The Three of Us (32 page)

9.20 p.m.

Peter

Joanna comes into my study, pale faced. ‘I think I may be having contractions.' This is not an especially noteworthy remark, however, as she says it most days.

10 p.m.

Joanna

The theme tune to
ER
has started and I know I am experiencing contractions. But they are not as I expected. They don't peak and tail off as my pregnancy manuals and Sigrid promised, but rather they peak and then sort of shift sideways into a dull, grinding backache. I spend another twenty minutes on the Gymnic bouncy ball before retreating into a hot shower. Neither remedy reduces the steadily expanding pain.

10.30 p.m.

Peter

Following Sigrid's instructions I am putting together a final selection of CDs for Joanna to give birth to. She is insisting on including Keith Jarrett's Köln Concert. But I am worried about Jarrett's unconventional keyboard antics, whereby he ventilates his piano playing with frequent and urgent porcine grunts of concentration. Might not these grunts be mistaken by the medical staff for Joanna's urgent grunts of pain?

11.45 p.m.

Joanna

We have worked through our entire repertoire of supposedly pain-relieving manoeuvres. Sigrid's ‘doula houla', where I lean forward on the sofa and Peter grips my pelvis between his knees and squeezes as hard as he can, has no discernible effect. Neither does inhaling lavender oil, another of her suggestions. Nor does spritzing my face with orange water. The hot shower she espoused so vigorously makes me feel more nauseous, as does the hot-water bottle pushed against my back alternated with an ice pack, made by hurriedly stuffing ice cubes into a yellow rubber glove.

At some point, remembering my yoga, I struggle down on to all fours and launch myself into the Angry Cat, exhaling, arching my back, then inhaling and stretching out. When this fails I curl into a Child's Pose, arms forward, knees splayed, trying to ‘breathe through the pain'.

Nothing helps.

The only thing which brings relief is to take off all my clothes and walk naked round and round and round the apartment, holding my belly and counting. Kitchen, study, bedroom, hall – kitchen, study, bedroom, hall. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight … But my count bears little relation to the length or frequency of the contractions, which begin to fold into one long, swaying pain.

Forty-six, forty-seven, forty-eight, forty-nine … the pain remains. Fifty-one, fifty-two, fifty-three, fifty-four … It is still there, dark and awful, sweeping me up and making me vomit and tremble violently.

‘I'm in labour, I know I'm in labour,' I groan repeatedly to Peter, who looks stricken.

We ring the doctor's answering service and leave a message.

11.50 p.m.

Peter

I know it's too late to pull out of my somewhat accidental role as labour coach, but I do wonder if the presence of men at the birth is really such a good idea. I mean there seems to be an almost universal cultural taboo against it, broken only in the last generation by Western man.

11.55 p.m.

Joanna

The doctor-on-call phones me back and I describe my symptoms.

‘Try to relax, you want to spend as much of your labour at home as possible,' she says, clearly thinking I am premature in demanding pain relief. Embarrassed that I've phoned too soon, I agree to keep doing breathing exercises and hang up, unsure of what to do next.

‘She says I shouldn't go to the hospital yet,' I moan.

‘Why don't you have another hot shower?' asks Peter. ‘What about using that lavender shower gel Sigrid suggested?'

Friday, 29 January – 12.40 a.m.

Peter

Joanna is gasping with the pain of it, pacing about and trembling uncontrollably. I try to time the contractions, but I appear to have forgotten even the most basic tenets of my Intensive Lamaze Birthing Course. Do you time from the beginning of one contraction to the end of the next? Or from the end of one to the end of the following one?

2 a.m.

Joanna

We call the doctor's answering service again.

‘You're going to the Birthing Center, right?' asks the doctor groggily, when she calls back.

‘God no, I need an epidural,' I gasp. The thought of natural childbirth now seems laughable.

‘Why don't you set off to the hospital? They'll call me when you get there.'

I have been dreading this moment. For the last four hours I've been naked and must now, dizzy with the fug of pain, get dressed, but I can't bear the idea of anything next to my skin. Only the lure of pain relief makes me haul on leggings and a hideous, oversized T-shirt. In the hall mirror on the way out, I catch my face. It's swollen from vomiting and grey with uncertainty and fear.

Hobbling across the lobby, I realize I've never seen this night doorman before. He's young and courteous and I promptly feel guilty that we failed to leave him a Christmas tip.

2 a.m.

Peter

Joanna can bear the pain no longer and I buzz down to the doorman and ask him to hail a cab. We stand silently in the descending lift surrounded by sufficient baggage for a long-haul holiday, and I realize that we will, if all goes well, be returning with a third person. The overnight doorman is girded against the freezing damp in a uniform that would earn the envy of a Ruritanian general on a Gilbert and Sullivan stage.

‘The very best of luck, sir,' he wishes. He pumps me cordially by the hand and holds open the cab door. As I duck into the cab I see that the illuminated neon wedge on its roof features a pair of cuffed wrists. ‘1-800-Innocent', its caption touts, ‘when you're only allowed to make one call.' The taxi driver tips up the peak of his baseball cap and checks out the scene in his rearview mirror. Joanna emits a long quavering groan, and his eyes widen in alarm. ‘You havin' a
baby?
' he asks incredulously, as though no one in Manhattan could be so primitive as to procreate.

‘I bloody well hope so,' pants Joanna and the driver roars off, savouring the moment of drama on an otherwise sleepy weekday night. Soon we are hurtling down the deserted concrete canyon of West End Avenue, dismissing the string of late amber lights and early reds against us like so much surplus Christmas decoration.

2.10 a.m.

Joanna

At 84th Street we swing onto Broadway and, convinced I'm going to vomit again, I wind down the window. The cold air is briefly refreshing and I concentrate on the store fronts which punctuate the Upper West Side. Origins, Barnes and Noble, Banana Republic. The famous trio of delis, Zabar's, Citarella and Fairway rush by. At 70th Street, opposite Relax the Back, where we bought the Gymnic bouncing ball, another contraction takes hold and I press my lower spine against the hot-water bottle I have brought with me under my coat. The heat makes it worse. I want to do nothing but curl up and close down.

2.20 a.m.

Peter

Staggering under the weight of two kit bags and a small turquoise backpack stuffed hopefully with tiny outfits, we arrive at Roosevelt Hospital to have a baby. We take the elevator to the twelfth floor, where we are ushered into an ‘observation' cubicle with a gurney bed, a sink, a bin and a chair. A nurse straps monitors to Joanna which measure her contractions and the foetal heartbeat, and then leaves us alone. The contractions are coming fast and hard and Joanna is complaining of acute back pain.

‘I'm going to throw up again,' she gasps. I help her to the sink, patting her heaving shoulders as she hugs the cold porcelain and retches violently.

‘Why you throw up in the sink?' demands a nurse from the doorway.

‘Where else were we supposed to do it?' I protest.

‘The bin,' she scowls.

‘Well, we thought that at least we could rinse out the sink,' I counter crossly.

‘You should have used the bin,' she insists.

‘Listen,' I say, feeling a fury bubbling up inside me, ‘we have come here to have a baby, not to argue about where to vomit.'

I regret my little outburst immediately, when the nurse's shoes squeal on the lino as she wheels round and stalks out, leaving Joanna to her haze of unmoderated pain.

2:25 a.m.

Joanna

‘I need an epidural,' I groan to the sulky nurse, sensing another contraction and start on a loud hissing breath which Mary Barnes, our yoga teacher, had assured me would help. ‘SSSSSSSSSSSSSSSS.'

The monitor to which I am hooked up records the contractions and spews forth a sheet of paper revealing a series of perfect U shapes. I give another hissing breath, ‘SSSSSSSSSSSSSSS', and a different nurse bustles in, examines the data and promptly hurries out. ‘Don't worry, we're not sending you home,' she says over her shoulder, though this thought had never occurred to me. ‘I'm going to get the resident to examine you now.'

3.05 a.m.

Peter

All thoughts of using the Birthing Center and having a ‘natural', drug-free labour have already been jettisoned. The stroppy nurse explains that the epidural can't be started until our own obstetrician arrives, but that in the meantime she will set up an IV drip, which is necessary in advance of the epidural, to boost the blood pressure.

Joanna looks away while she stretches a rubber tourniquet around her arm and inserts the IV needle into a bulging vein. The needle pops straight out again. The nurse tries again. And again. Each time the needle slips out with a shocking crimson blotch on the white hospital linen. I stare, appalled at each new blood patch, and find a new shape in them, like some macabre Rorschach test. They resemble continents: Africa, England, America – the tripod of our child's cultural heritage. Maybe this is a good sign, I rationalize, even in the nurse's incompetence.

‘Your veins – no good,' the nurse complains.

I compose an angry riposte about her lack of skill, her transformation of Joanna's arm into a junkie's runway, but I swallow it all unspoken for fear of further punishment. She wanders off, returning shortly with a gloomy, green-smocked Russian doctor whom I overhear scolding her for using the wrong needles. He manages first time.

3.30 a.m.

Joanna

We are finally assigned a delivery room, the last one on the corridor. It has a pink floral frieze and a matching floral pelmet, whose pleats I start counting to distract me from the pain. Only now do we follow one of Sigrid's instructions and close the door, pull the curtain across the room and unpack the CD player.

‘What music would you like?' asks Peter anxiously.

‘SSSSSSSSSSSSSS.'

I don't really care what music we have, but he is trying so hard to get it right that I pick the first one which comes into my head,
Adiemus.

‘Ah I know this track,' says yet another nurse, pulling back the curtain and fixing me up with an automatic blood-pressure cuff. ‘Dammit, what
IS
this? I know I recognize it.' She starts humming along.

‘It's called
Adiemus, Songs of Sanctuary,
by a British guy called Karl Jenkins,' I wince, preparing for the onset of another contraction.

‘I knew I recognized it,' she cries, ignoring me. ‘It's the music from the Delta Airways commercial.'

Great. I'm going to give birth to an advertising jingle.

4.45 a.m.

Peter

Narcis, the splendidly named relief nurse, has come and gone, and Deborah has now taken over. She is a calming, middle-aged black woman, who, she tells me, came up to New York from the Carolinas as a child. But somehow my platitudinous small talk about how the South compares with New York has taken a potentially tricky turn into the thorny issue of American race relations.

‘At least down in the South, they don't like us, they tell us to our face,' she says. ‘Up here they pretend to like us, but they stab us in the back.'

‘Uh huh,' I say, noncommittally. Though I realize that her ‘they' probably includes me, I decline to mount a defence of the guilty white liberal over the redneck racist. This morning I have no views on anything. This morning I am in her hands. She can entertain whatever opinions she likes without fear of any contradiction from me.

5 a.m.

Joanna

My own doctor arrives and finally approves the epidural, administered by a calm Asian anaesthetist, who speaks in a low whisper and has tiny, gentle hands. In the birthing class we were warned that the epidural was complicated, didn't always work and might even puncture the dura, leaving you with a six-week migraine. Compared to what I'm feeling now, a six-week migraine would be a relief. Again, I find myself laughing at the idea of getting through this by snorting lavender oil.

‘You should be fine now,' the anaesthetist smiles sympathetically as liquid Heaven courses through my legs and the back pain melts away, leaving me warm and euphoric with relief.

‘Oh thank you, thank you so much,' I hear myself saying, overwhelmed with gratitude. And suddenly Sigrid's face with her large pale eyes flashes before me and I remember the brisk scorn she reserved for ‘American women demanding epidurals in the parking lot'.

9 a.m.

Peter

Joanna is now rigged up to an intricate web of technological tendrils – wires to the monitors, and tubes to a drip which dispenses Pitocin – a drug to induce labour – and saline, to keep up her blood pressure. One by one we are conceding to all the things we were urged to resist in our birthing class, all the gadgetry and potions of a ‘medicated' birth.

The doctor decides to go in with an instrument that looks like a flattened crochet hook, ‘to break the waters', she explains. Luckily Joanna cannot see it.