Email 8
EMAIL TO: [All in Address Book]
SUBJECT: Pregnancy Update #8
Post pregnancy - Week 8
Well, it's taken me long enough to get around to it, but here it is finally - THE GRUESOME CONCLUSION! As my mother says, grab yourself a cuppa and a biscuit, this could take a while.
I awoke around noon (anyone who knows me knows this is pretty normal) on 'D-Day' with 'the feeling' - a strange sixth sense telling me the time had come. Well, that and the bad lower back pain.
My mother prophesised this would be the day because 1) she's weird and 2) it was the date her father died. Her side of the family has a strange habit of being born on other family member's birth and death dates (eg: I was born on my mother's birthday, which is also the date her brother died, etc) - wedding anniversaries don't seem to figure into the equation for some reason.
The next few hours were spent timing very faint contractions that were irregular - fifteen minutes here, half an hour there. By dinner time, I'd had enough. "Where's my four hour labour???" I wanted to know (Claudia was seven hours, so I'd promised myself this one would be shorter). So off I went to the hospital to find out what on earth was going on.
After the midwives did a bit of midwifery (or whatever) and discovered I was still smiling during my irregular contractions and even having some that I couldn't feel, they stated "You're in pre-labour."
What the hell is pre-labour??? I asked.
"It hasn't really started yet, but you'll be back in a couple of hours."
Righto. So it was going to happen soon, but it wasn't happening now. You can imagine how terribly frustrating this is to an impatient Aquarian.
So home I went, perplexed at what pre-labour was, and leaving the midwives perplexed that I could feel it.
From the moment I left the hospital, the contractions actually started to hurt a bit. And then at about 10pm, they really started to bloody hurt and finally become regular and very close. And, as usually happens at this time, I didn't want to go. After prolonging the departure by getting hubby to repack my hospital back and saying goodbye to Claudia five times ("Yeah, bye" - not nearly as emotional as the pregnancy books tell you your first child is going to be! I guess after preparing her for the past couple of months on what was going to happen on the day, she was the one who was prepared - not me!) - my mother eventually pushed us out the door with "Just get out of here!" Obviously she wasn't keen on delivering the baby herself.
Having contractions two minutes apart, we arrived at the hospital and were ushered to a birthing suite by a midwife way too cheery for my liking. Feel sorry for me! I thought. No, midwives are too hardened for that. After asking how long I'd been in labour for and me replying that it had been all over the place all day, she cheerily said "Oh no, you only time it from the first PAINFUL, regular contraction."
"Well, since 10pm then."
She smiled. It was now 11pm. Obviously she was thinking to herself, "Good, this will be a quick one. I'll be able to get back to my cuppa and magazine."
After dancing around the subject of giving me an exam to see how far dilated I was (they don't like doing that anymore apparently, in case you haven't progressed very far and get upset and want drugs - well, DUH!), she whisked me into the shower. There she left me with hubby to scream in agony for the next twenty minutes or so. The last shower my husband and I had together certainly wasn't like this, and I'm sure he was silently vowing to himself never to have another shower with me again after this one!
So much screaming and backache later (I tend to get labour pain in my lower back and nowhere else), I'm feeling like this kid is about to pop out and use the bathroom floor as a slip and slide. This is about where I threw up from the pain. "Oh good," says Way Too Cheery Midwife, "that means you're nearly fully dilated." Great. There are much better ways to find that out! But that's natural childbirth for you. The only that that was missing was the tree for me to give birth under.
Out of the shower and onto bed, the thoughts racing through my mind were few and brief:
"I want to go home",
"I want to die",
"Man, this hurts",
"I'm never doing this again",
"Stuff this natural childbirth garbage, it's for fools!"
With that last thought firmly lodged in my brain, I was in the process of asking the midwife to give me the gas - or shoot me, whichever was easiest - when the next contraction came. "Okay, breathe," says Cheery Midwife from the other side of the room. "No, I want to push," I yell. "Okay then, push," she replies. Why she was even there, I do not know.
Off I went, making sounds you'd probably only hear on any nature program when a wild animal has been injured and is dying a painful death. I pushed away for the next few minutes, pausing in between to remark "I don't remember it hurting like this last time." Although the gas didn't help with the pain for Claudia's birth, it did at least knock me out enough so that I could pass out every now and again. This time I was very LUCID!
Anyhow, a couple of pushes later, and out came Griffin, screaming his head off. I don't blame him. So labour ended up being 1 hour and 44 minutes. Not bad, but I still missed the end of the movie on television.
But I'm NEVER doing it again.
Since then, I've gotten very little sleep, needless to say. He's being bottle fed (I've stayed true to my belief that breastfeeding should only be done in hospital, so you don't get beaten over the head with a fabric breast), mainly by his father. Hey, I carried him and got him out, I can at least be spared a few feedings!
And yes, for those who haven't seen him, he's beautiful. But I still haven't quite forgiven him for the 'in utero' side kicks that nearly killed me.
So at the end of the Pregnancy Emails, the men breathe a sigh of relief (if you read this whole email, you did very well!) and the childless women save them in their Inbox as fuel for their "I don't want kids and this is why" fights with their husbands/mother's, etc.
Thank you for enduring. I leave you with one solitary word of wisdom:
Epidural!
© Cynthia M. Piromalli 2002
©2002 StoriesByEmail.com
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