Tuesday, an unforgettable Tuesday brings in our tiny little baby. Mardi Gras, Fat Tuesday (day before Ash Wednesday). This Tuesday brings weather upsets in the lower 48. Super Tuesday sees a spike in hope, in actual democracy, in Fairbanks, in America. Also, this Tuesday is a freezout in Fairbanks, minus 42.But, here’s the main event:
As Monday came to a close, we (Marin, Marisa and I) were talking about relaxing with a DVD, since Marin was having 12-15 minute apart contractions, and couldn’t really focus on anything.
My task is to get Teo into his pajamas, which has become a cinch now that he gets to watch an episode (“Two!!”) of “Peep and the Big Wide World,” a National Science Foundation Funded kids show which explores the world through three sweet characters/ friends, Peep (an ingenuous chick), Chirp (a smart, sensible baby bird) and Quack (a slightly self-absorbed, overwrought duck). They’re drawn as stick figures, or better, balloon figures, with incredibly expressive faces, and with innovative, narrow
“camera” angles. We LOVE the theme song, sung by Taj Mahal, and Teo has learned to protect himself from the “Tickle Fish” (me), which (unless kissed) pounces on him when, in the song, Peep hatches and says his first word, “peep.”The joint video didn’t happen. Marin and Marisa were getting Teo to bed with Marisa, which excluded her from the mix, so I watched a five year old episode of the HBO series about Baltimore, “The Wire.” Marin joined me upstairs afterwards. This is rare. We rarely make it past 10 pm as a couple. We sat around having contractions, applying pressure to her hips during her “cow” pose (google “yoga cow pose”). We decided to move to the bedroom for the possibility of sleep. Duh. Marin took a shower, which was supposed to slow things down, but it sped things up, from 10 minute intervals to more like six and seven. When it got through to me that Marin was going to be up all night, I got with the program, and jumped up from my stupor every time she stumbled out of bed to cow-pose on her yoga mat. After each contraction, Marin would check the digital clock with its blood red numerals, and write them down, and do the subtraction, to get 8 or 5 or 11 minutes.
Marin kept asking me if we should call Kate, our doula, and I kept asking, okay but when did she say we should call? and the answer was, when the contractions are 5 to 6 minutes apart, a condition which hadn’t been met yet. Until 2:30 am, when it was clear that we needed a new perspective to get us on to the next stage. Marin put in the call, and we moved our scene of engagement upstairs.
Kate arrived around 3 am, and began helping from the first moment. Instead of pushing Marin’s hips down in the cow position, she compressed them, muscled them in toward one another which worked better. We sat around and talked a little, Marin took a second shower, but we seemed to be hanging at 6 minutes. Nonetheless, around 5 am, we changed scene to the hospital.
We loaded up the car, newborn baby seat, cd player with JS Bach music, cameras, baby clothes, Mama clothes... And blue plug in electrical cord, one for us and one for Kate to borrow. It was minus 40.
The ice fog covered the dark landscape, particles of water vapor frozen and hanging in the air just off the ground, where it kept us and Kate following us from driving faster than 35 mph. When you follow another car at this speed, it spews out a huge cloud of invisibility, like a disappearing car in a spy movie. You have to drop back by lowering your speed until you’re 50 or 70 yards back, otherwise you may find yourself coming up at 35 mph upon the spewing car, stopped, with ten yards to bring your own two tons to a complete stop. Lots of accidents like this happen, involving first-winter-in-Alaska types, young families at the military base, etc.
At the hospital, you have to check in at Emergency. Marin’s off doing contractions while a military husband with telltale bags of new-baby gear is checking his absent wife in. Then we had to wait again while a nurse from the Women’s Center walked the 10 minute walk across the geography of the construction site which is the hospital rehab.
After Marin was checked into her room with Kate by her side, I had to find a parking place with a real plug-in, as they had no adapters for their proprietary plug ins in the main lot. It was an auxiliary lot, and walking back, I could feel the frostbite entering my ear lobes, like needles, probing.
So there we were. This is where the sleepless blur kicks in. The bed had a lot of settings, one of which dropped the lower part of the bed so you could kneel there, and rest your head on the upper part. The nurses, Mel (for Melody) and Lin, a nurse who was learning the ropes, checked Marin’s dilation and effacement. There’s this way of putting your fingers (each 1 centimeter wide) up against the uterus opening (cervix) to measure each of the “centimeter” increments. I think 9 cm is when the head can come through.
I spelled Kate for stretches of time. The large-number monitor had the baby’s heartbeat, usually around 130 but going as high as 180 or 200, as low as 80, though when it was at 70 for a little, Kate said it was picking up Marin’s pulse in her femoral artery. The monitor slipped around on Marin’s rotund belly, and nurses would appear from the nurses station when it wasn’t reading a correct pulse.
Marin’s contractions also showed up on the monitor. So there was this irony, as the hours passed, that we’d be watching the numbers on the monitor to know what to do as Marin went into a contraction, peaked, and came down the other side.
Mel and Lin had great ideas, they’d appear and suggest Marin try sitting, or lying on her side, or go walking, they were very engaged – Lin was positively chatty – and added an impetus which was very welcome to Marin, Kate and me. They could tell, for example, that “Pepita” didn’t like when Marin was on her right side, and immediately turned her to her left side, where Pepita’s numbers went back to normal. Then Kate would have a different pressure point to access because Marin was in a new position, she’d teach it to me, and Marin would gradually hone us in on the fine points of how it felt.
Mel and Lin suggested going for a walk their next visit to us, which was fun, doing rounds in the hall, and holding Marin up as if dancing. Contractors involved in the rehab squeezed past us, huddled in a slow-dance in the middle of the hall in the middle of the morning, while she had her contractions.
Dr. Hogenson (Ellie) showed up around 10, and confirmed what Kate and the nurses had said, that everything was on track. Every now and then, someone wanted to check Marin’s cervix when she was having contractions, which usually increased their intensity. Waiting for the next contraction, Ellie heard that we had Bach’s “Sonatas and Partitas for Solo Violin” playing and asked who was that, I said Nathan Milstein, and she thought it might have been me (???) and told a story about Joshua Bell playing the “Chaconne” incognito in the NYC Subway for the Wall Street Journal, and only got $30 in tips, and a couple kids who spent any time observing his world-class performance. Then the contraction came, end of that conversation.
Ellie mentioned “breaking your waters” to Marin, and our hearts sank. This was step one of Matteo’s Caesarean three years ago. We concurred, with a demoralized glance between us, that we wanted to think about it. All the attendants seemed to be of one mind, that it would take 2 hours off the labor. And, after talking to Kate over the next half hour, I led and Marin followed – we realized that, even though the “clock starts ticking” on a 24-hour deadline after artificially breaking the waters, we were going to be in Caesarian-ville if we were still laboring this time tomorrow – and we changed our minds. Ellie broke her waters around 11.
Mel and Lin had to leave at noon, and Jackie, the new nurse, said her philosophy was to let us labor unimpeded. That was a little disappointing, because it was always encouraging when either Mel or Lin came in, even just to chat. Later, however, Jackie came through, teaching us that Marin shouldn’t be consciously pushing right now, she should be breathing and relaxing, letting the womb do its work, as it pushed from the top and relaxed at the bottom, so that the baby’s head could ease through the thinning cervix. Jackie could tell by the sound Marin made when breathing that she (and we) were confused on breathing.
The next few hours we kept trying this, as well as this-and-that, feeling like things maybe were getting stalled but with Kate continuing to say we were doing great, a centimeter an hour, right on track. Thank God for cheerleaders! Then, to our surprise and relief, Mel reappeared between takes of the caesarian she and Lin were in on, and did one of those during-contraction cervical hand exams, and proclaimed she’d lifted the effaced cervix back around the head with her own two fingers, and that Marin was in “transition” which leads inexorably to the end phase of labor.
The Final Phase of Labor! Whoa! What a relief! We were going to have a baby, without a caesarian!
The next hour was a trip. Marin finally let loose, like a commander in chief marshaling her army. She just whaled-away at this problem that she was tasked with. Kate asked for a bar to put on the bed, and Jackie arrived with it, and Kate asked for a towel to wrap around the bar, and Jackie suggested a sheet instead, which, lying on her back with her heels up high on the bar, Marin used to haul her body into the desired curve when she sucked her breath in and, with enormous concentration, bore down on this little baby needing to emerge.
Slowly on there was a space being created by sheer will power, where Jackie said she saw hair on the baby, and later Ellie said, no way, that baby’s bald as a cue ball. Instead of a flat surface, a bulge began to build, contraction by contraction, like a volcano quietly, slowly emerging over the eons from the still surface of the ocean. But this was happening with a lot of growls, low gutturals, and deep exhausted sighing. Before long, a whole tribe of women were circled around, and I took my place in the outer ring, watching, seeing this for the first time.
They were: Kate using her pressure points, and whispering encouragement contraction by contraction, Jackie holding the monitor to get some of the baby’s heartbeat on the paper (by now there were huge long blanks on the screen and on the record, because of how the monitor couldn’t possibly stay at the right place to catch Pepita on the run) ostensibly for the purpose of any later lawsuits, Ellie was dressing up for the big moment while feeling around inside Marin to assist and report. Everyone knew that this was right on track, everyone but me and Marin, but at least Marin had them whispering to her and cheering her. Ellie figured out that Marin was pushing generically when she needed to be pushing toward the bottom of the birth canal, and somehow she communicated that so Marin could understand, and the baby’s head emerged more with each newly configured push. Each correct push got a round of encouragement and even cheers.
At the end it was, of course, a blur. The final push, the baby’s head sprang out, Ellie took hold of it and rotated the shoulders through (which looked SO marginal to do, I was SO glad this wasn’t me delivering in the back of a car or something), later Kate said that, as is routine, the umbilical cord was around the neck, and that’s what Ellie was doing, but that isn’t what you see on the secret CIA videotape of the moment, which will be destroyed as soon as Marin figures out how to use the movie camera, unless Jeff intervenes and hides the secret video tape so that Pepita can be appropriately grossed out when she’s 13 and we find ourselves resorting to extraordinary measures to drive home our abstinence-before-marriage, sex ed home curriculum. A curriculum of one 5-minute video, complete with amplified scream sound track.
The little Pepita plopped out, and Ellie proclaimed, it’s a girl all right.
Our little baby girl was suctioned out, sputtered, peeped, then cried, was wiped up, the cord was cut (not by me, cameraman on the close up), and she was placed under Marin’s gown on her chest, mama sweating and smiling, exhausted, a little stunned, of course. We were both of us stunned. A girl. A vaginal birth. The energy in the room was really high.
Dr Hogenson got busy stitching up a little tear, starting with novocaine or something in a huge hypodermic, which Marin didn’t really register. Marin was still too prone to really hold the Pepita to her breast, which I was trying to help with, and the little one was amazing, she knew how to suck. I mean, five minutes before she was an aquatic creature going through a death-squeeze-cavern to her doom, and, landing with her eyes open (Kate noticed that, too), she was now breathing air, and beginning the lifelong human search for the nipple.
But what I couldn’t get over was how different this was.
Last birth, we had a midwife plus male-doctor team, with a disappointing birth experience. Now that we have rehearsed that birth drama for three years, it’s clear to us that we came in to the hospital too eager too early, and stayed, getting anxious. And thrashed our “birth plan”, capitulating to the whole nine yards: stripping Marin’s membranes, breaking her waters, acquiescing to the IV insert, the Pitocin drip (causes strong contractions), the epidermal (pain block), the catheter (pee in the bag), and the KINK in the catheter (DING DING DING), and the baby in distress, and the Caesarean, and the doctor swearing as he discovered the kink in the catheter, and the $35,000 pricetag. Priceless.
This birth, we had a doula, she taught us how to gather around Marin’s body and help her, she told us we were doing fine, she told us when we might want to go in to the hospital. Then the nurses took their cue from us, we were just not so anxious (Kate told us, BTW, that we had the best nurse possible in Mel). Never a question about pain remediation or any kind of intervention. It was simply the tradition of a coven of women hovering over a birth, witching this little tiny baby forth from the sweet beleaguered Mama, with nary a male person in the room except the slaphappy Papa. This time, maybe $3,000. Put women in charge of the deficit, darn it.
And, on other fronts, I take it that Clinton got her big states last night, but Obama got more states, and unlikely states, like Idaho in the West and Georgia in the South. And people completely swarmed the Democratic caucus in minus-40 degree Fairbanks last night, I hear from a blogger friend who was there and took pictures. What an exhilaration, that everyday people are rallying everywhere in America, people who have been excluded and ignored by the present political machine as it subverts the constitution, breaks the law, increases our moral hazard in the world, and sends people off to heroic deaths for a few more years of post-peak petroleum and party advantage. These people are saying, “we love this country, and we will rise, given a chance, given a choice.”
On yet another front, there are what? 40 dead? in Texas? because of a flood or twister?, and was it Oklahoma? where 15 more? died. I am totally out of the news loop, new Papa stunned by the lovely sweet gaze of his quiet miracle daughter.
Plus, it’s Ash Wednesday, Ashenmitwoch. No ashes for me. But maybe a lenten discipline? Blogs enjoy disciplines. So do newborns, they shred them, both.
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