When I was pregnant, for some reason I had the idea in my head that we didn’t have enough stuff for the baby, that we wouldn’t be able to provide. Even though we collected the basics over the summer, I went out to garage sales every weekend and brought home loads of stuff - clothes, walkers, toys, bits and pieces of furniture - husband patiently stored it in the garage for “when we needed it someday”, I had been out looking for an umbrella stroller the morning labor started. Which was only a slow trickle of the amniotic fluid and an occasional light contraction. I called the doctor at noon and they said he would call me right back. At 4 p.m. I called again, they said they had forgotten all about me and to go up to the hospital. Nothing much had changed for me, and I thought they would tell me to go back home and come back when something serious was happening, but they said they were all ready and put me in a little room off a sort of common room where the nurses took breaks, I guess. There were other rooms and in the middle of the night I heard this one woman screaming her head off and carrying on like a banshee, that was the scariest part. They had put the baby on a monitor and labor pains got worse through the night. At 4 a.m. the nurses were out in the common room making toast! I could see bottles of salad dressing, etc. on the table in the room out in front of me! At 9 a.m., just about 12 hours since I went into labor, the pains were horrible, every couple of minutes. The doctor said labor was not progressing and they wanted to do a C-section. I said that was fine by me, just give me a shot!!! So they numbed me from the waist down and we went in and they put a sheet over my lower half - they told my husband he could be here if he stayed in his chair by my upper half - no worry there! I could definitely feel a lot of tugging down there, a little pressure, in spite of the numbness. The baby was taken out crying, waving her arms and legs, they said she was an 8 and then a 10 on the whatever-it’s-called-scale- they use to determine color, response, etc. of the baby. The incision was way down on my abdomen, an ugly thick shiny red held together with staples. It was of course painful the first few days but it didn’t really bother me much when I went home. I was supposed to rest and stay off my feet, but I really felt all right and after a couple of days went about my normal routine, nothing too strenuous. The incision would ache at night, the staples seemed to itch and burn and dig in then. Also my post-birth bleeding was profuse and went on longer than usual because I stayed active. (Today my little 5 lb. 13 oz. bundle of joy is taller than me! She is 12 and got her period just about a year ago, parenting one of these creatures is a whole new ballgame. I miss my baby, but I have a full formed human here now, who communicates and eats solids and everything…) Good Luck, you are in for a life altering and wonderful experience, hon!
I have a great labor story, but I don’t like to tell it because it scares pregnant women and more than one person has vowed to get their tubes tied after hearing it. If anyone wants the gory details feel free to e-mail me (warning, it’s a long story so make some space in your in-box.)
The most bizarre part was when Nicholas started to crown, and my two labor nurses got into an arguement about what color hair he had.
It’s blonde
No, it’s red.
No, blonde
Me: No, my baby is going to have a head full of long black hair.
No, dear, I’m sure it’s red.
So they call in all of their nurse friends, and they’re all looking up my vagina trying to figure out what color hair my baby has. I guess they couldn’t wait until he was born. As it turns out, I pushed for three hours, so maybe they were right to be impatient.
FTR, he had a teeny patch of strawberry blonde fuzz. But my next baby will have long black hair, this I swear!