Anne TootillT Be or Not to Be a Mother - Part Two
December 26th 2006 20:19
The first thing they did was wheel me into the delivery room so the doctor could cut my cervical stitch. The one holding my already fully effaced and one centimeter dilated cervix from springing open like time lapse photography on a budding rose. Thankfully it didn’t hurt.
Then it was back to the labor room to be hooked up to fetal monitors and get that Pitocin drip started. It wasn’t too bad at first. I could even get up to walk to the toilet – I couldn’t actually call it bathroom although it had the makings of a stall what with its three walls surrounding a single toilet and sink. The fourth side, however, was open for all the world to see and let me tell you, all the world seemed to pass through my room. Men, women, after a while I was too busy fielding the contractions (picture severe menstrual cramps and then increase the pain a hundred fold) to care if they were wearing an official hospital badge or they were just some pervert with a pregnancy/childbirth fetish.
At one point I looked at the clock and screamed to my husband that he had to make sure one of the parents were at the house to watch Josh because the babysitter had to leave. But apparently I was reading the clock backwards or upside down. The pain had caused me to lose all track of time.
Pain, pain, pain. And I suppose I wasn’t doing a very good job of hiding it because one of the nurses told me keep it down so I wouldn’t frighten the other patients in labor. You know, as in the other pain-wracked moaning and screaming patients in the unit. Guess she was grooming me for “labor- unit poster child for proper childbirth etiquette”. Unfortunately. she didn’t factor in the enormous pain I was in, which made it not only difficult to read a clock but to listen to her stupid, unkind, idiotic and ridiculous commands, as well.
Interestingly, for someone who had had a head start, my labor wasn’t progressing as quickly as the doctor would have liked. He suggested an epidural to 1) relieve the pain and 2) help the cervix relax and dilate further. I wanted to say, “yes doctor, please, please gimme drugs. I want drugs”. But in my head I kept remembering a friend’s recent story of his boss’ son’s wife who had been given an epidural and then the doctor and the staff asked the husband to leave the room with them to allow it to take affect. After 15 minutes they’d all returned to find the woman turning blue, her heart having stopped. Apparently, sometimes (as in that time) the epidural is injected into the wrong space and the respiratory system shuts down. If however the doctors had stayed in the room, they would have caught it immediately and placed the woman on a ventilator until the medication ran its course. She would have been fine a little while later. But because she’d been oxygen deprived for so long she’d lapsed into a coma and was later determined to be severely brain damaged. The baby was delivered and was fine. Motherless, but fine.
Even in my pained state that’s all I could think about as they began to inject the epidural…
Then it was back to the labor room to be hooked up to fetal monitors and get that Pitocin drip started. It wasn’t too bad at first. I could even get up to walk to the toilet – I couldn’t actually call it bathroom although it had the makings of a stall what with its three walls surrounding a single toilet and sink. The fourth side, however, was open for all the world to see and let me tell you, all the world seemed to pass through my room. Men, women, after a while I was too busy fielding the contractions (picture severe menstrual cramps and then increase the pain a hundred fold) to care if they were wearing an official hospital badge or they were just some pervert with a pregnancy/childbirth fetish.
At one point I looked at the clock and screamed to my husband that he had to make sure one of the parents were at the house to watch Josh because the babysitter had to leave. But apparently I was reading the clock backwards or upside down. The pain had caused me to lose all track of time.
Pain, pain, pain. And I suppose I wasn’t doing a very good job of hiding it because one of the nurses told me keep it down so I wouldn’t frighten the other patients in labor. You know, as in the other pain-wracked moaning and screaming patients in the unit. Guess she was grooming me for “labor- unit poster child for proper childbirth etiquette”. Unfortunately. she didn’t factor in the enormous pain I was in, which made it not only difficult to read a clock but to listen to her stupid, unkind, idiotic and ridiculous commands, as well.
Interestingly, for someone who had had a head start, my labor wasn’t progressing as quickly as the doctor would have liked. He suggested an epidural to 1) relieve the pain and 2) help the cervix relax and dilate further. I wanted to say, “yes doctor, please, please gimme drugs. I want drugs”. But in my head I kept remembering a friend’s recent story of his boss’ son’s wife who had been given an epidural and then the doctor and the staff asked the husband to leave the room with them to allow it to take affect. After 15 minutes they’d all returned to find the woman turning blue, her heart having stopped. Apparently, sometimes (as in that time) the epidural is injected into the wrong space and the respiratory system shuts down. If however the doctors had stayed in the room, they would have caught it immediately and placed the woman on a ventilator until the medication ran its course. She would have been fine a little while later. But because she’d been oxygen deprived for so long she’d lapsed into a coma and was later determined to be severely brain damaged. The baby was delivered and was fine. Motherless, but fine.
Even in my pained state that’s all I could think about as they began to inject the epidural…
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