Cleo's birth (Part 1): At Home

So on Tuesday, November 13th, I was sick.  Really sick. When I was in bed, I was burning hot, but if I moved the covers a fraction off of my chest, I started shaking.  That kind of sick. I had called in sick to work that day. I was too congested to breath when I would lay down, so I was trying to sleep on the couch when I got a call from H that evening.

"Hello?" I said.


"I may be going into labor tonight. They have me on a monitor. If the readings get more concerning they're just going to induce me."

"Who is dis?" I mumbled around blocked nasal passages.

"Funny. Can you pack the bag up for tonight?"  H and I were expecting the child on the 25th and since we were told that first pregnancies are usually late, I was expecting the child sometime in early December. The "pregnancy bag" consisted of a few halfhearted items thrown together into our travel bag. This is not the task I was hoping to take on at this time.

I'm not one to shirk husbandly duties, though, so between bouts of shivering where I would retreat to my fortress of blankets on the couch, I spent the next few hours packing the bag.  I remember thinking to myself, "Oh god, not tonight" as I planned out how I would take a taxi to the hospital since there was no way in hell I could drive.

When H called to say they were letting her go home and not inducing, I sighed with relief and collapsed onto the couch. The downside of the whole experience was that no matter how stressful that night was, I couldn't call in sick the next day. Once per year, my program does an extensive crisis in-service at the police training facilities. They break us up into partners as if we were going out onto calls and the supervisors take the worst calls and situations of the last year and act them out, seeing how we all react to these situations that were botched horribly the first time around.  It involves fake scenarios, real police officers, supervisors acting like crazed clients, and they are even staged in fake apartments and fake school rooms. You almost invariably fail but it's really about helping us learn about what we do wrong on calls and trying to correct our habits going forward.

It's our equivalent of the Kobayashi Maru.

Emma comforting H through the process

So I pumped myself full of cold medicine and stumbled through the day. Thankfully my assigned partner was awesome and did most of the heavy lifting and I was able to look halfway decent even though I felt halfway dead. It was a long, stressful day that completely drained me. However, when I got home and tried to sleep,  the congestion again thwarted my efforts at rest and at 11:30pm, I surrendered to a night propped up on the couch again. I drifted off and got about 2 blissful hours of sleep when I was gently shaken awake by my wife at about 2:30am on November 15th.

"I think I'm having contractions," she said.

"You think you are?"

"I don't know. I've never had them before. It feels like cramping, but it keeps coming and going."

I sighed and we fished out H's iPhone and pulled up a contraction timer app. It's a great little app that times between contractions, averages out the times over the past hour or so, and gives you a great idea of where you stand on the 5-1-1 situation.

That is, if you use it.

I love my wife dearly, but until we got an automatic rice maker, rice making was always a disaster in our house. She's a free spirit who doesn't like to be constrained by things like time and space; a sort of zen cook who goes by the feel of the cooking. This works MAGNIFICENTLY when she has recipes going on that demand her constant attention. However, if she is allowed to wander away from the kitchen and the recipe has several steps like stove top rice does (boil 5 minutes, cook 15 minutes, let stand 15 minutes), it becomes a very chancy thing. We have had everything from crunchy rice to a proto-tapioca to accompany our food, as well as a few unsalvageable pots and pans sent off to the dumpster to the sound of our smoke alarm going off.

It was very much like this with the timer. To be fair, I suppose she had other things on her mind. I attempted vigilant questioning to determine that the timer buttons were pushed at the appropriate times but being sick and sleep deprived made me a poor timekeeper and in the end, we didn't have a damn idea what the contractions were at.

"What have I gotten myself into?"

They started out light, and for the longest time H wasn't even sure she was having contractions.  The morning crept on, though, and as the hot showers became more and more frequent and the requests for hot water bottles came more often, we both knew it was getting up there. I took an opportunity to get snacks and stuff for the hospital from the store (not to mention gas up the car) and came back with plenty of time to spare.

At 2:30pm, she reached a new level of pain where the hot water bottles weren't helping. At 3:00pm, H decided to call labor and delivery. She still was somehow unsure that she was having real contractions, but L&D told her to come on in.

I was hoping we could be like the movies, where I would gun the Civic into the red and creep that speedometer up past levels it had never been to before, rocketing along I-205, cops motioning for me to pull over as I, in turn, motion to my screaming pregnant wife in the back seat. Then they pull ahead, sirens blaring to clear traffic for me as we race to the hospital. Sadly, the trip in was pretty anticlimactic but at least it was safe.

Part 2 coming soon!