Exploiting Her Baby

I've been reading Teresa Strasser's blog, Exploiting My Baby, for the past few months. She and I were due at the same time, and I loved reading her dry, funny, neurotic take on the pregnancy experience. As my time drew near, I occasionally wondered how she was feeling about hers.

We must have given birth within a day or two of each other because she just made a funny and touching blog post about her experience and I wish I'd written it. This was my favorite part because I understand exactly what she's trying to say:

There aren’t that many main courses on the menu in this life, when it comes to the big experiences.

So, despite wanting to be terminally unique, at some point you order
the chicken or the steak. Maybe the surf and turf. Because there are
only so many dinners available at the cosmic table. The real comfort,
and the big bombshell, isn’t how I felt too good to have what the rest
of you were having, but not good enough. And here I am with my baby,
like a billion and a half mothers before me, and we all want to hear
that our children are chunky monkeys, and that we are not,
and that’s where I find magic where I least expected it, right in the
hackiness. There aren’t many offerings for dessert, either, and that’s
the sweetest part, that we’re all telling the same stories and scooping
our cold spoon into one infinite pint.

Snapshots of one day in L.A.

It's 6pm. Scott and I are jumpy and nervous. We can't think of anything in particular we'd like to go do.

We decide to get manicures. But when we get there, they're too busy to take us. We decide to go to Solley's next door for deli instead. My belly gets to the door about five minutes before the rest of me.

"I don't want to answer another pregnancy question, ever," I tell Scott, just before the waitress comes up and asks me when I'm due. "Tonight," I tell her, and for the rest of the meal I am peppered with questions from a woman who, I'm fairly sure, is twice as excited about my baby as I've ever been.

When we leave, she asks me what kind of dessert I like and sends me off with a black and white cookie, on the house.

We try for manicures again and again are told that it will be a wait. I tell Scott it's okay, I don't need nice nails for the birth, but I do feel bad that he didn't get his done. "I didn't need it. I just thought it would calm you down," he replies.

I'm not allowed to call the hospital to confirm my induction until 9pm. To pass the time, I watch America's Next Top Model. I am absolutely positive that when I do call, I will be told that an army of laboring women have just taken up all the beds and I'll have to wait to come in until next week -- so why not get absorbed in a little prime time television?

At exactly 8:50, I lose my patience and call. I am told to come in at exactly 10pm.

As we fly around the house, making last minute phone calls and double-checking hospital bags, I try to catch the final segment to find out who is no longer in the running towards becoming America's Next Top Model. It turns out to be Lulu, which is good because she was really mean to Bianca and also had a nasty boob tattoo.

Our ride to the hospital is surreal. Sunset Boulevard is hopping and so is La Cienega. I start thinking back to only a year or two ago, when I was going out three or four nights a week. We shake our heads at two drunk guys wearing black shirts, trying to jaywalk across the street. So irresponsible!

I expect to wait a long time once we arrive at the hospital. But instead, everything rushes way too quickly. We're crammed into the tiniest room possible and Scott has to fit his body into a chair too narrow for him.

A doctor -- not my doctor, but one in her practice -- comes to check me. They're supposed to put in a Foley catheter to help me dilate, to get me ready for the Pitocin. "She doesn't need the Foley," he pronounces. "She's already 2-3 centimeters dilated. Let's go right to the Pit." My first thought is, "this should shorten labor by a few hours. Good."

I listen to a couple of Adam Carolla podcasts, and watch some bad late night television. Every time I have to pee, which seems like every twenty minutes, Scott has to unhook the fetal monitor and help me across the room with all my IV tubes and bags hanging everywhere. This alone is embarrassing enough that I kind of just want to get the epidural already.

I get the epidural around 4:30am. I'm only 4 cm at this point, but I'm also a giant wuss. I explain this to the anesthesiologist. He's young and handsome and his name is Dr. Yang. He understands. Scott and I try to think of friends we have who we could set up with Dr. Yang because this guy is a serious catch.

I'm still able to feel contractions, and it makes me nervous. The question I want someone to answer is, Is this normal? No, I'm not in too much pain. I'm just concerned. Is it normal that I can still feel contractions, that they're still uncomfortable? Does that mean as they get worse, my pain will get worse -- that the epidural hasn't taken effect correctly? This is what I try to ask, but what happens is that Dr. Yang comes back, thinks I'm saying I need more painkillers, and ups my medication. Suddenly I am completely, utterly deadened. This annoys me because I totally COULD have handled the pain and now I'm that girl who demanded the super-powered ultra-extreme epidural and yes I'm a wuss, but not THAT much of a wuss.

Our nurse is gruff and Canadian. This makes no sense to me. I thought all Canadians were really nice?

I'm being wheeled into the delivery room because the doctor is on her way. It's already early morning, 7am. How did that happen?

I am fully dilated -- after three hours? Wow. Apparently it's unusual for things to move this quickly. We don't know what to do. The doctor leaves to deliver another baby, and we realize for the first time that this baby might come a whole lot quicker than we'd anticipated. None of our family is scheduled to arrive until after lunch. Scott starts making phone calls. We're trying to stay calm. No wait -- I'm not trying. I AM calm. Very calm. Hell, I can't feel a thing!

Strike that. I'm really cold. Shivering a lot. When is the doctor coming back?

She's back! And gruff Canadian nurse has been replaced by awesome Jamaican nurse. She and my doctor ask me to push. I do, as hard as I can, and they look concerned. They need to wait for the baby to move down, and for my epidural to wear off enough for me to aid in pushing. They comically lift my legs, which fall over of their own accord. "She's really numb," Jamaican nurse says, amused. DAMN IT, DR. YANG.

The doctor is gone, will be back in two hours, and awesome Jamaican nurse is leaning over me. She counsels me to push on my own with each contraction, to help move the baby down while we wait for the doctor. It's like she's letting me in on some guilty little nurse secret.

Time passes. It's really cold.

I joke about the little hoity toity touches I can see all around us that remind me Cedars is the favorite birthing hospital of really, really rich people everywhere. I order Scott to take pictures of the sink in the corner, which isn't standard issue stainless steel, but rather one of those aesthetically pleasing stone bowls that stand separate from the faucet. I also really want him to take a picture of the popsicle they have given me to suck on, which is actually an imported Italian strawberry sorbetto. It strikes me as hilarious that the ingredients listed on the side of the wrapped are in Italian.

I ask Scott to turn on the television. Even though there's no sound, it's a distraction. We find a station that seems to be nothing but beautiful nature images: flowers floating on a lake, an oak tree at the top of a misty hill. "How nice," I think. "The hospital has a labor channel."

After two hours, the doctor comes back and checks me again. I'm still not ready. She tells me she's going to the office and will come back at eleven. That gives me another two hours.

I fret, thinking about everyone arriving at the hospital already expecting the baby to have arrived. What if they get impatient sitting in the waiting room together? What if they leave? Will they be mad that we called them all at 7am to tell them the baby was on her way when she really wasn't?

I'm noticing a definite change. I can feel more. Things are finally happening.

At 11am exactly, I have a total classic birthing moment: I turn to the nurse and say, "I think I need to push." And suddenly the doctor is back in the room and we are getting ready to push. "I think this baby will come in the next hour," the nurse informs me. I want to cheer!

Being on my back isn't working.

I'm turned over on my side.

I'm turned over on my back. "Did you remember to take a picture of of the Italian popsicle?" I ask Scott as one point. He tells me he forgot, which annoys me. My job is to push a child out of my womb. His is to take a picture of a popsicle. I'm temporarily very disappointed in my husband.

We use something called a squat bar. We take it away.

Scott and the nurse wait in silence, watching the contraction monitor.

I realize I can see the monitor in a reflection from the mirror across the room and watch as well.

The doctor returns. I can tell from her concern that it's been too long. Progress is not being made.

I can feel the tension in the room. Above me, the doctor, the nurse and my husband all stare intently at the monitor, waiting for the next contraction, then the one after that.

I study the images on the television. An image of a maple leaf is replaced by a bible verse and suddenly I am struck by the realization that for the last two hours, I have not been watching the labor channel -- I'm watching the God channel. And I don't even care.

Clear snapshots fade into a blur here as the last hour ticks down. Scary words and phrases are flung about. Words like vacuum, c-section, episiotomy, you need to try harder. It's this last one that really gets me. Nobody gets to tell me I didn't try hard enough. I try harder.

The ceiling of the room is white. If I weren't an athiest, I'd be praying. But instead, I'm just talking to myself. Try harder. Try harder. Try harder.

"It's her stupid shoulders," I say, frustrated after another failed push. My doctor gets angry. "Don't talk like that. Not in my delivery room," she snaps at me. I'm not too distracted to feel guilty. I just called my daughter's shoulders stupid. I'm going to be a bad mother!

What's going on? When did all these people come in?

The baby is here! She's here! Hi, baby! I'm sorry I called your shoulders stupid. They're beautiful. And...ugh, kind of messy.

She cries right away.

I have never, ever seen Scott's eyes so wide in my life.

It's 2pm and I have a baby. Her name is Sadie.

I hold her on my chest. For a long time. This sounded like a good idea when they told us about it on the hospital tour, but now everyone's gone and I'm kind of really wishing they would just wheel me to recovery already. The room is really, really, really cold.

Scott walks in the door with a chicken salad sandwich from Starbucks and a giant Coke. He offers me water, but the Coke is what I want. It is the best thing I have ever tasted.

The sandwich has cranberries in it. Scott wonders why Starbucks needs to ruin a perfectly good chicken salad sandwich with cranberries.

Now I'm being wheeled down a long, long hallway towards my room. In this snapshot, I'm not sure if the baby is in my arms or if someone is carrying her next to me. All I know is that a group of people is standing just beyond a set of automatic double doors. They aren't my people -- they're waiting for someone else. Another mom is being wheeled in behind me. But I get there first, and the people greet me as if all along, it's me they have been waiting for. They cheer for me. They wear huge smiles and congratulate me and tell me my daughter is beautiful.

In the recovery room, my family files in. Everyone got there in time! Their faces are filled with happiness. I have been holding it together pretty well this entire time, but when my dad walks in I can barely look at him because I know if I do I will burst into tears.

It's funny, the lasting impressions you leave with after an experience like this. They're small and personal, rather than large and monumental. A nurse with a Jamaican accent, the God Channel, a chicken salad sandwich with cranberries, and a little girl who was almost named for a great American scientist, but wound up with a name cobbled together from the letters of the names of her grandparents -- made up of parts of us all.

I'm Already Ready, Already

For the last few mornings I've woken up and realized that, to my supreme irritation, I feel great.

"Great" being a relative term, of course. The recent heat wave has exacerbated my carpal tunnel, which manifests itself as soreness in the middle fingers of both hands and makes me feel like a crotchety old woman paying her dues after a lifetime of flipping pesky little kids the bird. Walking further than half a block makes my back feel like it's going to give out, and the simple act of sitting down to pee in the middle of the night is more of an ordeal than ever because when I try to stand up again, my knees respond thusly: "AW HELL NO."

Despite all of this, my overall feeling this week has been one of good health. I'm nowhere near the crying, hysterical mess I was two weeks ago when, without warning, I collapsed in Scott's arms and moaned, "Everything hurts so much. I can't DO this anymore." Is this the last-minute burst of energy they always tell you about, where the day before you go into labor you get the sudden, uncontrollable urge to buff the house clean with a nailbrush? If so, it's gone on an awful long time.

I'm not the only impatient one, either. My mother and sister have taken to answering the phone with a breathless, "Hello? Hello?" Every time I call, expecting to hear that I'm on my way to the hospital. I know there are people who have been crossing their fingers that nature will take its own course before the doctors help prod me along starting tomorrow night. Looks like we're all out of luck in that regard.

The ironic thing about feeling so capable right now is that I literally have NOTHING LEFT TO DO. I actually planned too well. As a result, my hospital bag is packed, I've pre-registered at the hospital, the laundry has been done, the house is clean, the dogs are taken care of, there are groceries in the fridge for when we get home, and I've completed all my freelance work.

"Maybe I should buy some new underwear," I muse to myself as I play my 500th game of fetch with Pepper and idly surf Go Fug Yourself. "Like, some ugly granny ones I can throw away in a couple months. That's probably a smart idea." Then I turn over the idea of negotiating Target in my head, ultimately reject it, and decide that the granny panties I currently own will probably do just fine.

The induction process is an odd one in part because it's potentially so long. Unlike labor, where they urge you to hold off checking in for as long as possible so that you can hang out at your own house through the first phase, with an induction they are monitoring you for the entire process, and the process can run 24 hours or longer. When I check into the hospital tomorrow night, they will be inserting a balloon in order to begin the dilation process, and throughout the night I will simply be hanging out, waiting for it to do its job well enough to move to the second, more serious phase of labor, which is the point where I can demand painkillers without feeling like a total wuss.

This gives us an entire night to basically sit around and wait. Once Scott determined that I was not going to allow him to just go home and sleep until things started getting interesting, we came up with a gameplan of ways to pass the time. We're bringing cards for games of gin rummy, we've loaded up our iPods with podcasts, and we're downloading some TV shows to watch on his laptop. Knowing me, I'll probably wind up surfing the internet, posting to Facebook and various forums from my hospital bed, because that's how much of an internet addict I am.

"OMG nurse just said 4cm dilated! Water just broke all over the bed! They just gave me opiates! Sooooo excited, y'all!"

If you get a cracked out email from me at 2am Thursday morning, reporting facts about my uterus that you never, ever wanted or needed to know, this is why.

So that's it, people. If you don't hear from me again, you know where I'll be.

 

Natural Birth Advocates In My Life, Read This Editorial

I don't expect it to change your mindset.

I just expect it to help you understand my own.

Rational Moms

39 Week Appointment and Some Big News

Yesterday we went back to the doctor's office for my 39 week appointment.

This one was bound to be exciting for a couple reasons. For one, ever since I measured 1cm dilated at my last appointment, I've been trying to encourage the process through various means, and was excited to see if any of it had paid off.

Also I was scheduled for an ultrasound, and have been looking forward to seeing how she was growing. I've had two ultrasounds in the past two months -- in the first one the baby measured unusually large (76th percentile) and in the second, she was right on track (54th percentile), which just goes to show you how imperfect these things are. So I was less concerned with her potential size and more interested to see how she's positioned and to make sure everything looks good otherwise.

I should have been concerned about the size. She's back to being big. Quite big, as in she's measuring well over 8 lbs. "She has a very round belly," the tech told me cheerfully.

But it wasn't the belly that concerned my doctor. Rather, she explained to me that the baby's shoulders are measuring broad, and that's the kind of thing that makes doctors nervous because it increases the risk of getting a shoulder stuck in the birth canal.

"Ouch," was my reaction.

Next came the cervical check. I've had my hopes up this past week that I could do some basic tricks to help speed up this process and help with dilation. So I've been walking every day, sitting on an exercise ball, eating spicy food at night, and, well, you know. The other thing you're supposed to do, that your partner has to help you with, that I can't mention because my dad reads this blog.

None of it worked. I'm fully effaced but I'm still only 1cm dilated, the same as I was at 38 weeks.

So my doctor sat us down for a "little discussion." She told us flat out she didn't intend to let the baby go too far overdue because of her size and the breadth of her shoulders. She asked us how we felt about induction.

As it happens, I've been thinking quite a bit about induction over the past couple of days, although I've never considered it as a likelihood before. My thought process went a bit like this:

"Scott's leaving town the middle of next month. I really, really, really hope I don't go a few weeks overdue, because it would suck to come home with a newborn and then say goodbye to my husband for a week. I wonder what my doctor's feelings on scheduled inductions are."

Then I went and did a whole bunch of research on the subject, most of which agrees that unless there's a sound medical reason for it, most doctors don't like to schedule inductions before the 41st week or so. I'm not against elective induction, but at the same time, the thought of asking my doctor to do it just because I'm physically uncomfortable all the time and afraid of being alone in a house with a one week old newborn also didn't sit right with me.

So I'd pretty much already made the decision not to press the issue and to let nature take its course, but it was still in my head. The fact that the doctor is the one who brought up induction as a possibility was a relief. My immediate answer to her was, "I would be fine with it." Scott agreed.

After that? Everything was a bit of a blur. My doctor suggested we come in for it first thing next week. Scott wigged out a little bit and suggested the end of the week instead. We compromised on checking into the hospital late Wednesday night, which means that in all likelihood, I will be induced on my original due date, Sept. 24th.

So there you have it! All of a sudden, the game has changed -- I know for a fact that even if I don't go into labor naturally within the next few days, I will still be greeting my daughter in less than a week.

In future entries, I'll write a little bit about what the induction process involves, because I find it very interesting. In the meantime, I feel like a little kid 5 days before Christmas -- who has just been told that you never know, Christmas could always come early.