One Good Egg: An Illustrated Memoir (39 page)

Lorene snatched the phone and told her, “I think we’ll be going to the hospital now.” She called Dr. Bunnell’s office, called Meredith to scratch the pickup, snapped one last picture of me looking annoyed and pregnant, threw a towel onto her passenger seat (in case my water broke), and we were off.

A Room with a View

We arrived at the admissions desk
at 10:30. I gladly accepted a wheelchair even though other contracting walk-ins continued on their own two feet through the doors and into the birthing center. When I was examined, my cervix hadn’t budged. Three centimeters and holding. I was evicted from my wheelchair and ordered to walk the hospital halls in my johnny for the next two hours.

Meredith, Lorene, and I circled the floor, making stops for contractions. I took to resting my forehead on the cool wall, swaying left to right, saying “EEEEEEEEEEEE” at a decibel that caused my head to reverberate, drowning out a good portion of the pain. It was only a matter of time before I had one opposite the elevator doors.

I was initially afraid of being sent home, stalling my labor, Pitocin, or a C-section. After an hour, I didn’t care. I just wanted to be able to sit down, lie down, or take a bath.

I was finally admitted at 1:00 a.m., a paltry four centimeters dilated.

Our nurse, Linda, picked the nicest room for us—not one with a tub. Both tub rooms were free—I was guaranteed a tub when the time came, but the tubless rooms were much more spacious. I didn’t mean to harp on the tub, but it was a key part of my visualizations.

Linda explained how the tub-room transfer would take place: “We can only fill it once, so we don’t want to fill it too early or it’ll lose heat. Figure it takes fifteen or twenty minutes to fill. You just let me know when you’re ready.”

I decided to hold out for transition, use it to get me through the worst part. There was an LED board displaying the word
EPIDURAL
continuously in my brain, but the word never crossed my lips.

Transition

The short phase of labor marked by the most powerful contractions just before the pushing stage

A couple hours later, I still had two or four or four thousand centimeters to go until the magic ten when I could push three times, just like Meredith, and get this baby O-U-T. I called for the tub. In twenty minutes, we shuffled down to the new room. I looked for the cedar closet, and then I spied the “tub”—a freakin’ kiddie pool, on the floor, on the far side of the bed. The water was ankle deep and the hose wasn’t feeling any deadline pressure. I lowered myself to a full sit in order to take advantage of the water level, and BLAMMO! Major contraction. I couldn’t stand. I couldn’t sway. I couldn’t get out of the freakin’ tub. The sides folded in on me when I tried to hoist myself up. Lorene considered coming in, then she tried a lower-back massage. “DON’T TOUCH ME!” I screamed, and forgot to smell her hair.

I’d had it. I couldn’t take any more. Nurse Linda refused to measure me, she insisted she’d
know
—when my voice got really guttural. Nurse Linda called the doctor in; it was Dr. Bunnell’s colleague who was eight months pregnant herself. She informed me I was ten centimeters dilated
and
I was beating the second-time mother next door. “Are you ready to push?”

Oh yes, I am.
I am ready to push. Three times. Or ten. NOT one and a half hours.*

I had tried everything—sitting, squatting, hanging—and nothing seemed to be working. I gave up and resorted to lying on my back again. “There’s her head!” Nurse Linda wheeled a mirror over. “Do you want to see?”

I
knew
if I could see her little eyes, I’d—“Ew, oh gross, no!” I closed my eyes. There was nothing resembling an eye in that mess.
Oh, God, I hope those words weren’t her welcome to the world.

“Not yet, not yet, not yet, NOW! PUSHPUSHPUSH!” I squeezed my eyes tighter shut; I squeezed everything as hard as I could. “There she is!”

I opened my eyes. Lorene was lifting her up by her underarms. She laid her on my chest.

I looked down in disbelief. Not your garden-variety Miracle of Life awe. She had latched on to my left breast (not the nipple, a situation that Nurse Linda rectified once we all emerged from our postdelivery stupor) and was peacefully suckling.
Wait, this isn’t my baby. My baby, my baby, the one I’ve been carrying around for forty weeks and three days, is a dark-haired, red-faced screamer. Lorene must’ve pulled this one out of the drawer under the table while I had my eyes shut.
I was looking at a beautiful baby—fair-fuzz hair, pink skin.

“Does she have a name?”

“Aurora,” we said. “Aurora Jean Becker.”

A
fter all the years of dithering, wishing, waiting, it is unremarkable as far as birth stories go. I labored a very average eleven hours. There were no complications, for me or the baby, not counting the tub. I left out my water breaking (somewhere in the shower sequence), and there will be no mention of my “mucus plug.” Everybody else seems to leave out the afterbirth.

While Aurora was tranquilly nursing, I had to push out the placenta. (The third stage of labor and the second-most-underpublicized part of pregnancy, after the ten-not-nine-month gestation period.) It left the room before anybody had time to request a doggie bag.