Hellobee

It was eight o’clock in the morning on a cool Monday morning, late in January. Mr. Bear was sleeping peacefully beside me because he had worked the night shift. That meant that I was up at two in the morning instead of blissfully asleep because if we had gone to bed any sooner, his entire schedule would have been thrown off. Everything was peaceful and quiet – and I had to pee. Desperately. Not unusual with my due date just a measly five days away. I got up and glanced at the digital clock, went to the bathroom, did my business, then crawled back into bed. I dozed. It wasn’t very long until my body told me it really had to pee again. I registered it as a little odd but answered nature’s call only to crawl into bed, doze, and began to feel that pressure again. Okay, this was quickly getting weird.

I double checked the time, went to the bathroom, and instead of going back to bed I detoured to the living room where my copy of “What to Expect When You’re Expecting” – barely touched – were awaiting me. After a quick consultation and yet another trip to the bathroom, I called my midwives’ office. The only logical thing that I could come up with was that my water had broken. I spoke with the midwife on duty and she agreed that it did indeed sound like my water had broken. She scheduled an appointment for me to have the amniotic fluid tested later that afternoon, but it looked like today was the day!

I woke Mr. Bear as gently as I could and explained the situation to him, telling him that he probably ought to call into work. He reasoned that it would be best to wait until after my appointment, just to be sure and so that his shift manager wouldn’t circulate it around the office. At the time my father also worked at the same company as Mr. Bear and we didn’t want my parents finding out secondhand that we were about to have our child. So Mr. Bear got up and took a shower while I went back to the living room and started going over my checklists while we waited.

Finally it was time for the appointment and we hit our first snag of many. When we checked in, for some reason the appointment hadn’t been put in the books so the staff had to do some shuffling around to find a midwife who could see me. Which meant waiting, waiting, and more waiting plus the aggravation of multiple trips to the bathroom. When I was finally called back to an examination room, Mr. Bear opted to stay in the waiting room and called his boss and my father to fill them in on the situation. The midwives talked about my symptoms, took a look, and produced a test strip to test the fluid – it immediately turned bright blue. Yep, most definitely amniotic fluid! My water had broken.

Now what were we supposed to do? Answer: Wait for the contractions to start. Go home, rest, relax, eat, wait for the contractions to begin and progress. Time them just like we’d discussed. If the contractions didn’t start or didn’t regulate, they’d see us bright and early at the hospital!

Guess what? We were at the hospital at 7 in the morning after a fitful night of sleep and no progress when we hit another snag. Somehow my paperwork from the midwives’ office had gotten lost in translation on the way to the hospital. Which meant it took them an hour to locate my charts and finally get me back in a room. By the time 9 o’clock rolled around, I was in a hospital gown and strapped down to the bed. I say strapped down because not only did they have to put a saline drip in my arm (so that they could start administering the Pitocin and other fluids), but they also strapped a monitoring system around my abdomen to monitor the fetal movements and the baby’s heartbeat. Every time I moved even a little bit, at least three nurses would rush in to tell me not to fidget because an alarm had gone off at their station telling them that the monitors had lost contact. And going to the bathroom? Practically required an act of Congress. I was imprisoned in bed with no way to alleviate the pain from the contractions that progressively got worse as the Pitocin was steadily increased.

I admire the women who are able to tell you the exact time they were dilated to specific centimeters or were a certain percent effaced. I was not one of them. There was a clock in the room. I know I looked at it often, but other than thinking, “Please make the pain go away, please hurry up and be born,” time was meaningless. Maybe you’re wondering if this is where I caved from the pain and pressure, called “Uncle!” and got an epidural, but no. Right before the Pitocin levels got too high, right before the contractions got too close together and they were saying it was finally time to deliver the baby, I had pain medication delivered intravenously once. Then I was supposed to manage my pain with laughing gas. That would have been great, and it did help with a few really bad contractions, but I found that nitrous oxide made me feel unbelievably and unbearably nauseous. I was supposed to take ten to fifteen puffs of the stuff from the little mask they gave me which was hooked up to this little tank, but I found that after four or five, I was fighting to keep my stomach calm.

Mr. Bear was standing to the left of my bed, trying to soothe me as best he could. Which, strangely enough, wasn’t soothing at all. Unfortunately I found the sound of his voice grating. When he tried to help me breathe in and out to give me focus, I practically snapped his head off. So what could he do? He just stood there quietly and acted as my anchor. I would stare into his eyes and tell him, “I have to push” even as my mother and the nurses were telling me I couldn’t, and that I had to wait. If I pushed then like my body wanted me to, it would have made the labor that much harder. I could not push. I knew that. I followed their instructions. But I still had to tell someone that I felt like I had to push and I had to push right that second. Verbalizing my desires was very important to my sanity and it gave Mr. Bear something to do other than holding the gas mask for me. He was helping me as best he could with as much as I let him. Through it all he was incredible. I was a mess.

Mr. Bear, of course, gives all the credit where credit is due: to my mother. Had she not been there to soothe me (as he couldn’t do without getting snapped out), it probably wouldn’t have turned out so well. When I was finally given permission to push, my mom was the one coaching me through what to do, working as a medium. She would listen to what the doctor and nurses wanted me to do and then repeated it to me. Maybe it was just at 4:28pm on a Tuesday evening, 34 hours after my water had broken, Mr. Bear and I welcomed our son Patrick into the world.

All I can remember is my mother’s first awed exclamation about how we had a beautiful baby boy and the tears that welled in Mr. Bear’s eyes as he looked from me to our son. Patrick came out hand first, then the head and the rest of his long body followed in just a dozen or so really good pushes. When he was born, he had the umbilical cord wrapped around his neck twice – one loose and one tight. As soon as the cord was cut he was rushed to the side of the room where they briskly toweled him off and had him checked over by a team of NICU doctors. The concern was that since my water had broken 34 hours ago he might have suffered somehow or gotten an infection. Add to the fact that Patrick had the cord wrapped around his neck twice and they wanted to give him a thorough once over.

Patrick was declared as fit as a fiddle and he was brought back over to me and laid upon my chest. I’m pretty sure I cried and I might have attempted to nurse, but I don’t really remember. I do remember looking at him and thinking how perfect his name was, holding him while they put the eye drops in his eyes, and then he was whisked away again to run some tests. Even though he seemed fine, they wanted to run some more tests and ensure that he didn’t have an infection.

Mr. Bear went with Patrick and my mother stayed with me as the doctors and nurses prepped us to move to another room. While they were cleaning up they discovered Patrick had managed to tear me open a little during his quick exodus and I had to have about a dozen stitches – four external, the rest internal. Once I was stitched up and moved I waited. And waited. And waited. (The waiting you’ve been experiencing while pregnant doesn’t stop when you have the baby. It might feel like it does, because you finally get to meet your little one, but you do an awful lot of waiting for labor to start, waiting for labor to finish, waiting for your baby, waiting for your doctor to check you out, waiting on the nurses or lunch… just in general waiting. I think because you’re dealing with the hormones, all this waiting seems like torture on your already sensitive nerves. Or it could just be me.)

When they returned, I honestly felt a little anxiety upon seeing Patrick again. I still couldn’t believe he was mine, that he was real, that I had given birth to this beautiful baby boy. At this point my “baby blues” weren’t really present but I was anxious, even as I was in love with this bundle.

He had an IV port in his arm to match mine, Which meant he had lots of tape and gauze wrapped around his little arm. It made my otherwise healthy boy look pitiful, and you felt terrible for him as you watched him try and scratch everything. It was a little heartbreaking. Thankfully, he was only like this for about half a day. They took his port out later when they got the test results back saying that everything was fine, and he didn’t have an infection. Then when the doctor came in to listen to his heart, they found that he had a heart murmur. They said it sounded really loud so it must actually be a very small hole (don’t ask me the logic), but they needed to get him scanned in addition to the normal tests and shots. He was also a little jaundiced at first, but that luckily cleared up after a little light therapy when he was taken back to the nursery one of the times.

The rest was a blur. We went in on Tuesday morning and were released from the hospital on Thursday. Mr. Bear left the hospital on Wednesday after my sister arrived from California and returned on Thursday in time for us to check out. Then he drove Patrick, my sister, and me to my parents’ house and I stayed there for nearly a month. I say ‘nearly’ because any real sense of time after you’ve had a baby becomes very… slippery. My sister returned to California after a week and Patrick and I returned home after Mr. Bear finished remodeling our bedroom (long story). That, my dears, is my labor induced mostly med-free birth 29.5 months later!