Baby Jack: The Final 24 Hours

The Final 24 Hours - Part 2

We arrived at the hospital around 10 or so and they hooked Ann up to the monitors and took some cultures to be certain it was amniotic fluid they were seeing. We saw that she was indeed having contractions but they were highly irregular and not "productive labor." That is, the contractions weren't really doing squat for her.

Once they confirmed that her water did break, they moved us to a labor and delivery room and put Ann on pitocin (a synthetic form of the natural hormone oxytocin that the body produces to cause contractions) to induce labor. They found that she had dilated to 1 centimeter on her own and we just needed to go 9 more. It takes, on average, an hour per centimeter. It was going to be a long day. So, I went back to the car to get our bags and to call James to give him another update.

I had brought my PowerBook with me and was playing music with my mp3 player. I had turned on this incredible visual plug-in called "G-Force" which does these amazing light shows to the music. We both found it soothing to watch it and we were soon the hit of the maternity ward. Doctors and nurses kept coming in saying "I was told I had to see this computer!" I think I sold about 3 Macintoshes that day.

Ann spent the afternoon sitting in a comfy chair by the window in the sunlight watching the traffic on the street 10 floors below us. Around 3PM the contractions began to really hurt. We started our breathing to get Ann through them and they helped but Ann couldn't walk around much because she was on a pitocin drip and a penicillin drop and the pump machine had a dead battery. So, we could only walk within the length of the electric cord and the tubes on her arm. So, we paced back and forth in the room. At that point she looked at me and said "I feel no need to be a martyr. Get me the epidural."

They shoed me out of the room (hospital policy) while they gave Ann her epidural and I went downstairs, called some family and James again, and got some food in the hospital cafeteria. I learned a valuable lesson that day: do not, ever, under any circumstances, whatsoever, ever buy sushi in a hospital careteria. It was like eating fish flavored hockey pucks.

Continued on page 3

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