My wife’s water broke on a Wednesday afternoon, right as I was getting off work. Perfect timing, I thought. My wife’s due date was the next day. She even does labor in a scheduled way. I had heard that if the water breaks, the baby has 24 hours to be born, after which she starts to lose oxygen. I had the image and sound of a ticking digital clock in my head as I walked down the long outside stairway of my employer's building, to my car. The sun was setting – it was a perfect moment.
My wife’s bag was packed – we were ready. She was driving home from the auto dealership where she works. I would meet her there and we would go to the hospital together. It went according to plan. We arrived, they put us in a room, and hooked my wife up to a fetal monitor. It had an amber display, like an old IBM PC. The only graphic was a pulsating heart – keeping track of the baby’s heart rhythm was the machine’s main purpose.
The room was cool inside – why are all hospital rooms that way? It must have something to do with sterile environments.
We just sat there for a long time, waiting for a nurse or someone to come in and see us. Seems like that’s also always the way it is at hospitals. I think it may be that hospitals are chronically understaffed, so unless the situation is urgent people are never attended to in a timely way – unless doctors have their own definition of “timeliness.” My wife was in a hospital robe, which didn’t help since it was cool. My wife is a "freeze-baby."
Eventually various nurses came in to see us. They said the baby’s heartbeat was very strong, but they were concerned that she did not weigh enough. They thought she was about 6 lbs (they turned out to be off by a whole pound). Plenty to be nervous about, in addition to being nervous about the water having broken.
Speaking of which, we asked, didn’t they want to induce my wife so that the baby’s oxygen wouldn’t run out? No, they said, we’ll wait a while and see if she progresses on her own. Great, OK, whatever. What about this 24-hour time limit stuff? They said they weren’t worried about it, they could actually wait 36 hours or so. Oh, right, well – fine. We were relieved, but it’s frustrating to be quite wrong about something that serious.
They rotated nurses’ shifts frequently, so we saw new faces often. They said, if your labor progresses in the night, we’ll be here to monitor it and if that’s your time to give birth, we’ll do it. We had requested a water birth. They said they had no record of that, but would check. Overall I think nurses are kind people devoted to their profession, but they suffer from chronic sleeplessness. That makes it hard to get good service. (OTOH, the service probably is better, or at least isn’t as bad, as one gets from other professions.) The other unique thing about the hospital we went to is that all pregnant women are assigned certified nurse midwives, not doctors. We asked about our midwife, and they said she wasn’t on call tonight, but that another midwife would be available if you give birth tonight. OK…great.
There wasn’t much to do but wait. There was lots of tea (my wife drinks it like water) and little things to munch like saltines. She got food from the hospital, but I didn’t. (I think I did have some soup, though.) We watched the orange glow of the baby monitor and wondered if she was all right. The heart rate would go up, and then down, and then up again. At first I wasn’t sure if this was good, but no one was panicking, so I assumed it was all right. After that I relaxed more.
The beds for the husband in the nursery rooms are really terrible. Just like every other piece of furniture in there, it must be custom made just for hospitals. There must be this huge catalog-based business that provides the hospitals with this furniture. It must be a monopoly, because the quality is terrible. If there was any competition in that business, one of the vendors would make a bed that was better than the others. And this was the cushiest hospital I’ve ever been in, so surely they would have one. But no – just as husbands are only moderately tolerated in the obviously female environment of the nursery, so no one in the hospital administration would think of getting them a bed that meets minimum hospital standards.
But I digress. We mostly just sat and talked, thinking it could happen any minute, so we have to be ready. And in a certain sense, that’s true. But in a sense it’s not – I mean, when it did happen, the contractions got much stronger, but not all at once. It happened over several hours – I know that’s short compared to a typical labor, but it still wasn’t instantaneous. I think we fell asleep early that night – they said they would start administering something to propel the labor along the next morning, early.
Which they did, as I was waking up, with a horrible backache, from the wonderful excuse for a bed I’d been sleeping in. They said, well, we would be expecting you to be progressing faster than this, so let’s add some oxytocin to the mix. After that my wife did progress faster; within a matter of hours the contractions got stronger and more frequent. I don’t think I’ve ever heard my wife scream that loud - during the contractions. She sounded like an animal, guttural and virile. She took a bath to ease some of the pain, but it didn’t help much. Watching your wife go through labor and birth is really like nothing else I've ever seen (or probably ever will see). She asked for pain medications, which were administered in doses that lasted about the same amount of time an Advil does when someone has a migraine. They asked her how painful it was, on a 1 to 10 scale. To my surprise, my wife said, “Nine!” She’s not someone to cop to pain, normally. Of course she doesn’t remember any of this.
Breakfast was good, and we were in good spirits. We didn’t worry as much. I got to complain about the bed, and she sympathized. I think the labor lasted about six hours or so, getting progressively more painful. My wife asked for an epidural. They delayed giving it to her as long as possible. My wife insisted. (Beforehand, we had talked about this and her thinking was that she would delay asking for one as long as possible, but if she really needed one she would ask. She really needed one!) They made the call to the anesthesiologist, who said he would get there as soon as he could.
He didn’t make it in time. The contractions got terribly strong, and the nurses and midwife said the baby was ready to come out. They had my wife push and bear down during the contractions, instead of only doing breathing exercises. Then they had her lay on her side and grasp the handrail (which she was happy to do). They were very encouraging, saying “Good, you’re doing really well,” “The baby’s coming,” etc. I couldn’t see anything, so I assume they were referring to how they could feel (sense?) the baby’s descending.
Then I could see. I saw a little blue head emerging. I began encouraging my wife the same way the nurses were; saying, yeah, that’s it, push – push – push, OK, exhale, that’s good, she’s coming, honey, I can see her! The head came close to coming out a few times, during the pushing, but then it would go back in. I could see it was really hard and painful – my wife would push, run out of energy, and say, “No, I can’t!” and we would encourage more, yes, you can, you’re almost there, just a little further… My wife screamed several times. I was absolutely shaking. I remember they had me holding one of her legs up, and I had trouble holding it steady.
OK, here we go – Push! Yes, keep pushing, keep going – and then the little blue head came out. Keep pushing! The head was clear. We all exhaled; she was safe now; but then we re-purposed ourselves to finish the task. The next part of the task was to get her shoulders out; once that was done, the rest of her came out very quickly. We found out she was a girl from the nurses telling us, but they kept her from us for a while as they cleaned her off and checked her vital signs. My wife wasn’t very happy about this; she wanted to see her right away.
I took a picture of her as they weighed her. Poor thing, she was kind of bloody and small. And she had a plastic tube tied to what remained of the umbilical cord. She cried. I took a picture of her, her first picture. Actually it was the first picture I took since we got the hospital; there wasn’t much point to taking any pictures before then, it seemed. You can see her weight in the picture: seven pounds, five ounces. I knew that crying meant she was healthy, but it made me sad anyway.
Then they gave her to my wife, and said to nurse her, so my wife did right away. Then one of the nurses took a picture. I've never seen my wife so exhausted. And my wife is a Type A person, very high-energy. This had taken all the energy she had. She was really happy, though. The saying is true, that the pain from giving birth goes away when the mother gets to hold the baby for the first time.
We had decided to name our daughter Anna. We'd known the baby was probably a girl from the ultrasounds my wife had earlier. Anna was really hungry after she came out; she nursed really well for a whole hour.
Next my mother-in-law, who was staying with us, arrived to greet Anna's entrance into the world. She stayed for a while before we went to bed (or tried to, anyway).
It was a long night. Anna cried a lot; I guess she couldn't understand where she was or what was happening. She pooped for the first time, so we got to change our first diaper. The nurses were nice and helped us out, knowing that it was our first time. The poop came out so fast it startled the nurse who was helping us. As Anna cried, one of them told us that dealing with a crying baby is kind of like a game; you try to figure out what they want and give it to them, and it keeps them content for a while. Then they want something different, and the game goes on.
We didn't get much sleep that night. My wife got to sleep on the hospital bed, but I had the evil chair that pretended to unfold and become a bed. I was so tired I slept anyway, though. My back hurt afterwards. Although I suppose it was nothing compared to how my wife was feeling; they gave her more painkillers after the baby came out.
I have dealt with stomach trouble in the past, and I thought that perhaps Anna had some too, so in the morning (when she was crying inconsolably) I laid her across my lap sideways, and rubbed her little stomach. It seemed to help.
There is another picture of her swaddled in a blanket with this cute yarn hat. Babies have trouble regulating their temperature at first, I learned. So it is important to make sure they are warm. Swaddling came naturally to my wife, who is Ukrainian.
My gosh, she was so tiny. I felt really nervous carrying her, but not as much as I thought I would. My wife wasn’t nervous at all; it was obvious that this was something for which she had waited for a long time. And she had taken care of her younger brother when he was born, so she had some experience as well. I didn't have any; I was hoping I wouldn't do something stupid. I didn't; it went all right.
There’s another picture of Anna in the little mini-bassinet they have for newborns. She has her hand curled into a fist under her chin, so it looks like she’s thinking.
We had trouble figuring out how to get the car seat to work. After we bought it we never thought to practice with the straps, which was a mistake. It was crucial, because the nurses wouldn’t let you leave the hospital if the car seat wasn’t installed properly. They made us demonstrate that we knew how to use it. Fortunately, one of the nurses helped us figure it out and they let us take Anna downstairs.
When we got outside it was hot. Weird, it had been cool the night before. I had to go start the car and air condition it to a reasonable temperature – something I was going to do several times for what little remained of the summer. My wife waited for me with Anna by the hospital door. I drove up and put the seat in the car (something we had practiced how to do) and put Anna inside. She was fast asleep. My wife sat down next to her and watched her as we drove away from the hospital. She was still asleep when we got home.
When we got home my wife's mother was waiting for us. We put Anna upstairs in her crib (in her nursery, which was all prepared, painted yellow walls and everything) and marveled at the new person we had brought into the world. Then we went to sleep too. My parents would arrive the next day.
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