Jaideep Reed Chawan is here and he's now a day old. He's managed to do a lot in the past day -- he's got the eating thing down, he's busy making us little (and not so little) gifts in his diapers, he sneezes, and makes a lot of interesting faces. And, after the initial self-abuse, he's had his hands covered and he's stopped scratching his face. So much progress! Clearly, he's something special.While the journey is important, his arrival reminded me that getting there isn't always half the fun. Granted, this journey didn't involve taking off my shoes for security checks and making sure all my liquids were in 3oz containers, but there were some hassles and delays. We got to the hospital a little after 5PM and filled out a ton of paperwork. They put us into a room and the nurse took a bunch more information -- all things that should already be in my charts, but... maybe this is the secret double-check? By this time, we were almost at the 7PM shift change, and one of the nurses delivered the bad news to me that having had Pitocin ordered meant 1) it would be delivered via IV along with fluids and I'd be tied to an IV tree for the duration, and 2) there would be no happy pain relieving showers because Pitocin also means continuous monitoring of baby's vitals and mom's contractions. Delightful.
Once they got this monitoring going, the checked me over again and found that we were 80% effaced and 3cm dilated. Surely this Pitocin would help things along quickly. Or not. Five hours later, it's midnight and I'm checked again. Everything's the same on the inside. On the outside, I'm feeling some mighty pains. How was it possible this had been for nothing? Grrrr. So, the midwife tells us that we'll give things another hour or so and then we might need to make some decisions about what to do (read: how to intervene and get the kid out).
As nature / Pitocin drips would have it, by 1AM I'm standing and squatting next to the bed, miserable with pain that is apparently doing nothing. I tell Ajay to call the nurse -- I need some drugs of the dangerous sort. Whatever you have, I'll take two and pronto! Fortunately, because I was out of my designated location, the nurse came to me and we didn't even need to call. She called the anesthesiology people and we waited for them to come for what seemed like hours when, all of a sudden, there was a giant popping sound and a giant movie-style gush of water and other mess splats to the floor. I thought I'd been in pain before, but I'd been wrong. This event brought me to tears and started me shaking with pain. Not exactly something I'd expected.
When the bearers of good drugs appeared, they couldn't find some oxygen monitoring sensor and I was forced to wait -- sitting upright on the edge of the bed, curled over, clutching a pillow and the nurse, while not moving -- though another 3 or 4 miserable contractions. They gave me something in the drip that was supposed to feel like a 'couple glasses of wine' and --having had a couple glasses once upon a time, I can say with certitude that this was more like a bottle and a couple glasses. It didn't help the pain, but I didn't care as much -- call me a cab, it's time to go home! Finally they get the right equipment, hook me up to more things, and proceed with stabbing me in the spine. Comfortable it was not, but when she offered to do a second stab to put in some combination spinal something that would make things take effect faster, Ajay reports that I said, "Faster is good." Things were bad enough that speaking like a 2-year-old was the best I could do.
Another jab later, and my legs started feeling tingly and heavy, and relief was on the way. For the first time since getting hitched to my little IV wagon at 7, I was able to do what they'd been telling us to do: relax and be comfortable (never mind the beeping, constant blood pressure checks, people in and out, ...). Forget that I was shaking like a leaf from the effects of the epidural, I wasn't feeling like the pain was going to kill me anymore! Hooray! Finally, things started to change--when they checked where I was after I stopped shaking, we had a head locked in place, 90% effacement, and 6cm of room to work with.
Not even an hour later, at about 3:45, I asked the nurse to have the midwife come back and check me at 4AM because I was feeling something that wasn't pain but that was absolutely a pressure. She came in, told me we were ready to go and to give her a couple trial pushes to see what I could do. The results: I'm apparently good at pushing, so Ajay was made to get out of bed... where he'd just gotten comfortable after my little ordeal. We, and by that I mean "I", started pushing with the next contraction at 4:00, and 6 contractions later we had a baby at 4:07. If Pitocin is evil, the epidural is God's gift to a laboring Britta. Seriously, with a first baby, who has 7 minutes of pushing? It's unheard of for a reason.
Maybe it wasn't crossing the backbone of the Andes on foot, or taking a mule train with food into a jungle camp after the roads flood and the supplies have run out. It's not solving the mystery of why a kid can't read or how to finally make something make sense when it never has before. It's not the kind of physical or mental adventure I've had before, but it was by far the biggest. No mountains, or floods, or mysteries compare to this. And, that's how two became three with a little help from a lot of people and, in the end, with a little modern medicine applied to something as old as time itself. Pretty amazing stuff.
