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Dec. 14th, 2005 02:55 pmIt was the kind of labor and delivery that just 50 years ago would have ended with a C-section at best and at worst death of first the baby then the mother. But I’m getting ahead of myself.
I was sent home at noon on Wednesday, October 19 to begin my maternity leave. My midwife, Alice, felt it would be best if I rested for a couple of days before I had the baby. Of course, we thought he would come early. We had no idea he would be six days late. At my appointment on the 21st, one day before my due date, Alice said, “One and a half centimeters…I’d give it another week.” After three weeks of “give it another week” I was at my wits end! But what can you do, y’know? So I went home, disappointed and frustrated, only to find out that my mother had bought her plane ticket and would be arriving on Sunday the 23rd and leaving the following Saturday. “Hopefully you’re already at the hospital having that baby!” the message said.
Justin and I spent Saturday running the last few errands we had to do before the baby (or my mother) came. At every store I was asked, “When are you due?” I loved the expressions on their faces when I answered, “today.” At the video game store (The fourth SSX game came out!) a girl who was having a hard time deciding what she wanted to buy asked me what I was going to name the baby. I told her. She hesitated then said quietly, “I don’t mean to sound racist, but only black people are named Dominic.” She then launched into a long tale about what she would name her own children. Jacob Michael and Judah Benjamin. Because, she explained, Jacob and Judah are two of her favorite performers and Michael and Benjamin are from the Bible. I didn’t get an opportunity to ask the young black man behind her what he thought of the name Dominic.
Mom flew in the next day and we went to pick her up at the airport. I took along my hospital bag just in case, but we ended up not needing it. The week went by fairly quickly. Each day I got a little more frustrated about not going into labor. One night I woke at 2 a.m. and started crying. Justin woke up and listened to me tell him about my frustration. I was achy. I couldn’t move well. And I was tired of being pregnant.
On Wednesday I received a call from my doctor’s office that Alice had been called by the Red Cross to help the hurricane victims in Florida. She would be gone for two weeks. I was terribly upset, but then I realized that there were thousands of people in Florida who desperately needed her help and I was being incredibly selfish thinking, “How could this happen to me?” They moved my non-stress test to Thursday. So the next day I headed to the doctor’s office to be hooked up to a monitor to make sure the baby wasn’t under any stress. They put me in a quiet office in a recliner with a magazine and a juice box. After 20 minutes they came in to make sure the monitors were on correctly and then they checked the printouts. Something wasn’t quite right. They told me they couldn’t get a baseline on the baby. I wasn’t worried. He was moving around and kicking me pretty good. They gave me another juice box and let it go for another 20 minutes. When they came back in they said I needed to have an ultrasound because they couldn’t get the baby’s heartbeat on the monitor for any reasonable length of time. Their office in Hudson was booked for the day so I had to go to the maternity triage area (the emergency room for pregnant ladies). I had my cervix checked again before I left (still one and a half centimeters). As I was getting dressed the receptionist knocked on the door and said my mother was on the phone and wanted to know where I was and if I was OK and would it be all right if she told my mother that I was still at the office and doing fine. It had been two and a half hours since I had left and my doctor’s office is a five minute drive away. I asked her to tell Mom that I was fine and on my way home. When I got home I told her that I had to go to the hospital and she was welcome to come. I explained that it was just an ultrasound and I would likely be sent home right after. I then called Justin down in Canton and told him the same thing. I said he didn’t have to come home to go to the hospital with me, but he could if he wanted to. He told me he’d stay at work. So Mom and I went to the hospital.
We got to triage and started checking in. Five minutes later Justin showed up. Now, keep in mind Canton is over half an hour away and my house is a short ten minute drive to the hospital. He must’ve flown from the store to the hospital. After I undressed and got into my hospital gown they performed the ultrasound. The doctor asked me if the baby was moving OK and I said he was kicking pretty hard. He kind of rolled his eyes and said, “If the baby was moving so good doesn’t that indicate the baby is OK?” I just shrugged. What do I know about these things? Then they put me in a second room and made me wait. The nurse finally came in and said, “We got a beautiful baseline and your baby is just fine.” She said I could get dressed and head on home. Then she leaned over and quietly said, “But I bet I’ll see you again tonight.”
We got home at about 5:00 and Justin put the lasagna he had put together the day before in the oven (lasagna is a two-day operation, you see). It was so good! He had put in three kinds of cheese and mixed ground beef into the filling. Best. Lasagna. Ever. The entire time he was making it he was teasing me that I couldn’t have lasagna if I didn’t have a baby first. “Only closers get lasagna,” he said. I’d been having contractions for weeks so I didn’t think much about them as I ate what would the last meal I’d have for a very long time.
And this is where I will start making references to parts of my body and some bodily functions that you may not want to read about. If you don’t want to hear it, stop here. Thanks.
After dinner I started noticing how close my contractions were and I asked Justin to start timing them and writing them down. In childbirth classes they tell you to call your doctor when your contractions come every five minutes for an hour and they last one minute each. I went from having a one-minute-long contraction every eight minutes to having them every two minutes within half an hour. I asked Justin to call the doctor and see what they recommended, then I went to the bathroom. Your body has a tendency to clean itself out right before you have a baby and that’s exactly what happened. I heard Justin talking to the doctor. “So you want us to go now?...OK.” Justin called his parents, I grabbed my bag and we went back to triage. It was 8:00 p.m.
The nurse recognized me immediately. They put me in a triage room and strapped monitors around my belly. It seemed like an eternity that I was in there, but I’m told it was only about half an hour. David and Vanessa (Justin’s parents) showed up after about 10 – 15 minutes. We watched my contractions (represented by numbers on the monitor) rise and fall. “Oooh! That was a good one!” was heard often. I met with two nurses and one doctor. Finally a nurse came in and said, “We’re going to labor and delivery…quickly now.” They rushed me into a labor and delivery room, hooked me up to another monitor and inserted an IV. Well, they tried to insert an IV. It took several tries and several nurses to finally get one in properly. They started a saline bag and an antibiotic. I was beta strep positive and I needed the antibiotic to make sure that Dominic would not develop an infection from exposure to the beta strep as he was being born. Both mothers looked horrified when they heard “beta strep.” I think they thought it was an STD. It’s not. It is naturally occurring and sometimes colonizes in the vagina. If it happens to be present when you go into labor, you need antibiotics. Simple as that.
After a couple hours my contractions started coming sporadically. They weren’t producing any results, so they added Pitocin to my IV drip. Pitocin is the drug they use to induce labor but they also use it in cases like mine where I’m in labor but my contractions aren’t helping labor progress. It does have some side effects including vomiting and it tends to make labor more difficult.
The nurses started coming in fairly frequently to check on my monitors. It seems they kept losing the baby’s heartbeat. Finally, they gave up on the monitors that strap around the belly and went for one they insert into the vagina. It was a relief to me. Those monitors are enormously uncomfortable. The new monitor is like a long thin stick with an itty bitty corkscrew at the end of it. The tiny (I can’t emphasize how small it is) corkscrew pierces the baby’s scalp and that’s how they monitor the baby’s heart. They taped the part that remained outside my body to my inner thigh.
I started getting terribly sleepy around 2 a.m. I started dozing on and off, but I would wake up frequently and see what kind of horrible movies my mother, in-laws, and husband were watching. Around 6 a.m. David left to go to work, Mom went to my house for a nap, and Vanessa headed home for a shower. Justin was sleeping on the pull-out couch. After they left I called a nurse to unplug my monitors so I could use the bathroom. She unhooked me and started to walk my IV around as I stood up. The instant I stood up I felt warm fluid running down my legs. I was mortified. I thought I had lost bladder control. It took about 3 seconds of me stammering, “I…uh..um…a…” before I realized my water had broken. I said, “Oh! I think my water just broke!” I saw one of Justin’s eyes fly open. Just one. “OK,” the nurse said. Go to the bathroom and I’ll clean this up.” I had to throw away my socks. When I came out of the bathroom they had put a stack of several large, square pads down on my bed to catch and soak up the fluid. With every contraction more water came out. It was the most disgusting feeling in the world. The water was tinged a neon green. There was meconium in the water. Meconium is baby’s first bowel movement. It’s a green-black color and thick and sticky as tar. Sometimes they expel some while in the womb. When that happens the special nursery team needs to take the baby to be sure there’s no fluid still in the lungs because meconium could cause an infection.
Shortly after my water broke I met the midwife who was on call that day. I don’t remember her name. She stayed with me as my contractions became exponentially more painful. As I struggled to breathe through them she suggested I try the birthing ball. She rolled it out of the little side room and helped me balance on it. The spreading of my pubic bone as I balanced on the ball was a relief, but the pain was still remarkable. I looked at my sleeping husband and longed to plunge my elbow through his peaceful face. Finally the midwife woke him and asked him to support me from behind as I labored for two hours on the ball. When I began having problems breathing again she asked if I would like an epidural. “Yes. Now,” I replied after a contraction. It was 8 a.m.
The technician arrived in my room roughly half an hour later. They asked Justin to leave and helped me sit up on the edge of the bed. The midwife hunched me over and held my shoulders. Another nurse stood to my side and the tech remained behind me. They only administered injections just after a contraction. They told me when to expect the numbing shots and what to expect them to feel like. “This will feel like a bee sting.” Then I felt a bee sting. They warned me a second time and I felt another bee sting. They waited a minute while I had another contraction. Immediately following they warned me not to move a muscle. Don’t twitch, don’t shiver, don’t breathe, don’t move even if I had a contraction. They were inserting the epidural. An epidural is similar to a spinal. They insert a catheter into your spine. An epidural doesn’t go in quite as far as a spinal. But you have to remain absolutely still while they insert it because it is a risky procedure. That’s why they ask everyone to leave the room. They don’t want to take any chances. I went through three contractions while he inserted the epidural. After insertion, they taped it down thoroughly then started running the anesthetic through the tube. It took roughly half an hour to start feeling relief. But, oh, the relief! I once heard that if men knew how good epidural drugs were they’d be selling them on the street. Fantastic.
The midwife told me she needed to head to the other hospital to check on a couple other patients there. “I’ll be back,” she said. I never saw her again. Much to my delight, she had two patients at the other hospital in the area and needed to stay there, so she called my other favorite midwife, Nadia, and asked her to take care of me. I love Nadia and I was thrilled that she would be delivering my baby. I had said to the midwife that if I couldn’t have Alice I would love to have Nadia. I’m so glad she listened! And Nadia wasn’t even on call that day. She came in after work to take care of me.
After a while I started noticing some pain in the right side of my abdomen. The nurse said, “You shouldn’t have any pain.” “But I do,” I replied. So they redosed me. This kept happening until finally they’d dosed me so many times that both of my legs were completely dead. It was so strange. I couldn’t even feel any pressure when Justin would lay his hand down on my leg. Absolutely nothing. Whenever I would touch my leg they felt like two enormous sausages. I worried ever so slightly that I would never be able to use them again.
The nurses started flipping me every 20 minutes or so from side to side. They explained that epidurals work with gravity. I thought they were flipping me because of the epidural. They weren’t. They were flipping me because the baby’s heart rate had begun dipping after every contraction. That’s a sign of distress. My poor boy was no longer doing so good. I was only six centimeters dilated. They stopped the Pitocin drip. After a while the contractions started spacing out again and they were no longer dilating the cervix. They started the Pitocin drip back up again. Around 8:00 p.m. Nadia came in and told me she had just gotten off the phone with the on-call Doctor. He said that if I hadn’t dilated to 10 centimeters by 8:30 they would do an emergency C-section. I would like to say that I faced this new development bravely and with good humor. Instead I will tell you that I completely lost my composure and started bawling. Then I vomited. Nadia asked the parents to leave the room for a minute. We talked. I explained that it wasn’t the C-section I was upset about. I didn’t want a c-section, but I knew that it was a possibility and had even taken the special c-section class just to be prepared for it. It was the fact that I had waited so long and hadn’t been induced because the risk of C-section raises so much when you’re induced. It was Friday, my mother was leaving the next day and I felt I had wasted all of my time with her only to have the worst-case happen anyway. Nadia calmly said, “We have a little time. Let’s just wait and see what happens. Let’s check your cervix now and see where we are.” Then she moved down the foot of the bed and checked. “Ten centimeters,” she said. “Let’s push.”
She directed Justin to my left side and instructed him to hold my leg up by my head. The nurse held my other leg and then they told me how to push. “During your next contraction, put your chin on your chest and push like you have really bad constipation.” I pushed. Suddenly, I hurt. I told them my epidural had worn off. They called the tech to dose me again. He did, but I never felt it. The feeling was quickly returning in my legs. The pressure was building up in my pelvis and in my groin. I could feel the baby’s head. I had declined a mirror. I wouldn’t have minded seeing my baby being born, but I knew the sort of damage that can happen and I didn’t want to see myself tear. Nadia could see his head emerging. I asked what color his hair was and she told me he was “a little baldy,” then asked me if I wanted to reach down and feel his head. I did. It was wet and felt a little like jello. We continued to push and I could feel his head emerging. Every time I pushed I didn’t think I could open any wider. I could feel Nadia pushing my cervix around the baby’s head trying to make more room. When I didn’t think I could take it any longer, I was told to stop pushing. “WHAT?!?!” “I need you to stop pushing. Only push during every other contraction.” Suddenly my mother was in the room. I had specifically instructed all of the parents and all the nursing staff that I did not want my mother or my inlaws in the room while I delivered. There was a moment of mild annoyance, but I quickly dismissed it as I had other things to worry about. “We need your mother’s help,” I heard someone say. I don’t know who. Mom took my right leg just like Justin had my left and I continued to push. I felt an enormous relief as I delivered the head. “Stop pushing!” I was instructed. I saw scissors come out and heard a snip as the cord was cut. I didn’t know it was wrapped around his neck. Maybe they didn’t know either until they saw it. One more push and the rest of him was out. It was 9:03 p.m. I had been in labor for 25 hours. The special nursery team took him to the bassinet behind Justin and began cleaning him and clearing his lungs. I could hear him cry. “APGAR score is 8” I heard one of them say. “Eight is good,” I thought to myself. Nadia began to deliver the placenta. I was told delivering the placenta was painless. It wasn’t. It hurt nearly as much as the baby. After the placenta had been delivered and packed up Nadia said told me that I had torn. She said that she could fix level 1 and 2 tears, but not 3 or 4. I had torn pretty badly and I would need a surgeon to fix me. The surgeon was there immediately. I was told I had a level 3 tear. That means that my perineum (that’s what some people like to call the “taint”) had torn from my vagina to just shy of my rectum. I could feel the needle as he started stitching me up. “Woah! I can feel that!” “You shouldn’t be able to feel that,” he said. “Well I can!” So they injected me with some lidocaine and continued to sew. They sewed for an hour. “How many stitches am I getting?” I asked. “Some” Nadia replied. “How many is ‘Some?’” I asked. “It’s some,” she answered. I dropped the subject. I noticed Justin glancing over his shoulder every couple seconds to the baby’s bassinet. “Go over and see him” I said. Justin walked over to the bassinet and I watched my husband fall in love with my baby. Justin was cooing at him from a distance and I told him to get real close so Dominic could see him. Mom said, “Can I go see him too?” I told her of course she could. I told Justin to get his parents just as soon as they were done repairing me.
When I was all stitched, packed, and covered up, Justin let his parents into the room. They immediately came to me and hugged me, then they went to the baby’s bassinet to see him. The nurse picked him up and handed him to me so I could get my first look at him. I knew I loved him immediately. He was a total stranger and he looked nothing like I expected, but I loved him. There was about an hour or so of passing him around and taking pictures then my mom gave me a hug and a kiss and said goodbye. She was going to sleep before she had to catch her flight the next morning. David and Vanessa drove her back to my house and Justin and I were left alone with Dominic. I had an enormous craving for Pepsi so the nursing staff brought me a caffeine-free Coke and a glass of ice water. Yes, I know…Annissa drinking Pepsi? I don’t generally like Pepsi because it’s so thin. I usually prefer the thicker, more syrupy Coca-Cola. But at that instant I wanted the taste of Pepsi. I hadn’t eaten since Justin’s lasagna and I think I needed that quick sugar boost. As I sipped on my pop I watched Justin sitting on the couch holding and talking to Dominic. “Do you see your mama?” he said. “Isn’t she pretty?”
Soon they came to take Dominic to the nursery for his bath and Justin headed home to get some sleep. After a little while the nurses came to help me up, use the bathroom, and wheel me to my recovery room. Another nurse gave me a quick orientation in my room. She showed me all the stuff the hospital gives me, explained how the t.v. worked, showed me how to order my meals, then brought me a sandwich and several crackers and cookies to tide me over until the kitchen opened, and a dose of Milk of Magnesia. When you look like Frankenstein’s monster down below, the last thing you want is constipation. Then I tried to sleep. They kept waking me to change my antibiotics. I only got through two bags before I refused to take it anymore. The antibiotics burned my arm from my fingertips to my shoulder. They got permission from the doctor to change to an oral antibiotic (I had developed a fever while I was in labor and they were afraid I had an infection). They would bring Dominic to me to breastfeed him then take him back to the nursery so I could sleep.
Last week I went to the doctor to get a checkup and see if I could return to work. Alice asked me how the delivery went and I said there had been a lot of complications that I hadn’t noticed at the time, but when I reflected on them later realized how serious they were. I said I still didn’t know how many stitches I had. She said, “Oh, I can find out” and started flipping through my file. She got to the hand-written report of my labor and delivery. Her eyes got wide and she said, “Wow…this is really long!” Then she mentioned my level 3 tear and added that I had also had a labial laceration. I had felt them stitching there, but hadn’t thought much about it. I wonder how someone gets a labial laceration. It seems like one of those things that you probably shouldn’t Google while at work. I still don’t know how many stitches I had.
Vanessa, Dominic and I went to Olive Garden for lunch last week. The busboy cleaning another table asked Dominic’s name. He said, “That’s a good Irish name!” I’ve never met a black Irishman named Dominic.
I was sent home at noon on Wednesday, October 19 to begin my maternity leave. My midwife, Alice, felt it would be best if I rested for a couple of days before I had the baby. Of course, we thought he would come early. We had no idea he would be six days late. At my appointment on the 21st, one day before my due date, Alice said, “One and a half centimeters…I’d give it another week.” After three weeks of “give it another week” I was at my wits end! But what can you do, y’know? So I went home, disappointed and frustrated, only to find out that my mother had bought her plane ticket and would be arriving on Sunday the 23rd and leaving the following Saturday. “Hopefully you’re already at the hospital having that baby!” the message said.
Justin and I spent Saturday running the last few errands we had to do before the baby (or my mother) came. At every store I was asked, “When are you due?” I loved the expressions on their faces when I answered, “today.” At the video game store (The fourth SSX game came out!) a girl who was having a hard time deciding what she wanted to buy asked me what I was going to name the baby. I told her. She hesitated then said quietly, “I don’t mean to sound racist, but only black people are named Dominic.” She then launched into a long tale about what she would name her own children. Jacob Michael and Judah Benjamin. Because, she explained, Jacob and Judah are two of her favorite performers and Michael and Benjamin are from the Bible. I didn’t get an opportunity to ask the young black man behind her what he thought of the name Dominic.
Mom flew in the next day and we went to pick her up at the airport. I took along my hospital bag just in case, but we ended up not needing it. The week went by fairly quickly. Each day I got a little more frustrated about not going into labor. One night I woke at 2 a.m. and started crying. Justin woke up and listened to me tell him about my frustration. I was achy. I couldn’t move well. And I was tired of being pregnant.
On Wednesday I received a call from my doctor’s office that Alice had been called by the Red Cross to help the hurricane victims in Florida. She would be gone for two weeks. I was terribly upset, but then I realized that there were thousands of people in Florida who desperately needed her help and I was being incredibly selfish thinking, “How could this happen to me?” They moved my non-stress test to Thursday. So the next day I headed to the doctor’s office to be hooked up to a monitor to make sure the baby wasn’t under any stress. They put me in a quiet office in a recliner with a magazine and a juice box. After 20 minutes they came in to make sure the monitors were on correctly and then they checked the printouts. Something wasn’t quite right. They told me they couldn’t get a baseline on the baby. I wasn’t worried. He was moving around and kicking me pretty good. They gave me another juice box and let it go for another 20 minutes. When they came back in they said I needed to have an ultrasound because they couldn’t get the baby’s heartbeat on the monitor for any reasonable length of time. Their office in Hudson was booked for the day so I had to go to the maternity triage area (the emergency room for pregnant ladies). I had my cervix checked again before I left (still one and a half centimeters). As I was getting dressed the receptionist knocked on the door and said my mother was on the phone and wanted to know where I was and if I was OK and would it be all right if she told my mother that I was still at the office and doing fine. It had been two and a half hours since I had left and my doctor’s office is a five minute drive away. I asked her to tell Mom that I was fine and on my way home. When I got home I told her that I had to go to the hospital and she was welcome to come. I explained that it was just an ultrasound and I would likely be sent home right after. I then called Justin down in Canton and told him the same thing. I said he didn’t have to come home to go to the hospital with me, but he could if he wanted to. He told me he’d stay at work. So Mom and I went to the hospital.
We got to triage and started checking in. Five minutes later Justin showed up. Now, keep in mind Canton is over half an hour away and my house is a short ten minute drive to the hospital. He must’ve flown from the store to the hospital. After I undressed and got into my hospital gown they performed the ultrasound. The doctor asked me if the baby was moving OK and I said he was kicking pretty hard. He kind of rolled his eyes and said, “If the baby was moving so good doesn’t that indicate the baby is OK?” I just shrugged. What do I know about these things? Then they put me in a second room and made me wait. The nurse finally came in and said, “We got a beautiful baseline and your baby is just fine.” She said I could get dressed and head on home. Then she leaned over and quietly said, “But I bet I’ll see you again tonight.”
We got home at about 5:00 and Justin put the lasagna he had put together the day before in the oven (lasagna is a two-day operation, you see). It was so good! He had put in three kinds of cheese and mixed ground beef into the filling. Best. Lasagna. Ever. The entire time he was making it he was teasing me that I couldn’t have lasagna if I didn’t have a baby first. “Only closers get lasagna,” he said. I’d been having contractions for weeks so I didn’t think much about them as I ate what would the last meal I’d have for a very long time.
And this is where I will start making references to parts of my body and some bodily functions that you may not want to read about. If you don’t want to hear it, stop here. Thanks.
After dinner I started noticing how close my contractions were and I asked Justin to start timing them and writing them down. In childbirth classes they tell you to call your doctor when your contractions come every five minutes for an hour and they last one minute each. I went from having a one-minute-long contraction every eight minutes to having them every two minutes within half an hour. I asked Justin to call the doctor and see what they recommended, then I went to the bathroom. Your body has a tendency to clean itself out right before you have a baby and that’s exactly what happened. I heard Justin talking to the doctor. “So you want us to go now?...OK.” Justin called his parents, I grabbed my bag and we went back to triage. It was 8:00 p.m.
The nurse recognized me immediately. They put me in a triage room and strapped monitors around my belly. It seemed like an eternity that I was in there, but I’m told it was only about half an hour. David and Vanessa (Justin’s parents) showed up after about 10 – 15 minutes. We watched my contractions (represented by numbers on the monitor) rise and fall. “Oooh! That was a good one!” was heard often. I met with two nurses and one doctor. Finally a nurse came in and said, “We’re going to labor and delivery…quickly now.” They rushed me into a labor and delivery room, hooked me up to another monitor and inserted an IV. Well, they tried to insert an IV. It took several tries and several nurses to finally get one in properly. They started a saline bag and an antibiotic. I was beta strep positive and I needed the antibiotic to make sure that Dominic would not develop an infection from exposure to the beta strep as he was being born. Both mothers looked horrified when they heard “beta strep.” I think they thought it was an STD. It’s not. It is naturally occurring and sometimes colonizes in the vagina. If it happens to be present when you go into labor, you need antibiotics. Simple as that.
After a couple hours my contractions started coming sporadically. They weren’t producing any results, so they added Pitocin to my IV drip. Pitocin is the drug they use to induce labor but they also use it in cases like mine where I’m in labor but my contractions aren’t helping labor progress. It does have some side effects including vomiting and it tends to make labor more difficult.
The nurses started coming in fairly frequently to check on my monitors. It seems they kept losing the baby’s heartbeat. Finally, they gave up on the monitors that strap around the belly and went for one they insert into the vagina. It was a relief to me. Those monitors are enormously uncomfortable. The new monitor is like a long thin stick with an itty bitty corkscrew at the end of it. The tiny (I can’t emphasize how small it is) corkscrew pierces the baby’s scalp and that’s how they monitor the baby’s heart. They taped the part that remained outside my body to my inner thigh.
I started getting terribly sleepy around 2 a.m. I started dozing on and off, but I would wake up frequently and see what kind of horrible movies my mother, in-laws, and husband were watching. Around 6 a.m. David left to go to work, Mom went to my house for a nap, and Vanessa headed home for a shower. Justin was sleeping on the pull-out couch. After they left I called a nurse to unplug my monitors so I could use the bathroom. She unhooked me and started to walk my IV around as I stood up. The instant I stood up I felt warm fluid running down my legs. I was mortified. I thought I had lost bladder control. It took about 3 seconds of me stammering, “I…uh..um…a…” before I realized my water had broken. I said, “Oh! I think my water just broke!” I saw one of Justin’s eyes fly open. Just one. “OK,” the nurse said. Go to the bathroom and I’ll clean this up.” I had to throw away my socks. When I came out of the bathroom they had put a stack of several large, square pads down on my bed to catch and soak up the fluid. With every contraction more water came out. It was the most disgusting feeling in the world. The water was tinged a neon green. There was meconium in the water. Meconium is baby’s first bowel movement. It’s a green-black color and thick and sticky as tar. Sometimes they expel some while in the womb. When that happens the special nursery team needs to take the baby to be sure there’s no fluid still in the lungs because meconium could cause an infection.
Shortly after my water broke I met the midwife who was on call that day. I don’t remember her name. She stayed with me as my contractions became exponentially more painful. As I struggled to breathe through them she suggested I try the birthing ball. She rolled it out of the little side room and helped me balance on it. The spreading of my pubic bone as I balanced on the ball was a relief, but the pain was still remarkable. I looked at my sleeping husband and longed to plunge my elbow through his peaceful face. Finally the midwife woke him and asked him to support me from behind as I labored for two hours on the ball. When I began having problems breathing again she asked if I would like an epidural. “Yes. Now,” I replied after a contraction. It was 8 a.m.
The technician arrived in my room roughly half an hour later. They asked Justin to leave and helped me sit up on the edge of the bed. The midwife hunched me over and held my shoulders. Another nurse stood to my side and the tech remained behind me. They only administered injections just after a contraction. They told me when to expect the numbing shots and what to expect them to feel like. “This will feel like a bee sting.” Then I felt a bee sting. They warned me a second time and I felt another bee sting. They waited a minute while I had another contraction. Immediately following they warned me not to move a muscle. Don’t twitch, don’t shiver, don’t breathe, don’t move even if I had a contraction. They were inserting the epidural. An epidural is similar to a spinal. They insert a catheter into your spine. An epidural doesn’t go in quite as far as a spinal. But you have to remain absolutely still while they insert it because it is a risky procedure. That’s why they ask everyone to leave the room. They don’t want to take any chances. I went through three contractions while he inserted the epidural. After insertion, they taped it down thoroughly then started running the anesthetic through the tube. It took roughly half an hour to start feeling relief. But, oh, the relief! I once heard that if men knew how good epidural drugs were they’d be selling them on the street. Fantastic.
The midwife told me she needed to head to the other hospital to check on a couple other patients there. “I’ll be back,” she said. I never saw her again. Much to my delight, she had two patients at the other hospital in the area and needed to stay there, so she called my other favorite midwife, Nadia, and asked her to take care of me. I love Nadia and I was thrilled that she would be delivering my baby. I had said to the midwife that if I couldn’t have Alice I would love to have Nadia. I’m so glad she listened! And Nadia wasn’t even on call that day. She came in after work to take care of me.
After a while I started noticing some pain in the right side of my abdomen. The nurse said, “You shouldn’t have any pain.” “But I do,” I replied. So they redosed me. This kept happening until finally they’d dosed me so many times that both of my legs were completely dead. It was so strange. I couldn’t even feel any pressure when Justin would lay his hand down on my leg. Absolutely nothing. Whenever I would touch my leg they felt like two enormous sausages. I worried ever so slightly that I would never be able to use them again.
The nurses started flipping me every 20 minutes or so from side to side. They explained that epidurals work with gravity. I thought they were flipping me because of the epidural. They weren’t. They were flipping me because the baby’s heart rate had begun dipping after every contraction. That’s a sign of distress. My poor boy was no longer doing so good. I was only six centimeters dilated. They stopped the Pitocin drip. After a while the contractions started spacing out again and they were no longer dilating the cervix. They started the Pitocin drip back up again. Around 8:00 p.m. Nadia came in and told me she had just gotten off the phone with the on-call Doctor. He said that if I hadn’t dilated to 10 centimeters by 8:30 they would do an emergency C-section. I would like to say that I faced this new development bravely and with good humor. Instead I will tell you that I completely lost my composure and started bawling. Then I vomited. Nadia asked the parents to leave the room for a minute. We talked. I explained that it wasn’t the C-section I was upset about. I didn’t want a c-section, but I knew that it was a possibility and had even taken the special c-section class just to be prepared for it. It was the fact that I had waited so long and hadn’t been induced because the risk of C-section raises so much when you’re induced. It was Friday, my mother was leaving the next day and I felt I had wasted all of my time with her only to have the worst-case happen anyway. Nadia calmly said, “We have a little time. Let’s just wait and see what happens. Let’s check your cervix now and see where we are.” Then she moved down the foot of the bed and checked. “Ten centimeters,” she said. “Let’s push.”
She directed Justin to my left side and instructed him to hold my leg up by my head. The nurse held my other leg and then they told me how to push. “During your next contraction, put your chin on your chest and push like you have really bad constipation.” I pushed. Suddenly, I hurt. I told them my epidural had worn off. They called the tech to dose me again. He did, but I never felt it. The feeling was quickly returning in my legs. The pressure was building up in my pelvis and in my groin. I could feel the baby’s head. I had declined a mirror. I wouldn’t have minded seeing my baby being born, but I knew the sort of damage that can happen and I didn’t want to see myself tear. Nadia could see his head emerging. I asked what color his hair was and she told me he was “a little baldy,” then asked me if I wanted to reach down and feel his head. I did. It was wet and felt a little like jello. We continued to push and I could feel his head emerging. Every time I pushed I didn’t think I could open any wider. I could feel Nadia pushing my cervix around the baby’s head trying to make more room. When I didn’t think I could take it any longer, I was told to stop pushing. “WHAT?!?!” “I need you to stop pushing. Only push during every other contraction.” Suddenly my mother was in the room. I had specifically instructed all of the parents and all the nursing staff that I did not want my mother or my inlaws in the room while I delivered. There was a moment of mild annoyance, but I quickly dismissed it as I had other things to worry about. “We need your mother’s help,” I heard someone say. I don’t know who. Mom took my right leg just like Justin had my left and I continued to push. I felt an enormous relief as I delivered the head. “Stop pushing!” I was instructed. I saw scissors come out and heard a snip as the cord was cut. I didn’t know it was wrapped around his neck. Maybe they didn’t know either until they saw it. One more push and the rest of him was out. It was 9:03 p.m. I had been in labor for 25 hours. The special nursery team took him to the bassinet behind Justin and began cleaning him and clearing his lungs. I could hear him cry. “APGAR score is 8” I heard one of them say. “Eight is good,” I thought to myself. Nadia began to deliver the placenta. I was told delivering the placenta was painless. It wasn’t. It hurt nearly as much as the baby. After the placenta had been delivered and packed up Nadia said told me that I had torn. She said that she could fix level 1 and 2 tears, but not 3 or 4. I had torn pretty badly and I would need a surgeon to fix me. The surgeon was there immediately. I was told I had a level 3 tear. That means that my perineum (that’s what some people like to call the “taint”) had torn from my vagina to just shy of my rectum. I could feel the needle as he started stitching me up. “Woah! I can feel that!” “You shouldn’t be able to feel that,” he said. “Well I can!” So they injected me with some lidocaine and continued to sew. They sewed for an hour. “How many stitches am I getting?” I asked. “Some” Nadia replied. “How many is ‘Some?’” I asked. “It’s some,” she answered. I dropped the subject. I noticed Justin glancing over his shoulder every couple seconds to the baby’s bassinet. “Go over and see him” I said. Justin walked over to the bassinet and I watched my husband fall in love with my baby. Justin was cooing at him from a distance and I told him to get real close so Dominic could see him. Mom said, “Can I go see him too?” I told her of course she could. I told Justin to get his parents just as soon as they were done repairing me.
When I was all stitched, packed, and covered up, Justin let his parents into the room. They immediately came to me and hugged me, then they went to the baby’s bassinet to see him. The nurse picked him up and handed him to me so I could get my first look at him. I knew I loved him immediately. He was a total stranger and he looked nothing like I expected, but I loved him. There was about an hour or so of passing him around and taking pictures then my mom gave me a hug and a kiss and said goodbye. She was going to sleep before she had to catch her flight the next morning. David and Vanessa drove her back to my house and Justin and I were left alone with Dominic. I had an enormous craving for Pepsi so the nursing staff brought me a caffeine-free Coke and a glass of ice water. Yes, I know…Annissa drinking Pepsi? I don’t generally like Pepsi because it’s so thin. I usually prefer the thicker, more syrupy Coca-Cola. But at that instant I wanted the taste of Pepsi. I hadn’t eaten since Justin’s lasagna and I think I needed that quick sugar boost. As I sipped on my pop I watched Justin sitting on the couch holding and talking to Dominic. “Do you see your mama?” he said. “Isn’t she pretty?”
Soon they came to take Dominic to the nursery for his bath and Justin headed home to get some sleep. After a little while the nurses came to help me up, use the bathroom, and wheel me to my recovery room. Another nurse gave me a quick orientation in my room. She showed me all the stuff the hospital gives me, explained how the t.v. worked, showed me how to order my meals, then brought me a sandwich and several crackers and cookies to tide me over until the kitchen opened, and a dose of Milk of Magnesia. When you look like Frankenstein’s monster down below, the last thing you want is constipation. Then I tried to sleep. They kept waking me to change my antibiotics. I only got through two bags before I refused to take it anymore. The antibiotics burned my arm from my fingertips to my shoulder. They got permission from the doctor to change to an oral antibiotic (I had developed a fever while I was in labor and they were afraid I had an infection). They would bring Dominic to me to breastfeed him then take him back to the nursery so I could sleep.
Last week I went to the doctor to get a checkup and see if I could return to work. Alice asked me how the delivery went and I said there had been a lot of complications that I hadn’t noticed at the time, but when I reflected on them later realized how serious they were. I said I still didn’t know how many stitches I had. She said, “Oh, I can find out” and started flipping through my file. She got to the hand-written report of my labor and delivery. Her eyes got wide and she said, “Wow…this is really long!” Then she mentioned my level 3 tear and added that I had also had a labial laceration. I had felt them stitching there, but hadn’t thought much about it. I wonder how someone gets a labial laceration. It seems like one of those things that you probably shouldn’t Google while at work. I still don’t know how many stitches I had.
Vanessa, Dominic and I went to Olive Garden for lunch last week. The busboy cleaning another table asked Dominic’s name. He said, “That’s a good Irish name!” I’ve never met a black Irishman named Dominic.