It wasn't until the craziness calmed down a little and one of the women in my mom and baby group sent out a link for her own blog that the idea of squandering a lot of time that I should be using on more academic endeavors came to me. All of this is the really long way of saying that I haven't documented many of the early (pre-blog) events in Bry's life. Before my memory gets hazier than it already is, I thought I'd catalog some of the more notable ones, starting with his birth. It went something like this... (FYI: This post is rated PG-13 for some scary themes and graphic material. Also, Steve has helped me with this post. You can see his thoughts in italics). Hey everybody.
Sandy: Twas the day after Christmas and all through the land, not a creature was stirring...except my amniotic sac. At around 9:00 am on December 26th, Steve and I were just waking up and contemplating all of the baby-related tasks we had put off until after the holidays when I heard and felt a distinct pop. "What was that?" I groggily asked Steve.
Stock pregnancy imageShe said: Thirty seconds later I stood up and had a startling answer to my question as, well, I soaked my drawers. I hobbled into the bathroom and called out to Steve, "I think my water just broke." All I got in response was silence... "Are you sure?" he finally called back.
In my defense, I was still processing that "pop" sound. I was still a bit groggy after all, and this was quite a bit to take in.
She said: Fast forward 30 minutes. I'm still in the bathroom, calling my OB, and telling Steve he should eat some breakfast while I get in the shower. Steve, meanwhile, is crouched outside the bathroom door, hugging his knees, and still saying, "Are you sure this is really it?"
Again. Groggy and processing. A bad combination. But then she said something that REALLY threw my struggling brain for a loop: "Why don't you go have a bowl of Cheerios while I take a shower."
I had been very clear on the need to eat before going to the hospital. I had heard all of the horror stories about having only ice chips and air to subsist on after signing in to L&D and I was, after all, a very pregnant woman with an appetite that had in the not distant past led me to take a cheeseburger off of Steve's plate. He had been appalled at the reverse flow of the food, which in pre-pregnancy times always went from my plate to his.
All well and good, but seriously. Cheerios?! Had she gone mad? How could we seriously be talking about Cheerios at a time like this?! But of course, like the dutiful husband I am, I kept my mouth shut and did as I was told.
Post-Cheerios we got down to the task of packing a bag for the hospital (which we had planned to do that very day, but without the complicating factor of my being in labor).
Ah, the bag. If ever there was a moment when I felt woefully unprepared for fatherhood, it was on that fateful morning as I flipped open What to Expect When You're Expecting and gazed down at the section titled What to Bring to the Hospital:
- "Going home outfit for the baby"... Babies need an "outfit" to go home? Don't you just wrap them up in a blanket for the first few months?
- "Going home outfit for you (something that fit when 5 months pregnant." Uhhhh....
- "Highly absorbent sanitary pads." Next....
- "Tennis balls." Yes! That one I can do!
I pretty much put back everything Steve had taken out and gathered the right items. (The tennis balls stayed, though!) Bags packed, we realized that we would be driving to the hospital in Steve's dad's industrial-sized van, which we had borrowed the previous evening, intending on transporting a treadmill to our house, also on that very day (we had plans, people!, though I'm not sure what we thought we'd be doing with a treadmill). Steve's car, with the car seat base installed (we had done some preparing), was at his parent's house, 20 miles away.
By this point I had had about two contractions, but they were mild and not unlike the "practice" (go uterus!) Braxton-Hicks contractions I'd been having off and on for a week or so. But since I was pretty sure my bag o' waters had burst, my OB's office gave me the all clear to head to the hospital and off we went. Right after I heaved my very rotund body up into the van.
Steve pulled up to the hospital entrance, unloaded me and our "bag," (which had somehow morphed into something like three bags) full of useless stuff, like a laptop for watching movies, playing cards, snacks, pajamas, toiletries, etc. We apparently were led to believe that labor was going to be akin to a layover in an airport, where we would need to entertain ourselves for hours on end and possibly spend the night in case of a missed flight. In case you're wondering, labor is nothing like a layover. Unless your layovers involve heavy narcotics and wandering around the same three corridors trying to urge your cervix to open.
I could have gone for a movie, but I had a feeling that popping in a DVD would have gotten me into significant trouble.
Because we were feeling extraordinarily cheap, Steve drove the van to the nearby mall to avoid paying for parking in the hospital ramp, while I sat in the lobby and tried to decide whether I was having more contractions. (Answer: if you're trying to decide whether you're having contractions, you're not.) We checked in to L&D and were escorted to triage, where I was "checked" (if you don't know what that involves, you don't want to know). It was confirmed that my water had broken (duh) and that I could officially stay until the baby was delivered.
This is the point where the sequence gets a little blurry. I was given a room and changed into the ever fashionable hospital gown. I believe I was dilated to about 3 cm when I arrived. Since I still wasn't having strong contractions, I was told that if I didn't "progress" at an "acceptable" rate (am I being graded on labor now?), Pitocin would be administered to speed things along. Having heard some not-so-fun, super-duper heavy labor Pitocin-related stories, I was bound and determined to avoid the drug at all costs. So Steve and I began the process of pacing the same three corridors of the L&D floor over and over and over. In my eagerness to no longer be pregnant, I had dragged Steve out on three walks totaling 9 miles in the week prior to the big day. I figured that walking had served me well thus far, so a little more might just do the trick. I waddled along slowwwwly, with Steve by my side. The first few laps were no big deal, but I started to experience some stronger contractions after about 30 minutes. Every 20 steps or so, I would pause, stop talking, and breathe through the contraction. Steve would often be 3 or 4 steps ahead of me before he figured out that I had stopped and that he should probably turn back and do something. Like stand there and say, "Are you having another contraction?"
Hospitals can be dangerous places, people, so I thought it best to scope out our walking path before allowing my pregnant wife through.
By now we were several hours into this whole thing and the labor pain, it was getting a little more serious. After another check, it was determined that I had sped right along to about 5 cm dilation. I was working this labor, people! The only problem was that my blood pressure had started to creep up, so I was ordered into bed, on my left side, to see if it would come back down on its own. And then I got a taste of what labor really feels like. My body started to kick into a higher gear and all of a sudden I was moaning every time a contraction would hit, without the accompanying respite between contractions that I was promised in our prenatal class. The thought of counting and calmly breathing my way through a contraction was ludicrous at best, because they seemed to come one on top of another with very little signal between the end of the first and the start of the next. I'm not sure exactly what Steve was doing at this point because my eyes were squeezed tightly shut and the moaning I mentioned earlier seemed to drown out a lot of the ambient noise. Every now and then I would hear a nurse say, "Breathe a little deeper, OK? You can keep moaning, just breeeeeathe." Her voice was not unlike a buzzing gnat that I wanted desperately to swat at, except my hands were clenched in a death grip around the bed rail.
For the record, I was watching helplessly as I saw Sandy get hit with more and more pain and feeling rather guilty that I got off scot-free with this whole pregnancy thing.
Look! No stretch marks!Fast forward 30 minutes, an hour, who knows, I really lost track of time amidst all of the moaning and shallow, completely un-Zen-like breathing I was doing. At some undetermined point, I finally cried uncle and asked for some pain medication. The serene anesthesiologist waltzed in and placed an epidural, while I tried very hard not to contract, or move, while he was you know, poking a needle into my spine. A few minutes later, it was determined that I had just passed 7 cm dilation and was directed to "rest" before gearing up to push some time in the yet to be determined future. And rest I did. I've read lots of descriptions about the difference in sensations pre- and post-epidural and all I really have to add was that for me, it was like the difference between being repeatedly clubbed in the stomach, from the inside, and receiving a nice, soothing massage. Well, perhaps not quite like a massage, but the whole "pressure vs. pain" differential was most welcome.
If memory serves me right, Steve excused himself at some point to retrieve some lunch for himself. He must have known that I would have booted his bum right back out of the room if he had tried to eat in front of me, so he inhaled an entire cheeseburger and fries in about 30 seconds so as not to miss anything.
I "rested" for maybe 45 minutes, during which Steve and I discovered that the only TV station playing in our room was some new-agey nature scene complete with poorly dubbed "soothing" music. Luckily, my overachieving cervix saved us from having to fill the time in other ways, because before I knew it, I was deemed ready to push.
OK. I must comment on this one. Epidurals are amazing. In a very short time, Sandy went from lying on the bed moaning in agony to sitting up and comfortably watching TV. It was eerily mellow. After a short time, a nurse appeared and calmly said, "OK. It's time to start pushing." We said, "OK," Sandy laid back down on the bed, and began pushing. Just like that. It had the intensity of sitting in the waiting room at Great Clips and hearing our name get called, announcing that it was now time to get a hair cut. No screaming, no pain, no anything. I'll say it again: epidurals are amazing.
OK, permit me to counter-comment. Let's just say the intensity was a bit stronger for me than waiting for a haircut.
I'll spare everyone the fun details of this last phase of labor. It took just under an hour between "why don't you try to push now?" and "waaahh waaa wahhhh!" Steve had negotiated with the obstetrician earlier and was given the go ahead to help with the final stages of the delivery process.
During one of our prenatal classes, we saw a video where the father pulled the baby out. I was amazed- that was an option? I really wanted to do it. I liked the idea of being the first person to touch him and to be the one to actually pull him out into the world. The look on the doctor's face when I asked her suggested that this is not a very common request. But after assuring her that I could handle the gore (dissecting everything under the sun as a Bio teacher was finally paying off) she agreed to let me do it. During the last few pushes, the head became visible (which was absolutely amazing, by the way) so I quickly gowned and gloved up. The doctor pulled Bry's head and shoulders out and ensured that everything was proceeding normally and that he was OK. I reached under his arms, pulled him out, and placed him on his Mom's chest.
Bry managed to make his entrance into the world with his fist balled up tightly next to his head (thanks, Bry!), in an angry and triumphant salute at 5:14 that evening. As John, Bry's paternal grandfather likes to say, I wrapped up labor and delivery in a standard, 9-5 workday.
Worth the effort
You've come a long way in a year, little man.
3 comments:
Excellent narrative! In an anti-big pharmaceutical fashion, I'd like to point out that Pitocin is actually oxytocin, and your pituitary was likely already spewing some into your blood before the exogenous administration.
Whew, good thing I didn't actually get the Pitocin, eh?
Way to make me all teary-eyed before I even eat my morning oatmeal! No more reading blogs first thing in the morning for me! :)
Post a Comment