“If you start seeing little spots in your vision or hearing noises, or if you get a headache or anything at all out of the ordinary, I want you to come to the hospital immediately and call me on my cell from the road.”
“Okay, because that means my preeclampsia has gotten worse?” I asked, suddenly realizing how much we were really risking.
“Yes,” Dr. Laura said seriously.
Drew and I walked out of her office a little stunned and giddy. Before driving back to the house, we got some lunch, and I mentally kept checking my body for any signs of labor. Was that a contraction? Did I feel different? I never went into labor with Cole, so I had no idea what to expect.
Back at the house, I rushed to tell Pam.
“We’re inducing!” I called out as soon as we entered the house.
“Wait, what, right now?” she said, jumping up as I burst into the room.
“Yes! She gave me some meds at her office and now we just wait. I could have this baby at any moment.”
“Wow, that’s amazing! How do you feel?” she said as she came around the table to greet us.
“Great! I mean I don’t feel anything yet, but we’ll see.”
Drew was nervously smiling too much and had dashed off into the house to start preparing for the baby. We still hadn’t cut off the tags on the new baby clothes, and there was so much we hadn’t purchased yet. I was just over thirty-nine weeks pregnant. We’d been so sure that we had another week.
Pam picked up Cole and followed me into the house. Drew was already packing the overnight bag, and I turned toward them and gave Cole a kiss.
“Cole, the baby is coming. Are you ready to see the baby?” I asked, and we both looked at my belly.
“Baby?” he asked, wiggling down out of Pam’s arms. He put his hands on my belly and spoke into it, “Baby come out!”
You heard your brother, little one.
• • •
THAT NIGHT AFTER DINNER, still not in labor, we went to the park, which was packed. The day had finally cooled down and a man was grilling corn on a mobile food stand. The tienda was open, selling popcorn, lotus-shaped fried chips, and ice cream. The basketball court had been taken over by a game of soccer and a dozen young men were kicking a soccer ball up and down its length. Pam and Drew sat on a bench while Cole rode his bike around the perimeter, chasing the local kids on their bikes. Another family sat next to us, playing with a remote control car. I waved to them and sat briefly with Drew and Pam, then stood back up.
“I think I have to walk,” I said.
“Are you feeling something?” Pam asked.
“I don’t know. Maybe. Dr. Laura said walking might help it start.”
“Do you want me to come with you?” Drew asked.
“No, it’s fine, I am just going to walk around the edge of the park. Stay here, you can see me the whole time.”
I spent the next two hours making slow laps around the park, my huge belly drawing the eyes of everyone each time I passed. I felt sort of crampy but nothing like the labor pains I had read about. Come on, come on, come on, I thought as I walked, my hips burning and lower back clenched, willing myself to go into labor. But I only felt regular pregnancy discomfort, the aches that come with adding so much weight and shifting the balance so far forward.
That night I fell asleep thinking about the baby, trying to will myself to sleep so I would be rested for labor later. In my dreams, I spoke perfect Spanish, talking with Dr. Laura about the baby when she said, “Usted va a tener una niña.” You are going to have a baby girl.
“Ya sé, pero ¿qué tan grande es ella? ¿Cuánto pesa?” I know, but how big is she? How much does she weigh?
I wasn’t translating, it just bubbled out of me. Dr. Laura melted away, the way people do in a dream, and now I was trying to buy something at the store, but I couldn’t find it. I kept asking people if they had seen it. They kept shaking their heads. I circled around and around the store, looking and asking.
Then I woke up. I whispered to Drew, “What time is it?” and he bolted up, “Baby?”
“No, what time is it?”
He fished under his pillow for his phone and squinted at it.
“Five thirty a.m. Is the baby coming?” he said in a rush.
“No, not yet.” My body was quiet. I put my hands on my belly and it was soft, not tight and hard like it had been when I was walking around the park. I closed my eyes and started counting, waiting for a baby kick. One, two, three, four . . . After fifteen seconds I felt it, her little feet pushing against me, the space so limited that it didn’t even make my belly bulge when she did it.
She was okay, but the induction hadn’t worked. Yet.
• • •
WE KNEW THAT LIGHT EXERCISE might help jog the baby down into position, so the next morning Drew and I headed to the Malecón in Puerto Vallarta, the town’s iconic oceanside boardwalk that runs along the beach looking out at the deep blue Banderas Bay. The waves looked rough against the cool blue expanse of ocean and sky. Giant sand art installations dotted the beach, and string lined the perimeter, keeping the tourists back while the artists worked, smoothing sand with their hands, then spraying a fine mist of water with a canister mounted on their backs to keep the sand wet enough to continue working. A mermaid, a castle, a pirate ship.
We walked away from the Old Town, up into the hills of Puerto Vallarta. This had been my idea in order to jiggle the baby down. In practice, this was exactly what it sounded like: me walking up every set of stairs, doing covert sets of little lunges behind bushes when no one was looking, rolling my hips and massive baby bump, trying to feel for some position that would finally force this baby down and send me into labor.
I. will. have. this. baby. today.
Drew trailed behind me on the dozens of steps, carrying freshly squeezed orange juice (the energy drink of choice for labor day). We stood on a balcony and watched the ocean for a bit, the wind whipping wildly around us and cooling off the sweat from the long climb. It was something of a date, since Cole was home with Pam. We were so rarely without Cole that I felt like we were a couple of tourists on their honeymoon, except we were nine months pregnant and instead of getting drunk at lunch and having sex in our hotel room, we were trying to hustle up staircases so my cervix would open. It sounds strange, but it was one of the most romantic days of my life.
We returned downhill toward the Old Town, then across a wobbly foot bridge over the Río Cuale, and skirted the blazing afternoon sun in the shade of the double-story buildings that lined the streets, each one with a downstairs shop and upstairs apartment. Flowers and overgrown potted plants dangled off balconies overhead, with fat hibiscus flowers drooping from between iron railings. The pressure in my lower abdomen was sharp, and I was now convinced the baby was well lodged in my pelvis. I was preparing myself for the next steps of labor: the hospital admission, the pitocin drip, the mandatory epidural for my VBAC, the vaginal birth I felt certain I was about to have.
When we returned to Dr. Laura’s office for more tests, I tried to relax as the fetal heart rate monitor dug into my swollen belly, Drew doing his ad hoc (and as typical, completely inaccurate) reading of the printout. I was having mild contractions now, apparently, although I couldn’t feel them. The machine recorded each subtle movement and shift. The baby’s heart rate sounded good, Drew and I thought.
After the test, we sat in Dr. Laura’s office, a little smug. Drew had studied the printouts and we were both prepared for the good news.
“The baby’s heart rate is too low,” Dr. Laura said, reading from the printout and not looking at us. “She’s not handling it well.”
I let the news wash over me, the finality of that statement. I knew what it meant. Dr. Laura confirmed what I was thinking, saying, “Unless she has really progressed, I think we have no choice but to do a C-section now.”
Dre
w piped up. “Can we check?”
She took me into her examination room and asked me to undress as she was standing there. I did it, stripping off my pants and underwear with her watching, which I’d gathered was custom here in Mexico (unlike back home, where you undress privately, as if that makes a difference). As gracefully as possible I climbed half naked onto the table. I stared at the overhead light and waited for the news, my heart in my throat.
“Okay,” the doctor said. “You are one point five centimeters dilated.” Yay! I suppressed a smile, just barely, but I was ecstatic.
“But . . . the baby hasn’t moved down at all.” Oh.
“I’m sorry,” Dr. Laura said. “I can tell you really walked around and tried to get that baby down, but sometimes it doesn’t work.”
She stopped the examination. Drew teared up. I loved him so much in that moment, for how much he wanted this for me, even in the face of unavoidable circumstances.
Just like that, a phase of my life closed. I had always wondered what the labor of childbirth would be like, what contractions felt like, if I’d be able to handle the pain, how I’d feel in the last moments. It turned out that childbirth just wasn’t in my story. But I felt surprisingly calm. After all, at the end of this journey was a baby.
Twenty-five
In case you didn’t know, pregnant women are notorious for Googling scary crap about their pregnancies. I was no exception. I spent the entire night before my C-section terrifying myself with birth stories of babies born with the cord wrapped around their necks (which was what Dr. Laura feared the issue was with our baby). Drew kept yelling at me about it (“Why are you crying? Wait, don’t read that! Stop! Are you crazy, don’t even talk to me, I don’t want to know!”), so I made him read a few of the stories, which of course made him sob as well. Eventually Drew fell asleep while I stayed up clicking link after awful link.
We rolled into the hospital the next morning, a private hotel-esque space just north of the upscale Puerto Vallarta marina area. We had paid our hospital fees in advance ($1,100), and we were told we’d square away our bill with the doctora privately. It was incredibly cheap compared to U.S. hospitals, but for most Mexicans the fees were prohibitively expensive, so the place catered to a few wealthy locals and a majority of tourists and expats who were visiting Mexico temporarily. Because of this, the hospital didn’t have a lot of births. In fact, we were the only birth that day. When we arrived, the nursery was empty.
The room was nicer than the room I had for Cole’s birth in Oregon. It had a full suite attached, with a living room area beyond the standard bedroom and bathroom setup. We had cable and room service, and the bed was surprisingly soft with a big white duvet. Drew settled in on a spacious couch next to my bed.
I met my nurses, who started by speaking to me in Spanish but then quickly switched to English. They wheeled me into the surgery theater and faded away into the preparations. My anesthesiologist gently rolled me on my side and started his work to put the epidural in. Another nurse held my shoulders and I whimpered a little as the needle went in, even though I tried my best to be silent. I felt the rush of painkillers going down my legs and had a charley horse in my calf for about ten seconds—and then I felt nothing, but only for a moment.
Suddenly a wave of nausea hit me so hard that I lost my ability to talk. I watched them moving busily around me, chatting in Spanish, and I grappled with trying to say anything, English or otherwise.
I could hear my heartbeat on the monitors. The volume was turned up and the thump, thump of my heart was like a kind of soundtrack to the moment. I was underwater, fighting to battle back the seasick feeling long enough to say something, when I heard my own heart rate drop precipitously. The nurse came over. “Christine, what’s wrong?”
I pulled up out of the sickness long enough to say, “I feel sick.”
They rushed to give me oxygen and tilted the operating table to the left to remove the weight of the baby from my inferior vena cava, a major artery that gets squished when a pregnant woman lies on her back.
Slowly, I felt better, and soon the surgery started. They brought Drew in, cap, gown, and all. He held my hand and said, “You’re doing so good, sweetie.”
I mustered a smile.
In my first C-section, the doctors had talked about golf while they operated. About weekend plans. About things they had to finish around the house. This time comforting Spanish syllables rolled over me like a wave. Despite my growing proficiency, I regressed to a point of complete lack of understanding. It felt like complete and total language amnesia.
The surgery seemed to go so fast. I wasn’t aware of anything that was going on. I was told about the birth later, as if I hadn’t been in the same room, a story that was related back to me, that seemed to have happened to someone else. When they did pull her out, I held my breath until she let out a scream. It sounded gurgled like she had some fluid in there, which made me nervous. I gave Drew a look that I hoped signaled, Go, check her, and without a word he rushed off to greet her. When they brought her over to me, I kissed her messy face and she was whisked away again. She was bright red and breathing normally.
Okay, she’s fine, I thought, and relaxed.
I spent another hour or so in surgery while Drew left with the baby. I wasn’t nauseated anymore, but the Spanish continued to be impenetrable. I let the soft rolling sounds of the language go untranslated. When they finished, they wheeled me into an anteroom for “observation.” The doctors disappeared, and a single nurse checked my blood pressure from time to time. I wanted to see my baby. How long would I have to wait? I was getting emotional. I watched the clock, the second hand moving painfully slowly: one, two, three, four, five . . . I closed my eyes and willed myself to be patient. I would see her soon enough. How long had it been? Fifteen minutes? An hour? How much longer?
Finally, they wheeled me back to my room, where Drew and some of the nurses awaited me. My first question was, “Where’s the baby?”
“No, not yet,” the nurse said in broken English.
“Drew, where’s the baby?” I asked.
“Uh, she’s in the nursery, but they say she can’t come out for three hours.”
“Why? Is something wrong?” I panicked and my heart started beating fast.
Drew rushed to answer. “No, nothing is wrong, they just said that’s policy.”
“Well, that’s not okay!” I needed to see the baby right now. “Go get our baby!”
Drew ran out to the nursery. He talked to the nurses, then demanded to see the pediatrician. They told him again: Nothing is wrong, and we could see her, but not for an hour. Because, well, because they said so. So Drew called Dr. Laura, who by that point had already left the hospital. Drew rather frantically told her we needed to see the baby right now, like right this second, not in an hour. He hung up and we heard the phone ring in the nursery and the sounds of them talking to Dr. Laura. A nurse came rushing in.
“Oh! You want to see the baby? Why didn’t you say so! Just let us get her dressed.”
“Drew, go with her!” I said. He was already following her out the door.
I could hear some conversation, then a loud bang.
“No!” Drew.
“NO!” Again, Drew. What could possibly be going on? I waited, almost hyperventilating.
Eventually, the nurses came into the room with the baby and placed her in my arms. Finally. My sweet little one. She was so impossibly small. That panicked feeling I had of not seeing her melted away. I had my baby.
I breastfed her right away, and she latched on so perfectly that the nurses (who were a little touchy over being bossed around) had to admit, “Okay, she’s got this covered,” and left.
It was just me, Drew, and our baby. This soft, warm, little baby was so alert and gentle and sweet. Pure love.
Later I asked Drew, “What happened? Why were you yelling?”
“They were trying to give her formula. I don’t think any of them spoke English, not really anyway. So I said no the first time as they were putting the bottle up to her mouth and they just smiled and nodded and kept doing it, so I really yelled.”
“Thank you,” I said. “Thank you so much.”
“I love you.” Drew kissed me on the forehead and put his arm around me.
“I love you, too,” I told him. We both looked at our brand-new baby girl. “Look at her, Drew. Little Stella.”
“Stella Lucia Gilbert. She’s perfect.”
• • •
WE KEPT STELLA in our room for the entire two-day stay, and although we had many more fights with the nurses—mostly miscommunications because of the language barrier, because my Spanish skills continued to inexplicably regress at key moments—thankfully Dr. Laura was a rock star. She answered all of our calls, day and night, and triaged issues with the nurses for us, way more than we could have ever imagined. At one point, Drew came back to the room with food for himself, and the nurses came rushing into the room to take it away.
“No, no food.”
“No es para mí, es para mi marido,” I said. It’s not for me, it’s for my husband. They looked at me suspiciously. Did they really think I was going to break my postsurgery fast by chomping down on a hamburger? I could barely walk to the bathroom, never mind digest a giant hunk of meat.
They slowly relented and left the room. I burst into tears. It was so frustrating dealing with the nurses, between the language issues and cultural ones. On the first day they had dressed Stella in all three of the outfits we had brought with us, layered on top of each other, and gave me a dirty look when I said there weren’t any more clothes (I honestly didn’t expect them to put her in so many layers). They wouldn’t let us use the AC, so the room was sweltering hot, something of a Latino tradition to keep the baby as warm as possible. No doubt Stella was quite comfortable at ninety-eight degrees since exiting my womb, but I was cooking.
I had prepared all these Spanish medical terms that we didn’t end up needing, but I hadn’t even thought of how much the culture would impact the experience, from formula feeding, to bathing schedules (they gave her at least two baths per day—I think they just liked playing with her), to room temperature, to how they treated me in general. They were bossy and totally ignored my requests. I was emotionally tender and not ready for it. My postbirth hormones didn’t help either. I cried a lot in those two days.
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