My baby turned 14 this past week. I cannot believe it. It feels like just yesterday that he was running around the house in his socks and underwear, grinning like a little fool. Oh, wait. That was yesterday. I guess some things never change.
Last summer I marked Will's birthday by sharing his birth story, so I feel it is only fair to do the same for his big brother. Alex was my first child. I had no idea what I was getting into. You think you're all prepared, and you've got a plan all worked out. Ha! We did all our pre-natal classes like good little parents to be. I had taken all my vitamins and eaten not too horribly. We even had a birth plan. All of this was for naught. When the big event finally arrived we used nothing that we learned in our pre-natal classes, and our birth plan went right out the window somewhere around the 800th hour of labor.
It was a lovely day in early April of 2004 when my husband and I went into the OB's office for an ultrasound. Our little bundle of joy was overdue and the doctor wanted to check and make sure he was ok. Everything looked good, but she said she thought he might be a bit small, and she wanted to get him out sooner rather than later. She looked at us and said, "So, you wanna have a baby today"?
We were not expecting this, but heck yeah we wanted to have a baby today! Shortly thereafter we reported to the labor and delivery ward so I could be induced. Without going into too much detail, they began the 'inducement procedure'. Then I was tucked into a bed and we waited. And waited. And waited.
And waited.
I swear I didn't feel even the tiniest contraction until about noon the next day! I was really excited when I started to feel them. Sharp little cramps that lasted a couple of seconds. Progress! That excitement disappeared very quickly. By dinnertime I was in agony.
Now, in my birth plan (ha!), I had said I did not want an epidural. I have a thing about getting needles in my spine. No siree that was not for me. Drugs though? Yes please! The nurses brought me all kinds of pain killing goodies all of which did jack squat to relive my pain. I recall being in bed on my hands and knees, with my ass in the air and my face buried in a pillow, trying to stretch out and relive some of the pain in my back, when a shift change occurred and a new doctor came in to introduce himself. I looked back at him and said "Hi. I'm Michelle, and this is my butt". I was in labor for so long I think we went through 3 shift changes.
Now, in prenatal classes there are a lot of things that are mentioned, but not in great depth. A shining example of this is the 'mucus plug'. Yes, I remember them mentioning it. They said that one of the steps of the labor process was losing your mucus plug. What I do not remember is anyone telling me that at some point in the labor and delivery process a hundred and fifty gallons of disgusting, slimy, crotch loogie was going to come oozing out of my body. If you think it sounds disgusting, you should have lived it!!
At this point I had been in labor for a very long time. I was sweaty and gross and greasy and slimy. I looked like absolute crap. Lucky for me our room at the hospital had a Jacuzzi bath tub. I decided to climb in to see if it would help relive some of my pain. It didn't. I was soon back in bed. Things just were not moving along and so one of the doctors decided to break my water. Yes that hadn't happened yet. I was really looking forward to the big ker-woosh. I was retaining so much water I thought I'd create a tidal wave when my water finally broke. I was looking forward to trying for a record. A nurse arrived with a special pokey stick and, just like everything else in the hospital, shoved it up my wazoo. No ker-woosh.
"Whats going on"? I asked.
"Oh", she said," Your water has already broken".
What??!!!! Apparnetly my water has broken during a particulary painful contration in the jacuzzi and I never even noticed. To this day I feel I was robbed. When Alex finally made his grand entry into the world he had a tiny red dot on the top of his head from where the nurse had poked him.
Somewhere around 9pm on the second night, I gave up on the narcotics. They didn't work at all and they were making me nauseous. I finally agreed to get an epidural. I had been terrified of this procedure. I was panicking the whole time the anesthesiologist was prepping for the task. I braced myself to feel the hot sting of a humongous needed entering my spine, when the anesthesiologist stood up and said, "all done". I felt like the biggest ass. I had suffered for hours for nothing.
Another thing they don't teach you in prenatal classes, there is no dignity in giving birth. None. Honestly, by this point in my pregnancy I had been poked and prodded and swabbed and stuck so many times, it had just become part of the routine. By 9:30 that night I was feeling smooth, watching my contractions on the monitors instead of feeling them, trying to catch a little nap, thinking the worst was over when in comes the doctor followed by like seven medical students.
"Hi Mrs. Lambert", he says. "As you know this is a teaching hospital and these are our medical students. Would you mind if they all practiced checking your cervix"?
Well, at this point I was absolutely blissed out on narcotics and an epidural and like, every other person in the hospital had seen my snapper anyway, so hey, why not. Join the party. Seriously, I think even the janitor gotta peek.
Somewhere around the middle of the night it was time to push. I pushed a lot. Unfortunately it didn't really do anything and the residual pain drugs in my system caused me to puke after each push. The push/puke cycle went on for a long time apparently. To me it felt like maybe I'd been pushing for half an hour. My husband tells me it was much, much longer than that. Poor Alex just couldn't get his head out of my super tight vagina. (Yeah you heard me).
After some time of pushing and puking I started to get a really bad pain in my hip. I have no idea why. I think Alex's head my have been squishing a nerve somewhere. The epidural did nothing to ease this new pain and it was excruciating. Now I was freaking out. After what felt like two hours, but was probably twenty minutes the doctors decided to perform a c-section. The entire way to the OR I was wailing in pain. My poor husband must have been freaking out, but I was a little too busy to pay him much attention. In the OR a new anesthesiologist gave me a spinal and all the pain just vanished. It was glorious.
The doctors decided they wanted me to try and push one more time before they started. I pushed. Hard. And then I puked all over about a hundred thousand dollars worth of sophisticated medical equipment and they gave up.
I had a very interesting reaction to the spinal. It turned me into an absolute blabber mouth. The minute I was pain free I could not shut up. I was a jabbering fool. I started off profusely apologizing for barfing all over their nice operating room, then I chatted up the anesthesiologist and the nurse and my husband who looked super cute in his hospital scrubs, and sometime during all that chattering I noticed a funny smell.
Sniff, sniff. "Does anyone smell that"?
The doctor and the nurse, who were on either side of me, looked at me.
Sniff, sniff. "Smells like something's burning".
I was worried that maybe my barf had caused a piece of equipment to short out and we were gonna have a fire in the operating room.
The doctor and nurse looked at each other, and then back at me, and I could tell they were struggling with what to say. They looked extremely uncomfortable with my question. Then it hit me. I was so numb, I hadn't realized they had begun the actual operation. The smell was actually my burning flesh as they cauterized the incision they had just made. Oopsies!
"Ohhhhhh", I said. "It's me that's burning! Oh. Sorry. Continue". And they did.
5 minutes and a bunch of yanking later and they held up the most adorable little baby I had ever seen. I just soaked him in. He was little and pink and slimy and I said, "Huh. So that's what you look like".
And then he was ours. You think you're ready to be a mom. You've done all the classes, you've decorated the room and baby proofed the house and you've got six years worth of baby clothes in the closet, but when they hand you your actual, real, live, squiggly, squishy baby, you realize just how unprepared you are. Seems we figured it out though. Our boy has changed so much in 14 years. He's got muscles and hair and his voice, oh my God his voice is so low! But other things never change. He still wants to be picked up, (in the car that is). He still loves footsie pajamas and he still loves bubble baths. And most importantly, he still loves his mommy.
Happy Birthday Alex!!
Peace out!
Michy
No comments:
Post a Comment