Grabapple.net

This is a hard post to read, I want to warn my readers. It was hard to write.

I had a long, somewhat funny, happy series of posts already started to talk about Nathan’s birth. Step by step..this is how I felt, this is what time this thing happened, then this. Then we were off to the hospital.

The hospital part was all that remained to be written. It seemed like it would be fairly simple.

The hospital part made me throw out everything else I wrote before the hospital. Because I can’t look at those posts; I can’t face my own optimism and happiness and innocence. Because it hurts too much to think about myself, so confident and hopeful.

Because the hospital took all that away from me. Or tried to. Because while my midwives are perhaps well-meaning, when they contracted to take their clients to that place to birth, they left those clients open to a brutal, heartless, dangerous experience.

Let me start with the worst of it. Let me start with myself, battered by hours of hard and mostly fruitless labor, hours of Pitocin-induced pain that escalated past anything I could possibly get on top of, hours when I wasn’t allowed to eat or drink or use water therapy (which we’d been promised; no one had told us that those things are only available if you don’t use Pitocin, and of course we’d been given no choice about using Pitocin), when I had nothing but the edge of a rickety bed and the hands of my doula and my husband to deal with the pain.

While hospital personnel walked in and out, using part of my room as some sort of office…I remember one woman calmly sitting in an office chair at the other end of the room, entering data into spreadsheets with her back to me, while I screamed my way through one of those hellish contractions. Like I wasn’t there. Never a moment of quiet or privacy or calm; always on edge, even apart from the pain itself.

Let me start with myself finally giving in to the cesaerean, not knowing why I couldn’t progress, why I’d stayed at 8 centimeters for four hours, even after an epidural. About to have surgery for the first time in my life. Defeated, and scared, and confused. Not wanting to hurt my baby, not feeling I had any choices left.

Let me start with myself wheeled into an operating room, strapped with my arms out on platforms like Christ on the cross, staring at a green sheet that blocked my view of what was being done to the rest of me, screaming at a surgeon who was poking at me that YES, I could STILL FEEL EVERYTHING, for the love of God don’t cut me yet! Three times, I had to tell him, as he waved his eager knife over me; the anesthetic was working, but slowly, and my midwife and I and my husband were yelling as he kept coming in for the first cut. Not looking at me or talking to me or taking any time to calm me down and let me deal with the terror that was making the teeth rattle in my head. Just impatient to slice into me like a piece of meat.

My poor husband. Oh my God, how scared he was for me. I don’t think the midwife had ever seen anything like it either. She looked sick. It’s funny what you notice, what you remember.

I’m not sure if I was completely numb when they did cut, but I was mostly, I suppose, thanks to no one. The indescribable feeling of pressures inside my body, pushing and pulling, hard–the baby resisted, or he was hard to get a hold of. I remember alternating between hollering loud “ah-ah-ah-ahs” of shock and fear, and reassuring Matthew that it was ok, I was numb now, I was just freaking out, I was just scared. I wasn’t really hurting, he didn’t have to worry.

Then the pressures stopped, and there was a pause, and I suddenly realized a baby was screaming. I was delerious, from drugs and stress, and I couldn’t figure out where the sound was coming from at first. Then I saw nurses in a corner, gathered around a table where the screaming came from. “Is he ok? I want to see him. Is he ok?” I kept asking. No one answered me. I was told to keep still.

Then Matt appeared with the baby in his arms, wrapped in blankets and a cap. I couldn’ t really move; I knew he needed to be put to my breast right away, but the sheets covered me and my arms were still out to the sides. I put out my hand to touch him for a few moments, and Matt and I shared shaky smiles, because he was beautiful. Then the surgeon told me not to move my arm anymore because of the IVs.

The baby and Matt were escorted away, though I could still hear the baby yelling. The nurses laughed about what a yeller he was. And then they finished putting me back together, I suppose. I couldn’t really tell. I wasn’t being talked to, until my midwife bent over to tell me I was going to the recovery room. It seemed to take a long time, to sew me up. At some point the surgeon bent over to tell me that the baby was too big, which was why the cesearean was needed, also that my abdomen muscles had probably been “too tight.” I had no response to that. I was shivering a little less hard now.

They wheeled me out into the hallway. Dimly I saw Matt having some sort of altercation with a nurse; later I learned that he was demanding the baby be put to my breast for a few moments, as promised and requested. He even ran after her and grabbed the bassinet, but she refused to stop or even speak to him, and broke away, wheeling the baby off to the nursery. It was probably 6 or 7 hours before I saw my baby again, during which time they gave him sugar water, which we also didn’t want. Matt didn’t want to leave me but went with the baby, since someone had to. I think he may have chewed the midwife out at some point as well for letting this happen. But he knew my doula was supposed to be with me.

I spent some time in the recovery area, visiting with my doula until they threw her out because she wasn’t a relative. Then Matt showed up, and was told he only had 15 minutes to stay with me; thankfully, the nurse who said this got too busy to enforce it, so he was with me until we got a room.

I don’t remember much of the rest of the night, except when they threw Matt out because visiting hours were over and not even husbands were allowed to stay. I remember trying to get my baby to breastfeed, not sleeping at all really, in a haze of pain and getting in and out of bed to pick him up out of his bassinet while wincing from the stitches. I didn’t get any food, just ice chips, but I snuck some of my labor snacks out of my purse when no one was looking. In the morning they came to get the baby for tests, and I slept a little. At some point in the next day I was de-catheterized and told to get up and use the restroom. The restroom was filthy; there was actual blood and shit on the floor and seat. I saw a roach skitter behind the shower. The toilet was low to the ground, and there were no bars to help me get up and down from it, so I just stood over it the first few times. I couldn’t bend because of the stitches.

A sponge bath was promised but never materialized, so I didn’t get to bathe or change clothes until about 24 hours later, when I could barely manage it myself. My hair wasn’t washed at all while I was there; there was no way to do it by myself.

I had a fellow cesearean patient for a roommate, who was having about as hard a time as me. I was too exhausted to really talk to her much, though. Sometime during the second day, after my wonderful mother in law had helped me get some breastfeeding going and I was actually managing to do it, the blood pressure nurse came in and yanked my arm away from my baby to take my pressure. He fell off the nipple because I needed both hands to make it work. She didn’t care.

I pleaded to go home on the second day, but was told I couldn’t until they could take my staples out. It would be bad to go home with staples, I was told solemnly by several people. I couldn’t figure out why it was worse than being where I was.

The one thing they did do for me was feed me, eventually, though Matt had to supplement when he brought me things; my body was starving. And I found out from my roommate that I could call any time for pain killing drugs; they were generous with those. That helped me.

By the second night, my baby was having trouble breastfeeding. I was producing colostrum, and he could latch on, but it just wasn’t enough and he was getting frustrated. He was a big baby, and my body was in shock, so it couldn’t keep up with him. He was starting to get jaundiced, so for my last night, I let them keep him in the nursery and feed him formula so he wouldn’t starve, while I dutifully pumped to keep my breasts going and help them catch up. I slept deeply for about 4 hours, then woke up in the dark. I started thinking about the birth, and then the tears came. They still come, when I tell this story.

And then I went home, still in shock. But today, it started to get better. My fear and shock have started to turn to anger. I am beginning to make plans about filing complaints; I am able to come here and talk about this now, although it has taken me several hours to type and a few spells of sobbing to remember it all.

Matt is as shaken as me; you can’t watch someone you love go through that and not be. We cling to each other sometimes, and cry, and have no real way to comfort each other except by holding our precious baby. We both feel that when we talk about this week, we have to separate out the birth from the baby. One thing we can share with our friends in joy and pride. The other is something we have to grapple with and heal from.

The hospital in question is New York Methodist in Park Slope, Brooklyn. Yes, I am filing as many complaints about them in as many places as I can think of. I wouldn’t send my worst enemy there for a flu shot. Apparently they do something like 6,000 births a year.

My midwives were Park Slope Midwives in Brooklyn. Methodist is the only hospital they use. I am also going to be telling them my opinions next week at a follow up visit; they talk a very well-meaning, holistic, natural birth talk, but I might have actually had a better birth if I’d stayed with my epidural-happy OB/Gyn, frankly. At least I would have been under no illusions. And probably been at a better hospital. The midwives appear to have little to no power to direct how a birth will go if there is any medical intervention necessary whatsoever. This makes them worse than useless.

I want to finish by saying; my little boy is the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen. I love him with my whole soul and will never regret having him. But I will also never say, having him made what happened all ok. It didn’t. The two aren’t related. He would be what he is no matter what. What happened to me, should never happen to anyone.

I know, it’s been 5 days. I had a c-section, and there was a lot of other drama besides…I’ve been pretty much flat on my back, and my husband has had enough to do helping me breastfeed and shuffle around the house.

But he’s here. Nathan Wynn, born at 5:20pm on Nov. 14th. 9 pounds 15 oz. 22 inches long. Cute as a button. They keep telling me what a big baby he is, but he is actually very thin and fragile and sweet, with long monkey toes and fingers.

He makes a little squeaky sigh when he eats or is asleep that is the sweetest thing you ever heard…it melts your heart.

The birth itself was a story I can’t tell yet, there’s too much to say and I need to find the right way to say it. Once my friend Tylenol with Codeine helps me get through this week, I’ll be back.

Until then: pictures!

(no, no baby yet, just wanted to link to this)

One of the best descriptions of why pregnancy-regulation laws don’t work that I’ve ever read. Via IBTP.

So yeah. Nothing is still what’s happening. I’m not going to update anything else here baby-wise until it does. Which will be Monday at the latest, because that’s the date they’ll induce me if the Littlest Procrastinator refuses to leave my ever-more-cranky womb.

I’m more effaced but no more dialated, and that’s perfectly normal, if frustrating. Lots of Braxton Hicks yesterday, today; bupkis. I am super tired, and not getting enough sleep from being so wound up. And I just don’t want to talk about or think about or blog about my baby-making organs for a little while, which I’m sure is fine with all 6-7 of my readers.

Chances are I won’t be blogging anything else either, since my brain is just as tired as the rest of me. So I’ll see ya’ll later. I’ll be on the couch napping and eating popsicles until things change.

Still no baby, though the Braxton-Hicks contractions like to tease me by coming more frequently. Also, I am now having hot flashes. I have to assume they’re hormone-related and thus birth-related, but I don’t find anything online about them signaling Impending Labor, just being a random pregnancy symptom that you can sometimes get.

So that’s fun; it’s like a Menopause Preview.

Had a sudden craving for protein when Matt made some pork ribs tonight. Suddenly, my 9-months-long-distaste for animal flesh faded away and I wanted nothing more than to gnaw pork ribs like the carnivore I used to be. And that wasn’t enough, so I played it safe and scrambled some eggs, in case my body was telling me it would need the energy sometime soon for labor. Ha! Whatever, body, I know you’re just messing with me.

To be fair, I had more luck with my Zen today, I don’t know why. Resignation? Maybe, or just a realization that getting mad at one’s own uterus is perhaps a bit silly. And I’m not in pain or anything, just cranky. Getting as tired of blogging about this as you are of reading about it. I’m out of projects to do, so I’m not really sure what I’ll do to pass the time tomorrow. I don’t craft; when it comes to knitting, etc., you can call me Thumbsy McGee. I’ve read all my books, I’ve bored the Internets silly with the minutiae of my preggo experience, and the house is as clean and organized as it can reasonably be. I already nap enough to fit right in at the nursing home, and I suck at online gambling. Maybe I’ll take up celebrity stalking, or seeing how long it takes the FBI to come visit me after I write a threatening letter to the President.

Suggestions?

Over at I Blame the Patriarchy, an angry feminist blog that I generally love, a discussion over Maureen Dowd’s latest claptrap took a strange turn into an attack on the idea of marriage. It’s an argument I’ve heard before, that marriage began as basically an economic transaction selling a woman off to the highest bidder, and is therefore irremediably tainted forevermore.

I’m sympathetic to this; certainly, marriage hasn’t been much to look forward to for women for most of human history, and it’s still pretty much institutionalized servitude in many parts of the world. But it seems like a failure of imagination…and a denial of what appears to be a pretty strong instinct for human beings to pair up…to declare it universally bad. And especially, to deride anyone who participates in it as a tool of the patriarchy.

And it irks me no end to be told by someone who thinks this that my marriage is somehow oppressing me, or that the love that we have together is some sort of short-lived illusion based on a naive understanding of human nature. I’m perfectly accepting of the fact that some people shouldn’t marry and don’t want to. But of all the major decisions in my life, this one was probably the easiest. If marriage didn’t exist, we would have had to invent it.

Look, I understand cynicism when it comes to marriage, especially for anyone who pays attention to the history of male/female relationships. It’s easy to see the compromises of marriage as capitulation (no matter who’s making them) and to find that repulsive and strange. The idea of taking another person into account in your decisions for the rest of your life can seem inherently wrong, especially if you’ve fought very hard for your own personal liberty. And the burden of doing that has fallen way too hard on women in our history, to the point of denying them any liberty whatsoever.

But it is possible, though I know I can never prove this to hardcore cynics, to have this sort of compromise be both equally shared and not oppressive. Every time you make a decision in your life, after all, you have to take many factors into account that limit your choices. Your financial resources, your education, your family obligations, your physical abilities, all limit the choices you make. And not all of those are beyond your control; you choose to live in a certain place, to pursue certain careers, to live a certain lifestyle, and all of those choices have consequences. Marriage is no different; you decide whether its benefits outweigh whatever sacrifices it might demand of you. Some people believe it can never be worth the sacrifice. I don’t happen to be one of them. But it’s not because I was brainwashed by reading too many women’s magazines.

The strange fact is, Matt and I are ridiculously, ludicrously, well-suited to one another. When we were dating, this actually unnerved me quite a bit, because I kept waiting for the other shoe to drop. But we’ve been together some 7 years now, and so far, no shoe. We’ve had plenty of tests: we have lived together for over a year in one tiny room, no more than 10×10; we have taken long, grueling roadtrips; we have seen each other through multiple episodes of poverty and unemployment. We have forgiven each other multiple times for the stupidities that everyone is prone to. We have fought and had some major disagreements, and either learned to let things go or found a compromise. And things are still very very good between us.

I expect having a child will be a big challenge for us like it is for everyone, but I don’t expect there to be anything about it that will threaten to break us up. And there are always the things you can’t foresee, but most of the things that would force us apart would require major personality changes from one or both of us. Basically, we’d have to become very different people for this to stop working.

Because this marriage works. Not because we’re such wonderful people or have a magic secret, but because we’re best friends and a good match for one another. We need each other, but are strong on our own too. We get each other’s backs, and we just, generally speaking, like having the other one around. For two people, who, left to their own devices, would probably become hermits, this is a miraculous thing.

So to the marriage-is-an-evil relic idea, I would posit the following. Before there was marriage in a formal sense, there were, here and there, men and women* who sought each other’s company because they genuinely liked one another. Unless they were interefered with, it was perfectly natural for them to stay in that relationship with each other and raise a family and go through life together. This reality existed right alongside–and maybe even prior to–the woman-as-chattel-for-men idea. The rise of one did not erase the other, though it made it more difficult for it to occur.

And when the idea of companionship and love as a basis for marriage actually eclipsed the idea of marriage as slavery, then our culture gained something important. Even though the forces of patriarchy tried to ensure that “love” was twisted and misused to preserve women’s servitude, the idea itself continues to be revolutionary. The idea of marriage as something that is about love and friendship, and only love and friendship, is still making waves in our society. Not least because that in principle allows it to become something that gay and lesbian couples can participate in, if they choose to.

As I commented over at IBTP, there’s plenty of room for discussion in how we treat marriage as a society; how we determine what rights couples have or don’t, whether civil marriage is necessary, etc. But whatever form it takes, when two people in a good relationship commit to sharing their lives together, there is no need to assume that one of them is oppressing the other, or that both of them are oppressing the non-committed. A stable, happy marriage of equals is a positive force, in the lives of the people who are in it if nowhere else. And if we’re really fighting the patriarchy, it’s just the kind of weapon we need.

*and men and men, and women and women…

By “my Zen” I mean my ability to remain serene and calm. It’s having a hard time. It’s not that all my friends and family are super-eager to have me pop this baby out, either. I can’t blame them when I personally am ready to DO THIS ALREADY.

The problem is that I can’t get any sense of what’s happening. I can only have the doctor check me once a week or so. All the other symptoms I’ve been having are the vague kinds of things that could go on happening for another 2 weeks, easily. I could easily remain in this state until Induction Day, and goddammit, I don’t want to be induced, and worry about super fast super hard contractions from the Pitocin. I’m apprehensive enough about my ability to handle natural contractions, after all. Urgh.

I know induction is all in the name of Protecting the Baby, and also, Protecting my Midwife from Litigation, and I understand that, but I ain’t happy to have it looming over my head.

I do manage to distract myself periodically, but really, I’m just so damned tired that going much of anywhere or doing anything that requires a lot of energy isn’t happening. And just walking around is a pain because (squeamish male readers skip the next paragraph)

…since the baby’s so low down, he’s, how do you say, leaning on the exit door really heavily, and it hurts. Hurts in a place I don’t like hurting. All the muscles in that area are complaining every time I do any serious walking. And yet I need to keep doing some kind of walking if I don’t want my legs to completely turn to margarine. It’s getting old, people. OLD.

Anyway, gripe gripe. At least the weather is beautiful. There’s a huge tree I can see from our backyard that is slowly flushing from green to yellow to fiery orange, from the top down. It’s gorgeous. I have no idea what kind of tree it is, but I’d say it’s a good 80 feet tall. When I do go out, I see all the trees lining our street turning yellow or orange too. Soon they’ll start dropping their leaves, and then we’ll be waiting for the snow to come and make everything pretty again. No matter what, I know the baby will be here by the time that happens. And even if he’s induced, it’ll be a temporary annoyance; once he arrives, I won’t give a tinker’s damn about that. Or so I keep telling myself.

..for it does not contain the words “c–vix” or “m–us pl-g” or anything else that has made a few of my male readers shrink in horror. Sorry fellas. Just think about football or something.

Anyway, no baby yet. Lots of muscles cramping, stretching, and aching. Lots of naps. I’ve given up on the cleaning urge showing up; I think years of living in rental housing have killed it dead, and I will always revert to “ah, let the landlord fix it after we move. Not my house.” Plus the idea of bending over to clean stuff off of the floors is just laughable. If it falls on the floor, it stays on the floor. The baby won’t be crawling for months yet, we’ll clean up before then. Maybe.

Got a care package from my mom today; as always, she included new pajamas for me. She has a thing about my lack of appropriate pajama wear; somehow, my old Borders t-shirt from 1994 doesn’t meet her standards. So she sends me nice flannel-y numbers that work in the middle of winter but that I can’t wear the rest of the year. Oh well. There are worse hangups for a mom to have.

I wonder what kinds of things that I do will make my kid roll his eyes 30 years from now?

So just to keep my internet friends updated, my midwife says that I’m dilated to 2 cm and my cervix is quote “soft like butter.” I don’t know that that is the scientific term for 50% effacement, but there you go. And it’s definite progress from last week, when wasn’t nothing goin’ on.

Of course, many many women will tell you they walked around for weeks at 2cm, and various stages of effacement, and still had to be induced blah de blah, and don’t get all hyper yet emjaybee. And I’m not. But I am in a pretty good mood.

And I’ll tell you something else; I was up till 1:30 last night, per usual, but I still managed to wake up at 8 this morning, and had what I can only describe as sudden impulses to clean. Is it the dreaded Nesting Instinct? Who knows? But at least the kitchen is looking good. I’m sure a nap is going to be part of my afternoon, but I have also cleared out all my work projects, so I’m feeling pretty good about stuff happening, if it wants to happen today. Or not. It’s almost the weekend after all, so I don’t expect many crises in the next few days.

Is it wrong that I kind of dig the feeling of the baby moving when he’s so low down now? It doesn’t hurt, and it signals that things are moving. I’m feeling more Braxton-Hicks, or feeling them more, but so far I haven’t had anything painful. Which means the whole thing is probably still a little not-real to me and the first real contractions are going to put me in a whole different ballgame. But that’s ok too.

In the meantime, I think I’ll go eat some more breakfast, drink my raspberry leaf tea, and watch some pointless morning television.

Dear Kid;

I am not prone to dreams, prophetic or otherwise. If the Cosmos tries to send me messages through my dreams, I imagine it has a hard time with my extremely practical mind. The dreams I do have all seem to involve having the wrong driving directions and wandering endlessly around dreamscape highways with exit signs I can’t quite read. Make what you want of that, armchair therapists.

But today, on your due date, (not that that means anything) I had a lovely dream about you, and so I thought I’d write it down.

It started out a different dream, a Left Behind sort of dream, except I was part of a group of people getting persecuted by the Christians and having to escape them. Fortunately for me, they seemed to be quite inept at keeping prisoners locked up. Not a surprising dream to have the day after Bush nominates a guy who believes husbands have part-ownership of their wives’ uteruses to the Supreme Court.

Anyway, the dream changed to a simple dream about being at a family reunion. I was at my grandmother’s house. I went to take a bath to get ready for the event, and my mucus plug broke. I was very happy, got out and got dressed, and went to tell various family members. The first one I ran into was my Dad, who has showed up in my dreams quite a lot since he died. He was happy for me and worried for me. Then I was telling the rest of the family at the reunion that I was pretty much in labor and going to have a baby in the next few days. They were happy for me too. Then suddenly, in the way of dreams, I was holding you, a sturdy near-toddler, a big baby with blonde hair who looked a little frazzled by all the people. As we walked away, I woke up.

I’ve never pictured you as a blonde, or as a big sturdy baby, but that doesn’t matter. It felt good to be holding you just for a few dream-seconds. It felt good not to feel tense or scared about birth, but just happy to have you and show you off.

I am as far from the hippie-granola-magic-crystal type of person as you could meet. For the most part, I think of dreams as just the brain sorting its laundry. All the baby books mention having baby dreams, but I haven’t had any this whole pregnancy till now. So I’m not going to decide that this one means anything in terms of telling me the future. You might still be the slim brunette I imagined, you might not come for another two weeks as I feared. But waking up thinking such happy thoughts about you can’t be a bad thing.

I was planning a wholly different type of entry today, one about not freaking out and letting nature take its course, etc. Which are still all good thoughts. But you know, I think I like talking about you this way much better.

See you soon,

Mom