Archive for June, 2009

“I’ll almost certainly be a dad my tomorrow night,” I said.

You’d think I’d have learnt my lesson, wouldn’t you?

Thomas didn’t actually turn up until lunchtime on the day after that; and it had been, I can honestly say, a very long night.

Jane started the process of being induced on the Thursday morning. The drug they gave her didn’t do the trick, so she had to be put on a hormone drip in the evening. As this meant a night being constantly hooked up to machines and monitors, it basically threw out of the window any chance of the water birth that Jane would have liked. But, all along our guiding plan had been “whatever’s best for the baby”.

They encourage you these days to write a “birth plan” to tell the people involved how you’d like things to go. To my mind they’re pretty pointless, though. Either things are going swimmingly, in which case the mum’s in a position to dictate exactly how things should go without recourse to a written sheet, or there are complications, and it depends very much on what the complications are as to how they should be tackled.

Jane had an idea of a pre-printed flowchart that would allow you to describe what you wanted to happen in each eventuality, but as our midwife explained, there are so many eventualities that the flow chart would end up looking like a sea urchin trying to knit a map of the Underground. The flowchart, basically, is in the midwives’ heads, in the form of years of training and experience. The best birth plan is to say to the midwife “I want a healthy baby, and if at all possible a healthy mum too, what can YOU do to make that happen?”

Which is what we did, once things started departing from the script.

Jane was taken from the maternity ward to the delivery suite. Top tip: if you come into hospital to have a baby, never unpack your bags until the baby actually turns up. It’s not like a hotel, and the bed they give you when you check in isn’t yours until you check out. Half an hour after we arrived in the suite, the bags we’d left in the maternity ward arrived, all packed up again. Except whereas Jane had packed them with a sense of order, the nurses had packed them with merely a sense of urgency.

The contractions soon became so intense that Jane was in a great deal of pain, and although the gas and air was making her the life and soul of the party, it wasn’t helping with the pain itself. Jane asked for an epidural. She knew she was in for a marathon night, and didn’t want to greet the baby after hours of agony. I didn’t either.

The long night began. The hormone and epidural drips started to do their jobs. All we could do was wait, and try to sleep.

The steady thumping of the baby’s heartbeat was as gently lulling as a train slowly clacking over tracks, and equally disturbing when it suddenly stopped. The foetal heart monitor occasionally lost the signal, and while we knew this was because the baby had shifted inside, it was still worrying enough to jar me out of sleep each time.

Add to that the regular monitoring to measure Jane’s pulse, blood pressure, temperature, level of “block” (basically how far up her legs the epidural was working, measured by how hot a bag of ice felt at various points) and level of dilation; sleep was out of the question. It all became a rather surreal experience. Strangely, I kept having to remind myself why I was there, what the point of it all was.

I wandered the corridors of the hospital, which I know well from my day job but seemed strange and alien at night. For example, the staff-only canteen area (where I stopped for a cheaper bottle of coke) had changed from a light and convivial coffee lounge to a dark dormitory with the shadowy bodies of overworked junior doctors snoring on the couches.

By the morning Jane had dilated enough to enter the next stage: pushing.

The epidural meant that she wasn’t going to feel the pain so much, but it also meant she wouldn’t be getting the uncontrollable urge to push. The midwife explained that she’d have to learn to push.

She soon got the hang of it. Timed with each contraction, she began to push.

And push. For two hours.

The baby, despite Jane’s new-found skills, was refusing to move much. He “turned a corner”, according to the midwife, but he still had a long way to go.

Jane was exhausted and in a lot of pain, despite the epidural. An anaesthetist was sent for, and arrived full of the cocksure bravado that seems to be an essential personality trait for that career.

“So I hear that this baby is coming out of the sunroof?” he asked, smiling.

“Not necessarily!” said the midwife. But it felt like an unspoken truth had finally been said.

While the anaesthetist busied himself with the epidural drip, the surgeon arrived and had a brief feel around.

“I’m sorry, this baby isn’t coming out by itself. We need you to sign a release for a caesarian.”

Jane couldn’t sign fast enough.

Things suddenly got incredibly busy. I was sent to put on theatre blues and joined Jane under a tent in the operating theatre, the business end hidden from us both. A crowd of attendants concentrated on preparing things while the anaesthetist explained that if his knock-out juice had worked properly, Jane would feel nothing more than a sensation that someone was “doing the washing up” in her innards. If it hadn’t worked, then it might be a lot more painful and they’d have to knock her out.

Jane reported a pain like someone pressing hard on her pelvic bone. The local anaesthetic hadn’t worked. It was time for a general anaesthetic to put her under while the sunroof was opened. As my only job in the theatre was keeping Jane happy, I was surplus to requirements.

I was ushered back into the empty delivery room where we’d spent the night.

24 hours of tension, a sleepless night, worry, panic and stale adrenalin suddenly rolled over me, and my stiff upper lip deserted me somewhat. I noticed one thing through the tears: as we weren’t going to be using the room any more, someone had hastily packed our bloody bags again.

I sobbed. I knew things were going to be all right. Jane was in safe hands, the baby was healthy, he just needed to get out. Things were going to be okay, I told myself. I just didn’t want to listen.

I made a couple of calls to both grandmothers to let them know what was going on, which calmed me down a lot. After I hung up, there was a knock on the door. It was the midwife, with my son.

My beautiful, perfect son.

I held him in my arms and he opened his crystal clear eyes and looked, fleetingly, into mine. I’ll never forget that moment.

An hour of bonding later and we were reunited with mum, and for the first time ever, we were a family.

I love it when a plan comes together.