Baby Jack: The Final 24 Hours

The Final 24 Hours - Part 3

When I returned upstairs I found my wife smiling and happy. The actual administering of the epidural was hell for her but once it was in and working, she felt wonderful.

Everyone tells you about labor pains and breathing and so forth. But what nobody tells you is how boring it can be. Once she had the epidural, there was no need for breathing anymore and for the next six hours we were bored silly. I had brought "A Bug's Life" on DVD and we watched that on the computer (sold two more and had a very long conversation with the anesthesiologist about the movie (he's a big fan) while he upped her dosage at one point). I also got a newspaper so we'd have a paper from the day he was born and I read a lot of it aloud to her.

At 10:15 the OB on call came in and told her that she was 10 centimeters and it was time to push. This was it! The final part of labor! We had made it through active labor and sailed right through transition (that's the part of labor which, the instructor of our birthing class told us, is the part where women have been known to say horrible things to their husbands. It's where things get nasty) without any problems at all. We were there. This was it.

And we knew that the average time for this phase is over two hours. Two hours of bending my wife in half and saying "push!"

But we grit our teeth and started in. Every time she had a contraction, I'd grab one leg and the nurse the other, we'd bend them up towards Ann's stomach while she bent forward, head on her chest, and pushed as hard as she could. This is exhausting work whether or not you have an epidural. And it also starts to hurt. A lot.

[Warning: the next bits contain somewhat graphic descriptions of labor. Skip ahead to the following paragraph if you are squeamish]

But Ann was some kind of an amazing pusher. By 10:15, the nurse was able to show me his head. It was about 3-4 inches up inside her but I could see it. With each successive push, I could actually see her pelvis moving a bit outwards as the baby's head pushed things out of its way. At 10:45, only a half hour into the pushing, the OB and the resident and their student came in and they got everything set up. At 11PM her pushes actually made the head start to appear. He'd push out a bit and then when her push ended, he'd recede back in. On the next push he'd come out a bit more and then recede again. Finally they delivered the head (the most painful part) and then the rest of him literally slid right out. He cried, Ann cried, I cut the cord, they put him on Ann's chest and we both looked at this bizarre purple thing that was covered with goo and were amazed, and then they took him and put him under the french fry warming light and cleaned him up. And then they started working on repairing some of the small tearing Ann had while I walked over and stared at my son.

[Graphic bits are over]

Continued on page 4

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