I woke up confused. A man and woman were kneeling on either side of me. The woman was shouting, but as if in a dream, I couldn't make sense of what she was saying and her voice seemed to come from a great distance.
Something was not right. In fact, it was all terribly wrong. I was lying on my back on the floor of my bedroom, shaking violently, breathing raggedly. A moment ago I had been deeply immersed in some other reality that, although already growing nebulous, was far more pleasant than this.
This seemed bad, this felt bad. There was a frantic air of desperation that I didn't understand. What had happened?
24 hours earlier, Saturday afternoon
I emerged from the bathroom with a funny feeling in my stomach. I had just seen my mucous plug, but couldn't remember what that meant. Three births under my belt and yet this was my first pre-labor encounter with "bloody show." I was 9 days from my due date and had no desire to birth early. My mom wasn't coming for another couple of days and I had been hoping we would have some time together before the big day and all its ensuing chaos. But after a quick call to Jessica, my midwife (and of course, a few Google searches), I realized that this was probably it.
I called my friend Lana and told her I wouldn't be joining her for the poetry slam that evening. My husband Edwin and I both thought I should stay home, as my midwife said labor would probably happen sometime in the next 24 hours, possibly tonight. So we ate dinner and tried to nonchalantly prep the boys for the logistics of baby arriving by tomorrow.
Contractions had started, but were sporadic and and still mild. We called family, arranged with some friends to be on-call that night, watched tv and folded laundry. By 11 pm, contractions had become a bit more intense. I dutifully tried to sleep, but gave up quickly. How can any woman sleep knowing she's on the verge of something as monumental as birthing another human being?! Certainly not me, I thought (although little did I know I would do exactly that in another ten hours or so)!
The next couple of hours were spent moving around: birth ball, standing up, downstairs, upstairs, trying to relax through the waves of pain. Jessica and her assistant arrived around 2:30 am. After determining I was 6 cm, she declared we go for a walk around the park. I was a bit shocked at the idea of a dead-of-the-night and dead-of-the-winter stroll, but agreed. Why not?
We walked and chatted. I felt good, confident and eager to birth this baby. The night air was refreshing and mild for January.
By 6:30 in the morning, Jessica checked again: 8 cm. Such relief! Not as fast as I would have liked, but progress nonetheless.
Slowly the hours passed. I listened to myself moaning low and loud through each contraction, trying to relax my jaw and body, submitting. Edwin held me. I rocked on the birth ball. I knelt on the floor with my arms and head resting on the bed, letting it cradle me, soothe me. I silently thanked Jesus for the chance to unite my suffering with His.
The boys had woken up and were upstairs in the kitchen with my friend Lana, who had come in the middle of the night to sleep over. Their shouts and stomping filtered through the haze of pain, but I blocked them out.
I should have been in transition now, with relentless waves of pain crashing over me, one after another. Instead the contractions were still often at least five minutes apart. I was in bed with Edwin holding me, sleeping in between each one. I moaned in Edwin's ear, but he kept sleeping. We were exhausted.
Finally, Jessica checked again. It was 10:30 am and I was 9 cm. It had taken four hours to go from 8 to 9 cm. This was not normal for transition and very disheartening. She decided we should go back outside for another walk. We left Edwin asleep and went back out, this time to the sunlight of a shockingly beautiful winter Sunday morning. It seemed astonishing that the world had kept right on spinning despite my surreal night of limbo.
Jessica thought the baby needed to turn and was having trouble getting into the right position to descend. She had me do squats on the steps of the gazebo and hang from the monkey bars at the empty playground. What a ridiculous sight I must have been! But how desperate I was! I bent over and moaned each time the burning began anew.
Edwin was groggy and confused when we returned. He hadn't even realized we had left. Jessica was determined to keep things moving and suggested nipple stimulation. Willing to try anything at this point, Edwin and I agreed and took a shower together. What a bizarre ironic act, foreplay in an attempt to birth a baby! Each loving stroke brought on strong contractions that had me doubled over, poignantly illustrating the connection between the pleasure of sex and the pain of childbirth.
Soon after the shower, it was time to push. I was beyond exhausted and very nervous, despite my relief that that the end was near. In my experience, pushing has always been the most agonizing part of labor, the point that breaks me, when I lost all hope of enduring any more and go wild with torment. I lay on my left side on our bed. As with my other unmedicated births, I started to lose it, crying and crazed with the pain. Jessica put hot wash clothes on my perineum and told me to focus on the heat and direct my pushing toward it.
I focused and pushed. I concentrated on that small almost uncomfortable heat and gathered all my will and energy and pushed toward it. I thought of getting that baby out. Out out out. Push push push. Burning pain stretched me impossibly far. And then, with the next contraction, even farther. I screamed Oh God Oh God Oh God in a frantic incoherent plea. A gush of water poured out as my water finally broke.
And finally, his head and shoulders were out.
But that was all.
His hips and legs didn't slide out. Usually that's the easy part. But for some inexplicable reason, his lower half was stuck.
"Get him out," I begged. My midwife pulled on him and shook her head.
"I can't," she said, perplexed. "He's stuck. You have to do it."
I cried with the searing pain, still stretched beyond enduring. The little baby, moments ago cocooned in his warm liquid bubble, now cried lustily as well, half-hanging out of me. What an odd moment to witness!
With the next contraction, I managed to push him out. Jessica put him on my chest. It was noon. I whimpered and laughed. I could not believe it was finally over and he was here. My baby. My little one. Warm and so very alive with a dark brown shock of hair and beautiful alert eyes.
I soon nursed him. After a while, Edwin cut the cord. Jessica weighed him, 6 lb 10 oz, and gave him a perfect Apgar score. We cuddled some more. Such sweet solace.
However, the peace was short-lived. There was a problem.
The third stage of labor is the delivery of the placenta, the afterbirth, which usually happens within half-hour of the birth. The uterus needs to start contracting to close down all the open blood vessels and can't until the placenta is delivered. The risk of hemorrhaging increases the longer it stays in. But my placenta wasn't coming out.
I nursed Henry again, who was sucking beautifully by now, to stimulate the necessary contractions. Nothing happened.
Jessica tried cord traction over and over again, which left me sobbing and hysterical. They gave me an herb, Angelica, then a shot of Pitocin in both thighs and finally Cytotec inserted rectally. The midwife's assistant talked to me gently about the possibility of emotional turmoil preventing the release of the placenta. I denied any such thing and wept bitterly with frustration and pain.
At some point, my friend Brigid stopped by to pick up some things for the boys (she had taken over watching them) and to take a quick peek at the baby. She walked in on me weeping and quickly retreated, confused as to what had gone wrong.
Jessica suggested taking a shower to relax and see if gravity could help. I leaned against the cold white tiles in the shower and stared at the cut cord, hanging grotesquely between my legs as the water dripped over my puffy stomach. I wanted it out of me, away from me. I wanted to yank it out of my body. I wanted this over. I got out of the shower and emptied my bladder, holding the opaque rubbery end of the cord away from the toilet.
Finally, it was agreed: we had to go to the hospital. It had been four hours since the birth and it was getting riskier with every passing moment.
Everyone got busy preparing to leave. I sat on the birthing stool, once again hoping gravity would help with the seemingly impossible.
"I don't feel right," I declared quietly, anxiously.
"I think I'm going to faint," I said with the panicky realization that I was about to lose control over my body.
And then I passed out, unaware of the blood gushing onto the floor.
Edwin caught me. They laid me on the floor and hooked my legs over the birth stool. Moments later, when I woke back up, I was in hypovolemic shock, which occurs when you lose too much blood or fluids and the heart can't pump enough blood to the body. It is characterized by confusion, anxiety, rapid breathing, and pallor and can lead to death if not treated (and sometimes even if it is).
I stared at Edwin and the midwife, trying to make sense of who they were and what they were doing. During the brief time I had been unconscious, I had been deep in some other reality. Its potency left no room in my head for anything else. I wanted to crawl back into it, like a baby returning to the warmth and peace of the womb. I didn't want any part of this cold disorienting world.
I looked into Edwin's eyes. I suddenly recognized him and memories of the birth flooded over me. But what was happening now?
"Look at me. Don't close you eyes," Edwin whispered urgently.
I nodded dumbly, my teeth chattering too much to reply, trying to stay awake, but unsure if I could.
The midwife's assistant seemed to be talking very loudly. I couldn't understand her, although later I realized she was explaining to Edwin that I was in shock and that they needed to give me oxygen.
Jessica was on the phone with the 911 operator and kept losing them with our bad reception downstairs. They put an oxygen mask over my face and started an IV as we waited for the paramedics.
The wail of sirens grew louder, its piercing noise as intimate and comforting as a mother's caress. Help is coming, help is here, it joyfully proclaimed to me.
The EMTs bustled in, asking questions, hoisting me into a wheelchair and putting blankets around my flimsy nightgown.
"I'm going with her," the midwife said to Edwin. "You stay with the baby."
"No. I'm going with her," Edwin retorted.
They looked at each other, unsure of what to do next.
"I can stay with the baby," the assistant calmly offered. "You both go."
The EMTs wheeled me into the hallway at the same time that my friend Lana came through the open hall door at the other end, a look of shocked horror on her face. She had come by to drop off a meal she had made after handing the boys over to my friend Brigid earlier in the afternoon. Last she had heard, Henry had been born and everything was fine. It was only as she walked up the block to our place and saw the ambulances pulling up to our apartment that she began to understand something was wrong.
As I was wheeled past her in the hall, she looked at me and made the sign of the cross, signaling prayer. She told me later how horrible I looked, ashen with lifeless eyes.
They transferred me to a stretcher on the sidewalk. The air was sharp, but not frigid. A nanny pushing a stroller stood waiting to go past, the children eying me with curiosity.
We waited for Edwin to finish gathering a few things from home and get into the second ambulance that had come. Both ambulances raced down Jersey Avenue, the hospital mere minutes away. By the time we arrived, I had sunk deeper into shock: grey face, blue lips, erratic pulse.
My peripheral vision had disappeared. I didn't see the people spilling out of the ER, sitting in the hall with numbers, waiting for their turn. Nor did I see the staff thankfully waving us past them, through the doors to the elevator.
I knew I needed to pray--I knew that was the only thing I needed to do--but I couldn't think clearly.
Jesus.
Mary.
Jesus, Mary, be with me, I begged silently.
They wheeled me into a room and shoved papers in front of me to sign. I weakly scribbled something, anything, resembling my name.
A nurse cut my nightgown off of me. I lay waiting under the lights, cold and naked, until someone else noticed and kindly covered me with a blanket.
*********
I woke up a couple of hours later, moaning. My throat ached so badly I could hardly swallow. I was agonizingly thirsty.
But I was alive.
Labor was finally over.
The placenta--along with the cord that had taunted and tortured me as it dangled between my thighs all those hours--was gone.
The doctor told me that the placenta had been extremely difficult to get out. She didn't know why. She pulled it out piece by piece, ten pieces in all, and then had to perform curettage, scraping out any remaining parts. I lost at least 2 liters of blood and had to have a blood transfusion.
The midwife's assistant and Lana brought baby Henry to the hospital a little while later. Lana had stayed with the assistant at my house after we left in the ambulance. She told me later it seemed wrong to leave him, so new to the world, with a near stranger. So she kept vigil for us and said he did miraculously well all those hours without me.
Henry was able to spend the night at the hospital, although he confused all the nurses with his visitor status under the care of Edwin. He made up for his afternoon fast by demanding to nurse much of the night. Edwin would hold him and try to sleep sitting upright in the armchair next to my bed, handing him off to me every hour or so when he woke us with his raw newborn cry. I was determined to establish my milk supply, so I was grateful for his appetite, but it was a second torturous night of little sleep, interrupted not only by Henry and my painful throat, but by a barrage of nurses.
The next evening my hemoglobin level was 8 and they gave me permission to leave if I wanted. I couldn't face the prospect of another night like the previous one. I knew the boys were very eager to be reunited after spending a disorienting night and day away. My mom and two brothers, who had been driving from Chicago, were due to arrive as well. I felt ravaged and weak, but I wanted to go home.
My mom started to cry when she saw my bloodless face. I told her all the nurses had complimented me that morning on how much better I looked then when I first arrived at the hospital yesterday. She didn't appear comforted by that thought.
I was relieved to be home, to be with my sweet boys who had been more than a little traumatized by their time away, homebodies that they are. I was grateful to have my mom with us and my little one, healthy and perfect, next to me.
The next several days, I holed up in my bedroom, nursing Henry, sleeping, recovering, and ravenously eating the trays of food my mother brought down to me. But it took another month before I felt strong and like myself again.
