Birth of a Circus Act

First off, thanks to all of you wonderful people for the most awesome, supportive, and generally heartwarming comments on my last post. I'm all fuzzy and stuff. As for the K Family, well, we are hanging in there, getting through each day, learning how to be a bigger family. Phook is having a hard time, and I'm doing my best to apply love to the affected area in whatever quantity I can muster. Circus is a charmer. We are trying our best to inform him of the difference between days and nights. Big K and I are still glad we're married. I'll tell you more about all of this when I can, of course. But I wanted to share the Circus birth story before sleep deprivation gets the best of me and I forget the details. Note to those of you who aren't comfortable with cervix-related details and descriptions of things that hurt terribly: Don't read this, idiot.

So this is what happened. As I mentioned in one of my yammering baby update posts, my doctor ultimately became cool with letting me go to my due date (June 30), but was not cool with letting me get wildly overdue on account of increased risks to baby/momma as the baby grew and theoretically began to stress out its high blood pressure-laden home. About two weeks ago, my induction was scheduled for July 3. I didn't tell ya'll, for reasons also outlined in one of my other yammering posts. Of course, we were really, really hoping I'd go into labor on my own, but I had made peace with the likelihood of induction.

On Thursday morning, we went and checked into the hospital around 7:30 a.m. At 8:00, I was given a cervical ripening agent (a little pill they insert into your she-parts) and informed I was starting out dilated not quite to 1 cm, the baby was still very high in my pelvis, and my cervix was thick. (For those of you not in the loop on these matters...in order to push out a baby, your cervix has to dilate to 10 cm, it has to thin out to the point that it disappears, and your baby has to drop low in the pelvis (obviously on that last point)). So they gave me the ripening thing, and I had to lie in bed for 2 hours. Around 10:00, I got to get up and get walking, and the contractions started right away. Not very strong at first, but about every other minute.

Around 1:30, my doctor came and checked out my business, and found that I had dilated a little beyond 1 cm (woo hoo!), had thinned out a bit, and the baby had dropped a tiny bit. Not the most optimistic report, but it was at least progress, something I didn't make any of during my first 30-hour failed induction attempt with Phook, the party that occurred a full 6 days before she was actually born. I was then given another dose of the cervical ripener and spent another 2 hours in bed, which started to legitimately suck as my every-other-minute contractions got pretty legitimately painful. I was having to breathe through them and was starting to question my wisdom in procreational matters. The nurse checked out my business around 3:00, and found that I was dilated to 2 cm, was continuing to thin out, and that the baby was still stubbornly high. I got another chance to walk around, and at this point was kind of grabbing the wall with each contraction. We were optimistic we might actually have a baby within the month of July.

At 4:30, my doctor came and checked my business (if you haven't figured it out yet, I am using the term "checked my business" as a euphemism for putting way too much hand in my netheregions, reaching for my tonsils, and evaluating the status of my cervix). I was still around 2 cm, but continuing to thin out, baby still high. She decided to break my water. This was huge, as it means you are not leaving the hospital without the baby. Once the water is broken, your ass is committed. This exciting process was not exciting. Nay, it was highly painful. But successful. As soon as my water was broken, my contractions became nasty-licious. Still every-other-minute, now with extra suck. I wandered around with Big K, hanging on him occasionally, starting to get that feeling that I was an animal with no claims to being a part of the human race.

Around 6:00, the nurse checked my business, and I was dilated to 4 cm, thinner, baby still high. And when she checked me, my water decided to REALLY break. An entire quarter barrel of amniotic fluid poured out of me. It felt all weird and stuff. It also inspired my body to go batshit crazy in the labor intensity department. Oh balls of flaming pain. I was no longer in any way connected to the planet earth. One minute giant contractions with a minute or less in between. It felt constant, probably because it pretty much was. I was hanging around Big K's neck and/or leaned over with my head on the sink in my hospital room, rocking back and forth and kind of doing this weird squatty dance thing, which was just what my brain stem had me doing at that point. When the nurse came in again, I cordially invited myself to have an epidural.

I made it down to the delivery room and anesthesia dude came in. Earlier in the day I'd met with him in the event that I'd be requiring his services, and informed him that my epidural with Phook hadn't worked, I had a congenitally narrow spinal canal, and I'd had a disk surgically removed from my lumbar spine in 2002. He kind of blinked a lot, started drooling and twitching, and finally verbally indicated that he was not particularly optimistic about my case, to say the least. Those considerations aside, I wanted to take a shot at some pain relief. I'm not going to get all philosophical about this controversial issue. I'm just going to say that I was thoroughly exhausted by this pregnancy, thoroughly aware that I was about to embark on the thoroughly exhausting project of double motherhood, and thoroughly hoping that I could just get the gods to throw me a bone and score at least an hour of relief at some point in between.

The thing about an epidural is that it's not like they just give you a shot or a pill. No. It's like a procedure and shit. They have to find some little space in your spine, numb you locally, insert a catheter in your back, and do all sorts of shit involving a minuscule likelihood you'll die. It takes awhile, and you have to hold very still in a very uncomfortable and unnatural position. A difficult task while contracting like an absolute animal every other minute, to say the least. I'm gonna go ahead and call it hell. So old dude made an attempt and missed. I don't want to think about what that means. Eventually he got the thing inserted, got me all taped together, and told me it would take 15 minutes to work. 15 minutes later, I was lying on the bed, still dying from horrifying contractions, only now I wasn't allowed to move to work through them. My business was checked, and I was dilated to 6 cm. Anesthesia man kept returning to the room, mind boggled as I told him I felt not a hint of numbness anywhere on my body. He took a little alcohol pad or something and started rubbing it on various parts of my body, asking if I could feel cold. Yes and yes. I could have felt the whiskers of the world's tiniest kitten had they come within a mile of my midsection. No, not numb at all. At this point, it was 9:30 p.m. and I was dilated to 7 cm, very thin, baby still high. This was a dark hour.

Anesthesia man said, "You are the only patient I've ever had who has gotten no pain relief from an epidural." That was neat. But he decided it was worth attempting again. So he removed epidural #1 and took a few more stabs at epidural #2. Sitting through this experience, shaking like a rabid animal...yeah, ouch. I questioned whether or not I'd live. I don't know how I did, really. It's one of those experiences you absolutely do not think you could possibly live through...and then all of a sudden it is over and you just find you somehow have.

Eventually dude got another epidural inserted, and gave me a dose of intrathecal meds as well. You can google that if you want; I'm too lazy to link to something. The good news is that this medication worked, and I felt so much better. Intrathecal meds work for about 2 hours before they wear off, so I was feeling grand that I'd get at least a little break, even if this epidural also failed. And then anesthesia man said, "You're really making me appreciate that I have the day off tomorrow." Hey, I aim to please.

At this point, my contractions, all textbook-like, slowed down. I didn't dilate much over the next hour. So my doctor ordered some pitocin to get them moving again. And, yes, they moved. I got these wild shivers and my teeth started chattering and I started shaking uncontrollably, and, well, then my uterus decided to get hyperstimulated. Rad, huh? Basically, little Circus did not like the application of pitocin to his cocktail. His heart rate started doing things that are generally considered bad. Dropping to 80, for example. They shut off the pitocin, had me start sucking oxygen and changing positions, etc. He rebounded nicely. And I know that whole business all sounds really terrifying, but at the time I was oddly calm and confident we'd be okay. No one lost their shit and there were no hysterics. It just sort of happened.

By this time it was about 11:30 p.m. and the epidural was, thank you Lord, working. I could feel a lot of pressure and some general tightening of my belly, but not actual contraction pain. The nurse checked my business. I was fully dilated and ready to go. Except Circus was still hanging out much to the north of where babies ought to be before they make their exit. The nurse told us she didn't think I'd be able to push him out from his treetop location, and that c-section could be in my future. I acted casual. I mean, was there really any point in wasting energy on freaking out at that point? I think not. Then my doctor showed up, checked my business, and said that according to her estimation he wasn't quite as high as the nurse thought he was, saying something about taking the extreme lengths of my body into account when assessing the situation. She did say she thought it was likely she'd have to use the vacuum extractor thing to get the kidlet out, but that we'd give it a go. I was more than ready to give it a go myself, since I felt like I had a watermelon being dropped from the height of a 10-story building asking me none-too-politely to please extract it from my she-parts.

Okay, so at this point it was 11:50 p.m. My doctor had just confirmed that all the baby resuscitation equipment was ready to go, which freaked me out a bit. I was pretty sure I was gearing up for a marathon, not a sprint. I thought I was about to start the push-o-rama to end all push-o-ramas. I was imagining hours. But I was ready to do it. If you've ever been engaged in what I'd call a childbirth situation and felt the urge to push out a baby, you know that this sensation is not a suggestion. Nay, it is a demand. So Big K was getting rather chipper as he does when he's about to score a kid. I was grabbing my knees and reaching into my presumably empty pot of stamina. And right there in that pot I found stamina. I just gave it everything I had and pushed when I felt the urge and listened to Big K get all excited, "Oh, the baby's right there! I can see it! You can do it! Push! Oh, you're doing it!" And, you know, all that is pretty motivating. So I did, I pushed. And it hurt, it burned, it hurt. But this is not the sort of thing you want to do at 50%, so I pushed. And at 12:01 a.m., little man was born.

There was this quick moment where the doctor grabbed him and did something and I wasn't sure what was happening, and as it turned out she was removing the cord from around his neck. It happened so insanely fast that there was no time at all to panic or worry or freak out. And then I started saying, "What is it? What is it? What is it?" and she finally got an eye on the situation and told us it was a boy. I had no instinct at the moment of birth like I did with Phook, and it was kind of a weird moment. I had sensed I was carrying a boy through the majority of the pregnancy, but it was still kind of odd for it to become real. A boy? We actually created a boy? Big K was instantly crying of course. I know that he would have been just as happy with another girl, but there was a definite polish on that happiness on account of the fact that God had just handed him a son. I was so happy to see him so happy and by then I had a squealing newborn boy on my chest, totally cheesed off that he was no longer rocking out on planet utero.

The word that best describes my emotion upon seeing him is probably simply "relief." I was pretty damned scared through a lot of this pregnancy that I would eventually hit a chute and there would be some setback, some problem, some complication, some something horrible. The fact that I kept hitting ladders and here I was with a healthy little boy on my chest had me feeling like I'd been running hard forever, reaching for something I couldn't quite grab, and now I had finally grasped it. And I felt relief. I felt happy of course, but not the soul-shattering joy that I felt when I was handed Phook. I think that once your soul is shattered by the feeling of becoming a parent, you can't repeat the experience. Big K and I agreed that with your second baby, you need to fall in love with the actual baby rather than the whole scene around it, since you've already had the birth experience. Maybe that's just us though.

The good thing is, I started to fall in love fast. He'd been on my chest for about 10 minutes and he was getting a bit cranked up out in the scary cold world. So I put my finger in his little hand, and of course he instinctively gave it a squeeze. And he quieted right down too. And Big K melted a little and made that Big K melting sound, and I melted a little, and we all melted together a little bit and he started working his way into our hearts.

After this, there was weighing and measuring and checking and I suppose there was some tidying up business involving my parts (1 stitch) and whatnot. And then they gave him back to me and we made our first go at nursing. And the piglet latched on after about 1 minute and proceeded to nurse for a solid hour. Relief on that count too. Then I got a sandwich and some yogurt, and that was sweet. Oh, and a 7-Up. That was awesome, that right there. Let me tell you. Birthing is hard work, friends. I'm still hungry, actually.

And that, people, is the story of the birth of Circus. It happened a week ago today. It might as well have been four centuries ago. It was actually kind of difficult to conjure some of it up already. Time is whooshing by and everything is a blur and the days are flying off the calendar like the image they sometimes use in movies where they have like a desk calendar with the pages ripping off the thing at a wildly fast speed to illustrate the passage of time. There are moments where I want to scream, "Stop the ride!" and then there are moments when I am hanging on to anything I can find just riding and riding and letting the wind whip my face and looking around at the passengers in my car and just being glad that we're all on the ride together. I love my husband more than ever, even though I never thought that particularly possible. I love Phook, my suddenly huge child, so much that it makes my heart feel like it will just blow out of my chest, liquefied into in fine mist. And I love the little Circus, the tiny brand new baby soft little old man that he is...well, I love him like I've been loving him forever.