Anatomy of a Birth

Day by Day, Play by Play.

Tuesday Evening

Wife had been having contractions about 4 times an hour for a few hours now. I had stayed at home all day, trying to get over a rather nasty stomach flu. About 10:30pm, my wife assures me it's okay to take NyQuil and get some rest. At 11:30, she's in terrific pain, and by midnight, we're on our way to the hospital, where she spends the next five hours hooked up to monitors. "Sorry" says the doctor. Apparently not progressing fast enough. He thinks we ought to head home.

Wednesday

We pack up in the wee hours of the morning, and head home, arriving there at about 5:30am. Only to discover that Cute Critter has kept her 80-yr old great grandmother awake all night. My grandparents head home, and we head to bed.

I end up going into work at half day, just because I don't have the luxury of a lot of time to take off when the baby arrives. Still very sick with the flu, I get about 6 hours of work in, though less than half of that is actually productive. I can't even think straight through most of the day.

Thursday

Still feeling like total crap, I head to work anyway. The plan is to stay until about 6pm, so that I can make up some of the hours that I have missed this week.

Lunch time: Wife calls, and is having hard contractions about an hour apart. Baby probably won't come today, she says. About 4:30pm, I get a call. "I need you home....now!" I leave the office immediately, speeding home as quickly as I can. I arrive home at about 5:45pm, and my wife's contractions are so close and so hard that she can hardly walk. Weleave the house immediately, speeding toward the hospital. We pass by my grandparents' house on the way, essentially throwing our kids out on the curb with all of their stuff, and then continuing on to the hospital.

By now, my wife is screaming at me to just run the red lights to get to the hospital on time. We make a screeching tires entry up to the emergency room entrance, where I run up to the front desk. "Wife...labor...epidural....Now!!!" They came running out to the car, plopped her into a wheelchair and whisked her off to Labor and Delivery. I parked the car, then raced into the hospital to find her.

We have simply a gorgeous hospital where we live. Architecturally stunning. But to be able to find your way around inside requires a map and a portable GPS unit. I find her eventually, fact verified by the screaming and shouting, especially of the word "epidural".

The team of nurses attending to my wife are very good, and determine that she is going to have a baby quite quickly, so they disconnect the monitoring equipment and move her to a delivery room immediately. By now, my wife is swearing at them to "Get the damn epidural into me...NOW!" The anesthesiologist is located, and is ready quite quickly to administer said epidural. He also knowing his stuff, recognizes that there won't be enough time for the normal epidural to take effect, and so administers a pelvic block, numbing the whole pelvic area. Good news: It takes effect much quicker. Bad news: It also wears off much quicker.

The doctor walks in, greets me, and then proceeds to suit up in something that looks like a HAZMAT suit on steroids. Miraculously, my wife is only pushing for about a whole five minutes before our baby boy is born.

Wham, Bam, Thank You Ma'am. Here's your Boy!

And then it was over. The stress, the waiting, the "what-ifs", and trying to imagine every awful situation that could happen. All over. One healthy, beautiful baby boy was here. And from the beginning, he has been a very alert little guy, checking out his surroundings, and wondering why his reservations in the "Hotel Womb" were cut short by three weeks.

I spent the next few days pondering things. For some reason, I remembered a girl from our church congregation in college. It was mostly made up of married students, and so a lot us were all going through the same things at the time. Things like children being born, studying for our classes until our brains felt like they would melt, being financially destitute. Yeah, all of that.

Anyway, the thing I remember about this girl was that she was always championing the cause of natural childbirth. Natural medication free childbirth. She would go on and on about how amazing it was to give birth in your own home, and how marvelous her midwife was, yada, yada. I remember thinking that she was actually an attractive young woman, but that I could never think of her in any other terms now than squeezing kids out. The original ElastiGirl.

I don't know why I was thinking that, other than the fact that we came soooooo close to actually having a medication-free birth ourselves. Hmmmm.

Epilogue

We pick my wife and son up Saturday evening, at about 6pm, heading home under the twilight of a beautiful clear sky and snow-capped mountains.

The end of an ordeal, but the start of another one, as sleepless nights will probably plague us until he has grown up, moved out and has kids of his own.