Someone Could Get Hurt: A Memoir of Twenty-First-Century Parenthood (5 page)

M
y wife and I agreed that we needed to have a second child because an only child is 90 percent more likely to have an imaginary friend who wants to murder you in your sleep. Besides, our daughter was getting older now and my wife wanted her to have a “friend” in the house, as much as a two-year-old can be friends with a baby that doesn’t do anything but sleep and cry.

It took a year for us to conceive our second child. This is a common ordeal for the average middle-class American couple that puts off having children until their thirties. We knew so many other couples that had experienced fertility problems and miscarriages that it was more surprising when someone we knew had a child
without
being consigned to thirty-eight consecutive weeks of bed rest. Turns out God WANTS you to conceive when you’re eighteen years old, apparently so that you can spend your twenties miserable and penniless and living in a camper.

Months passed and our frustration over failing to have a second child grew more acute. Every new period that arrived felt like a horrible defeat.
All that hot sex for nothing!
My wife asked me to go to a urologist and he told me that, when trying to have a baby, the male should only orgasm once every three days, in order to build up a hefty payload. You really wanna saturate the woman’s reproductive area, like it’s an Iowa floodplain. I tried holding out for three days at a time. It was not easy. By the second day of the abstinence cycle, I was ready to hump a mailbox.

Sometimes my wife’s cycle would arrive a week late and we’d cross our fingers and hope that the pregnancy had taken root, getting our hopes up higher and higher the further we got away from the cycle date. Then the period would drop and the entire project would be reset. I felt like I was raking up a pile of leaves only to have the wind blow them all away. The process became torturous—the idea of a second baby finally arriving seemed so far away that I felt as if we would never get to it. We wanted every failed pregnancy test to be a mistake.
Hey, it came from Target. Just how reliable could it be?
Of course, the second we finally got a positive, we took the exact opposite stance.
Hey, it came from Target. It can’t possibly be wrong!

So it took a while to finally break into the bank vault and get my wife successfully pregnant again. By the time I got her to the hospital to be induced, we had essentially been waiting for the boy to arrive for twenty-one months. My wife didn’t feel like waiting one second longer.

The nurse came into my wife’s hospital room to check her cervix. It needed to be dilated to ten centimeters before she could start pushing the boy out. It was not at ten centimeters. It wasn’t even close.

“We’re gonna have to apply Cervidil,” she told us. For those of you who are unfamiliar with the drug Cervidil, it is—according to its own website—a “vaginal insert for cervical ripening,” which I think you’ll agree makes a woman’s cervix sound delicious. Cervidil must be applied directly to the cervix, which is akin to someone trying to jam a thumbtack into the back of your throat using a boxing glove. The nurse began the application.

“OH JESUS CHRIST!” my wife screamed.

“Almost there,” the nurse noted.

Meanwhile, I stood there holding my wife’s hand, being like, “It’s okay, dear.” And it so wasn’t okay. I was of no help whatsoever. You never feel more useless than when your pregnant wife is screaming her brains out and you know that there’s nothing you can do verbally or physically to make it better. The fact that you’re standing there like an idiot—having the dumb luck to be born with a penis—only makes it worse.

The worst part was that the Cervidil was merely the beginning. The drug doesn’t even induce labor. It only induces the inducement. You have to get it inserted overnight, wait twelve hours, have your cervix checked again, and THEN you get the Pitocin, which is a drug meant to speed up the process. After the first application, we sat there bored out of our minds for half a day. I turned on the TV in the room.

“Oh, hey,” I said to my wife. “It’s
House
! We haven’t seen this one!”

“I don’t wanna watch a hospital show. I’m IN a hospital. Right now.”

At that moment, one of the patients on the show started coughing up blood in her hospital room, and my wife nearly threw the remote at me.

She was strapped to two different machines, one that monitored contractions and another that monitored the baby’s heart rate and blood pressure. The cheap Velcro straps began to dig into her skin. You can’t lie flat on your back when you’re in the late stages of pregnancy because it can restrict blood flow to the fetus. As a result, pregnant women have to contort themselves into a variety of positions, none of them optimal. My wife couldn’t stand the discomfort one second longer. I stared at her belly and it seemed like it was its own separate entity, just this massive orb of flesh divorced from her body. I kept waiting for it to float away like a hot air balloon. Every time she wanted to take a leak, she had to rip the monitor equipment off, go to the bathroom, ask the nurse to resquirt her tummy with clear goo that looked like a porn film money shot, and have the monitor electrodes strapped back on. At one point, her eyes lolled back inside her head.

“I feel dizzy,” she said.

“Are you okay?” I asked.

“I think I’m gonna pass out.”

Her blood pressure began to drop precipitously and I ran out of the room to grab a nurse, only one was already walking over because nurses can monitor patients from the front desk, which is helpful for them because then they don’t have to actually talk to patients. The nurse strolled in and looked at my wife.

“Hmm. That’s weird,” she said casually. “Her blood pressure is NOT supposed to be that low.”

“Is she dying?”

“Huh. Why is this machine being so silly?”

I tried to strangle the nurse with my eyes. “IS SHE DYING?!”

The amazing thing about hospitals is how blasé the nurses and doctors can be about everything. An exploding heart is no more interesting to them than a bad sandwich. It’s not like on TV, where doctors run EVERYWHERE, their asses tightly clenched and their faces grim with the determination to save lives, no matter the cost. In a real hospital, everyone just plods along. A patient is an item on a to-do list. If a patient is stable enough to be left unattended for twenty straight hours, then they can be left unattended for twenty straight hours. There’s no constant sense of urgency.

Of course, doctors and nurses have to be this way. They can’t be emotionally attached to every patient. They can’t be screaming out for defibrillators every waking second. They’d end up doing their jobs poorly. I understood all that while we were in that room, and yet it was little comfort when my wife’s blood pressure was dipping down to corpse levels and the nurse was acting like the fucking cable box was on the fritz.

She administered new meds through the IV and my wife shot back to life. Then the nurse left us to process what had just happened.

“Was I dying?” my wife asked me.

“The nurse never really made it clear.”

“Because that felt . . . bad.”

“You didn’t look happy about it.”

“Somebody needs to come take this goddamn baby out. I’m dying of thirst.” When you’re in labor, you can’t eat. You can only suck on ice chips instead of drinking straight fluids. And ice chips are terrible—tiny little nuggets formed from what tastes like old dishwater. It’s like chewing on a handful of frozen teeth. Refilling the ice chip cup every half hour was the only useful task I could perform for her.

A few hours later, the nurse came in and said the Cervidil had to be applied a second time. My wife nearly passed out hearing the news.

Sixteen hours after arriving at the hospital, she was finally ready to be induced. The anesthesiologist came by to administer the epidural and my wife greeted him as a liberator. Soon after, the ob-gyn came into our room for the delivery, followed close behind by my father-in-law, who had popped in for a visit.

The doctor looked over my wife. “Okay, so I think we’re about ready to—”

“Excuse me, Doctor,” said my father-in-law. “Are you Dr. Kleinbaum of the Rockville Kleinbaums?”

“Oh, yes.”

“I think that your daughter is our neighbor at the beach!” My father-in-law is a wonderful man who hates waking up before 1:00
P.M.
and loves having extended conversations with absolute strangers.

“Really?” asked the doctor.

“Yes! I think they live in the townhome right next door.”

“Is that right?”

“How is she? We don’t get down there much because we usually have to rent out the house during the summer. You know, they’re making all kinds of noise about building on the lot next door—”

“HEY!” my wife shouted, pointing at her belly. “Pregnant woman here!”

My father-in-law took umbrage. “We’re just having a nice conversation,
Schatz
.”

“Will you get out of here already?”

“All right, all right.”

He looked at me and laughed. “Good luck, Drew.” Then he sauntered out of the room, as casual as if he had just gone shopping for groceries.

Finally, after hours of waiting for my wife to ripen, she was ready to push. The nurse took one of her legs and I hoisted the other. We pulled her legs back like she was a turkey waiting to be trussed as a second nurse sat sentry over the precious dilated cervix. She began pushing sometime around midnight. After a few hours of trying to pop the baby out, the thing had barely moved an inch. My wife looked exhausted. Defeated. She was looking for the doctor to finally walk back into the room (they don’t have to be there for all of the pushing; doctors are just closers) so that she could end the charade of trying to have the child naturally. At this point, she wanted sleep and a cold ginger ale more than she wanted a second child. The doctor came back in, examined the crown of the baby’s head, and offered my wife two options.

“Okay, so this baby isn’t coming out,” he told her. “And I see his heart rate dropping. So we can keep at this pushing for a bit, or we can—”

That was all the opening she needed. “CAESARIAN!”

“Are you sure?”

“Please. Just get this thing out.”

They handed me a set of surgical scrubs, which I put on with glee because I love pretending to be a doctor. Then the nurse told me I had to gather up all of our stuff because we weren’t coming back to the room. I looked around. There was a lot of shit. I didn’t want to move. I hate moving. This was our home now.

“Can’t I just leave it here for a second?” I asked.

“I’m afraid not,” the nurse said.

“Well, where do I put it? Is there, like, a bus station locker somewhere?”

“They’ll have a place for you to put your things in the recovery room.”

I threw all of our belongings into six different hospital-issued garbage bags and then huffed alongside my wife like a homeless person as they rolled her gurney roughly ten feet to the OR. I was expecting a much longer walk, a walk long enough for me to make some kind of rousing speech about the beauty of this moment to a woman who was half-conscious. Instead, the OR was right there, which makes perfect sense from a medical standpoint, though not from a dramatic one. The recovery room nurse told me to place my bags on a nearby chair, and I begged her reassurance that no one would come and steal my wallet while my wife was being slashed open.

They put a shower cap on my wife’s head and drew a curtain across the top of her stomach. The nurse told me not to go past the curtain, and I obeyed the hell out of her. A team of doctors gathered at her feet and the sounds began. I could hear gooshing and gurgling and all kinds of horrible noises. Not being able to look beyond the curtain only made things worse because it allowed my imagination to roam free, with scythes and ice cream scoops digging into my wife’s body.

“Do you have the baby?” I asked the doctor.

“Not yet. Sometimes, once the incision is opened, they hide.”

And I thought,
Where is there to hide?
It’s not like a uterus has a supply closet. I looked down at my wife and she was fighting to stay awake so that she could witness the birth.

“I’m gonna be sick,” she told me. The nurse handed me one of those plastic hospital basins shaped like a kidney bean to place near her mouth and she drooled bile into it. She began crying, the tears pooling along the bottom ridge of her glasses’ lenses.

“This is so awful, Drew.”

“You’re doing great. It’s all gonna be over soon.”

“It’s horrible. I can feel them reaching in.”

“It’ll all be over soon and we’ll have a beautiful son and you won’t remember any of this. Not the waiting. Not the Cervidil. Not the monitors. Not even this hospital. Please, just hang on.”

“I love you.”

“I love you so much, just please hang on. I swear to you it’ll be okay.”

Dr. Kleinbaum yanked the baby out and held him over the curtain, like this was some kind of puppet show.

“You did it!” I screamed to my wife. “You fucking did it!”

She gave the baby a kiss. “I’m going to pass out now.”

“By all means.”

And pass out she did. Once the baby pops out, you assume that’s the end of it, that they stitch Mommy up in five seconds and you go about your merry way. But in reality, a C-section is major surgery, which means layers upon layers of dermis and subcutaneous tissue must be repaired, the stitches made only after the placenta and the amniotic fluid have been removed. My wife slept in relative peace while I sat there, watching the silhouettes move ominously to and fro on the other side of the curtain and hearing the awful sounds of a medical vacuum sucking up the afterbirth.

“Are you guys almost done?” I asked.

“Not quite,” said the doctor. “We have to massage her uterus back into place from the inside.”

“Oh Jesus, don’t tell me that.”

I could see the doctor on the other side of the curtain laboring feverishly, as if he were mining for coal. Meanwhile, the baby was over in the corner of the room, having his vitals checked and his umbilical cord snipped (they don’t allow the father to snip the umbilical after a Caesarian for reasons of sterilization). He was perfect—a real live being created out of virtually nothing. He was much better off than my wife or me, frankly. No mixed-up intestines for our second kid; only our third one would get to experience that particular thrill. They started to wheel him away to the nursery while my wife was still being stitched up. The nurse asked me if I wanted to leave her to go with my son, and suddenly I felt as if I was being torn between loyalties. My poor wife was still a piece of meat lying on a cold surgical table. But you only get to be there for the first few moments of the child’s life once.