Labor, Part I
All right, cuz you're all dying to know how it went -- and cuz I'm still enjoying telling this story -- here's the lowdown on how Mr. Noah came into the world.
On Christmas Eve, I had a checkup at 11:30 a.m. The doctor, who was not my usual OB, said everything looked fine, although he thought the baby was pretty big, and he suggested we schedule me to be induced. He asked me what I thought about that.
You can imagine my response.
He called over the hospital to see if they could take me that afternoon, but they were all full, he said. So he scheduled me for Wednesday, Dec. 26, at 7 a.m. (which would have given Noah the same birthday as his Nana, who was turning 75, and one of his cousins, who was turning 21).
So I waddled out of there, drove home, rested for a bit and then went to the grocery store with my mother-in-law, who had come out to stay with us. While we were there, I started getting some pretty strong contractions. They weren't regular at all and, let's face it, I'd already had so many Braxton Hicks fake-out contractions that I didn't think twice about these.
We left the grocery store, stopped at the liquor store (wanna have some fun? Go in a liquor store when you're 10 months' pregnant and waddle through the skinny aisles, trying not to hit the glass bottles as people stare at you like you're a pariah) and bought Damon a bottle of vodka, then headed home.
The contractions came and went throughout the evening. By 7 or 8 p.m., they were so strong I was leaning against tables and other furniture during them -- but they still weren't close to being regular.
At 8 p.m., we put Sam to bed and ensured she wouldn't be able to go to sleep right away by telling her that we heard Santa's sleigh bells nearby outside and that he'd skip our house if she wasn't asleep when he got here. Can you remember trying to go to sleep on Christmas Eve? Man, that was always so tough.
Around 10 p.m., Damon said, "I know what'll send you into labor. I'm going to have two shots of vodka, which will ensure that I can't drive for about an hour."
Yeah, ha ha, smart ass.
I went to bed just after that, figuring the contractions would go away as soon as I fell asleep, which is what happened before. Except that didn't work this time. I woke up about every 7 to 10 minutes with so much pressure in my, uh, bottom, that I almost couldn't take it.
At 11:30, I went to the bathroom. I'll keep this post PG-13 by saying only that there was some general nastiness when I got there. I woke up Damon as I called the hospital, and the OB doctor on call told me to come in.
What does Damon say? "Can I go get a shower first?"
What do I say? "Sure, that should be fine."
It wasn't. Oh my God, was I starting to be in pain. I really felt with every contraction like I had to push, which I figured was NOT a good sign considering the fact that I was still in my house and the hospital is 35 minutes away and my husband was in the shower and my almost-75-year-old-mother-in-law, much as I love her, wasn't my first choice to be catching a kid coming out of me.
So I tried to distract myself. How? By putting all the presents out in front of the Christmas tree, which apparently we all forgot to do before we went to bed. There I am, basically the size of a barge with as much flexibility, in intermittent massive pain, crawling under Nana's bed to get the presents from Santa so Sam's Christmas morning is at least close to normal.
As distractions go, this one sucked, by the way. Didn't work a bit.
We finally got in the car, and Damon drove like the wind. By this point, the contractions were about every 2 or 3 minutes, and they were so strong that I had to plant my feet on the floor of the car, grab the handle above the door and try with all my might not to push during them.
Damon's admission to me the next day (*note: one word of this quote has been changed): "I almost poopied my pants on the way to the hospital."
To be continued ...
