This is the final part (part eight) of the story of the birth of our daughter.

Read Part: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7

He leaves, and my wife looks at me with panic in her eyes. I am feeling terrified (and not just because I have dirty dishes around the house and my underwear hasn’t been put in the hamper) but tell her everything will be OK. We’ll figure it out. Foolishly, she believes me.

We call my in-laws to come help with the process. In the end, they wheel my wife’s wheelchair down while I carry my daughter in her infant car seat. I leave my daughter inside the hospital with them and go get the van. Doh. It is snowing heavily outside. The snow is not staying on the ground, but it is not melting either. It is making a thick slushy paste that is both slippery as anything and able to saturate the entire lower half of my jeans.

I roll the van forward and hop out to place my daughter in her seat base. By the time I get around to my wife she is in the van safely. I thank my in-laws and tell them to meet us at the house. I get in the car and squeeze my wife’s hand.

The normally five minute drive home takes almost fifteen that night. It is dark, visibility is next to nothing, and the brakes on the van seem to be more like the hand brake on a “big wheel”, designed more for spinning you into a skid than stopping. Later I would look for grip marks on the steering wheel, convinced I had held it that tightly.

I get home and carry my daughter into the house. My wife is assisted by her parents. Amazingly, no one slips and falls, and we are finally a family in our home.

This is part seven of the story of the birth of our daughter.

Read Part: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6

The remainder of the day and the whole of the next passes without any significant incident. My younger sister comes up the first night and visits (transit to get her from her apartment to our town wasn’t servicing the area after midnight). Of course, my in-laws are there frequently.

The day after that we begin to wonder what the protocol is for discharging a c-section patient. Our nurse informs us there was “no way” we would be discharged today, and that Sunday is unlikely as well, given my wife’s slow recovery and that she had just begun to move on her own without someone holding on to her.

My older sister and her family come in the afternoon. We pretend to be ignorant of the rule that no children are allowed to visit except for siblings, allowing my niece and nephew to meet their cousin. About half an hour into the visit, our nurse comes and offers us a private room that has just become available. We jump at the opportunity (a private room means I can sleep in the room with them) and get my siblings to help move rooms.

We visit with them for another half hour or so in the new room, and they leave. About ten minutes after their departure (4pm-ish), the insensitive ob-gyn arrives and says, “Are you ready to go home?” Shocked and more than a little frightened, my wife replies, “No.” The doctor furrows his brow and says, “What’s wrong?” my wife says (holding back tears) that she is just not feeling physically ready. The ob-gyn replies, “Well, without a medical reason I have to discharge you today.”

Read Part Eight

This is part six of the story of the birth of our daughter.

Read Part: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5

I call my parents from the house as I sit in our office uploading the photos of our new daughter to a photo sharing site. I cry and avoid telling them the bulk of the story. I am saddened by the reality that they cannot travel to see their new granddaughter because of my mother’s health. It would be almost two months before my wife was well enough to travel.

I get to bed around 3:00am and sleep soundly until my alarm wakes me at 6:30am. I shower quickly and head back to the hospital. My wife would later tell me that my entrance into the room was like a ray of sunshine. I arrived to find my daughter screaming in her bassinet and my wife pressing the call button for a nurse. I pick up my daughter and she quiets immediately. My wife begins to cry. She (my daughter) had been screaming for over an hour, and she (my wife) could not get up to get her because of her incision. After ensuring my wife is OK with my daughter (she was needing to nurse) I go out to yell have a calm and rational discussion with the nurses to find out what was going on. Two words are returned. Two words that become the bane of our existence in the hospital: shift change.

We spend the early morning as a family. Well, my wife sleeps and I cuddle my daughter, but we’re all in the same room. Eventually our nurse arrives and introduces a college co-op student who will be shadowing her today. We are told to call for either of them if needed.

The student returns with a tub and some cloths and towels, informing us it is time for my daughter’s first bath. She instructs my wife to lower her bed flat and sit up, cross-legged, so she can watch. Incredulously, my wife looks at her and says, “I just had a c-section. I can’t do that.” The nurse seems perplexed. Obviously the school had given her strict instructions about how to perform the bath. She attempts to cajole my wife into trying, at which point I step in and tell her to put the tub at the end of the bed and do the bath, please.

Mid-afternoon they come to us and offer a “door side” bed in a semi-private. My wife asks me to take a look and make the call. I assess that there is little more space, but it is significantly less crowded, making it seem larger. So, the student and a couple of her student friends begin to navigate the bed (in which my wife is holding my daughter in her arms) out of the ward room while I move the bags and stuff. I arrive in the hall outside the new room watching them try and align the bed with the door. I see them bang the bed into the wall, and my wife winces. I clench my fists and grit my teeth. A few moments later, the three of them still can’t master the laws of physics and again the bed is jarred, and again my wife winces.

I step forward. “I will do it.”

“No sir. It’s OK. We’ll get it.”

“Step away from the bed. Now.”

The three of them move away slowly. I take a quick look and carefully roll the bed away from any walls. I then lift the lower half of the bed and rotate it (think like a wheelbarrow), aligning it with the door frame. I slide the bed about half way in and turn back to the trio of gape-mouthed students and say, “Can you handle it from here?”

Read Part Seven

This is part five of the story of the birth of our daughter.

Read Part: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4

Excited, I leave recovery and start toward the waiting room where I know my in-laws are. I decide against it because I figure my wife would want to share this moment with them. (Thankfully, otherwise they would have seen my daughter before my wife.)

Eventually they wheel my wife in. She looks weak and exhausted, and I choke back tears. I pass my daughter to her Mommy, and watch as my wife looks at my daughter for the first time. It is 11:45pm; over an hour since my daughter had been born. Then, the nurse does the whole weighing and measuring thing while I take some pictures. And finally, my wife gets to put my daughter on the breast (something she had wanted to do as soon as she was born). I heave a sigh of relief and offer to go get my wife’s family from the waiting room.

I go and collect my MIL from the waiting room (only one visitor at a time in recovery) and rush off to the pay phones to call my parents and tell them the news. Three successive calls go straight to voicemail (they have call waiting). I would later learn that my mother fell asleep with the cordless phone beside her and rolled over on it, pressing the “talk” button and effectively taking it off the hook. I call both my sisters and tell them the news, asking them to continue trying to call my parents. My younger sister would reach them shortly after 2am.

After my in-laws leave they wheel us to a ward (4 bed) room. I try to explain that we asked for a private room, or failing that a semi-private. I am told this is the only bed they have. It is cramped and dark (because, after all, it is after midnight by this point). The night nurse comes in and takes my daughter away. The panic in my wife’s eyes tells me I should follow the baby and not worry about my wife. I follow them to the little room where they do the assessments (you know: prick the heel to check blood sugar, test the grab reflex, weigh them, etc). When they lift her and try to turn her to her stomach (to make sure she has the reflex/strength to turn her head to the side and not, you know, suffocate herself) my daughter puts her arms out; stiff. She won’t lie on her tummy and instead does a push-up. The nurse looks at me and says, “You know, I’ve been doing this twenty years, and your daughter is the only one I have seen do this.”

I follow the nurse back to the room and am told that I have to go now. I express concern, but they tell me that I cannot stay in a ward room; it would not be fair to the other mothers. I kiss them both (my wife and daughter, not the nurse) and leave.

Read Part Six

This is part four of the story of the birth of our daughter.
Read Part: 1 | 2 | 3

They call me over to the assessment table (where they are giving her an apgar of 9) and encourage me to come see her (through the throngs of people all crowded around my little girl). I approach, and as I wander about the space in a confused daze I turn. Toward the operating table. And I see something I will never forget. You know those scenes you see on TLC of a surgery, where the person is open and you see things inside them? Those scenes that most people cringe and quickly flip the channel as soon as they realize what they are looking at? I saw my wife like that.

I recoil back. I keep saying to myself, “I did not need that. I did not need to see that.” A nurse grabs my shoulders and guides me to a stool where I can see neither my wife nor my daughter. The anesthesiologist comes over to hold me down as I am insisting on getting up. The nurse tells another that I am very pale. My wife hears a nurse call over the intercom, “Can I get a nurse for Dad here? He isn’t doing too well.”

My wife asks what is going on. No one will tell her anything. I cannot hear her over the nurse yelling at me.

I am arguing with the nurses and anesthesiologist that I am fine. I was stunned, I was scared, but I am no longer a concern. They refuse to believe me. They want me to leave. I refuse to leave my wife and child. As I sit there I hear the following…

Voice #1: one, two, three, four, five
Voice #2: one, two, three, four, five
loud clang of metal

This is repeated a couple more times before it dawns on me what they are doing: they are counting clamps or instruments or whatever and making sure they haven’t left any in my wife. I am too much in shock to cry at this point.

Finally, I negotiate the right to hold my daughter. They insist that I remain seated. At this point my wife calls out to me, and I tell her I am OK, and that the baby is beautiful (all I can see was her face as she is wrapped in like five blankets). Eventually they allow me to take my daughter into recovery to wait for my wife. I would later learn that no one showed the baby to my wife, and that the first time she saw my daughter was in recovery afterwards.

Check back tomorrow for Part Five

This is part three of the story of the birth of our daughter.

Read Part: 1 | 2

We talk. We cry. We panic. I try to call a friend of hers who had a c-section the previous December without success. I offer the following: insanity is doing the same thing twice and expecting a different result. She agrees, and the final push is that if we wait too long, the next ob-gyn on call is someone she saw for a couple appointments while her regular ob-gyn was on holidays, and this other ob-gyn was disgusting and not who she wanted delivering her first child.

We call for the ob-gyn to tell him of our decision. He again explains that the child is large (we get it) and as such he would suggest a vertical incision instead of a horizontal. We would later learn that all his c-sections are vertical (also known as “the old way that takes significantly longer to heal but is a lot easier for the doctor”). We agree to the vertical.

So around 8pm they come and take her to the O.R. while I wait in recovery next door. The next two hours or so I pace back and forth while the wonders of medical science figure out how to get an operational epidural into my wife. (We would later learn none of the earlier attempts to get her an epidural were “right”.)

I get collected by the anesthesiologist and brought to the O.R. He directs me cautiously past the table where my wife is and around to her head, behind a curtain (we had specifically told both the ob-gyn and the nurses that neither of us wanted any details about the surgery; we wanted to hide behind the curtain and not be given a play-by-play). She is on her back with her arms outstretched, and I am immediately angry for the years I spent in Catholic school classrooms, all of which had crucifixes in them.

I try to be coherent and talk to her as the team of doctors and nurses tend to her. Eventually, the ob-gyn exclaims, “Woah! Look at her!” To which I reply, “It’s a girl?” And he tosses back, “No, it’s a girl and a half!” Time of birth: 10:24pm.

Click Here for Part Four

This is part two of the story of the birth of our daughter.

Click here to read part one

At around noon they conclude that the baby is R.O.P. (right occipital posterior… don’t ask how I remember things like this; just go with it) which means the baby is facing sideways. Despite a pitocin drip we are stopped at 8cm with a cervical “lip” (I did not see this, but I was told to visualize a crescent moon shape). During the previous five hours, my wife has been complaining that there is a rod digging into her hip. The nurse tells her that she is imagining things and that the epidural wouldn’t let her feel that.

At around 2pm they finally give my wife the go-ahead to push (after her begging to try for hours). The caveat is that pushing will only work if the lip is lifted. Manually. By the nurse. While she pushes. I’ll give you a minute to work that visual out for yourself.

At around 4pm, after two hours of steady pushing, the nurse asks my wife, “Are you putting your feet in the stirrups while you push?” my wife replies, “Of course I am. I’m bearing down hard on them.” The nurse makes the “tsk tsk” sound and says, “Well we’ve just wasted the last two hours then.” My wife continues to complain about her hip.

At around 6pm, after another two hours of “proper” pushing, they give up on pushing and tell my wife to rest. My wife insists something is up with her bed. They roll her to her side and discover that her hip is resting on the joint in the bed frame, and that the mattress is extremely thin there (due to a history of bending the mattress at that point).

An hour later (we have been in the delivery room nearly twelve hours at this point) the on-call ob-gyn comes in and offers the following, “The baby is very big, and very healthy. We are not worried about the baby right now. However, you have been here all day and we have to consider the possibility of a c-section. You don’t have to do it; it’s your call. But if something goes wrong with the baby, it stops being your call and it becomes my call.” He leaves to allow us time to digest the information.

Read part 3

Over the next series of posts, I will share the story of the birth of our daughter. While the eventual outcome was joyous, the path there was somewhat less than ideal. I am not writing this to frighten anyone, or to lament the circumstances. I am writing to let people know that sometimes, things don’t go as planned, and even when things seem impossibly difficult, there is a light at the end of the tunnel. This is part one.

My wife was due March 29, 2005. Despite many ultrasounds (due to an “over ripe” placenta – seriously, that’s what they called it; like it was some kind of fruit or something) taken in anticipation of having a reason to induce labor, she still had not given birth on March 29. That night (March 29) she was very chatty, and we wound up talking until almost midnight (my routine is to get up at 5:30am, so this was a late night for us).

At 2am I am awakened by her feeble calls from the bathroom. I jump out of bed with a start (mostly because I was sound asleep). She tells me that her water broke (she had laid towels down on the bed) and that now she feels constipated and very crampy. I ask her what I can do, and she tells me to call the maternity ward nurse’s station at our local hospital for guidance. I call them (and in hindsight I can hear them snickering at me under their breath) and explain the situation. They tell me that the cramps are likely contractions, and that when they approach five minutes apart we should drive to the hospital.

At 5am, after a shower and phone calls to our parents, we leave with contractions in the five to six minute range. I am eerily calm. We arrive at the hospital and I drop my wife at the door and go park. She waits for me inside and we go up to the maternity floor together.

They put her on a fetal monitor in a triage room and we wait. The moans of agony continue to escalate from my wife as I stand by helpless. I watch as our assigned nurse spends ten minutes trying to start an IV without success. There is blood on the floor from the process, much to my horror. We finally get the IV started with the help of a second nurse.

At around 7am they move us to a delivery room. My wife is told that shift change is rapidly approaching, and that she has the following choices… option 1: get an epidural now; option 2: wait until potentially 9am to receive an epidural. She opts for option 1. Half an hour (and three failed “starts”) later she has an epidural line we would later learn was not properly inserted. They assess the situation, and find that she is over 7cm dilated but not effaced. Our new nurse (shift change) nonchalantly tells us we will be holding our baby before 11am.

Click Here for Part Two