A birth story - #134

And a return to writing.

Mothers and midwives like to laugh when you tell them you have a birth plan. “Good luck with that!” they say, chuckling at your naïveté. Babies come how they come, and your little plan is just the beginning of a new series of everlasting events you cannot control. But still, a birth plan is nice to have so when the doctor starts rattling off options, you know which ones you prefer. A birth plan is merely a series of if-thens, and we somehow checked off every single one of them. 

We arrived at the hospital on May 23, preparing to have an ECV (a procedure meant to flip a breech baby to head down) followed by an induction if the ECV was successful. The baby had been flipping every which way day in and day out, and my doctors were worried about my water breaking while he was breech. Safer to get him into position and move things along instead of seeing what happens in a cabin in the mountains 70-some miles from the hospital.

So, the baby was breech — or rather, he was transverse, lying happily sideways without a care in the world in his very, very big pool. I had the max amount of amniotic fluid you can have without doctors being notably worried. (I say notably because they were still casually worried throughout my entire pregnancy.) “Big sac,” they’d say looking at the ultrasound. No one ever really articulated why more fluid was bad — he might flip more, they would say, but he was flipping whenever he wanted anyway. 

An ECV can be done without pain meds at the bedside, but it can also be difficult and painful enough to move it into the OR. Plus, if something goes wrong during the ECV (like putting the baby in distress) it moves immediately into C-section. We knew all of this going in on that sunny Thursday morning, the leaves not yet on the trees. I was mentally prepared for a C-section but hoping for a natural birth merely because I didn’t want a statistically longer recovery time. Also, I don’t like getting surgery! 

When we arrived, they did an ultrasound to make sure the baby was still transverse. He was. So they put in an IV (on the third try), prepared me for potential surgery, and then the doctor arrived to begin manipulating the baby from the exterior. They set up another ultrasound to show the doctor exactly where the baby’s head was so she could begin the procedure. The nurse slid the ultrasound wand across my belly, then up and down, before pausing.  

Every medical professional in the room simultaneously puts their hands on their hips.

“Huh,” they said in chorus. “He’s head down.”

“He likes to swim,” I said, shrugging against the hospital bed.  

And then another curious thing happened: I went into labor. So they strapped me into a ten dollar girdle to keep the baby in position, cinched it as tight as they could without suffocating me, and strapped me to the monitors. 

After their collective surprise passed, along with several hours of my contractions not amping up, the nurses and midwives began the induction. The baby was in place and so was I. Might as well get on with it.

Now, in retrospect, if I’d really planned to give you the nitty gritty, I should have written this essay when I got home. But I didn’t want to. I didn’t want to think about my birth at all when I got home, so I’ll summarize what happened: I labored for fifty-eight hours before reaching 9cm dilated. They tried three different induction medicines and a cervical balloon, while I tried walking laps around the hospital, dancing, bouncing up and down on various sized balls, and enough complaining to get everyone to leave but the baby. 

During those 58 hours I ate two hamburgers, six crepes, two servings of french toast, three servings of pudding, three turkey sandwiches, three plates of hashbrowns, two servings of french fries, god knows how many pieces of bacon, and at least three chai lattes. I was eating the entire time because I was running a never ending marathon of contractions in my determination to not get an epidural.

But by hour 58, knowing I still had to actually push the baby out, I caved. I called for the epidural. I didn’t have any strength left to endure more pain. After the epidural was placed, they did a final cervical check to prepare for the ominously named “ring of fire.” 

“Huh,” my doctor said. 

Something was wrong with my cervix. Part of it was jutting out, swollen, and it was in the baby’s way.

The doctor rolled her stool back and rolled her lips inward, sighing deeply through her nose, hands pressed against her knees. 

“If you try to give birth naturally,” she started, “your cervix will rupture and you’ll need emergency abdominal surgery, with the risk of bleeding out. We need to move you into a C-section within the hour.” 

I started to cry. The nurse came to my bedside.

“Aw honey, you don’t need to be scared,” she said with a smile and the slightest of chuckles. 

“I’m not scared!” I barked at her. “I’m angry!” 

And in fact I had never been more furious in my life. Do you know how long 58 hours is? Imagine you work a 9-5 and you clock in on Monday, work all day, take a break here and there, and then clock out. Then you clock in on Tuesday, go to meetings, get an email that infuriates you, spend an hour dissecting the email with your favorite coworker, putz around a bit, clock out. Then it’s Wednesday, and before you head to work, you run an errand at the post office, then make it to work just a little late but still in time for the all-hands. There were rumors a reorg was being announced and you didn’t want to miss it. Everyone is on the edge of their seats, but the meeting passes without anything unusual. You get a few texts from coworkers and the coffee station is buzzing with speculation. Maybe it will be announced later? You spend the day wondering, but nothing comes to pass. You clock out. You do this two more times, two more days of emails and meetings and coffee breaks and messages amidst the mind-numbing clatter of keyboards and HVAC systems and that’s still only forty hours. And for all 58 hours I was awake and in pain and absolutely gorging myself on calories to keep going. Every muscle in my body was worn out. I hadn’t slept in days. I was in the worst self-inflicted condition possible going into surgery and because I’d done so much research, I knew this was going to make recovering from a C-section absolutely brutal when I could have just had the C-section when we’d shown up days earlier! And on top of everything, I’d been wearing a girdle the entire time!

I am still mad. Obviously. 

So we moved into the C-section, and despite feeling wholly patronized by the nurse assuming my tears were fear related, I did in fact move into terror. 

C-sections are routine, but they’re also insane. You are awake while you’re strapped to a table like Jesus on the cross with only a sheet blocking you from seeing half your organs on a bedside tray while they yank a human you’ve never met out of your midsection. And because I had an epidural instead of the typical medicine used at a scheduled C-section, I could feel everything they were doing, just without the pain. While the whirring of the machines amped up, so too did my anxiety staring at the sheet in front of me, sleep-deprived and physically trashed. 

“Could you… could you play some music?” I asked.

“Can we get some music in here?” the anesthesiologist asked.

Time passed.

“Can someone please play music?” I asked again, voice shaking as tears welled in my eyes.

“Can we get some music, now??” the anesthesiologist yelled. 

Time passed again. I start breathing harder.

“Where is the music?!” he yelled into the room that I could not see. 

Nothing. Nothing except the blaring lights and the omnipresent white noise of the hospital pouring like water over the mindless chatter of medical staff bored with a routine procedure on a patient they’ll never speak to. 

“OK hon,” he yelled over the increasing buzz of the room, “we’re just gonna do this on my phone. What do you want to listen to?”

What does a person want to listen to when being cut open, side to side, before taking on the greatest responsibility of their life? I considered it. 

“Harry Belafonte,” I whimpered. 

Time passes.

“Um, how do you spell‚—”

“B-E-L-A-F-O-N-T-E. JUST THE GREATEST HITS IS FINE,” I was also yelling now.

And then from his phone, sitting next to my head, I heard Harry.

Shake, shake, shake, Señora, shake your body line
Shake, shake, shake, Señora, shake it all the time
Work, work, work, Señora, work your body line
Work, work, work, Señora, work it all the time

I sang the lyrics under my breath. I held my eyes tightly shut, imagining a hot sweaty night, my body shaking on the exam table as they jerked me around. 

You can talk about cha-cha
Tango, waltz or the rumba
Señora's dance has no title
You jump in the saddle, hold on to the bridle

I gripped Ben’s hand, holding on as tight as I could.

Dance, dance, dance, Señora
Dance it all the time
Work, work, work, Señora
Work it all the time

“OK get ready,” I heard the doctor yell. “We’re getting ready to get him out,” she continued. 

Jump in the line
Rock your body in time
OK, I believe you!
Jump in the line
Rock your body in time
Somebody, help me!

“Here he comes!” she yelled. I sang with more intention, incanting him into the world, singing each verse louder and louder, gripping and fearing and hoping. My pregnancy had been routine. Routine symptoms, routine check-ups, routine wonders. Until Week 26. 

“Huh,” my doctor had said, looking at the ultrasound. “Never seen that before.”

The choroid cysts that are sometimes present in a baby’s brain and disappear by Week 26 did not disappear in this baby’s brain. They kept assuring us that surely by next week, they would be gone. But they were not. We kept getting ultrasounds. We kept seeing the cysts. We went to the specialists at the big hospital. “Could be nothing, could be Down Syndrome… could be still-born. But probably nothing.” I had told everyone about the cysts, and when everyone kept asking about them, I simply… lied. I said they were resolved. There was nothing we could do about them, and I didn’t want to endure the worry of others on top of my own. The baby was perfect, I said to them, to myself. 

Everyone will tell you the worst thing for you and for the baby is stress. The best thing you can do is be relaxed, be happy, be hopeful during the most stressful event of your life. And so throughout the pregnancy I sang and danced and hiked and meditated and moved through my days with stress at my heels, ignoring his clawing shadow. 

That is until I was crucified on a table. And then I let him encompass me. 

The song ended, the machines groaned, and from the silence, Harry Belafonte sang again. 

Day-o
Day-o
Daylight come and me wan' go home

I did want to go home. I wanted to go home so badly. 

Day, me say day, me say day, me say day, Me say day, me say day-o
Daylight come and me wan' go home.
Work all night on a drink of rum

And then, the wail.

“He’s here!” My doctor sang in unison with the baby. 

Daylight come and me wan' go home
Stack banana 'til de mornin' come
Daylight come and me wan' go home

He was whisked onto my chest, just under my chin. I could only see his belly and his legs, and I asked fervently, “is he OK? Is he OK?” 

Come, mister tally man, tally me banana
Daylight come and me wan' go home
Come, mister tally man, tally me banana
Daylight come and me wan' go home

My little tally man, I was still singing under my breath, tears of overwhelm and fear and relief and desperation streaming down the side of my face.

Lift six foot, seven foot, eight foot bunch
Daylight come and me wan' go home
Six foot, seven foot, eight foot bunch
Daylight come and me wan' go home

“You did great!” she assured me. “We’re just stitching you up, almost done down here.” 

“But is he great? Is he great?”

“He’s great, he’s fine, it’s OK.” Ben’s voice.

And from there on, I remember almost nothing. I don’t remember if he was crying anymore. I don’t remember Ben stroking my hair. I don’t remember the third song on Harry Belafonte’s Greatest Hits. The anesthesiologist had assured me that as soon as the baby was out, he would pump me full of anti-anxiety drugs, and that is exactly what he did. The baby was pulled through the slice at 4:15pm, and the next thing I remember was Ben asking me what kind of food I wanted. Thai. I wanted Thai. 

And by 7pm, I was gorging myself on it with a small human of 7 lbs tightly wrapped in a glass bin next to me. I asked the nurse when I could leave, if we could leave in the morning.

“You need to be able to walk to the end of the hall before you’re approved to leave.” She said it without even looking up from her clipboard, so confident in her years of C-section recoveries that my haste would lessen once the best of the meds wore off and I could begin to feel what had happened. In her estimation, I would not walk to the end of the hall tomorrow and likely not the day after. So the next morning after being sliced open I got out of bed and walked to the end of the hall.

“Huh,” the midwife said. She shrugged, and we packed our bags and our baby.

Woods Winchester Wright was on his way home. Now, he is some three months old. To say I’m grateful for my paid subscribers continuing to support this newsletter while I was (and am) recovering is an understatement. Recovery, as expected after laboring for nearly 60 hours first, has been rough. I bled for ten weeks straight. I wasn’t allowed to go for walks. And then as soon as I could go for walks, I got Covid. But here we are on the other side: I’m walking and writing with a little man on my chest. I’ve been reading him Anne Lamott, Martha Wells, and Neil Gaiman. I’ve been playing him Fine Young Cannibals and Billy Joel. I’ve been waking up early and going to bed even earlier. 

There was no cosmic shift as had been advertised, and to say I loved him immediately would be a bit of a stretch. But then, I am a person who not only loves cats, but loves the French. I am not a retriever, ready to love whoever has the ball. I like having to earn love, I like for it to be won with effort, with diligence and inspection. I like, when weeks and months later, you are enjoying a coffee with your morning reading on the couch and a small animal approaches, jumps up, and settles down next to you, pressing into your hip before starting their own morning routine, licking this paw and that, while you reflect on the quiet space you share. I like when love takes time.

And so that is where Woods and I find each other, sharing a quiet space in an alpine valley, hiking through the aspens before the afternoon monsoons. He is not a complicated fellow, yet, and if there’s any description Ben and I could give about parenting I think we’d both say it’s just a sudden surge of chores, like it’s begun raining inside every ten minutes and you absolutely must keep things dry or it will begin raining every five minutes, and if that happens, it is even more imperative to keep things dry lest the rain pummel you into a state of submission on the now very wet floor. It is a game of Tetris, where the point isn’t really to win, but rather to just not lose.

One might even think it a certain kind of hell, really, but only the Sisyphean kind. If a person can find joy in cutting the grass that grows again, they can find joy in this too.

And I do. 

I find joy in the shockingly loud sounds that can come out of something so small, no matter that they come at all hours of the night. I find joy when I look down to see if the little gremlin is still feeding and he is instead just gums clamped on the nipple looking up at me with his very sly grin. I find joy in the meep meep meep of the washing machine indicating it is done and working properly and not at all in distress when only two weeks into cloth diapers it instead made a meeeeep meeeeep meeeeep screaming for help because our septic system had backed up and flooded the garage. I even find joy in Finn the ole tomcat spraying throughout the house not because he is jealous of the baby as people warned but because he is fighting a territory war with sweet Jibs over who gets to be the baby’s protector. I can find joy in almost all of it if I just look close enough.

See you on Sundays, old friends. 

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