Journal Entry

Memorable mommy moments: Emergency delivery

When you’re pregnant for the first time, it’s an adventure into knowledge. I bought the books and signed up for the websites. I monitored my unborn baby’s size and accomplishments by the day, proudly telling people, “My baby is three inches long now and has fingerprints” with the same enthusiasm that a mother announces her toddler took his first steps. I didn’t prepare for the actual birth though, that’s the scary part for someone who hasn’t been through it before. I kept the last minute panic away by refusing to consider it. When the moment came, it turned out that no book or class could have prepared me for her birth.

With my husband away at work, I had fallen asleep with only the television for company. I had Dick Van Dyke and Mary Tyler Moore to keep me company; familiar friends in predictable circumstances. Their voices lulled me to sleep. I awoke after midnight to find myself in drenched sheets and deduced that my water had broken. I called my husband on his mobile phone. I was very calm, he was panicked.

I hadn’t felt even one pang of labor yet, so I didn’t feel rushed. I got into the shower and the phone began ringing. My husband again, assuring me he was on his way and that he had called my mother. I no sooner put down the phone than my mother called, assuring me that my sister was on the way.

They were all rushing to my side. I hadn’t rushed anywhere so far, I was still sitting on the bed, naked. Before I could get up to dress, the phone rang again. My niece’s voice came through to me, excited and demanding. “Where are you? My mother went to your house but no one answered and it’s all dark.”

“I am sitting on my bed, naked, and answering the phone,” I explained. “Perhaps if all of you stopped calling me, I could get dressed and unlock the door.”

I managed to throw on some clothes just before they all arrived simultaneously. As it turned out, their panic was justified, my calm demeanor was not. When I arrived at the hospital, it was quickly determined that I had cord prolepses. The rush of my water escaping the womb had pulled the umbilical cord past the cervix and the baby’s head was pressing down upon it. From the moment the doctor arrived and yelled “I got cord” to the time I was in the operating room was seconds.

One nurse was assigned the job of manually pushing my daughter’s head off the cord until they anesthetized me for an emergency C-section. I can’t explain the pain of having someone push a baby back into your womb, but let’s just say that a loud “arrgghh” escaped my lips with each push.

“I’m sorry, I have to do this,” the nurse explained.

“I know you have to do that,” I replied. “But while you are doing it, I have to make this noise.”

The next thing I remember is waking up in recovery, begging for a drink of water. I was offered instead, the moistened end of a hospital towel to suck on and wheeled to the nursery so that I might turn a groggy head and view my baby daughter.

The emotions came tumbling one after another—relief, joy, sleepiness, accomplishment and thirst. My baby was here, alive and healthy. I was here, alive and drifting in and out of consciousness.

In the end, that is all that is important, the details don’t matter.