Delivering #1

My senior year of college at Georgia Tech, I had my first child. I went to classes up to my 8th month, and appreciated the attention my pregnancy afforded me including flexibility from my professors, a handicapped sticker for parking closer to buildings, and the endless stares from other undergraduate students. I was proud of my bulging belly, and I felt wonderful about the baby I was carrying. It had been a perfect pregnancy. The rest...not so perfect.

Following exams Spring quarter, my blood pressure went up, and I spent the next 6 weeks on bedrest. It was a hot summer and my husband of almost 2 years went to school during the day and worked at night. We were poor and living on love (we were still newlyweds, what do you expect?)

My brother and his family came into town to meet the new baby...who was now 2 days past her due date. Miraculously, my blood pressure had returned to normal and I was allowed to leave my bed. I returned to the family home to see my siblings and wait for the baby to come.

Did I mention patience is not one of MY virtues? I had heard that drinking castor oil was one method of inducing labor. I had tried all the other old wives tales including eating spicy food, walking continuously, nipple twiddling and even repeated intercourse with my husband which is not fun at 9 mos. pregnant. After downing the entire 2 ounce bottle of castor oil mixed with pineapple juice to disguise the taste and texture, we all went out for a family dinner. Part way through dinner, I had to excuse myself as I was having some stomach cramping (duh!) We made it back to the house, and I was quite frustrated that "nothing" was happening besides a wicked case of diahrea.

However, my sister-in-law and I decided that this baby was coming tonight one way or another, so we started walking up and down my mom's street. Each time we passed by the house, my brother graciously refilled my husband's vodka/tonic glass. About 11:00pm, we left to go to our own apartment a few minutes away with my loving spouse yelling "I can't get no satisfaction" along with Mick Jagger while hanging his head outside the window the whole way. He promptly passed out in our bed.

At 4:00 in the morning, I woke up with a lightning bolt contraction. Knowing my husband (we'll call him Scott) had had a rough night, I got up and walked the hall eating popsicles and watching the clock. After the contractions had been coming every 5 minutes for another hour, I called the doctor who said to come to the hospital. I woke Scott and sent him to the bathroom for a shower and some sobering up. From my bed, I could hear him going to the bathroom while I breathed through a contraction. Suddenly, I heard a loud crash. When I gently leaned out of bed and glanced into the small bathroom, I could only see his feet dangling over the side of the bathtub and the shower curtain pulled down around him. This man passed out while pissing! Is that even possible?

After a shower and some coffee we headed BACK to my mom's to drop off the dog (figuring we wouldn't be home for a couple of days). As we pull on to her street, my husband tosses the dog across the car at me with his half empty coffee cup, throws open the door and pukes his guts out for about 5 minutes. (Two years later the stain was still there...YIKES!...what is IN that stuff?) Did I mention that the contractions were about 2 minutes apart now?

We finally arrive at the hospital and get admitted. My mom has followed us over and is SINGING to my stomach some made-up song that about drove me over the edge. Scott has passed out (again) literally on the small couch in my labor room. I can't take it anymore, and I send mom home for some REAL help...my sister-in-law who has already been through this twice several years before me. Thank God. She arrives as I get my epidural and suddenly my whole labor STOPS. It's a nightmare.

On top of that, my nurse is evil. She is the size of a house and smells like bandaids. She doesn't even pretend to be nice to me. Here I am, a first-time-mom, scared out of my wits, and she's abrupt, telling me to stop BEING a baby since I'm about to HAVE a baby... my husband is totally out of it, my estranged father has shown up (even though I had previously told him not to) just to piss off my mom from whom he is separated. Drama, drama, drama, bicker, bicker, bicker, I pass gas right in his face accidentally (I think) since my epidural is working wonders on the lower half of my body.

They finally start a pitocin drip, and I progress to 10 centimeters (eventually) and start pushing nearly 16 hours after my first major contraction. After 3 hours of pushing, the doctors start talking c-section. I FREAK OUT! What's wrong? Why? No, please, no. Nurse Bandaid steps up and says, "Let's try something first." Like what? Turns out the baby is coming out sunny side up (instead of face down) and she's stuck in the birth canal. I wasn't sure, but that did NOT sound good to me. Nurse Bandaid says that I need to be flipped on my side to give gravity the opportunity to turn the baby into the correct position. I thought she was crazy...even crazier when I realized that I could not "help" with this in anyway. My legs and lower back were completely paralyzed. Some aide, who I suspect from his gigantic biceps was usually called in to move piano-sized dead bodies, had to literally roll me over THEN hold my ENORMOUS leg in the air for about 10 minutes WHILE I pushed through 2 contractions. I'm panic-stricken, breathing oxygen, and trust me, I take back what I said about Nurse Bandaid's size. At this moment I realized that I probably had at least 100 pounds on her and it was all in this one leg.

OK, I forgot to say earlier that I wanted all of this captured on video for all eternity. I had been adopted as an infant, and therefore had no photos of myself before adoption day at 8 weeks. My somewhat modest husband was not as excited about my video project and personally believed that our baby had nothing to gain by seeing her own birth years later. Being the more stubborn personality, I won. So, while all this is going on, my sister-in-law is rolling film.

Suddenly Baby miraculously turned (just like Bandaid predicted). She's born moments later with the cord wrapped around her neck and all blue and yucky. In the video, I'm sobbing and weeping and saying "Thank God, Thank God!" while my sister-in-law is shouting "Oh, oh, she's beautiful, she's beautiful..." When I watched this later, I thought she had been VERY generous. The baby looked scary to me... all blue and swollen and her head...my gosh! She'd been in the birth canal so long, she looked like a little blue cone-headed alien!

She quickly pinked up and 10 minutes later, nicely wrapped in a blanket with a little hat on her head, I got to hold my sweet angel for the first time. She WAS beautiful. And my precious husband was instantly forgiven for his drunken stupor (he made it to consciousness just in time to appear as a completely involved dad in the video). Nurse Bandaid had saved me from a c-section and all was right in my world. For a time.

And that is how I started my child-bearing experience; a fourth degree episiotomy, a hung-over husband, a wayward father, a singing mother, 20 hours of labor, a bandaid-smelling-delivery-saving-big-meany-nurse, all caught on home video by my sister-in-law.