Milo's Birth Story - Part Two
By morning, around 7 or 8 am, the contractions got a bit closer together - somewhere around 3 minutes apart - and the pain increased significantly. At this point I kept thinking about the scene in Signs, the crap M. Night Shyamlan film with Joaquin Phoenix and Mel Gibson where Mel Gibson's wife gets pinned to a tree by a truck and is basically cut in half. That was what the pain was like. Except, truth be told, I wasn't really thinking about the scene in Signs. I was thinking about a parody of the scene in Scream 3, which we'd watched the night before, in which Charlie Sheen makes idiotic sexual gestures while a police officer attempts to tell him that his wife has been pinned to a tree by a truck (and he wants to know if she'll still be able to have sex).
"Why would you think of the parody of the scene instead of the actual scene?" Steven asked a few nights later when I told him I kept replaying that stupid Scream 3 scene in my head, and explained that the pain of my contractions had seemed, while I was in labor, to be on par with that of the pain of being cut in half by a truck.
Why? Because one is not a rational, thinking person in labor. One is a hurt, lowing animal. One is reduced to nothing but a uterus and a cervix and a few functioning brain cells. Some cells of which were thinking about traffic. I didn't want to be suffering through contractions while stuck in traffic on the Brooklyn Bridge. And so, even though at 9am we called the OB and finally spoke to my doctor who, upon hearing me go through a contraction, said she thought it was time we came back to the hospital, I insisted that we wait until 10am. To avoid rush hour.
And so at 10am we packed the food bag and the clothing bag and the pillow bag and my huge, moaning self back into a cab and off we went back to the hospital. So here's a weird thing about labor. In between contractions you are a totally normal, pain-free person. So you are writhing in pain one minute, and the next minute you're arguing with your husband and the cab driver about the best route to the hospital.
The cab driver, seeing rather quickly that I was in the throes of full on active labor, did not do what I feared he might and throw us out of the cab. Rather, he got excited.
"Do you want I go extra fast?" he asked in an accent that at some other point in time i might have tried to place but at that point could have cared less about.
Sure, we said. Go extra fast. He then proceeded to drive straight through two red lights.
"Not that fast!" Steven and I both shouted.
"There's the police," he said. "You want I try to get pulled over?"
Steven and I looked at each other and realized that he was hoping to get us a police escort to the hospital. Steven tried to explain that we weren't in that much of a hurry. Yes, I was in labor but it's not like the baby was about to be born in the car.
This time around things at the hospital went much faster. I was instantly whisked off to the triage room and checked. The OB on duty announced that I was dilated to 5 centimeters, at which point I was so happy I burst into tears, which seemed to freak her out a bit.
Someone asked if I wanted pain relief and there was not for one second a doubt in my mind as to what the answer was. I'd said, pre-labor, that I would play it by ear. I'd go as far as I could without medication, but I wasn't going to torture myself. And in my mind, 5 cm was the magic number. I'd just wanted to get to 5. And now, 28 hours into my labor, I'd made it and sweet relief would be mine, damn it.
Things happened quickly after that. A nurse made a failed attempt to get an IV started in my left arm, then successfully got one into my right arm. Cell phones rang. The anesthesiologist showed up and had me sign some papers and more cell phones rang and then I was making a C shape with my back so they could get the needle in and it was just like on Birth Day on Lifetime except this time it was me and not some random woman in Philadelphia and then the pain of the contractions started to fade but only on the left side and then they were adjusting the epidural and then all was quiet and I was trying to sleep.
And then my contractions slowed down. A few hours later someone came in to check my cervix and I was still at 5cm. My OB arrived and broke my water and we waited. And nothing changed. At which point it was time for Pitocin. I've seen this Birth Day episode before, I kept thinking. The one where the woman's labor completely stalls out and they have to give her a C-section. I don't want a C-section. Start, labor, start!
At 5pm my OB came in and checked me again. Miraculously, the Pitcoin had done the trick. I was at 9cm, and the OB thought it was time for me to start pushing. She took one of my legs and Steven took the other and they counted to ten as I pushed. I thought about how much I wanted this whole ordeal to be over and how unfair it would be if after 36 hours of labor it took me two hours to push the baby out and how I just wanted him out already for God's sake, and I pushed as hard as I could. Fifteen minutes later, Milo was born.
The OB plopped him up, hot and slimy, onto my now deflated belly and as I looked at him my first thought was, omigod, he has my father's nose. My second thought was that he didn't look anything like I'd been imagining he would. I'd thought he'd be familiar in some way, that because he'd been growing inside me for 9 months I would instantly recognize him. But I didn't. He was totally his own person, someone I couldn't possibly have anticipated or imagined. I also thought that I'd be overcome with emotion, that I'd cry or laugh or, I don't know, emote in some way. But mostly I just felt exhausted. Exhausted and scared with a baby lying on me.
"Why would you think of the parody of the scene instead of the actual scene?" Steven asked a few nights later when I told him I kept replaying that stupid Scream 3 scene in my head, and explained that the pain of my contractions had seemed, while I was in labor, to be on par with that of the pain of being cut in half by a truck.
Why? Because one is not a rational, thinking person in labor. One is a hurt, lowing animal. One is reduced to nothing but a uterus and a cervix and a few functioning brain cells. Some cells of which were thinking about traffic. I didn't want to be suffering through contractions while stuck in traffic on the Brooklyn Bridge. And so, even though at 9am we called the OB and finally spoke to my doctor who, upon hearing me go through a contraction, said she thought it was time we came back to the hospital, I insisted that we wait until 10am. To avoid rush hour.
And so at 10am we packed the food bag and the clothing bag and the pillow bag and my huge, moaning self back into a cab and off we went back to the hospital. So here's a weird thing about labor. In between contractions you are a totally normal, pain-free person. So you are writhing in pain one minute, and the next minute you're arguing with your husband and the cab driver about the best route to the hospital.
The cab driver, seeing rather quickly that I was in the throes of full on active labor, did not do what I feared he might and throw us out of the cab. Rather, he got excited.
"Do you want I go extra fast?" he asked in an accent that at some other point in time i might have tried to place but at that point could have cared less about.
Sure, we said. Go extra fast. He then proceeded to drive straight through two red lights.
"Not that fast!" Steven and I both shouted.
"There's the police," he said. "You want I try to get pulled over?"
Steven and I looked at each other and realized that he was hoping to get us a police escort to the hospital. Steven tried to explain that we weren't in that much of a hurry. Yes, I was in labor but it's not like the baby was about to be born in the car.
This time around things at the hospital went much faster. I was instantly whisked off to the triage room and checked. The OB on duty announced that I was dilated to 5 centimeters, at which point I was so happy I burst into tears, which seemed to freak her out a bit.
Someone asked if I wanted pain relief and there was not for one second a doubt in my mind as to what the answer was. I'd said, pre-labor, that I would play it by ear. I'd go as far as I could without medication, but I wasn't going to torture myself. And in my mind, 5 cm was the magic number. I'd just wanted to get to 5. And now, 28 hours into my labor, I'd made it and sweet relief would be mine, damn it.
Things happened quickly after that. A nurse made a failed attempt to get an IV started in my left arm, then successfully got one into my right arm. Cell phones rang. The anesthesiologist showed up and had me sign some papers and more cell phones rang and then I was making a C shape with my back so they could get the needle in and it was just like on Birth Day on Lifetime except this time it was me and not some random woman in Philadelphia and then the pain of the contractions started to fade but only on the left side and then they were adjusting the epidural and then all was quiet and I was trying to sleep.
And then my contractions slowed down. A few hours later someone came in to check my cervix and I was still at 5cm. My OB arrived and broke my water and we waited. And nothing changed. At which point it was time for Pitocin. I've seen this Birth Day episode before, I kept thinking. The one where the woman's labor completely stalls out and they have to give her a C-section. I don't want a C-section. Start, labor, start!
At 5pm my OB came in and checked me again. Miraculously, the Pitcoin had done the trick. I was at 9cm, and the OB thought it was time for me to start pushing. She took one of my legs and Steven took the other and they counted to ten as I pushed. I thought about how much I wanted this whole ordeal to be over and how unfair it would be if after 36 hours of labor it took me two hours to push the baby out and how I just wanted him out already for God's sake, and I pushed as hard as I could. Fifteen minutes later, Milo was born.
The OB plopped him up, hot and slimy, onto my now deflated belly and as I looked at him my first thought was, omigod, he has my father's nose. My second thought was that he didn't look anything like I'd been imagining he would. I'd thought he'd be familiar in some way, that because he'd been growing inside me for 9 months I would instantly recognize him. But I didn't. He was totally his own person, someone I couldn't possibly have anticipated or imagined. I also thought that I'd be overcome with emotion, that I'd cry or laugh or, I don't know, emote in some way. But mostly I just felt exhausted. Exhausted and scared with a baby lying on me.
posted by Hana @ 9:45 PM
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