The last three month
s have been hect
ic. Sarah's up every hour to pee and her back is killing her. Sammy's been kicking nonstop. Apparently she never stops moving. Well actually, she did last month. Sarah called me at work and said she hadn't felt Sammy move since one o'clock. It was 2:30 when she called. I told her to relax, that she'd be fine, just give it some more time. We, of course, ended up in emergency at the Civic Hospital sitting around the waiting room for three hours, only to discover that everything was perfectly normal. Sammy began to kick away madly when the nurse put the heart monitor on Sarah's belly.
I've been sleeping on the couch the past few nights because Sarah is up all the time. She's ten days overdue. We're going to the hospital today so she can be induced. So hopefully, I'll be seeing little Sammy soon. The car seat has been installed and the hospital bag was packed three weeks ago: a couple of pairs of pyjamas for Sarah, her bathrobe, toiletries, infant diapers, a baby blanket, an outfit for Sammy to wear home, and the video camera with extra tapes and batteries. When we pull into the parking lot, which is still under construction, Sarah blurts out that she is scared.
“What are you worried about?”
“What if something happens?” she asks, squeezing my hand.
“Listen, whatever happens, happens. But this is a good hospital with very knowledgeable doctors and nurses. They have all the fancy equipment in case anything should happen, which it won't.”
“How can you be sure? What if the cord wraps around her neck? I think about that all the time, Sammy being strangled by the cord,” Sarah says, grabbing her belly.
“What is it?” I ask, because I can tell by the look on her face that something is wrong.
“Nothing, I just haven't felt her move in a while.”
“When's a while?”
“Just a second,” she says pushing on her belly with the palm of her hand.
“When? When's the last time you felt her move?”
“Maybe an hour ago.”
“Jesus, let's go.”
The round suction-cup end of the video camera's viewfinder rests against my eye socket as the word “REC” flashes in red in the upper right hand corner of my visual screen. “Tell us what's going on,” I ask Sarah who's sitting in a lavender hospital chair with two straps around her torso monitoring Sammy's heartbeat and her own possible contractions.
“Jesus, Colin, do you have to film this?”
“Hey, Sammy's going to love this when she's older.”
“I don't want all this on film.”
“Why not?”
“Fine. Film away,” she says, looking away from the camera at the wall.
“Sarah has just had the insert placed into her cervix to soften it and hopefully this will get things moving along. Sarah is being monitored in case of uterine hyperstimulation, which means she would have contractions right away. Nothing is happening at the moment.” I pan over to the monitoring equipment, then pan back to Sarah and zoom in on her face.
“Can you turn that shit off?” she asks.
After forty minutes of nothing, they send us home. We stop for lunch at the hospital cafeteria because Sarah is starving. She orders a cheeseburger and fries with gravy, but manages only to eat half before she says she's full. Her stomach is being squished by Sammy sitting on it. I anticipated this, so I only bought a small salad.
As soon as we get in the door, Sarah rushes to the washroom to pee. “Colin, it fell out!” she yells calmly.
“What, the insert or the baby?”
“Very funny. The insert. What should we do?”
I call the hospital and they tell us to come back in. So back we go. A different doctor comes in and reinserts the insert. “There, that ought to do it,” she says. We head back home.
“I'm having pain,” says Sarah on the way home in the car.
“Are you okay, should I turn around?”
“No, no. They said there might be a little discomfort associated with the insert. I should be fine.”
When we arrive back home for the second time, Sarah seems quite uncomfortable. “I don't know Colin, it seems really intense, cramping. I'm going to take a bath to see if it takes the edge off.” She does this for a while, then she says, “Jesus, maybe the first time when they monitored us it wasn't in. Then they put it in properly and they didn't monitor us. You know, Colin, I think I'm having contractions here. Phone the hospital!”
I phone and they tell me to tell Sarah to take the insert out. So I do and she does. She gets out of the bath and gets dressed and we drive back to the hospital. When we hit the maternity ward, Sarah is writhing in pain. We are taken to a room where a doctor can check her out. She gets undressed again and puts on a green hospital gown which is open all down the back. As soon as she sits down on the examination table, there is a small almost-inaudible pop. “Something happened, I'm all wet,” Sarah says. I can tell she is doing her best to stay calm.
“Relax honey,” says one of the nurses. “Your water broke is all.”
Sarah looks scared. I have no clue what to expect. I too sometimes think about the cord wrapping around little Sammy's neck, but I'd never tell Sarah that. “You're fine baby,” I tell her in the most soothing voice I can muster. “You're going to do great.”
The doctor checks her and tells her everything is fine, tells Sarah to relax. After they put a plastic IV lock in her hand, they take us to a birthing room. She's contracting every minute. She's been hyperstimulated. She went from zero to sixty, full-on contractions, in a matter of minutes when they put the insert in the second time. When we get to the birthing room, I'm surprised at how big it is. In fact it's enormous. Sarah's become wild, her eyes have widened and her breathing is rapid. “I can't get on top of the pain. I'm so hot,” she says ripping her hospital gown from her body. She's running around in a circle clutching her lower back, her head flopping, spinning as she moans in pain. I look to the nurse for help.
“Okay, Sarah sweetie,” says the nurse, “you need to calm down.”
“Okay,” says Sarah, slowing her pace but continuing to walk around the room.
“Would you like something to ease the pain?”
“Yes,” she blurts.
“Would you like to try the Jacuzzi tub?”
“Sure, but something for the pain.” I help Sarah get into the tub and get the bubbles going while the nurse leaves to get some drug called Nubain.
“I'm sorry Colin, I wanted to do it without the drugs, but I didn't think the pain would be this intense. It just came on so fast. I think I'm going to need to take the epidural.”
“It's okay, baby,” I tell her. “You're doing great. You just hang in there.”
I run the water in the tub and get the jets going. I help Sarah in. She flops around the tub like a whale. She's moaning in pain.
“Oh God, I'm going to be sick,” she says.
I help her out of the tub and Sarah throws up, missing the toilet of course. Most of it hits the side of the Jacuzzi.
“Sorry,” she says.
“Don't worry about it.”
“I have to go to the washroom,” she says, sitting down on the toilet.
“You do that.”
The nurse comes in and sees the vomit.
“Oh, a little accident. Don't worry, we'll get that cleaned up. I've got your Nubain when you're finished.
The drug doesn't do much for Sarah and she's in a state of panic. She orders the epidural. After a gut-wrenching two-hour wait of watching Sarah in agony, the anaesthesiologist finally comes and gives her the epidural. After this Sarah can't walk, she's numb from the waist down. But now she's comfortable. When she lies back in bed, the muscles in her shoulders, neck and face relax. I relax, too. I didn't realize how wound up I'd become. Watching Sarah go through that kind of pain, it was like hundreds of little strings were being pulled all over my body, making various parts of my body involuntarily contract. Women say men don't understand the pain of childbirth. Maybe so. I'll never know it, but I have a vivid imagination and a stockpile of empathy.
Before the epidural I'd been watching
The Exorcist
and suddenly the channel changed to
The Sound of Music
. Now it's all birds and butterflies. Sarah is smiling. She asks me to pass her
People
magazine. I realize that I'm super hungry. It's almost nine and we haven't eaten anything since lunch. Sarah isn't allowed to eat anything but clear fluids and Jell-O. They don't want Sarah vomiting while she is anesthetized and choking to death on a cafeteria cheeseburger. “Listen babe, do you mind if I go grab a bite to eat?”
“Sure honey, just be a sweetie pie and get me a ginger ale before you go.”
My wife is five floors up, paralyzed from the waist down, about to birth out my first child and I'm staring at the cafeteria salad bar. Guilt hangs about my mind, a crooked shadow in my skull; I should be feeling more. This is a life-pivoting moment, but here I am, thinking about my stomach. Maybe I'll be a rotten father? Profound thoughts or feelings about my situation aside, a man has to eat.
The mushrooms, the broccoli, the olives, the carrots, all the veggies for that matter, look like they have let out a collective sigh, and they each lie existentially defeated in small round beige containers surrounded by crushed ice. Blue cheese, French and Italian dressings languish to one side. I decide to skip the healthy choice for fear of being depressed. I move to the main food counter. A little gruff woman dressed in a white kitchen uniform and a hairnet barks that the daily special is cabbage rolls. She uncovers a rectangular silver tray containing their grey leafy bodies resting in a red sauce which I imagine should be tangy, but it's probably as bland as paste.
“I think I'll just get a cheeseburger,” I tell her. She seems pissed.
“Lettuce, onion, tomato, pickle?” she rattles at me at high speed.
“Yeah, sure, the works.”
“Fries?” she spits.
“Sure.”
“Gravy?” she yells.
“No thanks.” Jesus, what's with this lady?
I watch as she fries a pre-cooked patty and places not just depressed veggies, but suicidal ones on my hamburger bun. The slice of tomato looks like it has reached the end. The crinkly fries have been under the heat lamp since 8 a.m., I'm sure. She passes me my platter and says, “Enjoy,” without a smile.
I don't want to eat in front of Sarah, so I grab a seat and quickly try to wolf it down, worried too that I might be needed upstairs. The cheeseburger has a strange chemical taste to it, as do the fries. I pour ketchup over everything but it still tastes like what it is, bad hospital cafeteria food. I manage to eat half of it and give up. When I get back up to our room, Sarah is still reading her magazine.
“Hi honey, would you be a sweetie pie and get me some Jell-O and ginger ale?” she asks again.
For the next twelve hours we ride out the storm of labour. There's a chair for me that unfolds into an uncomfortable makeshift bed. We both drift in and out, trying to sleep, trying to stay comfortable. But the excitement, the worry, keeps both of us up. Every once in a while I pull out the video camera and take some footage, noting the time and how many centimetres Sarah is dilated.
At 8:42 in the morning, Sarah's reached ten centimetres â show time. The doctor comes into the room with several other people. I'm filming and holding Sarah's hand.
“I'm scared,” Sarah repeats again to me.
“You're doing fine,” I tell her trying to channel the soothing voice our hippie prenatal instructor said I should be using.
“Okay, when you feel a contraction I want you to push for the duration of the contraction,” says the nurse.
Sarah pushes with each contraction. “I can't do it,” she says.
“Yes you can,” the nurse reassures her.
“I can't. I'm telling you I can't”
“You can. You have to.”
“Aaagrrrrrraahhhhh!”
“Good, that's it.”
“Aaahhhhherrga!”
“Good, good”
This continues for twenty minutes, and then I see the top of Sammy's head appear, and then disappear in a kind of peek-a-boo game being played out with Sarah's vagina. Then in one screaming giant push Sammy's head pops out. It's a light shade of purple. Her eyes are closed and she appears not to be breathing. I think, stillborn. Maybe she was strangled by the cord? I panic. I look around the room at the faces of the doctors and nurses. I scan them for any signs, a look of horror or panic on their faces, something to confirm my fear that yes, Sammy is dead. Nothing. Then Sarah performs yet another mighty push and Sammy's shoulders come through. Then the rest of her seems to slip out. I see movement!
“She's alive!” I yell. Perhaps it's the lack of sleep, or our long struggle to have a child, but a furnace door opens inside me, a heat that radiates from my navel to my head and it comes out of my body as hot tears. Somebody asks me if I want to cut the cord. I do, first wiping my face on my shirt sleeves.
“Is she healthy?” Sarah asks, trying to see.
“She's beautiful, baby, beautiful.”
“I did it,” Sarah says.
“Yes, yes you did, baby.”
I call my mother and she's crazy excited. She tells me she's on her way to the hospital to meet Sammy. Then I debate who to call next, my father or Sarah's mother. I call Sarah's mother, not really sure which is the lesser of two evils.
“Hello, Franklin residence,” says a cold voice. It's Sarah's mother.
“Hello Barbara, it's me, Colin. Your granddaughter was just born.”
“Oh great. Everything went smoothly I take it?” she says with almost no enthusiasm in her voice, as if I just told her I replaced an air filter in her car.
“Fairly smoothly I guess you could say.”