"The door is broken"
I'd been feeling pretty low energy for the past two weeks and actually overslept 3 hours on Thurs morning, so when I woke up a little damp and frantically running for the bathroom at 6:45am on Fri morning, I assumed that I'd overslept past my bladder's urges. Poor sleepy Jon clearly wanted to stay in bed, despite my large number of expletives, but explained how to swiffer the floor. (I did it naked to cheer him up.) Then I continued uncontrollably leaking and I noticed the toilet bowl was slightly pink and not at all yellow - had I really drunk that much water the day before? - and the Internets told me amniotic fluid smells sweet.
The on-call doctor told me to go to the hospital of course, so we putzed around trying to pull together a birth bag: with almost 2 months to my due date, I hadn't gotten around to creating a definitive list. When we got there, they checked me with a speculum, which revealed a reddish bag of water. I'd started having some periodic pains down there, which they checked on the ultrasound. Turns out the lack of fluids meant my son's head was lower, and had no cushion to keep it from banging against me, so the nice nurse said he was probably just turning his head periodically. I had a monitor to track contractions, which showed nothing. She also explained that if anyone asked to do a vaginal exam, to check how dilated I was, I should refuse and ask if my obstetrician had ordered it, because it would dilate my cervix more and we needed to keep me as undilated as possible. A NICU doctor stopped by to explain that the baby would be staying at the hospital for 4 weeks, until he would have been full-term, in or out of me. The doctor I'd spoken to from home, a more-famous partner of my obstetrician, stopped by and ordered antibiotics and steroids (to protect the baby and develop his lungs).
The triage area sounded very busy from behind our curtain, but Jon had told me childbirth is lots of time by ourselves, so I figured it was normal to wait a lot, even in not-childbirth. Eventually they took us to the Maternal-Fetal Evaluation unit, where the same ultrasound tech who originally told me about my fibroids measured the amniotic fluid remaining. I had 0.8 units, whereas 0.5 units was the minimum, and everything else looked good, so there was no reason why I couldn't stay like that. She used the analogy of a house: the building was structurally fine, but the door was broken, so they had to deal with that. Waiting outside the MFE, we started chatting with a woman who'd been there for 2 weeks, since her 25th week of pregnancy, and hoped to stay there quite a bit longer. We already had a lot to be grateful for.
They wheeled me back to the triage area, where "just a few minutes while we get your room ready" turned into over an hour, possibly two. I just sat in the wheelchair. Since we'd arrived at the hospital, I'd had periodic spasms. I'd mentioned them to the nurse in charge of triage when we first got there, but she explained that since my contraction monitor was silent, it was just the baby's head banging against me with no fluid as a barrier. In the morning, it had been a sensation I was tracking; by the time we got to the hospital room, I was visibly using what I'd learned in boymeat's pain management classes. The nurse who introduced herself when we got to the room - we'd meet over a dozen different medical professionals before the day was over - talked to us for fifteen minutes, including a conversation about pain relief, then came back and asked, "Wait, why are you here?" She'd assumed I was there because of the pain and didn't know my water had broken.
My baby shower had been scheduled for Saturday, so I'd texted my sister and SIL to let them know I'd be at the hospital and it needed to be cancelled. One of my sorority sisters, who had also done theater with me, had flown in from Charlotte to see me. Because she was there anyway, she decided to stop in and see me. She was the first MIT mama to tell me her birth stories - she has four children, 3 of whom were born in her bathtub at home because the first experience was so overly medicalized - and she is plugged in to the hypnobirth/breastfeeding communities in her area. She sat with us all afternoon, as the pain spasms got worse, holding my hand, touching my knee, asking me about bits of my recent life, ignoring how the pain spasms cut off the stories and made them incoherent. I'd told her that the pain spasms were just my darling baby shaking my head, that the monitors said it wasn't contractions. I still wanted a natural childbirth, when the time came, but I wondered how I'd get through 4 weeks of these spasms, day and night, with no pain relief, especially since they weren't letting me drink water or eat food.
The nurses said they were watching my monitors, but my sorority sister noticed both the fetal monitor and contraction monitor were randomly firing and marched off to the nurses station to get someone to fix that. When they were fixed, she pointed out that every time I had my pain spams, the contraction monitor was going to 40. She asked me to clarify what the spasms felt like, which brought to my attention that it was no longer just stabbing pain below my belly button, it also included what felt like my yoga instructor-who-is-also-a-doula's description of back labor, which seemed unlikely since the ultrasounds showed the baby was in the right position.
It was early evening, maybe 6pm, when a doctor asked to check my vagina -- and discovered I was fully dilated. Suddenly we were in labor mode. After a day of crossing my legs and planning for a month in a strange bed, now that I could no longer sit up without pain, now I was supposed to suddenly use all the things I'd learned in 5 months of doula-flavored yoga to bring on the baby. Did I mention that the first time Jon and my sorority sister had offered to lift me higher so I wasn't slumped in my bed, I refused because I was scared of it hurting, let alone trying to sit up myself?
So of course, when they told me the obstetrician had been called and would come in 30 minutes, and would I like an anesthesiologist, the answer was YES YES YES. I would've scaled a 10 foot wall over broken glass to get pain relief. Unfortunately, what I actually had to do was sit still. I remember having to ask them to hold off for a moment, while another pain spasm seized me. I tried to ask for a walking epidural and one of the nurses told me they don't exist. I flinched once while the anesthesiologist was sticking the needle in, but held very still after his exclamation.
When the obstetrician arrived, I said something about when the baby arrives in a few hours and he said, "No, the baby will be here in an hour." Nurse Isbethema held my left leg, Jon held my right, and the doctor explained how I was to push. Alas, not feeling pain meant not feeling anything down there and they repeatedly had to tell me I was flexing my legs, not pushing down there. (Aerial acrobatics and pilates turned out to be great training for this part.) The doctor had his finger where he wanted me to push, and told me to push like I had the most epic poop ever. I even at one point asked the doctor to tap his finger, but still couldn't get it. I asked if they could see the head and Jon commented they could, whenever I pushed, which was great motivation. Eventually the doctor used a vacuum and then there was a loud baby screaming and the nurses who'd been in a catcher's position - not an exaggeration - were hustling and bundling and murmuring. My part was done. With nothing else to do, I looked at the placenta, which was blue, and the doctor took a moment to show it to Jon and I. The nurses handled me a bundle of blankets, the center of which was a large red mouth and a cute nose. Jon took a picture and then we were alone.
For those who insist on numbers, my son was 1.93kg, with a length of 41cm and a head circumference of 31cm, and an Apgar score of 9, when he was born.
The on-call doctor told me to go to the hospital of course, so we putzed around trying to pull together a birth bag: with almost 2 months to my due date, I hadn't gotten around to creating a definitive list. When we got there, they checked me with a speculum, which revealed a reddish bag of water. I'd started having some periodic pains down there, which they checked on the ultrasound. Turns out the lack of fluids meant my son's head was lower, and had no cushion to keep it from banging against me, so the nice nurse said he was probably just turning his head periodically. I had a monitor to track contractions, which showed nothing. She also explained that if anyone asked to do a vaginal exam, to check how dilated I was, I should refuse and ask if my obstetrician had ordered it, because it would dilate my cervix more and we needed to keep me as undilated as possible. A NICU doctor stopped by to explain that the baby would be staying at the hospital for 4 weeks, until he would have been full-term, in or out of me. The doctor I'd spoken to from home, a more-famous partner of my obstetrician, stopped by and ordered antibiotics and steroids (to protect the baby and develop his lungs).
The triage area sounded very busy from behind our curtain, but Jon had told me childbirth is lots of time by ourselves, so I figured it was normal to wait a lot, even in not-childbirth. Eventually they took us to the Maternal-Fetal Evaluation unit, where the same ultrasound tech who originally told me about my fibroids measured the amniotic fluid remaining. I had 0.8 units, whereas 0.5 units was the minimum, and everything else looked good, so there was no reason why I couldn't stay like that. She used the analogy of a house: the building was structurally fine, but the door was broken, so they had to deal with that. Waiting outside the MFE, we started chatting with a woman who'd been there for 2 weeks, since her 25th week of pregnancy, and hoped to stay there quite a bit longer. We already had a lot to be grateful for.
They wheeled me back to the triage area, where "just a few minutes while we get your room ready" turned into over an hour, possibly two. I just sat in the wheelchair. Since we'd arrived at the hospital, I'd had periodic spasms. I'd mentioned them to the nurse in charge of triage when we first got there, but she explained that since my contraction monitor was silent, it was just the baby's head banging against me with no fluid as a barrier. In the morning, it had been a sensation I was tracking; by the time we got to the hospital room, I was visibly using what I'd learned in boymeat's pain management classes. The nurse who introduced herself when we got to the room - we'd meet over a dozen different medical professionals before the day was over - talked to us for fifteen minutes, including a conversation about pain relief, then came back and asked, "Wait, why are you here?" She'd assumed I was there because of the pain and didn't know my water had broken.
My baby shower had been scheduled for Saturday, so I'd texted my sister and SIL to let them know I'd be at the hospital and it needed to be cancelled. One of my sorority sisters, who had also done theater with me, had flown in from Charlotte to see me. Because she was there anyway, she decided to stop in and see me. She was the first MIT mama to tell me her birth stories - she has four children, 3 of whom were born in her bathtub at home because the first experience was so overly medicalized - and she is plugged in to the hypnobirth/breastfeeding communities in her area. She sat with us all afternoon, as the pain spasms got worse, holding my hand, touching my knee, asking me about bits of my recent life, ignoring how the pain spasms cut off the stories and made them incoherent. I'd told her that the pain spasms were just my darling baby shaking my head, that the monitors said it wasn't contractions. I still wanted a natural childbirth, when the time came, but I wondered how I'd get through 4 weeks of these spasms, day and night, with no pain relief, especially since they weren't letting me drink water or eat food.
The nurses said they were watching my monitors, but my sorority sister noticed both the fetal monitor and contraction monitor were randomly firing and marched off to the nurses station to get someone to fix that. When they were fixed, she pointed out that every time I had my pain spams, the contraction monitor was going to 40. She asked me to clarify what the spasms felt like, which brought to my attention that it was no longer just stabbing pain below my belly button, it also included what felt like my yoga instructor-who-is-also-a-doula's description of back labor, which seemed unlikely since the ultrasounds showed the baby was in the right position.
It was early evening, maybe 6pm, when a doctor asked to check my vagina -- and discovered I was fully dilated. Suddenly we were in labor mode. After a day of crossing my legs and planning for a month in a strange bed, now that I could no longer sit up without pain, now I was supposed to suddenly use all the things I'd learned in 5 months of doula-flavored yoga to bring on the baby. Did I mention that the first time Jon and my sorority sister had offered to lift me higher so I wasn't slumped in my bed, I refused because I was scared of it hurting, let alone trying to sit up myself?
So of course, when they told me the obstetrician had been called and would come in 30 minutes, and would I like an anesthesiologist, the answer was YES YES YES. I would've scaled a 10 foot wall over broken glass to get pain relief. Unfortunately, what I actually had to do was sit still. I remember having to ask them to hold off for a moment, while another pain spasm seized me. I tried to ask for a walking epidural and one of the nurses told me they don't exist. I flinched once while the anesthesiologist was sticking the needle in, but held very still after his exclamation.
When the obstetrician arrived, I said something about when the baby arrives in a few hours and he said, "No, the baby will be here in an hour." Nurse Isbethema held my left leg, Jon held my right, and the doctor explained how I was to push. Alas, not feeling pain meant not feeling anything down there and they repeatedly had to tell me I was flexing my legs, not pushing down there. (Aerial acrobatics and pilates turned out to be great training for this part.) The doctor had his finger where he wanted me to push, and told me to push like I had the most epic poop ever. I even at one point asked the doctor to tap his finger, but still couldn't get it. I asked if they could see the head and Jon commented they could, whenever I pushed, which was great motivation. Eventually the doctor used a vacuum and then there was a loud baby screaming and the nurses who'd been in a catcher's position - not an exaggeration - were hustling and bundling and murmuring. My part was done. With nothing else to do, I looked at the placenta, which was blue, and the doctor took a moment to show it to Jon and I. The nurses handled me a bundle of blankets, the center of which was a large red mouth and a cute nose. Jon took a picture and then we were alone.
For those who insist on numbers, my son was 1.93kg, with a length of 41cm and a head circumference of 31cm, and an Apgar score of 9, when he was born.