Slouching over the table, I recall that in medical situations it’s helpful to warn people that you might freak out. They take it pretty seriously.
“I don’t want to alarm you, and I’ll probably be fine, but there is a small chance I might freak out.”
They are hesitant to give me any kind of anxiety-reducing drug, which could mess with the baby, and I am hesitant to ask for one, but I just need everyone to be on their toes in case I get the shakes or something. The forced cheerfulness in the room immediately increases by at least 27 percent as the team assures me I’m doing great. I’m not actually doing anything, just slouching and breathing, but I’ll take any validation I can get. The doctor finally pokes through what I can only imagine is my fat dura and they lay me down and wait for the medicine to paralyze the lower half of my body. My arms are strapped down.
At this point, Margie and Daniel are allowed to come in and watch the show, though there is a big green medical sheet obscuring the business end of my body as they stand near my head. The medical team is chatting it up, they have some doctor friends in common, it’s all very chipper, very ordinary, just another day at the office, another routine procedure, my body being sliced open to reveal a live baby for which I will be responsible the rest of my life, before and after which all manner of things could go wrong. I picture lots of rushing around, codes being called, the baby in an incubator, but the medical team is calm, doing their jobs, a carefully choreographed dance they’ve done hundreds of times.
If you know you are going to have a C-section and it’s unavoidable, please think twice about reading the rest of this chapter. You will be fine, but maybe the less you know in advance the better.
As I start to lose feeling in my legs, it gets harder to breathe. The sensation in the lower half of my body—or lack thereof—is so disturbing, I keep asking where my legs are, as if being able to visualize their coordinates would make this less troubling. They give me an oxygen mask, but I still feel like I can’t get air.
Margie assures me I’m not suffocating. “I’m looking right at the oxygen monitor. You’re fine. The baby is fine.”
It’s hard to communicate through the oxygen mask, but I manage to inquire as to the location of my legs half a dozen more times.
I need distraction. There are way worse surgical situations than not being able to feel your lower half when you are totally awake. I know this. Still, it’s so unbearable emotionally that it’s unclear how long I can take it. This is hard to explain without sounding like someone who cuts her forearms and reads too much Plath, but I’ve never been afraid of dying. You leave the party and it’s ashes to ashes and funk to funky. Being paralyzed, however, has always been my biggest fear. This paralysis isn’t permanent, as it was for the aforementioned heroic vet Kovic, but the experience is beyond unpleasant.
Margie, seasoned birth professional that she is, warns me never to look up at the surgical light fixture, as the metal provides a reflective surface and I will be seeing the C. I avert my eyes and ask Margie to just describe the proceedings. She lets me know, right in my ear in her dulcet doula voice, that they have made the first cut. There might be the smell of burning flesh soon when the wound is cauterized, she explains. Good to know.
“Talk to me,” I say to my husband, who is nothing if not laconic.
On our second date, I asked if I was talking too much and he begged me never to stop yammering. We made a deal that I would talk 85 percent of the time and he would fill in the rest for the duration of our relationship. He doesn’t like to talk about himself and just isn’t a loquacious guy. Now, he’s blinking too much, looking a bit faint and mumbling, “Um, what should I talk about?”
I feel so bad. It’s like asking a kitten to tap dance.
The doula delivers. I mean, she doesn’t actually have to deliver, just deliver on her promise to make things easier, which she does by filling in the conversational gap, telling me how the incision looks, how the baby is doing, what to expect next. That was the best $1,500 we ever spent and I feel guilty that this is probably boring for her compared to a vaginal birth, but I’m grateful she’s here. I wish there were doulas for everything difficult in life—job interviews, final exams, home buying, Thanksgiving with my family. I would like to grab Margie by the denim pant legs and never let her go. Looking into my husband’s eyes, I love him for his quietness, because as much as I would enjoy a constant prattle, I know he’s focused and present, and he’s the kind of guy you want around during an emergency, emotional or otherwise. In the movies, when the woman is in labor, she curses the father for putting her in this position, and although I can’t actually feel what position I’m in, I’m not cursing Daniel. I’m madly, painfully, achingly in love with him for the blinking and the terror and the forced preservation of a calm demeanor, because all of these things tell me how much we matter, Buster and me.
“Is it almost over? Where are my legs?” I ask again, still thinking knowing would make the paralysis more palatable. I tell myself it’s just a few more minutes, that I’ll get through it, that so many women have done this before me and I’ve never heard a single one talk about the creepy, helpless terror of a nerve block. What’s that quote? Whatever doesn’t kill you just makes you wish you were dead. No, it’s supposed to make you stronger. Right. Right. This is making me stronger as I grit it out. It certainly beats the nerves firing at a time like this, and I should delight in the medical miracle of spinal blocks, but this is stretching the space-time continuum because I could swear my legs have been frozen for hours.
Small talk. Small talk. Small talk. Margie on the weather. The medical team continues to chat breezily like they do during surgeries on medical TV shows. Margie on whether we’ve chosen a baby name. Daniel blinking a lot. Margie reassuring me I’m getting enough oxygen. Daniel blinking and peering toward the sheet obscuring the procedure. Margie on how great this hospital is, because they let doulas in the operating room and because Adventist hospitals are known for their excellent food. Me on the leg thing again. Daniel finally grunting out the first syllable of a word, rest of word still unknown. Daniel looking longingly toward Margie when there is a brief silence. Margie reengaging small talk. Me willing to listen to any manner of conversation to forget that my skin, muscles, uterus are probably cleaved apart at this very moment, internal organs shifted aside, some set on top of my stomach for safekeeping to be returned after the baby is removed. The doctor’s fingers are getting close to Buster. Frank No Name Buster. He is inside of my body and in minutes he will be out.
More blinking. Margie warning me the baby might not cry right away, so don’t panic if we don’t hear anything for a few seconds.
I don’t know who it is, maybe a doctor, a nurse, the anesthesiologist, someone announces, “He’s a chunky monkey,” and I’ve never been more relieved than I am to hear the first fat joke about my son. I know no one would be joking if he didn’t have all of his fingers and toes and appear to be in good working order. You don’t start rhyming and referencing Ben & Jerry’s flavors when things are going awry. Even someone with a spinal block, restraints and a nasty case of alarmism knows this on some visceral level.
After he’s pronounced a chunky monkey, and the doctor says, “He was definitely breech ... and definitely a boy” (I guess Buster presented with a big rump and typically swollen baby balls) I start bawling right there on the table, tears pooling around my oxygen mask. I’m trying not to choke on snot and shock and the weird mucus that collects when you’re on your back and huge.
He is held up in the air like a bunch of grapes at a Sunday farmer’s market, purple and shiny.
Until the second they bring him over to me and let me kiss his goopy red face, I am convinced that setting up a crib and buying a rug for his nursery and occasionally imagining he would be okay would all have cursed him, and that I would never, ever be lucky enough to get a real live healthy baby.
“Nine minutes,” my husband says, because he’s the kind of man who times things, a
nd they hustle my husband over to cut the cord, calling him “Dad.” Buster and Daniel leave so the medical team can weigh the baby and check his vitals while I get sewn up.
No matter how many tests told me otherwise and no matter how often I saw the graph of his heartbeat, even moments before they removed him and I could hear his heart thudding steady and strong on the fetal monitor, I was sure this was all a big mistake and that something would be wrong and everyone had missed it.
It takes half an hour to stitch the opening he left (I know this because my husband timed that, too) and I never stop sobbing with relief.
A nice Canadian nurse with Disney characters on her scrubs greets me in the recovery room. She hands me the baby to nurse him. He’s all cleaned up, has a full head of light-colored hair, dimples on his cheeks. I know biology is supposed to make me think this way, but he really is beyond perfect. The Canadian woman helps me to nurse him for the first time, placing him on my chest, but it’s easy.
Breast-feeding easily is the equivalent of having a big dick—no one will admit how good it feels, because it’s really arbitrary and in no way means one is more of a man—but when that baby just takes to the boob, no pain, no trouble, I feel like I have a huge, swinging cock. I may have been so-so on nursing, and put off by all the wacky zealots who promote it, but I must admit, it gives me confidence. If nothing else, my baby, despite me, is doing something right. I’m feeding my baby, and all the nurses comment on his perfect latch and suddenly I want to pat myself on the back for taking that breast-feeding class and brag to anyone who will listen. My baby is a chunky monkey and he has a perfect latch.
We go to our room, with a huge window facing out toward the mountains, and the baby “rooms in.” In other words, there is no nursery at our hospital. He’s an hour old and he’s ours full-time. I have a catheter, am on major opiates, can’t walk, have been sliced open and still have an IV drip of fluids, but along with my husband I am now responsible for another person. We have no clue what we are doing.
Nurses, like angels, bring me a special juice cocktail they’ve invented: apple, prune, grapefruit, orange, all the juice flavors thrown together with ice and a straw.
Every sound Buster makes is adorable and terrifying. He sleeps all swaddled in a crisp hospital linen, white with red and blue trim. It’s the “burrito” swaddle, a nurse tells us, as she places him in a bassinet across the room. Daniel is on a roll-away in the corner. I’m in a hospital bed, sedated and wired. And we’re just sitting there with our baby.
Our baby.
twenty-four
Four Days in the Hole
I don’t want to say hospitals play fast and loose with the pills after a C-section, but the bill from the pharmacy is over five grand. Next time I spend five grand on drugs, someone better throw in a hooker.
Again, if you know you are having a C-section, you may want to skip this chapter, because while some people have no trouble at all with the procedure, my recovery was gnarly.
There’s no sleeping that first night.
For one thing, I’m staring at the bassinet, and back at my husband on a cot in the corner, and back at the baby, and I’m high on motherhood and narcotics and this is the best night of my life and I don’t want to miss a thing (or ever sound like an Aerosmith song ever again).
Sure, I don’t want to miss a thing, but being in the hospital after a C-section is not exactly conducive to rest anyway. The baby needs to nurse, my husband needs to change the kid’s diapers because I can’t move but Buster’s bowels can, pediatricians need to check on the little guy, and it seems like every hour or so a nurse or a doctor needs to invade our room, clanging around almost cartoonishly like someone “accidentally” on purpose waking up a hungover teenager who’s been sleeping twelve hours and should really be mowing the lawn.
Everyone has a job to do, which I understand, but it seems that job involves covering the hospital’s ass so it doesn’t get sued for not monitoring our vitals every four seconds.
They check my blood pressure constantly, which is painful because my upper arms are so swollen that the cuff squeezes the life out of me, causing my eyes to water until my dad begs them to use the old-school, crank-style BP machine. About every other time, they grudgingly succumb to my dad’s pleas, but my arm is red and bruised nonetheless.
There’s just overall a lot of barging. They barge in to take the baby’s temperature, to make sure my catheter is still taped to my leg, to wash my privates, which to my surprise bleed profusely even after a C-section. I’m wearing giant maxipad things the likes of which you’ve never seen and the sponge baths they give my lady parts are dehumanizing for everyone involved.
Baby and Mom need lots of tests, no question, but somehow the way the disruptions are spaced makes me feel like a sleep experiment subject who eventually becomes psychotic. What happens if we wait until the subject hits REM and just wake her up every single time and see if she can solve a simple math problem? Let’s choose the perfect wake-up intervals to make sure her brain becomes scrambled and disorganized and her already fragile emotional state unravels and see how that goes. I don’t want to say the protocol is like torture, but I’m pretty sure John Yoo signed off on it.
To illustrate how many medications I’m given around the clock, I will just tell you that not only was the pharmacy bill five grand, the itemized list of drugs we later request is four pages long, single-spaced.
They give me pain pills, stool softeners, injections for nausea, suppositories for the constipation caused by the pain pills, pills for the itching caused by the morphine, gas tablets, Motrin and more.
My ankles and hands continue to swell up like a corpse floating in the Hudson.
There’s a sudden piercing pain in my shoulder, like my clavicle is snapping, which convinces me I’m having some sort of heart attack. Since getting out of surgery, I have had pulsating pneumatic compression devices strapped to both my calves for the prevention of deep vein thrombosis, but perhaps they didn’t work (other than the excellent job they do making me itchy and irritated). Now, I’m sure the gripping, gnawing feeling in my shoulder is a heart attack, a blood clot, or the beginnings of a stroke. The nurse tells me not to worry, that it is just gas. Gas in my shoulder? That is some bad, bad gas. They encourage me to get out of bed with my IV and walk the ward to shake the gas free. It takes half an hour to go ten yards, my husband pushing the baby along in the bassinet, but anything to get rid of this damn shoulder gas.
After the stroll, I hand Buster over to my dad. He is holding the baby in his lap, the 49ers game is on in the background, the baby yawns, and the sunlight from the window is landing on the baby’s hair as he dozes in his grandfather’s lap.
Listen, I don’t want to miss a thing, but I’m kind of missing a lot of things.
Normally, I love opiates like Aerosmith loves ... well, opiates, but I want to remember the way the sun looks reflecting on my dad’s thick eyeglasses as he bounces my son and hums. I want to be less high. What am I, high?
I ask for weaker and fewer pain meds.
Days go by in a blur of pills and burst-open doors and baby checks and blood pressure readings and trapped gas bubbles until a headache hits like a stiletto to the side of my head. The nurse says this happens sometimes when the spinal cord gets nicked during a nerve block; no problem, they just open you up and patch it.
That’s when, despite not having moved my bowels for days, I lose my proverbial shit. Before I even entered the hospital, I was sleep-deprived, and since then I have slept twenty minutes in thirty-six hours. I haven’t pooped, I’m peeing into a bag, I can’t even lift my own baby, my stomach is numb except where it burns, and now I might have to go back into surgery?
The heaving cries start, a few nurses materialize, offer to get a social worker, discuss giving me Xanax (yay!), which is contraindicated for breast-feeding (boo!) and I start having what feels like a bout of PTSD, flashbacks of losing feeling in my legs, of being sliced open, of the struggling for air, o
f the big old nothing that is supposed to be so routine. Can’t go back. Can’t.
“If you don’t have this meltdown, I’ll rub your feet,” says my husband, in the same tone he now uses with Buster. So I stop and he rubs. Suicide hotlines should consider this tactic.
“You’re just tired,” he adds, massaging, and the nurses take pity on us and offer to babysit for a couple of hours, wheeling the baby in his bassinet out to the nursing station.
There’s a chance the headache is actually a withdrawal symptom from not stepping gradually down off the dolls. The prescription? A large cup of medical-grade coffee that probably costs my insurance company $97, and it works. In your face, Starbucks, you ain’t the most expensive cup of coffee in town. One cure for a symptom caused by another cure.
Between the C-section and the chasing my own tail by treating ills caused by pills treating other ills, I feel this experience turning me against my sweet, sweet drugs and Western medicine in general (which seems unfair, being that a breech baby would likely have ripped me apart without the surgical intervention in the first place. I should consider myself lucky to be enjoying the age of modern obstetrics).
Ironically, after the coffee I sleep, with the baby under the care of a nursing assistant named Delilah, who I’m pretty sure is breaking a rule but is mending my psyche.
After a while, she brings the baby in to nurse. The breast-feeding is constant. At one point I think the baby has peed on me, but the rush of liquid is really just my milk coming in (as opposed to colostrum, the low-volume nutrient moms make first) and spilling out, gushing down my hospital gown. My boobs are engorged, a solid D cup if not bigger now, and hard as bone.
Exploiting My Baby Page 20