X's birth story

Sunday, February 27th, around 6 p.m., JW came upstairs to see if I could come down for dinner. He found me kneeling on the floor with one leg balanced on top of the bed, typing away furiously. "This job is literally killing me," I sobbed. "My leg keeps cramping up, and I'm supposed to finish this merger agreement ASAP, and I haven't even started the work I'm supposed to have done by tomorrow. I'm 38 weeks pregnant. I've been working nonstop. What is wrong with these people? Can't they have some compassion?" I had a brief fantasy that the leg cramps turned out to be deep vein thrombosis and that the partners who assigned me all that work showed up at my funeral, stricken and vowing to be more humane in the future.

JW, seasoned husband that he is, let me finish my meltdown and asked, "What can I do to help?"

I calmed down a little. "You already are. You've been taking care of K all afternoon and you made dinner. I just have to get through this."


We talked about how I should start pushing back at work. I agreed, but pointed out that I had no way of knowing K would be sick all week when I accepted the assignments I had been working on all weekend.  Then JW made a rookie mistake. "We know you'll probably be overdue, so --" I glared at him. "You don't know that!" "But your OB said --" "She doesn't know either!" He apologized and retreated back downstairs.

At around eleven that night, I closed my laptop. I still hadn't started my major assignment that was supposed to be done the next day and had spent about ten minutes preparing for my Monday lunch presentation instead of the 3-4 hours I had planned, but I couldn't stay awake much longer. During my pre-bedtime shower, I made a decision. Instead of working right up until my water broke, I'd start my maternity leave the day before my due date and relax, get the baby's room done, finally get that prenatal massage I had been wanting all through my pregnancy, maybe persuade JW to meet me in Boston for a lunch date. That meant I'd only have a week and a half of work left! I could handle that. We'd schedule the C section for March 14th, Pi Day, like we had talked about. Feeling much more cheerful, I went to tell JW my plan. "Okay," he replied, "but it sounds like you're assuming you'll be overdue? When I said that, you seemed... um... upset." "I know. I didn't want to hear that," I said. "But you're right, realistically it looks like I'll be overdue again since the baby is still so high up and I'm only a centimeter dilated."

At 4 a.m., I woke up. I just have to pee, I thought to myself. My water didn't break. With K I had a flood. This is just a trickle. I just have to go to the bathroom.

Usually in the middle of the night, I go to the bathroom without turning the lights on. This time, just before cleaning up, I turned on the lights. There was blood in the toilet and in my underwear. Not just "bloody show." More like a period.

I called my OB and apologized for waking her in the middle of the night. "I'm wide awake," she said. "I just delivered three babies in three hours." She told me to come in to the hospital.

I woke up JW and told him that I was bleeding but not in pain, and that I needed to go to the hospital. But unlike last time, we had a sleeping toddler in the next room. I wasn't having contractions yet and knew they would spend a while monitoring me before anything else happened, so I decided that JW should stay home with K and I would drive myself. My husband elected not to argue with me. He went outside and brushed snow off the car while I threw some clothes in an overnight bag and emailed work to let them know I wouldn't be in. Then he came in to help me out to the car. When I started slipping on the ice, it occurred to me that this was a bad idea. We called a cab instead. The cab driver (the second one, after the first cab arrived, honked once, and immediately drove away) made no comment on the hugely pregnant woman in his car being rushed to the hospital, and instead chatted about the weather. When I arrived, the lobby was completely empty and I wandered around for a while before remembering how to get to the labor and delivery wing.

I spent the next hour or so strapped to a fetal monitor in the exam room. I sat around, read my book, and texted reassuring messages to JW. My OB said the baby seemed perfectly fine and I didn't appear to be in active labor yet but was still bleeding a little, so she wanted me to be admitted for additional monitoring. I got moved to a delivery room and settled in, first giving JW a call to let him know that everything was fine and that he could take his time dropping off K at school before meeting me at the hospital.

Once in the delivery room, I started feeling happy. I changed into my robe and slippers. Then I sat on the bed and did nothing for a few minutes. Just enjoyed being by myself in a quiet room with nobody demanding my attention and nothing to do but sit there. "I am on maternity leave!" I said to myself.

Then the phone rang. I'm not sure why I picked it up. It was a client who has a habit of calling me on my cell. "I tried your office," he said. "Where are you?" "I'm in the hospital." "Are you delivering?" he asked. "Not right this minute. Is there something you need?" "I'm in the hospital, too!" he replied. He explained that he had been injured in an accident. Delaware annual reports and franchise taxes were due the next day. "If YOU'RE in the hospital, and I'M in the hospital, who's going to do my filing?" he complained. A nurse walked in just in time to hear me say, "Our paralegal should be able to file that for you." She raised an eyebrow. "Are you still working?" she asked. "Not anymore," I said, hanging up.

JW arrived after dropping K off at school. "This is happening today, huh?" he asked. "Looks like it," I replied. "So what's this kid's name?" JW thought for a minute. "X?" "Okay. X."

A few minutes later, my OB came in and explained our options. The baby still had a strong heartbeat, but since I was leaking blood and amniotic fluid she said my choices were either to be induced or to have a C section. A friend had recently told me a horror story about attempting a VBAC and having to be induced, and I remembered getting induced last time and how horrible it felt. But I hated the idea of choosing to get my abs sliced open. My OB explained that while a C section would always remain an option up until the end, getting induced was routine in this situation. I remembered that part of the reason I had such a bad experience last time was that I refused pain medication for so long. So I agreed and got hooked up to an IV.

The first few hours, my contractions became more regular and intense, but I could handle them. By afternoon, I asked for the epidural. Ah, sweet pain relief. Still, by the middle of the night I was exhausted and kept having to turn up the epidural. Early in the morning, my OB asked if I was ready to push. She said I was about eight and a half centimeters dilated and that the baby was still fairly high up, but had moved down enough that I should be able to push him out. She gave me a pep talk about how up until now, I had to endure what was happening to me, but now it was up to me to work hard and push this baby out. It was actually a relief to be doing something active instead of lying there waiting for a contraction. I discussed pushing in detail here, but after about two and a half hours of intense work, including twenty minutes of screaming in agony while pushing out the baby's head and shoulders, our baby was born!

I didn't get to see him immediately, except in the mirrors. Our OB said that the umbilical cord had been wrapped twice around his neck and that he was "more stunned than she expected". In retrospect, I should have realized this was a very bad thing, considering how measured my OB is with her words. Later we learned that he had been blue and unresponsive, and had an Apgar score of 2 a minute after birth. You get a 1 for having a pulse. I was so relieved when after a few minutes, we heard him cry. Thank goodness, five minutes after birth, his Apgar score went up to 8. He was taken away to the nursery for initial tests and for warming before we got to see him again.

The nurses kept congratulating me on having a successful VBAC. "You were amazing. You made it look easy," said the nurse who was with me through the pushing phase. "Most people are so worried about not having a C section that they tense up and can't go through with it." I didn't realize it was an accomplishment. My OB made it sound like it wasn't uncommon and that even though a C section would remain a possibility at any point, there was no reason I couldn't have a successful VBAC as long as the baby and my body cooperated.

Over the next few days, X got poked, prodded, and snipped in various ways. X's body temperature was low and he needed additional warming time. He was born tongue-tied, with his tongue attached to the bottom of his mouth by tissue that a doctor snipped on his second day alive. He had a heart murmur that the doctors decided wasn't a problem after additional testing and an EKG. He was also jaundiced and the pediatrician wanted to keep him in the hospital for light treatment, but said we could take him home and try to flush out his system with lots of fluids before coming back the next day for another test. After a day of nonstop feeding and an anxious lab test at the hospital, we got to keep him.

I was having my own problems recovering, which I've already mentioned. I won't go into them again here. As awful as it was to have my bladder stop working for over a week, three weeks after giving birth I feel about 90% back to normal and have lost about 20 pounds. Can't complain about that.

And now we're home and I feel so lucky that we are both healthy and all this is behind us. After X was born, I think my first words were, "Our baby!" and then "I am never doing this again."

(Compare and contrast: K's birth story.)