gummed-up eyelids and makes small noises. He is a fine hearty lad, all of 8 pounds and 12 ounces. Once he's out, I can't believe he was ever in. How did this fine fat fellow fit in there?
Upon assessing the service at Greenwich Hospital, he is well pleased. He decides to be a nice, placid baby (and three weeks later, he still is). Encouraged by his delightful surroundings, he latches on without a second's hesitation.
Despite having numb legs for the next couple of hours or more, I feel fine. I schedule a one-hour postpartum massage, book my celebration meal (filet mignon and champagne), and read a nice book. I also watch an hour of "Lost" on the hotel television (I mean "hospital," and actually typed "hotel" completely by accident). As a friend once said, Greenwich is so nice that it makes you want to go back and have another baby, just to birth it there! I think, however, that I will close boy-production services down for now, due to a surplus.
This time, I was in Greenwich Hospital. The foyer includes tinkling water and a player piano, and the gift shop sells golfing togs so that patients can exit the hospital doors and head straight to the links with their IV bags attached. The hallways are pleasantly lit, carpeted, and adorned with paintings--of better quality that one might find in many major hotel chains.
I was scheduled to be induced, as all three of my boys have held on to their environs like barnacles. (And at least two of my three OBs have made a cringeworthy crack about babies not wanting to exit a place where they have "womb service.") Induction is good for several reasons, the first being that there is no crack of dawn drive to the hospital while one is in pain. The other is that you can schedule other children for a trip to IHOP with the babysitter, well in advance.
I'll keep the story short and to the point:
Check-in time: 8 a.m. My nurse, Terry, is delightful.
Attempt to break amniotic sac: 9 a.m. (failed)
Pitocin drip: 10 a.m.
Pain/suffering felt to a mild degree: 11 a.m.
Pain/suffering increases: 11:30 a.m. I am informed that the epidural man will not be available during the hours of 1-2 p.m. due to a prior commitment. Recommendation is to book the service now. I do so.
Epidural man arrives: 12:30. Randomly, while inserting a needle into my spine, he asks if I've done a lot of hiking. Yes, I happen to have hiked a lot. White Mountains in NH? Sure, you bet. (How did he know this? I'll never know. Maybe my back bears the telltale signs of having carried a 40 lb frame pack. Either way, I like the epidural man. He is cool! The doctor mentions that he wears a Rolex. I think one of his patients must have given him that Rolex, as thanks.)
Epidural in place: 1:00 p.m.
Husband and OB discuss cars: 1:00-3:00 p.m. I realize that if I were in pain during this time I would have thrown a brick at both of them. Because I am not in pain, I lie there idly and listen to them talk about "suicide doors" and other items of interest to car aficionados. The doctor shares photos of his favorite car.
At some point I suggested that I felt a wee bit of pressure and they checked and, sure enough, that baby is on his way out. And out he comes, after three meager pushes, at 3:11 p.m. He is purple, even down to his tiny purple fingernails, and vaguely out of sorts. As I hold him, wrapped against my chest, he turns from purple to pink and blinks his gummed-up eyelids and makes small noises. He is a fine hearty lad, all of 8 pounds and 12 ounces. Once he's out, I can't believe he was ever in. How did this fine fat fellow fit in there?
Upon assessing the service at Greenwich Hospital, he is well pleased. He decides to be a nice, placid baby (and three weeks later, he still is). Encouraged by his delightful surroundings, he latches on without a second's hesitation.
Despite having numb legs for the next couple of hours or more, I feel fine. I schedule a one-hour postpartum massage, book my celebration meal (filet mignon and champagne), and read a nice book. I also watch an hour of "Lost" on the hotel television (I mean "hospital," and actually typed "hotel" completely by accident). As a friend once said, Greenwich is so nice that it makes you want to go back and have another baby, just to birth it there! I think, however, that I will close boy-production services down for now, due to a surplus.
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