The Birth Story: Part Two

"There is a sacredness in tears. They are not the mark of weakness but of power. They are messengers of overwhelming grief and of unspeakable love."---Washington Irving


Around 8am my doctor comes to make rounds and-despite my horrendous burning abdominal pain-I’m somewhat NOT a bitch because I’ve been allowed to drink an entire cup of coffee for the first time in nine months without any guilt about gestating a fetus. I swear, sometimes I disappoint myself with how the tiniest crap can amuse me. She, unfortunately, is not wearing four- inch gold lame heels. Today they are lime green sling-backs with pointy toes and she’s curled her hair perfectly and is wearing contacts and lipstick. Obviously, unlike mine, her evening took an upward swing after we parted ways at 9:00pm the night before.

She checks my legs and calves as I’ve had on compression boots all night to prevent blood clots after the surgery. She says they look fine and will be off by noon or so. I show her my incision and she says it looks good as well and asks about my pain. I tell her the Percocet is working fine. She then tells me that I can go to see my baby just as soon as I can sit in a wheel chair. But, OH WAIT, before I try to do that she wants me wheeled down to radiology for an x-ray because of my chest wheezing and raspy cough. She then tells me that the neonatologist will be around in a bit to update me on Parks. I’m less excited about this as The Man has been sprinting down the hall with his super spider legs every twenty minutes this morning to check on her and then report. I married a good man. It was because of him that I was very well informed of her status and the fact that she was completely fine as of 7:30am and was just requiring observation for another couple of hours until they discharged her from the NICU into the Well Baby nursery. His actions during this time period are about the only things that kept other people’s eyeballs in their sockets and skin on their arms. That and the Percocet.

I’ll go ahead and admit that this whole “x-ray-before-you-see-the-baby” part is my entire fault. I’d had a nasty sinus infection that turned into bronchitis towards the end of my pregnancy. I’d refused medication at that point because, hell, I hadn’t taken anything thus far and I didn’t think it was going to kill me to live with some nancy sinus infection until she was born. I hadn’t been able to shake it for about three weeks despite continual neti pot use and lots of coughing, hacking, and blowing. Unfortunately, the doctor seemed to think it was killing me. Someone said something about “pneumonia” . Whatever. We don’t get “pneumonia” in our family. We just get a snotty nose and lay down for a week. People are such alarmists.

Unfortunately, my doctor didn’t believe in my family’s way of doing things and demanded the chest x-ray be performed before I went to see my baby as “she was still in the NICU” and all.

Looking back on this situation it is amazing to me that I wasn’t spitting fire and tearing off people’s heads at this point. People that know me will also be shocked that I was quiet, compliant, and did what staff told me. When I think about it now, I can tell that I was in complete and total shock. One thing you will learn is that there are two reactions when people go into shock. They will either do exactly as instructed or they will lose their shit and freak out. I’m just not the “freaking out” type. It just doesn’t happen. So, I went along.

Finally, about an hour after my doctor made the proclamation, an orderly pushing a bed wheels into the room and requests that I STAND UP AND GET ON THE BED.

What the living hell? I inform him them they’ve just separated my lower half from my top half and things are not quite held together that well yet. You know, the glue hasn’t dried and stuff. But it sounded more like, “I JUST HAD A C-SECTION 11 HOURS AGO. ARE YOU EFFING KIDDING ME? “He looked scared and ran and got a female nurse. Typical. Between the two of them, and one other aide, they managed to shimmy me onto the gurney with only a small amount of me screaming and muttering curse words under my breath. After which I immediately apologized and they forgave me. All twenty-eight times.

I am wheeled down the hall. We go past the “Well Baby” nursery and I look in and see four babies. We pass the door to the NICU and I know she is in there. The closest I’d been to her in 14 hours after living with her for the past ten months. I got sad. I started crying. The Man wipes my face and the orderly asks if I’m ok. I tell him an abridged version of the story. He tells me he will try to make the trip to radiology quick. I put on a brave face and start making jokes. That’s what I do.

The Man follows the gurney down to the bays used for people waiting to get into radiology. They have televisions that come over from the wall and we watch the news and pretend to talk about it. I cry on and off and we joke and freak out and talk about how weird this whole experience is and keeps on getting. The older man beside me is crying and shaking and I am reminded of how I never want to be old and I think about Parks and I cry. I then saw two nurses get into a semi-impressive cat fight and I realized how this is just a “day at work” to them and I think about my days at work and how you get used to the suffering. We wait for what seems like forever and then I am taken, begrudgingly, by the nurse that lost the cat fight into the x-ray room where I am curtly pulled up and told to stand and walk up against the wall.

I look dumbfounded at the nurse and almost start laughing because she has to be joking, you know? So, I just look at her and don’t move with a half smile on my face and she repeats the instructions a little louder. Like I just hadn’t heard her. I finally speak and want to say something eloquent like, “IF YOU SPEAK TO ME LIKE THAT AGAIN I WILL HUNT YOU DOWN, FIND YOUR CHILDREN, AND TATTOO PICTURES OF LADY GAGA ON THEIR FOREHEADS.” Instead, I kind of mumble, “I, uh, just had a c-section, um, a baby, you know? Like, um, twelve hours ago? And, well, I haven’t, um, stood up yet? And, I have these boots on my feet?”

“It’ll be fine. Get on up and walk over there to the wall and stand against it.”

She unhooks my boots from the power source on the bed and leaves them on my calves. I gingerly stand, holding on to the bed rails and she nicely offers her arm. I begin hobbling towards the wall she indicated and within seconds I feel it.

I KNEW IT. There is a wetness filling the inside of the compression boots and I can feel it on my legs and eventually under my feet.

I am so embarrassed and there’s nothing I can do. It starts light but as I look down I see the trail of blood following me and getting wider and deeper and it is when we finally make it to the wall that I motion to the nurse (who is looking forward this entire time) that either Freddy Kruger just visited this x-ray room, or I’m currently bleeding out on this here floor here, ma’am. I say it and I start to kind of giggle and I realize that I am FINALLY losing it. It is that hysterical giggle that escapes the lips in waves and you try to tamp it down because you know the situation isn’t right but there’s nothing else to do. Every other emotion seems fruitless. I have cried enough. I cannot scream loud enough to justify how this feels. There is nothing left. I will die if I do not laugh.

She looks at me funny and I return it just as sassy and say, “I’m sorry. I do this everywhere I go.” She didn’t laugh and walked into a side room and walked out with five green towels that she threw at my feet.

“That’s okay honey. Not a big deal. This happens all the time.”

I make a mental note to not have surgery at this hospital. I then make a mental note to tell God when I fall out and die here from blood loss that this woman is an insensitive bitch who deserves AT LEAST the fifth level of hell.

I stand on the towels and she places the plates in the correct position while I continuously drip onto the floor. She takes four plates and then just as brightly requests that I walk back and sit down on the bed. Knowing the level of pain to expect, I’d gotten faster at moving. No one helped me as I got to the bed, swung my legs around, and grasping on to a pillow, held it to my midsection where my stitches were placed while I settled back down on my back.

I was rolled out of radiology into the bay where The Man was waiting. He saw the look on my face and the blood covering my legs and the boots and got worried. He asked what happened and I told him. He was so mad he was about to go find my doctor. I stopped him because I wanted it to be OVER. I convinced him to sit in the radiology bay while he seethed and we heard the nurses’ station paging our orderly for the next thirty minutes. It was around 11am.

After watching more news in silence and talking about the absolute absurdity of our situation, the orderly shows up and rolls me back to our room. He casually asks about the blood on the compression boots and I just say “knife fight in radiology.”

My phone then rings.

I pick up because I see it is my father. We do not visit that often and I had not seen him since Christmas. We have never been especially close, but he’d been trying more in the past few years to keep in touch. I ask him where he is. He says, “I’m holding your baby.”

This is where The Man asks the hospital about their policy of giving someone Xanax…large, large amounts of Xanax to someone currently taking the level of Percocet that I am on. Or maybe just one of those shots in the neck and some restraints? Padded room? A riot shield? My husband was desperate.

My face turns red and I sputter. I cannot talk and I choke up and I act like I can’t hear my father on the phone. I scream I’ll be in my room in five minutes and hang up. I turn to The Man and before I can get a word out he just says, “I KNOW”. I know he knows but I have to tell him anyway. I tell him to leave me and run up to the NICU as fast as his super spider legs will take him and to tell them that NO ONE is allowed to see my child until I am allowed to see my child. I think I even use the term “bitch slap”. This is not normal cursing policy for me. He says that he will as soon as we get back to our floor.

I then say the “F” word a really whole, whole lot. I said it so much the orderly looked concerned. The Man, understanding the gravity of what had just occurred, looked very, very concerned.

I arrived back in my room to find my father, with his ever impressive timing, standing there with my step-mother and my six-year-old niece. I am angry. I am a gruesome mess of a sight. I am covered in blood and have matted hair and red eyes. I am angry that he does not know enough to keep a six-year-old out of my room. I am angry he did not ask permission to visit. But, mostly, I am angry that he has held my child and I have yet to meet her.

He asks me how I am doing and I immediately burst into tears and decide to actually tell him.

“I am HORRIBLE. I HAVE NOT SEEN MY BABY. I JUST WANT TO SEE MY BABY.”

I’d pretty much been repeating these two sentences one right after another for the past 16 hours. Yelling them one more time at him wasn’t really going to hurt anything, you know? And right before I collapse into a sobbing heap on the bed, I see him back slowly out of the room and mumble something about “hormones.” The Man holds me and kisses me and makes it better. We lay in the bed for a few minutes until a nurse comes in for my next dose of Percocet. She then tells me that I am allowed to go see my child but that since I’m completely covered in blood, they are going to send some aides down to bathe me before I go to the nursery. Defeated, I lay back in the bed and The Man and I stare at the Disney channel and I finally figure out who The Jonas Brothers are for the first time. Surprisingly, I don’t HATE them. A few minutes later two elderly ladies in scrubs walk in wearing gloves and looking all business-like and full of late- in-life sass that I usually appreciate.

They removed the bloody compression boots and helped me out of the bed. I wouldn’t take their hands because I’m hard headed and I’ve always been that way. I was going to stand. I was going to take a shower. I was going to do whatever the women told me to do if it meant getting me in a wheel chair and down the hall.

The older nurse purses her lips approvingly and says, “The young ones don’t stand up so soon. They’re afraid of the pain.” And right before the wave of burning stabs beat across my abdomen, I was able to squeak out, “They said I had to stand up to see her” and then I took a step toward the shower and realized how many and varied are the shapes that types of bodily pain can take. I stopped and took a breath and they asked me if I wanted to sit down. I just looked at them as I still couldn’t decide if I was going to be offended by the nurse’s obvious statement about my age. I ultimately decided that since I lived only four blocks from the hospital, I could pretty much come back and punch her in the face later-at my earliest convenience. NOW, not being that time. It is a sad, sad day when you know a 65-year-old woman could take you in a fight.

I walked to that shower like I hiked the last two miles out of Mt. St. Helen’s when my calves were screaming and my feet were numb from the previous ten miles half-way up its north face. I put one foot in front of the other. I saw only the shower and I said, “left, right, left, right, left, right, left, right” Because sometimes, when things hurt, the only thing that will get you through it is reminding yourself of the actual physical steps it will take in order for that pain to stop. There is only an end goal. And that goal becomes all that matters.

Right when I thought I wasn’t going to make it, despite my determination, the last dose of Percocet kicked in.

My Percocet Haiku
Percocet my love
There is nothing greater than
When the nurses bring me more.

Don’t get me wrong. There was still a high level of pain. I just no longer felt the need to hold my right arm in front of my stomach thinking that my entrails were going to fall out at any moment. Thank the Lord for small favors, right? No longer afraid of evisceration, I could actually balance with one hand and hold on to furniture with others. And I finally made it. Fifteen whole glorious feet.

I dropped my hospital gown and for the first time in a LONG TIME was naked in front of two people at once. I’m talking so long it might have been at MY birth. I look down at my deflated belly and it feels both empty and full of heat at the same time. It feels separate, no longer a part of me. It didn’t help the strange detached feelings that I could touch most of it and was actually unable to physically feel it either. I was completely numb from my belly button to the tops of my hips. I’d never felt so “undone” before. Pregnant, yet, Not Pregnant. Mother, yet, Not Mother. I instantly understood staring in the bathroom mirror looking at how strange that belly looked that I was in the “middle” of something. And, well, one cannot get done with being in the “middle” of something until one simply gets through until the end of it. I’ve endured enough significant events in my life to understand this. So, I commit to getting through to the end.

I carefully and slowly sat on the bench so thoughtfully placed in the shower and the two women began hosing me down with detachable shower heads. I was naked. In front of two strangers. Being hosed down. With hoses.

They were hosing blood off of me. The water ran pink down into the drain and I instantly understood why they tiled the bathroom stall a light natural mauve. I sat there and-because I am a therapist and will forever have an internal gauge concerning human interaction-I wondered if this event was shaming. Or, as she helped me wash my hair, strangely tender? When I genuinely think about it, isn’t true caretaking bathing another person? There are very few people one usually bathes in their life, you know? Your children, your spouse, and maybe-down the road-a parent. But, this wasn’t a relative, and while I totally appreciated the clean hair, I’m still leaning toward defining that situation as a bit fucked up. ( I was even trying to use a non-curse word there and I couldn’t. There is no other word for it.)

And, since I’m never just satisfied knowing my OWN opinion, and that combined with the fact that the last dose of Percocet had just kicked in, I ask the aides, “Its it weird to come to work every day and see strangers naked?” And, at that moment, I REALLY wanted to know. Because I don’t have to see people naked at work. I’ve seen openly psychotic people. I’ve seen extreme physical aggression, cursing, hyperactivity, but never just straight up butt-nakedness at work.

She laughed and told me no. I grabbed my belly protectively from habit and got sad.

I tried to stand up from the bench and realized sitting down for the shower had been the easy part. Now I required drying. Drying they left me to do alone. And, since I couldn’t really bend nor MOVE a whole hell of a lot, I ended up standing in the bathroom and staring in the mirror. After about five minutes I decided I wasn’t going to do that again for, oh, about six months until all that crap straightened itself out. No reason to depress myself now.

I then dried off the best I could, wrapped the adult diaper they left in the restroom they referred to as a “pad” around my crotch, threw on the netted underwear they left to hold them up, and waddled out of the bathroom to lay on the bed. To the amazement of The Man, I then applied make-up, false eyelashes, and blew dried and styled my hair.

The Man didn’t understand why I was bothering. I knew there was no use in explaining that in order to get up and get down that hall, I needed all the ammunition I had. I’d just completed about half of it.

I then sat and waited for the nurse. It was about 1pm on June 17, 2009.

TO BE CONTINUED