Levedy

Birth Story

ed. note: this was originally posted in a series of three entries. -jmr

The story of Chris’ birth really starts by talking about poop.

I woke up Friday morning feeling uncomfortable “down there.” I was not thinking that it was labor; I was thinking it was the Philly cheese steak that I had eaten the day before. I waddled out to the computer to check my email, read the paper, and generally wait for the train to leave the station, if you know what I’m saying.

So the train left the station, and I was still feeling uncomfortable. I woke Dimitri up and told him that this might, MIGHT be labor. He laughed and told me that I just had to take a dump. I told him that I already -well- see how highbrow this post is turning out to be?

It’s only going to get worse from here. I feel that I should give you fair warning.

So I told Dim that my pains were coming frequently, but I didn’t start timing them because I thought that timing what might be the descent of a cheese steak was a bit embarrassing. I told him that we should, though, call his mom and put her on notice to take Bean in case the hoagie ends up being Bean’s little brother. Dim fed Bean breakfast and then got in a shower while I swayed back and forth on a big yoga ball.

During Dim’s shower, the pains really picked up in intensity and frequency. I realized that this definitely wasn’t constipation – this was labor! Hooray! Finally!

And then I realize – this fucking hurrrrts.

Bean knows something’s up. She’s anxious – padding around me in circles in her footie jammies asking me to pick her up. I apologize repeatedly between deep breaths; there’s no way I could manage to pick her up. The pain is worse than it was with Bean, and getting worse by the minute. Dim gets out of the shower and asks me how far apart they are. I snarl something at him while rolling my eyes – how could he expect me to look at a clock at a time like this? Owwwwwwwwww, that’s all I know right now. Fucking owwwwwwwww.
We throw Bean in the car in her jammies and head off to Sophie’s house. I realize silently that Sophie’s house is in the opposite direction from the hospital, something that really annoys me. They say that distracting a woman from her labor pains is sometimes helpful, but distracting her with the flaws in Las Vegas’ geography is not a good choice. I don’t consciously start the low moaning: I guess it’s automatic. Dim throws Bean into Sophie’s living room while I grab the dashboard and the center console and try to moo through the pains.

Dim hustles back to the car and does a good job of driving in a straight line at only slightly faster-than-legal speed to the hospital. I wasn’t looking at the clock, but the contractions had to be faster than five minutes apart. After one subsides, it feels like I can only get a few deep breaths before the next one washes over me. It occurs to me that not only am I having a baby today, but I’m having a baby, like, in an hour or two.

Wow. And ow.

We get to the hospital, and Dimitri (this idiocy can only be chalked up to nerves – I refuse to believe that my husband is actually this dense) asks if we should valet the car or park in the lot and walk back to the hospital. I manage a one-word response (which, surprisingly, was “VAAAAAAALET!” although I was thinking of a few others) and stagger out of the car. I hug the column outside the main entrance of the hospital and groan through another contraction while Dim handles the valet and grabs our bags. I really don’t want to let go of the column: it’s cool and concrete and didn’t ask me to walk across a parking lot in my condition– I like it. We’re friends. But I realize that the anesthesiologist is unlikely to give me an epidural in front of the valet stand, so I must try to trudge through the hospital lobby to the labor ward. The old lady at the desk asks me if I want a wheelchair, but I am unwilling to stop moving long enough to wait for one, and I politely decline and continue gracefully on my way. Actually, I think I shot her a death glare as I waddled past her, but Dim picked up the slack for me.

We get to the labor ward and – huzzah!- there’s another column to grab. Oh column, how I love thee. Dimitri answers this new lady-at-the-desk’s questions (So many ladies. So many desks. I don’t care. I have a column-buddy.) and a nurse comes to take us to a labor room. At this point, there is no delay between the contractions. There is no time for me to catch my breath or look at a focal point or practice the hee hee hew breathing nonsense that they teach you in the childbirth classes. There is only pain; wave after wave of pain that bashes against me while other people (who are not in pain, and therefore are jerks) stare at me and try to muster pity. I have to stop several times to grab a wall and moo at it while the worst of the pains batters me, but in the back of my mind I know that the more time I spend leaning is more time away from any sort of pain relief, and so I force myself to keep moving.

I guess that's good advice: no matter how bad things get, you can always find it in you to keep moving forward. The strength is there when you need it, it always is.

In the back of my mind, the intellectual, thinking part that was shrinking rapidly to make room for the growing primal, screaming, woman-in-labor part of my brain realized that my new son was waiting for me, and I had to suck it up and plod forward if I was going to meet him. It was enough to keep me plodding towards the labor room, even if I had to sound like a tortured bull to get there.

(Part II)
I suppose that I should say how different this labor was from my last one. With Bean, my induction was orderly, progressive, and controlled. My epidural was administered early enough that I never really felt out of control or scared at all. My epidural was given at 4 centimeters: by way of comparison, I was waddling around dilated to 4 centimeters for a few weeks this time around.

This labor was everything the first one wasn’t: primal and painful. Painful is not the right word. Papercuts are painful – this was skull-crushing AGONY. The nurse asked me to pee in a specimen cup, and for the first time in my pregnancy, I could not pee. There I sat in the hospital bathroom, naked from the waist down, moaning, and I couldn’t pee. I started to cry. If I couldn’t manage to push out liquid, how the hell am I going to manage a baby? It seems so silly now, but I felt so inadequate right then, squatting, naked from the waist down for God and everyone to see, unable to do the one thing I could do pretty much on command every ten minutes for the prior three months.

The nurse says never mind, and get out of there before you have the baby on the toilet. She gets me up onto the delivery bed and checks me: 8 centimeters. This is really happening. She asks if I want pain relief, and I say as demurely as I can “UUUURRRRRGGGGGHHH!! AAAAGHHH! GOD, YES!!!!!” A gaggle of nurses come in and apologize, but need me to sign paperwork. Seriously, isn’t this why I pre-registered? I’m initialing paperwork with my left hand and grabbing the rail of the bed with my right, groaning through contractions when the anesthesiologist comes in. THANK GOD. He explains that he can either do an epidural or a labor spinal. He’s talking calmly and rationally, thinking foolishly that I am in a mental state to respond in kind.

He recommends the labor spinal, since the effect is immediate. Sounds delicious, I’ll take three. He warns me, though, that the labor spinal will only last between two and five hours. “I’m not going to last that long! OOOOOOooooHHHHhhhhhh!” I yell while gripping the rails of the bed. “I don’t think so, either,” he says, and prepares the injection. He asks me if I can feel the needle, and if it’s right, left, or center. I start to cry again. I don’t understand what he’s asking me to tell him, and HE’S STICKING A NEEDLE INTO MY SPINE. Aren’t you the one who went to spine school, man? Can’t you see I’m in no position to give directions? The nurse tells me that he’s just trying a “distraction technique” and my eyes open long enough to see her throw him a look that says “Dude, lay off.” He shuts up and finishes the injection.

And may I just take a moment to say: AAAaaaahhhhhhhh.

Except that only my left side is numb. My right side is still hurting like hell. It takes about ten minutes for whatever manna the guy shot into my central nervous system to get to the right side of my body. That was a funky ten minutes, I’ll tell you what. Half of me is getting relief, the other half of me wants to writhe away and hide in the corner. After ten minutes, I’m good. I can feel my toes, I can move my legs, and the frightened-animal mania has passed. I can crack jokes. I can ask the nurse’s name – Denise. There, that’s better. Are the contractions gone? No. My pain has returned to the morning's cheese steak levels. I can manage them, and that makes all the difference.

I can relax. The lab flunky takes blood. The nurse sets up a saline IV. I eat ice chips. It’s all good. I get a visit from Haze, the totally awesome nurse that delivered Bean. She says hi and chats us up for a bit. It’s all lovely. I tell Denise that I feel pressure, and she asks me what kind. I say “Not kid hanging out of me pressure, but pressure.” She says “okay, that means you’re complete. I’ll tell them to get the doctor.” She gets the go-ahead to break my water, but she wants to wait until she can get confirmation that the doctor isn’t far away because she thinks that I’ll go all Cape-Canaveral-Rocket-Launch as soon as she does it.

The doctor had just finished a C-section, I hear one nurse tell Denise, and moved her next c-section back 30 minutes. She was on her way.

Okay, I think to myself. I’m going to have a baby in the next 30 minutes. Hooray. Awesome. And ow.

Wait, ow? But it’s only been like an hour. Why are my contractions starting to hurt like a mother again? SOMEone flunked spine school.

This will not be fun.

(Part III)

My labor spinal only lasted an hour. It was a blissful hour, but too early in the process. That is SO like me: always the awkward early guest at a party. Helpful, but always too early and always ready to leave before anyone else. Sigh.

The pain quickly resumes. Nurse Denise asks me if I’m feeling pressure or pain, but she looks at my hand inching toward the rail of the bed again to grab it and doesn’t need a response. Her tone changes to emphasize how fast his will go, don’t worry, as soon as we break your water this little guy’s going to practically fall out, just breathe, everything will be fast, don’t worry. Just breathe, Jen.

Oh no, the back of my mind thinks. She’s preparing me for something VERY BAD. This will not be fun. This is going to be OOOOOOOOOWWWWWWW! Where’s that anesthesiologist? I want to ask him if I’m aiming at the left , right, or center of his sack before I kick it.

They say that time warps in time of stress. Time can slow to a crawl in emergencies, making everything seem to run in slow motion long enough for you to see the true extent of the danger at hand and adjust your reaction accordingly. That didn’t happen to me. Things sped up. People moved more quickly, as if someone set the movie projector reel one speed too fast. In retrospect, I’m glad for this. Slow motion childbirth would have sucked way worse. The realization that I was going to have a natural childbirth whether I had wanted one or not (to which I can clearly assert that I DID NOT) didn’t dawn on me, as people so poetically put. The realization didn’t dawn on me; it hit me like a Mack truck.

The nurse broke my water right before the doctor breezed into the room. She checked me, confirmed that I was completely dilated, and told me to push with the next contraction.

Oh, boy. Here we go.

I’m told that I was only pushing for 18 minutes. I’m told that it took two contractions to get the head out and one for the rest of him. I’ll have to take Dim’s word on that, because, believe it or not, I was a little too busy to watch the clock. I pushed like I pushed with Bean, but with Bean I did not have the overwhelming urge to scream like a banshee. There was so much screaming. It seemed like the best course of action, what with my VAGINA TURNING INSIDE OUT and all, but the nurses insisted on my stopping. Dimitri was probably telling me to calm down and breathe, but I was in my own little world. There was me, and there was the pain, and that was it. There was no husband next to me trying to calm me (he was there of course, but I couldn’t tell.) I couldn’t hear anything but my own screams and the instructions of Denise, who had the good sense to get within two inches of my nose, look me dead in the eye, and tell me to shut up and push.

And then the sound bubble popped. I could hear everything. Denise was convincing me that yelling prevented pushing, and pushing was what was going to get me through this. The doctor was telling me to get mad and PUUUUUUSSSSHH! Another nurse was staring at the monitor, trying to determine if I was in a contraction or no. Denise pushed her out of the way with her hips as she helped me keep my legs pushed back. The nurse started to protest, but Denise said “She knows when she’s having one, don’t worry.”

And then I clenched my teeth, shut my mouth, and pushed with everything I had. I felt my body respond, sluggishly at first, but then faster. I felt the head come. Yes, there was burning, the “ring of fire” as all the hippy midwives call it, but this kid was coming OUT, and I wasn't going to stop to enjoy the moment. And then there was a small release, and the head was out. I waited for the doctor to suction his nose and mouth, and pushed again. Again, I felt my body contort to accommodate the rest of him passing out of me. It was pretty amazing, truth be told.

And then there he was, pink and screaming like I had been moments ago. They mopped him up a bit and set him on me. I started sobbing. Big, torso-shaking sobs that I hadn’t had since junior high when life was so unfair and all I could do was cry my heart out. But this was different. This was my child, and rather than the bewilderment of inexperience that I felt after Sophie was born, I could only think of how much I loved her and how lucky I was as a woman and as a human being to experience this joy again. The anticipation of it made me cry giant, snotty tears of happiness. Dim went to the warming table to cut the cord and take pictures, and I lay on the table, alternately sobbing and laughing.

Meanwhile, the doctor cleaned house in Ladytown, so to speak, and then hugged me and apologized over and over for it hurting so much. Nurse Denise patted me on the shoulder and congratulated me. I did it! I am woman, hear me roar! I asked to see the placenta, since I didn’t get to see the last one. It was about what you’d expect – a slimy alliance between a Portuguese man-of-war and a small intestine. I nursed him for about half of an hour, and then they took him to the nursery for bathing and shots and such. I lay alone in the labor room for a while, totally star struck.

After an hour or so, I walked from the labor ward to the post-partum ward. Nurse Denise kept asking me if I needed a wheelchair or her shoulder to lean on or anything, but I kept telling her that I was fine. And I was. I felt amazing. I wasn’t about to run a marathon, but I could walk and joke and ask where a girl could get a cheeseburger.

Dim wheeled the baby into the room. Here he was, my little Christopher. Christopher George, named after his two grandfathers. I imagine he will learn kindness from one and Texas Hold ‘Em from the other. He weighed in at 7 pounds, 9 ounces, a little more than a pound heavier than his sister. So now we’re a family of four, and, although I haven’t slept and am dealing with serious jealousy issues, not just from his big sister, but from the cat as well, I couldn’t be happier.

I don’t know if this is the size that our family will stay, or if it will get bigger in the future, but I can say that it feels really good to have another one here beside us. There’s another man in my life now, and even though he has a habit of peeing on me, I think I’m in love.

Posted by Jen at March 7, 2008 7:18 PM