Cleo's Birth Part 2: At the Hospital

So after a disappointingly normal drive to labor and delivery, we got H checked in. She was apologizing to the midwife in advance for wasting her time (H still wasn't convinced she was REALLY in labor). That's when we were informed that H was 5 centimeters dilated! Judging by H's face, this was both validating and terrifying for her. We both shared nervous smiles during this time as they started the machine chugging along that would end with us having a baby. This was really happening!

We were escorted back to the delivery rooms. I knock on Kaiser a lot and I personally had a decidedly less than pleasant experience staying in H's recovery room for the following days, but the delivery rooms are quite pleasant. Kind of a dim, hardwood decor going on back there like you get in a really nice Starbucks.  H requested a laboring tub and they went about getting things prepped for her to do this. They set her up with an IV bag (Not fun. H has tiny veins and is always a hassle to even draw blood from, much less set up an IV), and we were shown into the tub room.

For those of you who haven't seen a laboring tub before, it looks pretty freaking nice. It's like half a hot tub, molded into an oval shape. For the next 5 hours, H would be in there, moving around and breathing. This was the first (but not the last) time this night I would be immensely impressed with H. Her pain level was very, very obviously high at this point, but she was doing her best to move past it. Finally, though, she asked for IV drugs.

The image of this will stick with me till the day I die. I'll try to paint a verbal picture of this.

I demand narcotics as Tribute!

H stood up from the tub as the nurse came in. Nine months pregnant, mostly naked except for a swath of cloth attached to her to hold the monitors in place, she emerged from the birthing tub like a goddess of the sea! Water cascading down her, her hand clutching her IV stand like a trident imbued to summon the Kraken lest you thwart her will, she requested her pain medication to be bestowed upon her as if she were decreeing it to her mortal attendants. IT WAS GLORIOUS!

What followed, unfortunately, was not as glorious. They gave her the IV meds, but also examined her and found that while earlier she had dilated to 8 centimeters, she had now stalled. The doctor brought up breaking H's water, but H declined. The IV drugs helped some, and H gave it another hour in the tub, but it was obvious the pain was breaking through. The time had come for an epidural.

It must be odd to be a hospital specialist. For you, this is just a day. For everyone else, this is major fucking stuff. So it was with the anesthesiologist. He was a good natured man who had worked up in Alaska, and upon finding out that H was from Alaska and that her mother had been in the same medical outreach program as him (decades earlier) he was really fascinated by this.

H, on the other hand, was preoccupied with the pain.

"So, how long did your mom work for them?" the anesthesiologist would say from behind H as he inserted a tube into my wife's spine. H would answer him politely, but from my perspective in front, she was positively feral, with wild darting eyes and teeth bared.  I hope I never see that expression from her in another circumstance because it will likely mean she is going to drop to all fours, grow fur, and savagely pounce on someone, incisors going for the jugular. Finally, the epidural was in place and the snarling creature turned once again back into my wife.

The good news was it was enough pain medication that H was able to sleep, meaning I was able to finally sleep too. She was the one in massive life changing pain, but I was still sick, downing Mucinex, Sudaphed, Ibuprofin, and cough drops continuously.  I had slept 2 hours out of the last 48 and was probably not in a great mental state myself as I crashed on the "dad couch" in the room.

The bad news, we found out later, was that the epidural had squashed the contractions down significantly. In fact, Hydee was now only dilated to 7 centimeters. They put her on close to an 8mg drip of Pictosin (synthetic oxytosin) to re-induce labor and left us to rest.

This was not good. The kid was not dropping into the right position. No one had ruled out the dreaded C section, yet the specter of it was lurking in the glances the med techs gave each other as they drifted in throughout the night to check on things.

As a guy, the whole "git it done" mentality is damn near imprinted into your head from birth. So in a situation where there is nothing for you to get done, it's hard to keep a lid on your frustrations. Throw in sleep deprivation and cold medicine and I was an emotional walking wound myself. Which is how we stumbled our way into the conversation.

The short of it is that I expressed some frustration about how she hadn't allowed the midwife to break her water yet. H countered that she wanted a non-invasive pregnancy, and I got huffy, saying that the epidural had already made it invasive and now we might be facing a Cesarean.

I immediately regretted it. I'm good in a crisis when there's action and had been a rock for her while she was in pain, but now that things were getting slow and ponderous (and I was still sick and sleep deprived), I was beginning to founder.

Thankfully, H tells me it did have an effect on her in a good way. We were able to back away from the volatility of it and have a calmer conversation. As H describes it, she had an ideal of how she wanted the pregnancy to go, and even though we were way off the map, she still was trying to force it back into her ideal image. With us finally talking about it, she realized that instead of trying to shoehorn things back into the plan she wanted, she was able to take her situation for what it was and move forward instead.

Call me superstitious, but I kind of wonder if that's what did it. When the nurse came to do what felt like the final check to see if they needed to start talking to us about a Cesarean, Cleo had dropped. They propped H up on her side, the epidural began to wear off, and the pushing began!

Part 3 coming soon!