In all Haste

Saturday, April 21, 2007

Sometime shortly after passing the Daniel Boone Bridge, Collette was quite convinced that the contractions were real.

“Looks like they’re coming every six minutes,” OLeif said almost a little nervously, trying to drive while watching the stopwatch on his cellphone.

They were coming fast, very fast for having just started. St. John’s quickly came into sight that slightly cool evening and Collette was soon following OLeif across the parking lot, barely able to walk. Although she shook her head when OLeif offered to find her a wheelchair. In her opinion, walking was going to get her there faster.

The pain had grown. Collette found that she could only stand still in the hall with her head pressed against OLeif’s stomach for a few moments until the peak of the wave had passed. Still, she had felt worse before in her life. After some confusion about where they were to go, exactly, they arrived in the fully empty waiting room of the women’s evaluation unit. After she had to sit down for another minute, breathing carefully through another sharp peak in pain, three or four nurses helped her back to a room.

They were very friendly and were all talking to her at once and asking questions, all of which she tried to answer as accurately as possible. Heart disease in the family? Allergies? History of cancer? Surgery before? These questions were pouring in while she somehow managed to dress in a hospital gown and crawl into the bed while the other nurses tied monitors around her stomach, stuck her twice for the IV (the first try didn’t work too great) but she hardly felt it anyway, and monitored contractions and centimeters.

The head nurse had just come in.

“Four to five centimeters,” she said cheerfully. “You’re having this baby tonight.”

Not much later, all of the papers had been signed, all the questions answered, all the equipment prepared, and Collette was lifted into a wheelchair, not caring for perhaps one of the only times in her life that she was barefoot in a public place.

She was hastily wheeled through the quiet halls and elevators. Her contractions were already a minute apart, and it was not quite midnight.

They soon found themselves in the delivery room and Collette was lifted into bed.

“This is a nice room,” OLeif was saying. “It’s bigger than ours.”

For the next hours, OLeif was there to hold her hand and to talk about random things in case she needed the distraction. And Rachel, the young nurse supervising the birth, was excellently chatty and encouraging herself.

“This is the fastest labor I’ve ever seen,” she said. “You’re already at ten.”

At one point, Collette was given oxygen. Everything was already dreamlike, and the oxygen made it more so.

“Just keep that deep breathing going,” Rachel told her. “It’s going to help this baby’s heart rate.”

Collette had to admit that there were a few times her own heart jumped when she could hear baby’s heart come to a stop on the monitor.

“I don’t like the sound of that, bud,” Rachel talked to the baby. “Work with me here.”

And then his pulse would always jump back up.

“Giving everyone here heart attacks,” she scolded him.

Various nurses came and went.

“Hello, Collette, I’m your anesthesia lady.”

Collette smiled at her with a Nice to meet you, and prepared for the sticking of the great epidural needle into her back, waiting for the sharp rush of pain. She began to feel a little cold creep through her back.

“There, done,” the nurse said.

“Thank You, thank You,” she thought to God.

It hadn’t hurt a bit. The contractions continued for a short time longer. But finally, the last of them passed as the medicine moved through her back. And she suddenly realized to herself that despite the intensity of the relatively brief number of contractions she had experienced, they still had not equaled the pain she had felt from cramps earlier in her life. She recalled the time that they had once been so intense and so very painful and long-lasting, that she had passed out right in the beginning of her violin lesson. Her teacher had been thoughtful enough to catch her violin as she had collapsed in a heap.