All Wrung Out

Today has been a simply unbelievable day.

With two days left until our appointment with the c-section, and over a week until the due date, Zola decided to change the script a bit. I went to see Frank Black at the 9:30 club, but knew I was on-call. So I drank a couple of beers, and nursed a black coffee for most of the show. When I got home, I sat in bed and chatted with Susie for about half an hour. She got up and said she felt nauseous, and walked into the bathroom.

"I think my water broke." she said.

So I rushed her to the Georgetown emergency room. I dropped her off, and headed home, with the idea that she was going to call if she needed me to come pick her up. She called a bit later to say it was a false alarm, and that she'd be taking a cab home, then an hour or so after to say she had a second, larger "incident" again while leaving the hospital, and that they'd tested her, and she was in labor.

I had about 30 min to get to the hospital to be with her during the ceasarian surgery. Driving like mad, I got there with a while to spare, put on some surgical garments, and was led into the operating theater.

Susie was incapacitated from the armpits down, and lashed to some sort of crosspiece
to prevent her from moving. After about 20 min, the anesthesiologist asked me, "Would you like to see the delivery?"

"I sure would."

"I'll let you know when you should look."

After a few more minutes the anesthesiologist, eyes intently watching the main show, said, "Okay, here goes."

So I stood up, and looked over the partition. The first thing I saw was blood, lots of blood. Then that weird yellowish wrinkles you get when you combine skin, surgical adhesive, and iodine. And finally, the rear half of my infant daughter, sticking out of my wife's abdomen. Unbelievable.

I guess one of the goals of a successful c-section is to make the width of the incision as short as possible, because they had managed to free Zola pretty much from her toes to her chin, but weren't having much success getting her fat head out.

The worst moment was when, briefly, her mouth broke the surface of the skin, and she let out her first cry into this world. It was immediately snuffed as her head was re-subsumed into Susie's belly. Yikes! Who to be more terrified for?

When they finally managed to extricate Zola, and we could hear her crying, there was nothing to do but cry ourselves. This tiny person, who the two of us had made, alone on a cold plastic tray, being cleaned and weighed and measured on the far side of the room. How beautiful, and how terrifying.

I don't think you ever really look at a baby unless it's your baby. Either that or you've got the baby fever. Susie and I spent about 8 hours today just gazing at Zola, wondering who she'd become, how we'd get along, what her capacities would be.

Waiting.

Ahhh! So it's November 20th, 2006, and Susie finally started her maternity leave. Three months of dandling, nursing, and tending crappy nappies. I'm taking the next three weeks off, but since I'm working from home, I hope I won't miss out on too much.

I was home working today, and Susie went to the new Foggy Bottom Trader Joes. We're now stocked with enough food to outlast a nuclear winter. It's going to be great to have everyone barricaded at home for the near future. Thank goodness for those dozens of books I've been meaning to read.

October 25th seems vanishingly close.

Personal Flashback: Pregnancy Scares

Looking back down the pregnancy timeline, it's been quite the bumpy road, this pregnancy thing. But that was before this blog, so no postings from that era, unfortunately.

So just to get you, Constant Reader, up to speed, and possibly to keep these thoughts for posterity, I wanted to briefly summarize what came before.

The first pregnancy never got to the viability stage. In other words, conception happened, but the engine never kicked over. No heartbeat after something like 16 weeks or something (the details escape me, it's not a time I want to remember vividly). We were offered the choice of surgical D&C or "letting nature take it's course."

Not being big fans of nature, particularly after her [Nature's] recent shoddy behavior, we opted for door number 2: the surgical D&C.

Pregnancy #2 (the current one) kicked off just a few short months later.  

[I'm returning two years later to finish up.  Sorry...]

...short months later.  We never really expected Susie to get pregnant again that quickly, so we were pretty happy.  But, to make a long story short, as well as things went for the first few months, Susie ended up having a traumatic episode.  Not to get into the gory details, but she thought she had a miscarriage.  She called the nurse on call at GW, described the situation, and the nurse pretty much agreed.  She scheduled a follow-up visit, hung up the phone, and we just kind of comforted each other as best we could.  

This being a Saturday, the nurse made the appointment for the following Monday.  Susie asked me to stay in the car with Jacques, and said she'd call me when she was done with her appointment.  So I got the call, drove around to the entrance, and opened the door.  She had an odd kind of dazed expression on her face.  "We'll that was strange..." she said.

Turned out everything was fine after all.  The human body is a very, very strange thing.  

The doctor did say it was the happiest moment of his professional career, though.  So it's nice to spread the joy around.

Teh Internets

Something I came across while reading up on Cesarean procedures, ECV, &tc... This is from the Cesarean Voices website. A place for "[w]ritings and artwork by cesarean born people, both non-labor and labor, by parents of cesareans, by several artists, by obstetricians, psychiatrists and psychologists, and by other interested people."

From the site:

The creator of this website is Jane English who has since 1973 been exploring the implications of having been born non-labor cesarean, of coming into a human life here on earth without going through the heretofore universal initiation and learning experience of the journey down the birth canal.

Just FYI. Z, if you're reading this, you might want to file this away for future reference--especially if you need a cudgel in your "angry teens."

Making Our Reservations

Well, we had a visit with the second doctor today; not the delightfully fresh-faced Dr. Buek, but the stylish and reassuring Dr. Bowles-Johnson. Z's still breech, and holding her own, although apparently her ass is not beating down the gates of Susie's cervix anymore, so that's a win.

The Dr. B-J's professional opinion is that Z's not going to do The Big Flip anytime soon, so we're given one of two options.

One solution offered was for Susie to go in and have her belly kneaded like a loaf of fresh dough for an hour or two so to try to convince the intransigent Z to get with the program (this is a procedure known as "External cephalic version"). It has the combined attributes of 1) being extremely painful; and 2) having a low success rate.

So they've scheduled a Caesarian for October 25th. A Scorpio just like dear ole Mom.

It's a Blog!

I'll make this brief, because first postings are very difficult, and tend toward the navel-gazing, and that's not the point of this blog. This blog is supposed to serve as a diary of the gestation, birth, and upbringing of our new kid, whose name for now will remain undisclosed. Though I do reserve the right to an occasional eruption of navel-gazing.

So that's that, and here we go.