Born (Second of Three)

part one

This is not a high-drama birth story. Everything went exactly as expected. In fact, there is nothing interesting about it to outsiders, but for me it was possibly the most intense few hours of my life to date.

Matt and I packed the last few things we needed and were probably in the car within 15 minutes. I noted that we’d missed the full moon by a few days and hoped that that meant that the hospital wouldn’t be too busy.

When we arrived, we did some fairly brief paperwork in triage (ooohh, paperwork! I warned you: not high drama), and then I was taken into a small room where they listened to the babies’ heartbeats with a Doppler, took my blood pressure, and asked if I was a victim of domestic violence. Then Matt and I sat in the nearly empty waiting room (turns out that 2 a.m. on a Sunday is a good time to have the hospital to yourself) for a few minutes before being taken into a fancier room where they hooked me up to a monitor and – lo and behold! I was having contractions! Cool! I could sort of feel them, and I even had one that could be called fairly uncomfortable. I felt as though I had been given a tiny consolation prize for not getting to experience labor: one semi-painful contraction. Woo! Even better, the obstetric resident came in and announced that I was 3 centimeters dilated. I was actually pretty happy that my body was getting a few cues that the pregnancy was coming to an end rather than just having the babies removed without any notice at all.

I don’t remember much else from that room except Matt becoming faint as the nurse placed my IV very inexpertly (that turned out to be the most painful pre-surgery moment) and doing a fair amount of sitting around and watching our babies’ heartbeats on the monitor. What felt like hours later (yet also sooner than I could believe), I was being wheeled to the operating room.

This is when they cruelly separated me from Matt. I took my midwife’s advice to an extreme and told everyone who would listen how scared I was, and this actually garnered me a fair amount of kindness from the nurses as I waited for my spinal block. To receive the block, you lie down on your side in the fetal position, as curled up as you can possibly get, while they administer the anesthesia, and the nice thing about this is that the fetal position is pretty much the position you feel like lying in at this point anyway. It wasn’t nearly as uncomfortable as I expected, and the next thing I knew I was being helped onto my back and my legs were getting numb.

Oh boy, this is really where things get fuzzy, so rather than trying to describe the chronology, I will just tell you the moments I remember: Matt coming back in; being asked whether I could feel pain with various pokes (I took those questions extremely seriously and thought hard before answering, given that I knew that they would be followed by some serious slicing and dicing); feeling lots and lots and lots of tugging and asking if the baby was out yet, and then hearing the OB announce that we had a little boy. Oh man, I get teary just thinking about that moment. My Baby A! He was real, he was here, and he was a little boy! The only thing better was hearing the OB announce one minute later that we also had a little girl – not because I so desperately preferred a girl to a boy, but because the enormity of it all just washed over me: we had two children. Our family suddenly complete, its configuration finally known to me. A boy and a girl. One of each. I couldn’t believe it.

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