That whole birth thing March 25, 2008

Number One Son doesn’t leave me much time for luxuries like writing, eating, or sleeping these days, so I won’t be banging on in great detail about how the kid eventually got born. I will bang on a bit about some of it, though, thoughtfully organised into procedure, followed by commentary.

1. Membrane sweep: did not work for me.

2. Cervix-softening gel (X 3 applications): involves midwife sticking fingers up your jacksie to load your cervix up with this gel stuff, designed to make your cervix all gooey and to trick it into starting labour. The first application did nothing, the second - a double dose - did work. A bit. Not much, but a bit.

3. TENS machine: involves sticking little pads to the small of your back and then giving you this little remote control console, whereby when a contraction hits you, you pump electrical current down into the pads in an effort to convince your body that there is no pain. This does not work. You only convince your mind that you are playing novelty with electricity. It’s a dinky little piece of kit, and probably would have amused me more if I wasn’t trying to squeeze a small elephant out of my vagina at the time.

4. Artificial rupture of the membranes: this procedure is not complete without a ginormous, very long crochet hook (nope, not kidding), brandished by the midwife and inserted fully up your jacksie and way, way up the back of your uterus. You feel a teeny, tiny little tug, and then you panic a little, because the midwife starts leaning very hard against the top of your belly, and then suddenly there is a f l o o d of liquid gushing out all over the bed and the floor. This is very disconcerting. Part of your mind thinks that you must be wetting your pants, and another part of your brain just doesn’t know what to make of it all.

If you’re a normal person, this procedure will bring on very strong contractions. If you are a freak, like moi, it’ll actually stop your contractions altogether, much to the bemusement of the hospital staff. It is at this point you lose any hope of having a normal delivery and resign yourself to not having a waterbirth as planned. Then the midwife and the registrar come in to your room looking very solemn and advise you to get used to the idea of having an epidural, because they are about to hook you up to fake oxytocin to really get the party started.

5. Epidural and related IV drugs: the epidural was the one thing I did not want to have, along with a caesarian, but to be honest it hurt less than having a blood test done. More painful was the canula they inserted into my left wrist, which is kind of like an IV double adaptor that they use to get more than one kind of liquid into your veins at once. That was excruciating; it took weeks for my vein to recover. The epidural involved me crying a lot about the idea of someone sticking a big needle into my spine, a five minute chat with the loveliest anaesthetist you are ever likely to meet and then about 20 seconds curled over a pillow trying not to move at all. One tiny pin prick and it was all over. And the relief it brought me - fantastic. What they don’t tell you is that not only is an epidural a kind of local anaesthetic, it’s also loaded with opiates to relax you, so you pretty much doze off here and there and get entertained by the room going all woozy. Then you ask the midwife to top you up, as it were, and your brain goes all nice and fuzzy. After 24 hours of labour, an epidural was quite definitely the best idea I’d had in a long time. Contractions? What contractions?

6. The dreaded C-section: I really, really didn’t want to have one, but after 10 hours of contracting and pushing the kid just wasn’t coming out. Because I’d already had an epidural, I didn’t need to have another spinal block, they just turbo-loaded me with more local, then wheeled me into surgery. And guess what happened then? Yep. MASSIVE panic attack. MASSIVE. The screen was up around my neck and I had to have my arms resting up around there too, so I felt like I couldn’t breathe and didn’t really know what was going on. I was shaking and trembling and went completely dry in the mouth and then couldn’t talk, which freaked me out even more. Poor old Beloved couldn’t calm me, nothing could calm me and nobody could hear me calling out for a sip of water because my mouth was too dry to talk. And then I threw up all over myself. Did I feel anything? Yes. I didn’t feel Nelson actually coming out, but I felt lots of tugging and pressure as I was being sewn up and that was a fine line between pressure and pain.

And then before I knew what was going on, the doctor was there urging The Beloved to yell out the sex of the baby and one of the midwives was showing me this wrapped up bundle with a red, squishy face at one end. My son. It was all very surreal, in part because you don’t get to connect with the baby until you get back to your room, while they finish sewing you up, and then when you get back to your room you are just drugged out of your mind on morphine and everybody wants to come and stick more needles in you and check the baby over.

It wasn’t really until I got on to the ward and The Beloved had gone home that I was able to take a look over the kid, and marvel at what the fuck I’d done.

Something I still do, that marvelling thing, quite often. Nelson is just so perfect, and so much a product of us both, without either of us really doing much other than having sex in the first place.