Sonia's birth story
Wednesday night, the evening before my scheduled c-section, I went to bed "early" because my cold had really started worsening and I knew that it was going to be no picnic to deal with a bad stuffy nose, sneezing, tickles in my throat and general foggy head when I was also dealing with recovery from surgery. We did our usual bedtime routine with Felix, though I explained during story time that tomorrow was going to be different because I had to go to the hospital and the doctor was going to take the baby out of my tummy so he'd finally get to meet his sister. He understood, I think, that things were going to be strange and new over the next few days and I do think there was some anticipation there as well - as much as a 2 and a half year old could come up with for something unknown like this, anyway.
By now, Floyd was coming down with the same cold as well - so early bedtime was on the agenda for both of us. In the end though, neither of us got much sleep that night - I think Floyd got about 45 minutes, and I probably got less than half an hour the whole night. My cold had really gotten very bothersome, but there was very little that I could do to deal with the symptoms with all the restrictions I had. I couldn't take Sudafed or any other medicines that would have helped with the sinus pressure, and even the nasal spray that I'd heard was generally OK to use while pregnant, the advice nurse told me that she couldn't authorize my use of it the evening before surgery. Pretty much my only options were to drink a lot of hot tea - except that I wasn't allowed anything to eat or drink, not even water, after midnight! I spent a good half of the night trying to guess whether I could cheat and say that cough drops, at least, didn't qualify as food or drink.
I did, however, take 3 steam baths - especially since realizing that trying to do a steam bath over the sink with a huge pregnant belly turns out to be nearly impossible task. By morning, the two of us must have been quite a sight, I'm sure - though I consoled myself that many women spend 24 hours in hard labor before they end up finding out that they need a c-section so assuredly things could have been much worse.
At about 5:15 in the morning, my mother, Floyd and I all got into the car and left the house in the rainy dark. Our neighbor, Brian, was just leaving for work as well, and he was just about the only other person out on the road until we got onto the freeway. I suspect he guessed where we would be heading at that hour.
We left Felix, still asleep, at home with Bill and Jean, who planned to take him to school and then pick him up in the afternoon to come join us once they got news that all was going well.
We arrived at the hospital and on our way towards the elevators that head towards the maternity ward, two nurses getting into a service elevator spotted our group and asked if we were arriving for a scheduled c-section. When we told them yes, they told us they'd give us a lift using a short cut.
The nurses at the front desk greeted us and took us to a nice room way at the end of the hall, right next to one of the little "nourishment" rooms with all the free teas, coffees, juices, and assorted little snacks. The room is really nice - not as enormous as the one they had me in last time, but luxurious nonetheless. In addition to a fancy birthing bed, which splits in half in the center and can be used for normal labor, it has a little couch and a folded up bed for guests, a baby bassinet (in most cases, the baby never leaves the room from the mother from the moment of delivery, unless the mother wants to send it to the nursery to get some rest) and in general has the feel of a high-tech Red Lion Inn suite more than a small, sterile and impersonal hospital room. I actually remembered that the last time I was here, I had a surgical bed, not a labor bed, and recalled that they were slightly more comfortable. Since I wasn't going to be dealing with normal labor, I requested a surgical bed if one was available for my room instead, which they did, in fact, deliver for me.
I was nervous as hell by this time, Floyd seemed excited and perhaps a little nervous too, or at least protective of me, and my mom was just plain giddy and bouncy and generally high on anticipation.
The nurse came in and attached me to a baby monitor and calmly went through some routine paperwork and questions with me - none of the scary end-of-life stuff that had so freaked me out last time around was brought up, other than a cursory reference to who would make decisions should the "unlikely event" arise. Still, my memories of the last time I delivered were now coming flooding back to me.
A nurse explained that she needed to get me hooked up to an IV so that they could start getting me hydrated before the surgery, and while she prepared her needle for that, a second nurse came in with her own needles to draw some blood work. The IV gal plunged her needle into my right arm and then proceeded to dig for gold for a while before giving up on finding the vein in that arm. The blood work sample was much easier, but now another set of nurses came in to try to hook me up to the IV. This time, they selected a spot on the back of my left hand and tried a couple of times unsuccessfully to find a vein that wouldn't "blow out" on them. By this time, I was pretty worked up and unhappy - that first IV attempt in my right arm had hurt bad enough and now they were repeating the process over and over. At this point, it was fast approaching time for the scheduled surgery and the nurses all agreed that they didn't have time to mess with this, especially given how my veins kept collapsing, and needed to get me hydrated as quickly as possible, so they selected the biggest needle they had (an 18) and plunged it into the back of my right hand. I don't think I even knew that the needle was that big, though it certainly hurt a lot. When the nurse on shift a few days later was taking the thing out of my hand her eyes simply boggled when she saw the size of it, saying that she hadn't seen one that big used for this purpose in her 5 years of nursing at this hospital.
And if being stuck with a giant stick was painful, it was followed by the strong burning and ice-needle sensation of having cold cold IV fluids pumped into my arm. By this time I was crying, because it just hurt too much to "act brave" and the nurses kept telling me with much sympathy that this IV thing was so torturous that the spinal which I had been repeatedly saying I was so scared of will probably be a breeze after this. They had needed to get a large amount of fluids into me fast, and chose the largest pipe they had to finally do it. I was walking to the operating room less than 5 minutes after the whole ordeal.
And through all of this, I kept remembering how the last time I went through this with Felix, the IV was the least difficult part of everything I had gone through, so as you can imagine, by this time I was completely worked up.
Next, they had me walk over to the Operating Room and my mom and Floyd had to go sit in the hallway while they prepped me for the spinal. Floyd would be allowed to join me only after the spinal had been put in place and I was all ready for surgery. It was weird walking myself into the operating room - my doctor kept saying things like "you remember this from last time around" and I kept repeating that last time around I wasn't in any state to walk and things had been quite different!
My teeth were chattering horribly and I was feeling extremely cold and tense - my whole right arm stung. The anesthesiologists were telling me that this was mostly due to me having a massive adrenalin rush as well as a reaction to the IV. One nurse promised she'd place a warm pack on my arm which should help once they got me all settled.
And then, we stepped into the room. There were people everywhere - several nurses were lining up sharp instruments on a table, another was setting up a big elaborate machine at the head of the table, a couple more were by the sinks, and I think there were two over by the table where they clean the baby. Two anesthesiologists came up to me and helped me onto the table in the middle of the room. I was asked to sit on the table, with my feet over the edge, and the gal who had plunged in the giant IV needle now stood in front of me and held me by the shoulders. My teeth were still chattering
and I was totally obsessed with the fear that my shaking would cause me to move when they stuck the needle in my back - I had read in several places that moving during this part was the more dangerous thing during a spinal or epidural procedure. Everyone kept assuring me that the teeth chattering movement was "too minor" to cause problems.
Then someone started rubbing my back with something cold to prep the area where the needle was to go in. I had been told something about how "if you feel the needle go left let me know and I'll move it more to the right and vice versa" but I didn't understand what she meant by that - and now I started being nervous that there was something I was supposed to do that I might mess up on. The gal in front of me told me that first they were going to numb the area and then I would need to lean forward into her, slump down and relax my shoulders, and then arch my back like a cat into the needle. I felt something of a pin prick in my spine and started yelling over my fear: it's going left it's going left!!! because I felt something like a hot spreading liquid sensation pointing into and leftwards from the point where the needle went in...and I heard someone say it was fine. A few seconds later, it felt like another prick (though honestly I have no idea at all exactly what was going on) and this time the warm sensation moved right. Again I called out that it was "going right" and they told me everything was fine and now I needed to arch into the needle. I was so frightened at this point that fear was my biggest problem. I just kept anticipating the "worse" parts that surely would follow.
It hurt a little when the needle went in - like a bee sting, but nothing at all like the IV and the pain didn't last anywhere near as long either. It was hard to follow instructions to move into the needle because that's just so counterintuitive to your body to push into something that hurts a little. I kept repeating "hold on to me tighter - I'm afraid I will fall off the table" and the woman in front of me kept assuring me she had a good hold on me. Someone told me my feet would start feeling warm and I continued in my panic mode: "I can only feel the warmth in one foot! Oh wait...now I feel it in another one! But wait! I still feel everything!!" They all assured me everything I was feeling was normal...and I was still waiting for the big bad spinal pain that I had heard so much about.
"You mean....that's it?!!!" I asked in disbelief, when I realized we were past the needlework.
They told me to lay on the table while I still could and I did - my feet and lower half started feeling tingly and warm like dead weights - a very odd sensation because it didn't hurt but it wasn't exactly numb either. I could still feel everything when they touched me but it was as though the edge was taken off. Every now and again I'd worry that I could still feel everything because there would be pockets that felt numbish and others that felt completely normal, but they assured me once again that it took about 8 minutes for it all to take effect.
One nurse asked if I would remember to keep my arms on the arm-rests, which stuck out at 90 degree angles from the table, and I told her I wasn't sure and asked her to please tie my arm to the arm rest at least enough to remind me. She tied it loosely, so I wasn't really constrained, (the bandage would tear anyway if I really pulled, but the point was to remind without truly strapping me down) - given how panicky I was feeling about the whole thing I found this very comforting. She left my other arm alone, because I was holding a tissue for my nose and also she had placed a warm pack across the arm and IV.
She started to test the effects of the spinal. This is where things went from scary to just plain weird and surreal. I could still feel it whenever my lower body was touched... evidently the one thing I didn't feel was pain. So she'd rub a cold wet tissue on my shoulder and ask, "you feel the cold?", which I did...then she'd rub it on my belly and I could feel that she was rubbing on me, but it wasn't cold at all. She'd continue to do this to test how high up the threshold had gotten. Then, she repeated the test with a sharp edged wooden stick. I felt the sharpness on my shoulder, but while I felt that she touched me with it on my belly I couldn't feel any of the "edge" sensations at all.
They had warned me that it starts to move up to the chest and that hopefully it would stop at the lower end of my chest so it becomes noticeable but not difficult - yet being warned and feeling it were still two separate events for me and it was just a really bizarre. Occasionally, I'd worry that with my cold stuffing up my nose I'd be hyperventilating from this concern of added breathing difficulty, but the nurses were really good about reminding me to take it easy and doing what they could to keep me comfortable.
At this point, the spinal appeared to be working, and a second doctor came into my view and introduced herself as the working partner with Doctor Lewis. At about this time, they brought in Floyd as well. I later learned that the entire spinal process had taken about 25 minutes, and that both Floyd and my mother had been very nervously and quietly awaiting news down the hall during that time. My mother later said that for her it was a terribly long 25 minutes.
Floyd came in and sat somewhere back by my head and I had just been saying that I didn't want to see them cutting me open when a giant sheet was pulled up to cover my view of what was going on beneath my chest. At this point, there was no pain and it was mostly just a really bizarre sensation to feel them moving stuff around, poking and prodding, pushing and pulling, as they worked their way through the layers, without my feeling them actually cutting anything. It started to feel especially weird when I started feeling what felt like my organs being pushed around...and the nurses would assure me that they had to push some layers apart so yes, for example, it was probably something bumping up against my lungs as they worked their way into the uterus that I was feeling. Floyd kept a firm grip on my hand and was asking me "Are you OK?" and all I could tell him was just that it was...well...really weird.
And then I felt the doctors fingers digging around in places where you just really don't ever expect to feel fingers touching. No pain at all, but man that was bizarre. I felt some tugging and pressure as they wrapped their fingers around the baby, and then they told me to breathe out because they were going to pull her out. *insert twilight zone music here*
"There's the head crowning!" called out Doctor Lewis, and I saw Floyd peek over the sheet with curiosity.
And then I breathed out heavily and felt an enormous tugging sensation, like all of a sudden I was a giant latex glove with a small slit cut in one end, and something big was being tugged out and slurped through the little hole. I was still trying to decide whether this sensation was one that was going to make me revert to feeling fear again when I heard the SCHLOOP of the baby as she spilled out, followed within a second by a newborn baby wailing.
I had been so wrapped up with my fears and anticipations about the actual act of delivering this baby that I hadn't even had time to sort out my feelings about actually getting to meet my baby for the first time - hearing that baby cry as the doctor announced "It's a girl!" parted the clouds of haze for me and I was suddenly completely overwhelmed with joy and started bawling - all my other worries completely dropped at my sides. I heard the baby get passed from the doctor who had been sitting at my lower right to a nurse. They walked the baby across to my left side so that I could see her and told me they were going to wash her up so that I could hold her - I had earlier requested that they hold off from giving her the vitamin jelly in her eyes for a bit so that I could see her properly first.
Through my tears of joy, I could see a beautiful squirming little pink girl - her skin completely covered in white vernix caseosa which looked like she was covered in a creamy body-lotion. Two nurses placed her on a little changing table right in my line of sight and when I recovered enough to speak I said out loud to Floyd "Look honey! She has a butt! And pudgy little cheekies!!" (Felix has been so tiny there was no baby fat on him at all when he was born)
And she was a feisty one too! She had her hands shoved into her mouth even as they carried her over to the washing table. The nurses were trying to get her diaper on so that they could hand her to me but she was wiggling and squirming so much they had a hard time doing so. We're probably in for it with her, because one of the nurses giggled as they fought with her, "My goodness she's a strong one!"
Meanwhile, the doctors continued to work on me, moving more stuff around, removing placenta and cleaning out my insides and then they started the process of stitching me back up. The nurses brought me my little bundle and laid her on the table right by my head so that Floyd and I could admire her.
The stitching up part, to me, seemed to take the longest - I was trying very hard not to think about what they were doing as they tugged and pulled and pushed my guts around, trying to focus instead on the baby in front of me. My blood pressure was going up and down during this process and the anesthesiologist fiddled with buttons and levers to compensate for the shifting balances. Whenever my blood pressure dropped, I'd start to feel tired and out of it, as though I was going to pass out, which in turn made me start thinking too much about breathing properly and put me in line for hyperventilating. Whenever this started to happen, Floyd would squeeze my hand and I'd look over to look at Sonia to try to keep my mind off of what was going on behind the curtain.
The doctors were having a conversation about some sort of pants - though I didn't catch the details. I could see the actual surgery reflected in the edges of the overhead lamp, and the most surreal moment of all was when they started to put the staples in, and I realized that it really did sound like an office stapler when they punched those things in.
And after what seemed like ages, they finally announced that they were done. The sheet was pulled down and the nurses lifted me over to the stretcher. Another surreal moment realizing how totally helpless I was in terms of feeling or moving my lower body, and a brief moment wondering if the feeling would ever return, and then they placed Sonia by my side and Floyd walked with me back from the operating room. My mom joined us in the hallway and we all came back to the room together.
This photograph was taken as they wheeled me out of the OR.
During the surgery, one of the nurses had gone out to tell my mother when the baby was born, and she then called Bill and Jean with the news. Bill was assigned the task of telling the world via my journal. Floyd phoned home after we were all wheeled out to give a more detailed report, and a few hours later Bill and Jean brought Felix to the hospital to meet his new sister for the first time. Felix's sweet reactions and curiosity towards Sonia were again so very touching and wonderful. I will always have beautiful memories of the family coming together like this.
The next couple of days were much easier than anything I went through last time. There was a lot less bleeding than I remembered - evidently the magnesium they had pumped into my system to prevent seizures also causes a lot of side effects, heavy bleeding and terrible pain when they massage your uterus muscles to cause contractions being some of them. While I wouldn't say that everything was a piece of cake, it certainly didn't even approach the levels of discomfort I experienced last time around. And in the end, the nurses ended up actually being right, something which I thought they were just saying to calm me down, that indeed, the most difficult part of this experience was going to be the IV. I hurt a little, but the itching resulting from some pain-killer in the spinal wearing off was probably the biggest irritant. But seeing Sonia so quickly during this ordeal, and having her in my arms - I can suddenly understand how anyone could say childbirth can be an incredibly wonderful experience. There was no trauma at all, other than possibly working through some of the trauma my last experience had left in me, and she's so unbelievably beautiful, so perfect.. and the day they discharged me from the hospital, wheeling me out with my new baby in my arms... what a fantastically triumphant moment that was - we were finally going home.
Links:
Photo slideshow of our homecoming with Sonia. Felix's birth story
By now, Floyd was coming down with the same cold as well - so early bedtime was on the agenda for both of us. In the end though, neither of us got much sleep that night - I think Floyd got about 45 minutes, and I probably got less than half an hour the whole night. My cold had really gotten very bothersome, but there was very little that I could do to deal with the symptoms with all the restrictions I had. I couldn't take Sudafed or any other medicines that would have helped with the sinus pressure, and even the nasal spray that I'd heard was generally OK to use while pregnant, the advice nurse told me that she couldn't authorize my use of it the evening before surgery. Pretty much my only options were to drink a lot of hot tea - except that I wasn't allowed anything to eat or drink, not even water, after midnight! I spent a good half of the night trying to guess whether I could cheat and say that cough drops, at least, didn't qualify as food or drink.
I did, however, take 3 steam baths - especially since realizing that trying to do a steam bath over the sink with a huge pregnant belly turns out to be nearly impossible task. By morning, the two of us must have been quite a sight, I'm sure - though I consoled myself that many women spend 24 hours in hard labor before they end up finding out that they need a c-section so assuredly things could have been much worse.
At about 5:15 in the morning, my mother, Floyd and I all got into the car and left the house in the rainy dark. Our neighbor, Brian, was just leaving for work as well, and he was just about the only other person out on the road until we got onto the freeway. I suspect he guessed where we would be heading at that hour.
We left Felix, still asleep, at home with Bill and Jean, who planned to take him to school and then pick him up in the afternoon to come join us once they got news that all was going well.
We arrived at the hospital and on our way towards the elevators that head towards the maternity ward, two nurses getting into a service elevator spotted our group and asked if we were arriving for a scheduled c-section. When we told them yes, they told us they'd give us a lift using a short cut.
The nurses at the front desk greeted us and took us to a nice room way at the end of the hall, right next to one of the little "nourishment" rooms with all the free teas, coffees, juices, and assorted little snacks. The room is really nice - not as enormous as the one they had me in last time, but luxurious nonetheless. In addition to a fancy birthing bed, which splits in half in the center and can be used for normal labor, it has a little couch and a folded up bed for guests, a baby bassinet (in most cases, the baby never leaves the room from the mother from the moment of delivery, unless the mother wants to send it to the nursery to get some rest) and in general has the feel of a high-tech Red Lion Inn suite more than a small, sterile and impersonal hospital room. I actually remembered that the last time I was here, I had a surgical bed, not a labor bed, and recalled that they were slightly more comfortable. Since I wasn't going to be dealing with normal labor, I requested a surgical bed if one was available for my room instead, which they did, in fact, deliver for me.
I was nervous as hell by this time, Floyd seemed excited and perhaps a little nervous too, or at least protective of me, and my mom was just plain giddy and bouncy and generally high on anticipation.
The nurse came in and attached me to a baby monitor and calmly went through some routine paperwork and questions with me - none of the scary end-of-life stuff that had so freaked me out last time around was brought up, other than a cursory reference to who would make decisions should the "unlikely event" arise. Still, my memories of the last time I delivered were now coming flooding back to me.
A nurse explained that she needed to get me hooked up to an IV so that they could start getting me hydrated before the surgery, and while she prepared her needle for that, a second nurse came in with her own needles to draw some blood work. The IV gal plunged her needle into my right arm and then proceeded to dig for gold for a while before giving up on finding the vein in that arm. The blood work sample was much easier, but now another set of nurses came in to try to hook me up to the IV. This time, they selected a spot on the back of my left hand and tried a couple of times unsuccessfully to find a vein that wouldn't "blow out" on them. By this time, I was pretty worked up and unhappy - that first IV attempt in my right arm had hurt bad enough and now they were repeating the process over and over. At this point, it was fast approaching time for the scheduled surgery and the nurses all agreed that they didn't have time to mess with this, especially given how my veins kept collapsing, and needed to get me hydrated as quickly as possible, so they selected the biggest needle they had (an 18) and plunged it into the back of my right hand. I don't think I even knew that the needle was that big, though it certainly hurt a lot. When the nurse on shift a few days later was taking the thing out of my hand her eyes simply boggled when she saw the size of it, saying that she hadn't seen one that big used for this purpose in her 5 years of nursing at this hospital.
And if being stuck with a giant stick was painful, it was followed by the strong burning and ice-needle sensation of having cold cold IV fluids pumped into my arm. By this time I was crying, because it just hurt too much to "act brave" and the nurses kept telling me with much sympathy that this IV thing was so torturous that the spinal which I had been repeatedly saying I was so scared of will probably be a breeze after this. They had needed to get a large amount of fluids into me fast, and chose the largest pipe they had to finally do it. I was walking to the operating room less than 5 minutes after the whole ordeal.
And through all of this, I kept remembering how the last time I went through this with Felix, the IV was the least difficult part of everything I had gone through, so as you can imagine, by this time I was completely worked up.
Next, they had me walk over to the Operating Room and my mom and Floyd had to go sit in the hallway while they prepped me for the spinal. Floyd would be allowed to join me only after the spinal had been put in place and I was all ready for surgery. It was weird walking myself into the operating room - my doctor kept saying things like "you remember this from last time around" and I kept repeating that last time around I wasn't in any state to walk and things had been quite different!
My teeth were chattering horribly and I was feeling extremely cold and tense - my whole right arm stung. The anesthesiologists were telling me that this was mostly due to me having a massive adrenalin rush as well as a reaction to the IV. One nurse promised she'd place a warm pack on my arm which should help once they got me all settled.
And then, we stepped into the room. There were people everywhere - several nurses were lining up sharp instruments on a table, another was setting up a big elaborate machine at the head of the table, a couple more were by the sinks, and I think there were two over by the table where they clean the baby. Two anesthesiologists came up to me and helped me onto the table in the middle of the room. I was asked to sit on the table, with my feet over the edge, and the gal who had plunged in the giant IV needle now stood in front of me and held me by the shoulders. My teeth were still chattering
and I was totally obsessed with the fear that my shaking would cause me to move when they stuck the needle in my back - I had read in several places that moving during this part was the more dangerous thing during a spinal or epidural procedure. Everyone kept assuring me that the teeth chattering movement was "too minor" to cause problems.
Then someone started rubbing my back with something cold to prep the area where the needle was to go in. I had been told something about how "if you feel the needle go left let me know and I'll move it more to the right and vice versa" but I didn't understand what she meant by that - and now I started being nervous that there was something I was supposed to do that I might mess up on. The gal in front of me told me that first they were going to numb the area and then I would need to lean forward into her, slump down and relax my shoulders, and then arch my back like a cat into the needle. I felt something of a pin prick in my spine and started yelling over my fear: it's going left it's going left!!! because I felt something like a hot spreading liquid sensation pointing into and leftwards from the point where the needle went in...and I heard someone say it was fine. A few seconds later, it felt like another prick (though honestly I have no idea at all exactly what was going on) and this time the warm sensation moved right. Again I called out that it was "going right" and they told me everything was fine and now I needed to arch into the needle. I was so frightened at this point that fear was my biggest problem. I just kept anticipating the "worse" parts that surely would follow.
It hurt a little when the needle went in - like a bee sting, but nothing at all like the IV and the pain didn't last anywhere near as long either. It was hard to follow instructions to move into the needle because that's just so counterintuitive to your body to push into something that hurts a little. I kept repeating "hold on to me tighter - I'm afraid I will fall off the table" and the woman in front of me kept assuring me she had a good hold on me. Someone told me my feet would start feeling warm and I continued in my panic mode: "I can only feel the warmth in one foot! Oh wait...now I feel it in another one! But wait! I still feel everything!!" They all assured me everything I was feeling was normal...and I was still waiting for the big bad spinal pain that I had heard so much about.
"You mean....that's it?!!!" I asked in disbelief, when I realized we were past the needlework.
They told me to lay on the table while I still could and I did - my feet and lower half started feeling tingly and warm like dead weights - a very odd sensation because it didn't hurt but it wasn't exactly numb either. I could still feel everything when they touched me but it was as though the edge was taken off. Every now and again I'd worry that I could still feel everything because there would be pockets that felt numbish and others that felt completely normal, but they assured me once again that it took about 8 minutes for it all to take effect.
One nurse asked if I would remember to keep my arms on the arm-rests, which stuck out at 90 degree angles from the table, and I told her I wasn't sure and asked her to please tie my arm to the arm rest at least enough to remind me. She tied it loosely, so I wasn't really constrained, (the bandage would tear anyway if I really pulled, but the point was to remind without truly strapping me down) - given how panicky I was feeling about the whole thing I found this very comforting. She left my other arm alone, because I was holding a tissue for my nose and also she had placed a warm pack across the arm and IV.
She started to test the effects of the spinal. This is where things went from scary to just plain weird and surreal. I could still feel it whenever my lower body was touched... evidently the one thing I didn't feel was pain. So she'd rub a cold wet tissue on my shoulder and ask, "you feel the cold?", which I did...then she'd rub it on my belly and I could feel that she was rubbing on me, but it wasn't cold at all. She'd continue to do this to test how high up the threshold had gotten. Then, she repeated the test with a sharp edged wooden stick. I felt the sharpness on my shoulder, but while I felt that she touched me with it on my belly I couldn't feel any of the "edge" sensations at all.
They had warned me that it starts to move up to the chest and that hopefully it would stop at the lower end of my chest so it becomes noticeable but not difficult - yet being warned and feeling it were still two separate events for me and it was just a really bizarre. Occasionally, I'd worry that with my cold stuffing up my nose I'd be hyperventilating from this concern of added breathing difficulty, but the nurses were really good about reminding me to take it easy and doing what they could to keep me comfortable.
At this point, the spinal appeared to be working, and a second doctor came into my view and introduced herself as the working partner with Doctor Lewis. At about this time, they brought in Floyd as well. I later learned that the entire spinal process had taken about 25 minutes, and that both Floyd and my mother had been very nervously and quietly awaiting news down the hall during that time. My mother later said that for her it was a terribly long 25 minutes.
Floyd came in and sat somewhere back by my head and I had just been saying that I didn't want to see them cutting me open when a giant sheet was pulled up to cover my view of what was going on beneath my chest. At this point, there was no pain and it was mostly just a really bizarre sensation to feel them moving stuff around, poking and prodding, pushing and pulling, as they worked their way through the layers, without my feeling them actually cutting anything. It started to feel especially weird when I started feeling what felt like my organs being pushed around...and the nurses would assure me that they had to push some layers apart so yes, for example, it was probably something bumping up against my lungs as they worked their way into the uterus that I was feeling. Floyd kept a firm grip on my hand and was asking me "Are you OK?" and all I could tell him was just that it was...well...really weird.
And then I felt the doctors fingers digging around in places where you just really don't ever expect to feel fingers touching. No pain at all, but man that was bizarre. I felt some tugging and pressure as they wrapped their fingers around the baby, and then they told me to breathe out because they were going to pull her out. *insert twilight zone music here*
"There's the head crowning!" called out Doctor Lewis, and I saw Floyd peek over the sheet with curiosity.
And then I breathed out heavily and felt an enormous tugging sensation, like all of a sudden I was a giant latex glove with a small slit cut in one end, and something big was being tugged out and slurped through the little hole. I was still trying to decide whether this sensation was one that was going to make me revert to feeling fear again when I heard the SCHLOOP of the baby as she spilled out, followed within a second by a newborn baby wailing.
I had been so wrapped up with my fears and anticipations about the actual act of delivering this baby that I hadn't even had time to sort out my feelings about actually getting to meet my baby for the first time - hearing that baby cry as the doctor announced "It's a girl!" parted the clouds of haze for me and I was suddenly completely overwhelmed with joy and started bawling - all my other worries completely dropped at my sides. I heard the baby get passed from the doctor who had been sitting at my lower right to a nurse. They walked the baby across to my left side so that I could see her and told me they were going to wash her up so that I could hold her - I had earlier requested that they hold off from giving her the vitamin jelly in her eyes for a bit so that I could see her properly first.
Through my tears of joy, I could see a beautiful squirming little pink girl - her skin completely covered in white vernix caseosa which looked like she was covered in a creamy body-lotion. Two nurses placed her on a little changing table right in my line of sight and when I recovered enough to speak I said out loud to Floyd "Look honey! She has a butt! And pudgy little cheekies!!" (Felix has been so tiny there was no baby fat on him at all when he was born)
And she was a feisty one too! She had her hands shoved into her mouth even as they carried her over to the washing table. The nurses were trying to get her diaper on so that they could hand her to me but she was wiggling and squirming so much they had a hard time doing so. We're probably in for it with her, because one of the nurses giggled as they fought with her, "My goodness she's a strong one!"
Meanwhile, the doctors continued to work on me, moving more stuff around, removing placenta and cleaning out my insides and then they started the process of stitching me back up. The nurses brought me my little bundle and laid her on the table right by my head so that Floyd and I could admire her.
The stitching up part, to me, seemed to take the longest - I was trying very hard not to think about what they were doing as they tugged and pulled and pushed my guts around, trying to focus instead on the baby in front of me. My blood pressure was going up and down during this process and the anesthesiologist fiddled with buttons and levers to compensate for the shifting balances. Whenever my blood pressure dropped, I'd start to feel tired and out of it, as though I was going to pass out, which in turn made me start thinking too much about breathing properly and put me in line for hyperventilating. Whenever this started to happen, Floyd would squeeze my hand and I'd look over to look at Sonia to try to keep my mind off of what was going on behind the curtain.
The doctors were having a conversation about some sort of pants - though I didn't catch the details. I could see the actual surgery reflected in the edges of the overhead lamp, and the most surreal moment of all was when they started to put the staples in, and I realized that it really did sound like an office stapler when they punched those things in.
And after what seemed like ages, they finally announced that they were done. The sheet was pulled down and the nurses lifted me over to the stretcher. Another surreal moment realizing how totally helpless I was in terms of feeling or moving my lower body, and a brief moment wondering if the feeling would ever return, and then they placed Sonia by my side and Floyd walked with me back from the operating room. My mom joined us in the hallway and we all came back to the room together.
This photograph was taken as they wheeled me out of the OR.
During the surgery, one of the nurses had gone out to tell my mother when the baby was born, and she then called Bill and Jean with the news. Bill was assigned the task of telling the world via my journal. Floyd phoned home after we were all wheeled out to give a more detailed report, and a few hours later Bill and Jean brought Felix to the hospital to meet his new sister for the first time. Felix's sweet reactions and curiosity towards Sonia were again so very touching and wonderful. I will always have beautiful memories of the family coming together like this.
The next couple of days were much easier than anything I went through last time. There was a lot less bleeding than I remembered - evidently the magnesium they had pumped into my system to prevent seizures also causes a lot of side effects, heavy bleeding and terrible pain when they massage your uterus muscles to cause contractions being some of them. While I wouldn't say that everything was a piece of cake, it certainly didn't even approach the levels of discomfort I experienced last time around. And in the end, the nurses ended up actually being right, something which I thought they were just saying to calm me down, that indeed, the most difficult part of this experience was going to be the IV. I hurt a little, but the itching resulting from some pain-killer in the spinal wearing off was probably the biggest irritant. But seeing Sonia so quickly during this ordeal, and having her in my arms - I can suddenly understand how anyone could say childbirth can be an incredibly wonderful experience. There was no trauma at all, other than possibly working through some of the trauma my last experience had left in me, and she's so unbelievably beautiful, so perfect.. and the day they discharged me from the hospital, wheeling me out with my new baby in my arms... what a fantastically triumphant moment that was - we were finally going home.
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