When you read about birth, or watch movies about birth, it seems like labor always begins when the mom’s water breaks. When you actually have a kid, you discover this only happens about 20 percent of the time. When Clara was born, for example, the nurse delivering her had to break my water.
When Louis Oliver was born, on August 26, my water did break first, and it happened pretty much like the movies. I was sleeping, then I was suddenly standing in the bathroom, half-awake, soaking the rug in front of the bathtub.
I got Simon up, and we both lamented the fact that it was 2 am, a scant few hours after we’d gone to bed. I called the on-call doctor, who said, “Come in when it starts to hurt.” Then I ran a hot bath and had some chocolate. Simon stood in the bathroom doorway for a moment, his eyes bleary. Then he suddenly switched into high gear and went frantically about the house making sure we had everything in our hospital bag.
I hoped labor wouldn’t start for several hours, but my lower abdomen felt heavy and restless. I wasn’t surprised when the discomfort started to coalesce into contractions about ten minutes after I got into the bath.
Simon got Clara up, wrapped her in her favorite blanket and held her against his shoulder. Any wishes we might have had about her staying asleep during the transfer to the neighbors’ house were instantly dashed. Clara is not a sleeper under the best of circumstances. She was delighted to be awake at such a grown-up hour, and launched into her favorite game—“pretend mewling cat that licks its paws”—before her eyes were even properly open. While Simon carried her across the lawn to the neighbors’, she chattered about the night and the “rain” (the sprinkler system was running).
I had to go through the emergency room at the hospital because the main entrance was closed. The emergency-room technicians made me ride in a wheelchair to Triage while Simon parked the car. The nurse who pushed the chair told me this was owing to the fact that someone in labor could just squirt out a kid in one of the long passageways between Emergency and Triage and then the hospital would be in a real pickle.
Sitting in the wheelchair was faintly unpleasant. I could feel Louis’ head somewhere down in my nether regions, hanging like a ripe cantaloupe.
In Triage, they strapped me to the abdominal monitor so they could measure my contractions. For the first ten minutes, everything was fine. Then I felt a surge from the top of my stomach. I stared hard at the ceiling. It was one of those institutional false ceilings, ubiquitous across corporate and medical America. It looked like it was made of cork, with tiny ventilation holes punched through it. I focused intently on one of the pinholes. It suddenly seemed like a lemony-yellow watercolor stain bled slowly out of it. Little black stars sparkled around the periphery of my sight. Then, as I inhaled sharply, the lemony-yellow color got sucked back into the pinhole’s darkness.
“Wow! That was a huge contraction!” Simon said, looking at the contraction monitor.
“I think I’m gonna barf,” I said. We called the nurse, who detached me from the monitoring system so I could shuffle across the hall to the bathroom and empty my guts.
When I got back, the nurse checked my cervix, pronounced me ready for Labor and Delivery, and asked if I wanted an epidural. Friends, there was only one answer to that question: YES.
In a moment, the nurse came to my bedside in Triage with another wheelchair. This time I couldn’t really sit in it. Instead, I used my triceps to carry my weight, hovering just above the seat and puffing through the contractions like a freight train. In my memory, I see the nurse frantically running with me to Labor and Delivery, pushing the chair so hard that we take the corners on two wheels.
In reality, I’m sure her pace was much more sedate.
When we got to Labor and Delivery, we learned the person delivering and administering the epidural would not arrive for several more minutes.
As Simon and the nurse helped me into a bed, I tried to steel myself for each contraction. You might ask, “Didn’t you do this before?” Yes, as my rancher-father would say, I am a “two-calf heifer.” On top of which I didn’t have any pain medication when I gave birth to Clara. This time around I felt peculiarly unprepared to give birth, worn out from chasing a toddler in an extremely-swollen state, psychically exhausted, and disenchanted with the whole idea of a “medication-free” birth.
Waiting for the nurse-anesthetist, I tried to “surf” the waves of pain. But that only made me think of that Hawaiian surfer who got her arm bitten off by a shark in the early 2000’s. How painful must that have been? Then I tried to imagine my cervix opening, while thinking “Open, open, open.” This was something my mother did when she gave birth to me and my siblings. But the exercise only reminded me of a story from my childhood, Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves. A greedy man in the story can’t remember the pass phrase to open a special cave full of treasure. The pass phrase is “Open sesame,” but the man, who must remember the phrase to leave the cave before murderous robbers find him there, keeps shouting things like, “Open wheat!” and “Open barley!” and “Open rye!” (At this point in the story my siblings and I used to frantically shout, "It's 'Open sesame!! Open sesame!!'" ) Alas, the robbers catch the greedy man in the cave and whack him into four pieces. Gruesome, very gruesome. Not something to think about while laboring.
At last, the nurse-anesthetist arrived to administer the epidural. She was a dour-looking woman who recited the long epidural disclaimer in a fatalistic tone. With her stocky body and matter-of-fact way of speaking, she reminded me of a long-haul trucker. Stuck on a freeway outside Fargo during a freak blizzard in July. With no friends, food or radio contact.
Finally she was done giving the spinal block and left.
Quickly the labor pain abated and my outlook improved considerably. I could even doze a little between contractions.
My OB came in around seven, fresh off a vacation to Red Fish Lake up North (My OB almost never takes vacations, delivers over 98 percent of his own patients.) He and a nurse put my legs into these weird…well, leg-holders, for want of a better word. They didn’t look like stirrups to me, but that’s what they kept calling them. I could feel my legs a bit—a tingling sensation—but I couldn’t move them at all.
“Okay, when I say, I want you to pick up her leg and push her knee to her chest,” the nurse told Simon. “I’ll get the other one. When we’re done with the contraction, put the leg back into the stirrup. If you drop it, it’ll hit the doctor or go off the side of the bed and take your wife with it.”
She glanced up at Simon as she spoke. She must have noticed the look on his face, because she added, “I’ve never actually seen it done, but it could happen, which is why I have to warn you.”
The nurse acted like she’d delivered babies for about a million years. Her hands did things automatically—positioned monitors, pressed buttons on the side of my bed, hung an IV bag—while she chatted amicably with the OB and other nurses.
“How are you?” my OB asked me.
“This epidural is great. I feel like I’m in the Caribbean,” I replied, hearing the slur in my speech.
“Mmmmm….I’ve never heard it described that way.”
My OB has a giant head with thick, dark hair that stands on end sometimes. His head is so big in proportion to his body that I sometimes think of him as mostly head, with a slender, effete body hurrying along behind.
He settled himself on a stool between my knees to catch the baby. I dozed off and on between pushing. It must have been an interesting-looking tableau: Me with my legs up in the birthing position, but drowsing a little as though I were on a beach somewhere with a Mai Tai in my hand. Simon and I asking the OB questions about his vacation when I wasn’t napping, the conversation peppered with kiddie-themed jokes (the OB has three young kids) and observations about the air, which was smoky from wildfires.
At times throughout my pushing phase, the OB stared off dreamily over my knees and I knew he was probably reminiscing about his vacation. That he was able to do this while seated directly in front of the gore of childbirth is a testament to his professionalism and experience. He’s probably caught thousands and thousands of babies in his career.
After awhile I started throwing up again and the nurse brought over some little throw-up bags. I filled one and casually handed it to Simon.
“Don’t worry. She’ll be handing you something far better in a couple minutes,” the OB told him. Simon gave the bag to a nurse to dispose of. The vomiting seemed to help push the baby down further, and it took only three more pushes for him to emerge.
The doctor didn’t have any trouble getting the baby’s head out, but he had to wrangle his little shoulders a bit. “Linebacker shoulders,” was what he called them.
The first thing I saw was a little head covered in black hair, then an impressively pink little body and chubby little arms. I found Simon’s eyes through the glare on his glasses and grinned.
Louis was confused and upset, and his forlorn cry nearly broke my heart. I wanted to hold him immediately, but the nurse wanted to towel him off a bit. Finally she gave him to me and I cuddled his slippery body close, trying to find in his features resemblance to me or Simon. But unlike Clara, who at first definitely looked like Simon’s side of the family, Louis looked like himself right from the get-go. He had lots of dark hair and a pretty little mouth. I remember thinking he was beautiful, and I must have said it out loud, too, because Simon said, “You can call him beautiful, even if he is a boy.”
I looked up and it seemed strange the doctor was still there, and the nurses. It seemed like it was just me and Louis in the whole universe. He had soft blond down on his arms and a patch of darker down on his upper back.
After awhile everyone left and it was just the three of us: Simon, me and Louis. At some point, Simon realized he was still holding my leg up--clutching it, really. He carefully put it back in the stirrup and took Louis for a bit, talked to him and kissed him. I thought how I couldn’t wait for Clara to come meet Louis, and the things she might say when she saw him for the first time.
