Part One.

“Even the miniscule, erratic wireless signal at the window seems to have been extinguished, so heaven only knows when I will be able to post this.”

That was the first sentence of the entry I was writing at 12:30 p.m. on February 7th. I remember noticing as I wrote that it felt remarkably like the first day of my period.

“Thalia asked why they aren’t giving me anything for contractions, and the answer is that contractions are often a sign of infection (which could be dangerous to Simone), and they don’t want to mask them. As soon as my water broke I was started on antibiotics, which were discontinued a few days ago. So they are certainly trying to prevent infection, just not contractions.”

That was the last paragraph I typed. An hour later I was in labor.

I wasn’t going to write a birth story. But in the interest of this week’s ENEMA OF THE SOUL, I will give you the facts. It was a Thursday. I was 25w5d. I had been on hospital bedrest for almost two weeks; Ames had been dead for nearly a month, his water broken for 12 days. It had been OVER a month since this picture was taken, so thanks to my short torso, I was shaped like a sideways camel, a paranoid camel who felt compelled to store lots and lots of extra water in his hump—you know, for the apocalypse.
As awed as I was by the quality of care I received on bedrest, and that Simone received in the NICU, my labor experience still upsets me. I am not talking about the loss of some patchouli-scented experiential ideal. My birth plan had been downgraded from “get the babies out alive” to “get at least 50% of the babies out alive,” so I think my expectations were pretty well managed. What I am talking about is a complete lack of communication, leading to the impression that while I was ostensibly a patient in the antepartum unit (I was never moved to Labor & Delivery), I had essentially been left to my own devices. It strengthened my newly-forged opinion that pregnancy and birth are a miracle not in some pseudo-spiritual sense, but in that it is a goddamn MIRACLE anyone makes it out alive.

I started having painful, regular contractions at 1:30 p.m. At 2:00, a cervical check revealed that I was not dilated. Simone was transverse, and I’d been informed that if I was really, truly, no-turning-back in labor, I was likely to deliver by C-section. They would “try to keep me comfortable.” I was given some stick-on heating pads. A new nurse started at 3:00.
The new nurse put me on the monitors and, as always, had a hard time picking up Simone’s heartbeat and my contractions. She picked up contractions at two minutes apart for a while and then got nothing for 15 minutes while they continued. I was given a dose of Vistaril to relax me; it helped a bit and spaced the contractions to five minutes apart. By five o’clock the Vistaril had worn off, and the pain felt grinding and insistent, like some efficient German industrial process. I remember telling Scott in a low voice that this was it. Dinner arrived and I asked the nurse whether I should eat, figuring they might want me NPO for surgery. She said she would check with the doctor and disappeared.
Over an hour later Scott and I had asked for our nurse at the nurses’ station several times with no response. I was starving, and nauseated from the pain and lack of food. I ate half of my sandwich, one bite at a time: chew chew chew, stop for contraction. The nurse returned and told me the doctor had said not to eat, just in case.

During contractions, Scott would watch the monitor and tell me when the numbers stopped rising, indicating that the worst was over. I was half-watching episodes of Sex and the City, trying to focus and keep myself calm, but the relentlessness of the contractions—one after another—had started to make me edgy and desperate. We asked the nurse to call the doctor. I wanted to know what the plan was, and I wanted something for the pain. The nurse vanished for another hour or so, and when she returned she said the doctor had ordered Demerol, but that the pharmacy hadn’t sent it up.

More time passed. It was quiet and dark. Still no Demerol. It’s hard to remember what happened during this time. They had me on the monitors at some point, adjusting the disks over and over, failing to get a consistent strip. I had started passing blood and mucous. I asked again about The Plan, and the nurse said the doctor wanted to see how I was in the morning. I said I didn’t think I could make it that long, and was reminded that I hadn’t been dilated when they checked me at 2:00. Eight. Hours. Earlier. I was told they couldn’t reexamine me because of the risk of infection. The nurse left. My cervix was never checked again.

More pain, for I don’t know how long. I was shaking. I finally got my shot of Demerol, which might as well have been a single, expired Tylenol. I threw up. They gave me more Vistaril and said I should try to sleep. I told Scott to go to bed. There didn’t seem to be anything anyone could do. I lay on my side facing the window, holding the bedrail, the contractions seizing me in what felt like one undulating wave. I could feel a pushing down and leaking with each spasm. I was afraid I would give birth to Ames in bed, terrified he would come out in pieces. Everything smelled like death. I was making noise—Scott later told me I sounded like a porn soundtrack, and you could hear me in the hallway.
There had been a shift change. The new nurse heard me moaning through a contraction and told me to breathe. I wanted to say that I was hours past “breathe,” and instead I begged her to contact the doctor on call. “It’s an EIGHT,” I wheezed, referring to the pain scale. EIGHT was the highest number I’d ever used, higher than my kidney stones and miscarriages. I always figured I’d save my TEN for an attack by bears or a slow dismemberment by spork.

At some point I went to the bathroom and passed more unpleasant goo, and then I fainted, pulling the emergency cord as I fell. I was surrounded by nurses who helped me onto a chair and back to bed. They all told me to breathe. I wanted to kill them, but was too tired.

It was after 4:00 a.m. The doctor on call from my perinatology practice appeared. I had met her once before, when she pronounced Ames and Simone “ideal” at my 20-week anatomy ultrasound. She said I was “probably in early labor.” Because of Simone’s position, we needed to decide whether to do a C-section or attempt to stop the contractions with another bag of Magnesium. She looked at me expectantly, and I realized she meant I needed to decide. I said I was confused, as the other doctors had told me it was best NOT to stall labor. She nodded again, thoughtfully, and waited.

It had been 15 hours. I did not want to be the one deciding to deliver my child at 25 weeks. How would I ever know whether I had made the decision because of the pain, the horrible pain that would not stop? I kept asking the doctor what she thought I should do and she kept demurring. Finally she said she didn’t think the Mag would buy us more than a few hours and recommended the caesarian. I was relieved, and ashamed of being relieved.

Scott was whisked away; I was given something foul to drink, and then briefed by an anesthesiologist who had missed his calling as an auctioneer. Nurses from Labor and Delivery had come to take over, among them my favorite from the night I was admitted, who’d held me while I panicked and retched and went into shock after Ames’ water broke. Now she prepped me, and I was wheeled to the OR. I leaned into her while they swabbed my back. I’d always thought I’d be terrified of the spinal, but by then if they had told me that plunging a red-hot serrated bread-knife into my eye would relieve me of all sensation below the waist I wouldn’t have hesitated. I had one more terrible contraction…and they were gone.

I started babbling gratefully that I couldn’t feel a thing. Scott held my hand. We stared at each other. I heard the time called and realized the incision had been made. Something happened with my blood pressure, and I threw up for the last time in my pregnancy. I felt a rolling and a rustling, and heard the doctor say “Poor little thing.” Ames was out.
More pulling. Then, 5:35 a.m.: they held up a wormy purple-red bundle. I saw a leg moving—oh my god, it was moving, it was a live person! I gasped and gasped and laughed and cried and they took her away and I told Scott We have a baby! We have a daughter!

Scott left with Simone and I heard the doctor talking about how much she loved her new staple gun. I heard the CHUNK, CHUNK of the staples. She appeared by my head to tell me that my uterus had been completely thinned out by contractions. “I’m sorry,” she said, “You didn’t seem like a woman in active labor.”
In recovery, a nurse asked whether I had any pain and I burbled the same words I would repeat for the next two days: “But no contractions!” That night I would have nightmares about contracting and wake to find it was only the automatically-constricting pressure cuffs on my legs.

They wheeled Simone into recovery on her way to the NICU. She had cried before she was intubated, they told me. I was so proud. Her eyes were fused shut, she was red and wrapped in plastic, her head the size of a bulb syringe: she was beautiful. I reached my hand into her isolette and she gripped the tip of my finger. In a few hours I would spike a fever, and they’d hang my IV poles with festive bags of broad-spectrum antibiotics. We got her out just in time.