Not Hospitable

 

Well, here I am some two weeks later, and yes, I have a baby! Sometimes I'm doing something and I look down and think - who's baby is that? Oh its MY baby? Wow.

It was a hard road getting here. I knew I would be induced between weeks 41 and 42 partly because of my two vessel umbilical cord, and partly because of my age. They say the placenta stops doing its job after 42 weeks. My aunt claims she was two MONTHS overdue with her first child, my cousin who is 50 now, but I don't believe her.  Perhaps she got her conception date wrong, because that sounds crazytown.

So we went in for a checkup on Monday the 9th, 8 days past her due date, and decided to bite the bullet and check in for inducement that evening. The plan would be to insert something called Cervadil next to my cervix overnight, which should ripen it (I was still at a zero dilation) and make it ready for the pitocin (a synthetic oxytocin, the chemical that tells your uterus to start contracting) to do its job intravenously. I thought I could be seeing my little girl by the next day, or Wednesday at the latest. I was nervous but we had a pretty good attitude going in, stopping for a 'last supper' at a favorite bar nearby, getting a take out menu and telling the waitress we would likely be ordering more from the hospital in coming days. The staff was very excited for us.

So I checked in, and was told to put on the hospital gown immediately. That would be the last time I wore real people clothes for 5 days. A resident came along to insert the Cervadil, which I had read was a sort of soluble pill that would gently nestle against my cervix. Instead, she showed me an inch long piece of hard plastic that she tried to insert gently, but she had to keep dry so there was a bit of complaining as it went in. "Ouch!" I said after. "A man must have designed that," the nurse confirmed. Getting the saline lock in place also cemented my confinement, and my boo and I settled in for the night, watching a movie on my ipad to calm us a little. 

Things happen early in the morning in hospitals, and I was awoken by my usual OBGYN and a young resident assistant of hers.  "I work with Dr. M," was all she said before she lubed up and put her hands inside me to retrieve the first of many tricks. As it set in how uncomfortable this device felt going in as it was coming out, I realize this young lady hadn't even told me her name. In the next instant I felt a stab of pain and she said "oops" and continued removing the damned thing. She said she dropped it. Definitely invented by a man. *

 The day passed as I was fed increasing amounts of the pitocin via IV. I was served breakfast but nothing else. Waking up in a hospital room put me off my food, so I just had tea and told M to eat the rest, which he did without complaint. When I'm really nervous I tend to empty my stomach, and I'm braver with it empty and full of Irish Breakfast tea (yes I brought my own tea, as it is the most important meal of the day). Old fumble hands came back in the afternoon to check my dilation, and I made sure to ask her name this time, gently pointing out her doctor-patient faux pas. Yes you should introduce yourself to someone before you put your hands up in her ladyparts. Not much seemed to happen that day, I only dilated to a 1 at this point, so later in the afternoon they decided to add another trick. This was a balloon catheter that they would insert above the cervix, fill with saline, and it would gently open the cervix even more. Great. One of the residents had mentioned this procedure in the morning, but I told her that my Dr. M had not planned on that, no sirree. I was going to chill out on the pitocin (which did make me oddly very relaxed) until the baby came. But here I was up against the very clear fact that nothing was happening, and I would need further help. 

I asked if I could have something for my nerves for the third or forth time, like maybe a xanax? The nurse had promised me she would ask my doctor but I had a feeling they all just ignored this request for the most part. Which is why what happened next happened at all. The young resident who I did not trust promised the insertion of the catheter balloon would take just a few minutes. I asked her if she could make sure to lube all instruments. She snottily responded that she was putting iodine on all of them but that she would also use some gel if that made me feel better. So you girls know that metal thing that they use in pap smears? I don't mind the metal thing. Once it gets into place you can just breathe through it and it usually delightfully comes out a minute or so later. Ole fumbly hands decides that she is going to move it around and place in in increasingly more uncomfortable positions. There's one rule to the metal thing - you get one chance to get it right. You don't get to go, 'hrmm that's not quite where I wanted it' and start moving it around. So I told her "we're taking a break." And then I asked my awesome nurse for the narcotic cocktail that was my right to have at any point once my saline lock went in. And she gave me a dose in the IV, and a second dose in my arm, and then I went all tingly. Then I told the girl to have another go at it, and my legs dropped and she swears my cervix moved into view and she got it in. Then I got super duper dizzy and my dinner came mistakenly and M ATE IT. After all that, he just tucked in!

So a few hours later, they pulled on the catheter and it did come out and then someone else put their hands up in my business (who knows who, at this point, it could be one of five people or more) and I was still only dilated to a 4 or maybe a 5, depending on who is feeling it. So we decide to ramp up the pitocin overnight and see what happens. 

I sleep like a baby on this stuff, but the sweet Eastern European nurse keeps checking on me every hour. All I wanted to do was sleep and forget this current nightmare. Apparently my doctor had gone home but couldn't sleep herself and was calling in every hour to see if I was having any contractions. And I most certainly was not. Here I was, 5 cm dilated and on about 5,000 gallons of contract-y juice and nothing was happening. 

She woke me up about 7am. She said I had two options - I could go home and come back the next day and try again. (Going home at this point was depressing - all this work to just come back in and get in the horrid hospital gown again?) Or we could break the water, continue on the pitocin, but I was in to stay at that point, as they don't let you go home if your water is broken. I felt sick that it was taking this long, and I was also tired and wanted some time to wake up and talk to M about it. We decided that we would stay and break the water. I wanted to meet my daughter some time in the next day or so. 

One of the nicer residents came in and did that pretty quickly and efficiently, and I felt the warm fluid immediately start leaking around me and I was glad to have my favorite Caribbean nurse there all day. She was big and plump and smart and informative and never rushed in explaining anything to me about childbirth. And she had given birth two ways - once in Jamaica where only the very rich get painkillers for birth - and once in America where she had an epidural. Guess which method she preferred? She reminded me that once I was 3 cm I could get the epidural whenever I wanted. 

So when I started to feel real contractions about an hour or so later, it only took me about five minutes to upgrade my narcotics request to an epidural request. My doc got someone from the ER to come up as she didn't like the anesthesiologist on duty in the ward that day, and he was freakishly tall and from Montenegro with a big angry accent to boot. I didn't like bending over my giant belly and compressing my ribs into my lungs but he got the job done and the contractions just turned into cramps. But a while later I did need to get the juice turned up a bit because I was still uncomfortable. So I met the other anesthesiologist and I thought she was just lovely. I was sortof in love with Caribbean women in general at this point, but she turned the juice up so high my legs went completely numb. This helped me reach my turning point. Next time my doctor came in I asked her what our end game was. Knowing the water was broken, I knew we couldn't go on like this forever (thank god). "I want to try one more thing," she said, explaining she was going to take the pitocin down to zero and ramp it back up again. I said ok fine, but if that doesn't work we're going for the knife as I'm not doing this whole thing again tomorrow. I just couldn't. I looked around and I was attached to no less than 8 different things - IV for saline/pitocin, epidural painkiller, internal contraction monitor (forgot to tell you about that one!), pulse monitor on my finger, blood pressure cuff going off every 15 minutes, catheter, etc. Mentally I was done. 

My dreamy nurse was taking good care of me, changing my bedclothes when needed, taking my temperature and blood pressure. Suddenly my doctor came in and said that my temperature had shot up, and that she was concerned about meconium (i.e. baby poop) in my fluid. We were being recommended for a c-section, stat. And it was only 7pm (she thought her little experiment might bring news closer to 12 or 1am). I was game, M was game, and a half hour later I was in the OR. I had been texting all my girlfriends who had ever given birth via C some time earlier that afternoon, knowing it was likely the way things would go. So I had a few tips for getting through it - ask for the hands not to be tied down, ask to move the sheet away from my face if claustrophobic, and ask for something to calm my nerves from the anesthesiologist. All of which worked fine except she wouldn't give me any narcotics until the baby was born.

And the baby was greeting them face up so after a LOT of very awkward tugging (I can't say it hurt, per se, but it was violent enough that I was complaining quite a bit) they got baby out. I only saw a glimpse of her before she was taken to the nursery - they don't do the mother contact thing in the OR there. And as I was totally high recovering in the post op room, the director of the special care nursery came in the tell me my baby had a temperature of 103 (which went down almost immediately) so would be kept in there for the next three days on antibiotic treatment. And I would have to stay in bed for 12 hours. Which meant I wouldn't get to see her until the next morning. Which was oddly ok as I was so FUCKED UP, I'm not sure what I would have done with a baby in my room all night anyway. M said that people in the hall were talking and I was answering them. I remember talking to the nurse as if I was in a scripted show, everything came out naturally but felt as if it had already happened in the past. I was like that kid in the YouTube video - "is this reality?" 

So instead of holding my baby, M showed me adorable video and pictures of her, and we called our respective parents, and told them her name, and then we went back to the room and I sent pictures of her and announced her on facebook and basically just stared at the clock all night with a huge dopey grin on my face. It was over, she was here, she was perfect and I couldn't wait to hold her.

The end. The beginning. 

E

*this asterisk represents approximately one week passing by before I had two hands and more than 20 minutes to finish this post. God bless newborns.