Born (Second of Three)
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.
Filed under Getting Pregnant, Parenting | Tags: birth | Comments (3)Positive!
After much waiting and hoping, Rachel was able to wake me up this morning with good news.
That’s right: she took two, for good measure. Needless to say, we were quite excited…
… until it occurred to me just where the sticks we’d been joyfully waving around had been.
The magic and wonder of procreation
When you’re very actively trying to conceive, you quickly learn all about the various fertility aids that are available to assist you. One of the most common of these is the Ovulation Predictor Kit, or OPK — a stick you pee on that tells you when you’re about to ovulate. People with regular cycles have a pretty good idea of when they should start to use these each month, and they usually get a positive within a few days. If you’re like me, and you have infinitely long, completely inscrutable cycles, you just have to keep peeing and peeing and peeing and hope one day to get a surprise.
Because I use so many of these, I buy ultra cheap ones off the internet. These are just little strips, not the fancy and convenient “mid-stream” cartridges, so they have to be dipped into a cup of urine. I keep a plastic cup in the bathroom just for this purpose, and I hope none of you has recently spent the night at our house and tried to get a glass of water in the night.
It is with this background that I describe one of the more dispiriting yet hilarious moments in this odyssey so far:
In our smallish bathroom, directly across from the toilet we have one of these “seven-drawer solutions” — basically just a plastic stand with several vertical drawers. The top drawer is mine, and it is stuffed with an astounding amount of stuff, including the aforementioned plastic cup. Last week I opened the drawer, got out the cup, and did my business into it as usual.
When I finished, I went to place the cup on the vanity opposite me, but I had some sort of spatial relations failure and kind of hit the bottom of the cup onto the lip of the open drawer with a decent amount of momentum, thereby tipping the entire (remarkably full!) cup of steaming pee into the drawer and all over its contents.
Matt and I had just been about to go out to do errands, and I was forced to tell him that he’d have to go without me, because I had to stay home and mop up about a half pint of urine from our personal toiletries. He is still finding reasons to make fun of me about that multiple times a day.
Filed under Getting Pregnant | Tags: infertility | Comment (0)Typography
We’re hoping it’s unnecessary, but we’ve made an appointment with a fertility specialist. The first round of Clomid didn’t seem to do the trick, so the Certified Nurse Midwife we’ve been seeing is putting Rachel on a higher dose, but suggested that we might as well set up a meeting with a reproductive endocrinologist, just in case. The appointment isn’t for several weeks, but yesterday a big packet of information arrived at the house.
First impressions? Mixed. It included a very thorough pre-screening questionnaire, including one question that I have to assume is there to weed out the morons. (“During intercourse, does your partner ejaculate in the vagina?”) The introductory letter was very professional and reassuring, and made it clear that I was invited and encouraged to be present at all of the appointments; I like that. Despite all that, I’m not sure I can get over my initial negative reaction: the letter was written in Comic Sans. Comic. Fucking. Sans.
I’m not sure I can trust someone with such poor taste in typography to have his mitts all over my wife’s lady-parts.
Filed under Getting Pregnant | Tags: comic sans, infertility | Comment (1)Masculinity
There’s only so much I can contribute to the whole “getting pregnant” thing. I know what my role is, and I’m more than happy to perform it, as often as is necessary. Since we haven’t successfully conceived yet, Rachel’s going in for a whole series of tests; it’s only fair that I get tested, too.
The testing process for men is certainly less painful and invasive than it is for women: I don’t have to get blood drawn or anything. I’ll submit that it’s still more uncomfortable. Rachel brought home a sterile specimen cup with instructions to “obtain a sample” no more than an hour before bringing it into the lab, and to “keep the sample close to body temperature” until it could be brought in.
We’ll just keep the process of obtaining the sample behind the veil of ignorance, since this is, after all, a family blog. (Literally! Hee!) I’ll just say that I found it a somewhat awkward procedure, given the size of the opening of the bottle, the logistics of transporting it, and the interminable paperwork once I arrived at the lab with a container of my precious bodily fluids in my pocket.
I got a call back from Rachel’s doctor a few days later, telling me that the results were “good.” We wanted some more details, so when Rachel went in for a follow-up appointment she asked for specifics. As it happened, I was at school when she got back from the appointment, and so the following exchange was captured by Google chat for posterity:
Rachel: So, she also asked if I wanted more details on the sperm analysis. I made a fast decision, and I said yes. Is that okay? I was really torn.
Me: Of course.
Rachel: Well, not of course. I respect your privacy. But anyway, she said they like to see a sperm count of at least 60 million. Would you like to guess what yours was?
Me: Um. 60 million?
Rachel: 115 million.
Me: FUCK YEAH
Rachel: They look for at least 60 percent motility, and you were at 70 percent. Basically she sort of chuckled and said, “Yeah, he has some really good sperm.”
Me: Hell, yes. I’m totally motile, baby.
Rachel: So once my ovaries finally give up an egg, at least we know we’re advantaged in that way.
Me: That egg won’t know what hit it.
Rachel: You’re being hilariously, uncharacteristically macho.
Me: Well, this is pretty much the core of masculinity here.
Rachel: Indeed.
Me: ME IMPREGNANTE! GRR!