Disconnected

Over the course of our hospital stay, I had a bunch of little ideas that probably aren’t each worth their own post, so here they are, all jumbled together:

—

The food at the Women and Infants’ Hospital cafeteria isn’t bad, for cafeteria food, but the food that gets delivered to patients’ rooms is actually quite good, for hospital food. My advice to partners of post-partum women: ask the Food and Nutrition people for a menu to order a guest tray up to the room while you’re hanging around. It only costs $6.

Also: if you’re planning to stay overnight in your partner’s room, do yourself a favor and get an air mattress. The nurses will happily provide you with a spare set of sheets. The fold-out chair thing that they provide has only a passing resemblance to a bed.

—

You find a good number of men wandering the halls of the hospital. When two of us found ourselves waiting for the elevator, we would greet each other with a furtive glance towards the other’s left wrist. On seeing the tell-tale hospital bracelet, we give each other a comradely head-nod (what a friend from college calls the “Pez-head”) or, if we’re feeling more gregarious, a world-weary, “Hey, man, congratulations.”

In such encounters, when I pulled my hand out of my pocket and flashed my two bracelets, I confess I felt like a total bad-ass.

—

A hospital is a noisy place. Pretty much every piece of machinery in the building hums, buzzes, trills, or beeps. On a number of occasions (such as listening to Rachel’s IV pump loudly beep in a futile attempt to tell us that her saline bag was empty) I wondered how the staff would ever be able to tell when something urgent came up. Wouldn’t all the beeping just drown in the general clamor?

One evening on a stroll back from the bathroom (Rachel’s room had a bathroom, of course, but it was separated from the main room by nothing more than a curtain, which didn’t provide the level of privacy I require) I found out. A loud three-note tone sequence like nothing I’d heard before came over the intercom, followed by a woman’s calm voice:

“Code blue. Labor room eighteen. Second floor. Infant.”

The tone and message repeated three times and then went quiet. Now, it’s too early in this parenting process for me to pull any crap about how, as a parent, I found the announcement especially harrowing. I’d only been a parent for a few days, and I think I’d have felt a chill up my spine even if I didn’t have two tiny babies waiting for me just down the hall. But I’d be lying if told you I didn’t rush back with a little more urgency to scoop them up and make sure they were OK.

Filed under Parenting | Tags: hospital | Comment (0)

Unexpected

I did not expect the Red Sox to win Game 5 of the ALCS, so I certainly did not expect to be watching Game 6 until after midnight. And I definitely did not expect to be woken two hours after going to sleep by Rachel calling to me from the bathroom.

“Matt? I think my water broke.”

The predictable half-hour of frantic scrambling ensued. By a happy coincidence, we had spent the day Saturday packing our hospital bags and installing the car seats, “just in case.” In fact, I had confidently predicted to Rachel that by packing the bags in advance, we were ensuring that the babies would wait until their scheduled date to arrive. It’s the same theory that holds that by packing an umbrella for your vacation, you can guarantee that it won’t rain. I guess the principle doesn’t apply to babies.

So: bags, pillows, and an air mattress got thrown in the back of the car, food was hastily poured out for the cats, cameras and a laptop were stuffed in their bags, and off we went to the hospital.

The nice part about rushing to the hospital at 2:30 in the morning is that you get your choice of parking spaces, and there’s not much of a wait at triage. By 3:30 at the latest, we were in an exam room, Rachel was gowned up and on monitors, and the all of the preparations were underway. Rachel was pretty nervous, but I was able to keep myself upbeat and confident—until the nurse decided to put Rachel’s IV in the arm that I happened to be sitting next to and I nearly passed out. (Dramatic tension! if he can’t handle watching an IV go on, how will he manage in the operating room? Stay tuned!)

As mentioned previously, we were reasonably pleased to have the C-section scheduled because it meant that Rachel’s doctor would perform the surgery, and her midwife would attend to help keep us both calm and comfortable. (In fact, both of them planned to come in on their day off for us, which we can’t help but find flattering.) Coming in early meant that we got the doctor on call, who happened to be very nice, very professional, and very French Canadian. They also paged the midwife on call, but due to a communications breakdown somewhere along the line, the hospital staff forgot to wake her up from her nap to attend the surgery. I suppose if anyone was going to sleep through the surgery, a midwife we’d never met before was probably the best candidate.

After a seemingly interminable wait in the exam room, they finally wheeled Rachel up to the second floor and into the OR. This is the part Rachel (and I) were especially nervous about: neither of us liked the idea of being separated while she got on the operating table and had her spinal block. I’ll let Rachel relate the story from the woman’s perspective, but I can say that, from the male perspective, waiting to be called into the OR for your wife’s C-section will be the most boring and nerve-wracking fifteen minutes of your life.

Once they wheeled Rachel through the double doors, they handed me a bag of scrubs (size XXL) to pull on over my clothes, pointed me to towards one of two sad little chairs in the hallway, and told me to wait. I had time to experiment with self-portraiture:

After what seemed like hours, I was finally called into the OR. I had no idea what to expect, really, having never been in an operating room. What I saw was Rachel’s head poking out of a blue curtain, and two baby receiving stations just to her left. To her right was, essentially, the machine that goes “ping!” manned by her anesthesiologist—a man who had less personality than the aforementioned blue curtain. (He seemed like the kind of person who has never in his life been greeted with, “Hey! Good to see you!” I’m guessing he gets a lot of, “Oh. Hi, Bob.” The guy walked past be twice while I was waiting out in the hallway and was the only person out of more than a dozen not to congratulate me or, you know, acknowledge me sitting there in my oversized scrubs.)

Rachel was nervous, but brave. I was definitely holding it together, and was determined not to look over, past, or around that blue curtain, because very very gross things were going to be happening over there. My problem was this: I was told that as soon as the babies were out, I was free (and indeed encouraged) to go over to them, take pictures of them, and touch them. What complicated matters was that the room was laid out as follows:

Going over to Baby B was going to require edging past the curtain, making absolutely sure not to turn around, even for a second. After my misadventure in the exam room downstairs, I was determined not to screw this one up.

I sat down on the “dad” stool, the doctor started doing something behind the curtain, and less than ten minutes later, we heard Dr. Caron shout over the curtain, “I’m taking out Baby A! Do you want to know what it is?” Rachel and I replied in the affirmative, and the doctor sang out, “It’s a boy!” What seemed like a whole herd of blue-suited nurses sprang up around the Baby A table and before I could decide whether or not to get up off of my stool, Dr. Caron was telling us that the second baby was a girl.

(I didn’t care, much, what the sexes of our babies were, but I’d be lying if I didn’t say I was hoping for at least one girl. The more I think about it, the more it seems like we got absolutely the perfect combination.)

All in all, the “getting the babies out” portion of the event took maybe twenty minutes. Julian, Eloise, and I hung out for a few minutes, and then the three of us were ushered off to recovery to wait for Rachel to get stitched back together. So there I found myself, sitting in a warm, dark hospital room at six in the morning, staring at two helpless, pink, and crusty miniature persons. I did not expect to be doing that at all.

Filed under Parenting, Pregnancy | Tags: birth, c-section, hospital | Comments (7)