Superhero Josie Lightning is BORN... Part 2

OK, where were we? Oh, I'm trying to get my seriously pregnant and in-labor ass in the car to get to the hospital.

Quick clarification-- remember how the famous urge to push seized me while I was on the stairs outside my apartment? I should mention that not only did I really want to push, but that I did actually push-- HARD-- and felt like the baby was halfway out of me, and that's partially why I felt like I needed to lock my knees.

So, I somehow made it up the block and around the corner and into the car. I managed to position myself so that I was reclined on my side and wasn't sitting on my butt, because sitting on your butt when you're in the throes of labor is just NOT an option. (This is one of the reasons why I refused to consider giving birth at the Cambridge Birth Center-- it's supposedly AMAZING, but driving all the way to Cambridge while in labor never seemed like a viable option to me.) Not being completely vertical was probably the best thing to stall my labor-- the whole time I'd been at home, I had been standing through the contractions and leaning on Dan for support, and I think that gravity had really helped things along, so the drive to the hospital may have allowed us to get there to give birth (in more ways than one).

Dan started to drive, and all I could say was, "GO FASTER" even though he was probably driving relatively quickly. Sarafina was like, "OK, Dan, you can drive quickly but safely..." and I think he got the message. Thankfully, it WAS the middle of the night, so there weren't any cars on the road. We did hit a red light, and I was like, "JUST GO" (did he really consider stopping for a red light??) and thankfully, Sarafina said (in the calmest voice humanly imaginable), "You can go ahead and blow your horn and go through that."

And another contraction came. My biggest fear was having to give birth in the car-- we have a Civic, and since Chickie's big carseat is in the backseat, it's not like I could have lain down or stretched out in any way back there, so if the baby came while we were in the car, I was looking at delivering on the sidewalk. Lovely.

But thankfully, this contraction wasn't as strong as the one I had had on the stairs outside the apartment, and I managed to do what Sarafina had suggested and pretend that I was blowing out birthday candles and blow through it. And I had this flash of sanity and thought, "OK, maybe we really CAN make it" because we were nearly there. Thank goodness the Brigham is 2 miles from our house.

This is the part of the story that was pieced together later, because not only did I not realize what all was going on at the time, but I clearly had a skewed perception of what I DID remember. I think Dan kind of screeched into the valet area in front of the hospital, and right when the valet guy opened the door to let me out, I had another contraction, and any thread of sanity and calm vanished, and I started yelling, "SHE'S COMING!" again. (Sarafina later told me that I wasn't actually screaming, but it certainly felt like it at the time). I think the valet guys were already on alert by the time we pulled up to the hospital entrance, because who screeches into a hospital at 4 a.m.? Someone who's bleeding from the head, right?

So, the valet guys took one look at me braying like a donkey and got on their walkie-talkies and called a Code Blue, which basically means, "Attention everyone and their mom in the hospital: get your freaking asses out here and deliver this baby so that I don't have to." By the time I made it through the revolving doors (the slowest freaking doors known to humankind), there were ER docs and nurses putting on gloves and running towards me. I had another contraction and screamed and brayed again and pushed like hell, and my water broke all over the lobby. (At the time, I thought I had peed my pants because surprisingly little water actually came out because the baby's head was in the way.) I felt the baby's head start to crown and come out of my body, prompting me to yell, "Holy shit, SHE'S COMING!!" yet again.

Apparently, Sarafina called off the dogs and told the good ER folks to back off and that we were going to go upstairs to L&D. Some very nice woman arrived with a wheelchair and instructed me to sit down, and I was like, "Are you crazy? There's a baby's head coming out of me and you want me to sit down on it??" But somehow, I got into the chair, and we started to roll. I think I just kept saying, "You have to go faster, you have to make it go faster" (especially in the elevator-- who knew elevator doors take SO FREAKING LONG to open and close??) and the lovely woman was like, "OK, honey, we're going as fast as we can..."

We got out of the elevator on the L&D floor, and once again, a bunch of folks dashed out to meet us. I can't remember if I pushed again then or not, but I do remember that somehow, my pants came off, and the midwife looked between my legs and said, "OK, there she is!" Duh. I could have told you that, lady; I freaking sat on her head in that wheelchair. And then she said the unthinkable: "OK, let's get you back in the chair and get you to a bed." I said, "No, I can't move; I'm going to have her here," and everyone started chattering again about what to do with me. (I heard someone say, "Well, she won't move-- we need to get her to move"-- um, I'm giving birth; I'm not deaf. Say it to my face, people...) Once again, someone convinced me to get in the chair, and the next thing I knew, someone was wheeling me down the hall and helping me climb onto the bed. The whole time, I was convinced that I had a baby hanging out of my body down to my knees.

At this point, I was still in crazy-freaked-out-panicked mode. I hadn't gotten a chance to catch my breath and get a hold of myself because I had been so petrified of giving birth in the car, in the lobby, etc. The midwife then said to me, "OK, I want you to reach down-- you can feel your baby's head right here" and sure enough, when I reached between my legs, I felt something warm, soft, wet and slimy. Yup, she was coming. I was going to do this. And I locked back in mentally. Dan said that that was actually a cool moment-- I had been pretty frantic and all over the place, and he said that I suddenly became quiet and focused and calm.

(The whole time, various people were asking me if I had my purple card and my blue card and random other shit you have to present when you get admitted to the hospital. Since we basically skipped every administrative step, everyone was scrambling to figure out who I was, where my medical record was, what my history was, etc. In the rush to leave for the hospital, we had forgotten to call the midwife on call to say we were coming in, and for some reason, the midwife I had spoken to had neglected to give the heads up to the other midwife, so no one knew anything about me. Oooooops.)

I was on all fours on the bed, and when the next contraction came, the midwife helped me push. It was amazing-- it was the most easy and controlled thing, quite the antithesis of my pushing experience with Chickie (when my OB, who was lovely and well-meaning but clueless when it came to dealing with an unanesthetized woman, said I needed to push on my back because that's how she could best protect my bottom... so, I lay on my back, hiked my legs up, held my breath, and pushed as hard as humanly possible for a count of 10 3 times per contraction. I hated it, and everything about it felt wrong and counter-intuitive, but I never knew that I really had a choice... and that's why I switched to the midwifery practice. At least midwives *heart* gravity.) This midwife guided me through exhaling slowly and pushing gently and repeatedly-- not one huge push, but lots of little ones, then a little bigger one, then a couple little ones, as her head eased its way out of me.

The funny thing was that Dan and I had talked a lot about how maintaining eye-contact would be really important for me during labor; during my labor with Chickie, he and my doula had been behind me while I was in transition, and although they were amazing and supportive and rubbed my back and told me I was a goddess, I felt really alone and disconnected from them, so this time, we had talked about keeping eye-contact to stay connected. So, Dan was in front of me as I kneeled on the bed, and of course, I had my eyes closed the entire time. At this point, the poor guy was like, "OK, I think I need to watch my daughter being born..."

Once her head was out, her body got a little stuck, and the midwife said, "OK, let's have you flip over onto your back to get a different angle," and I was like, "Um, no; there's a baby's head hanging out of me"-- and this time there really WAS a baby's head hanging out of me-- "so how the hell can that happen?" And the next thing I knew, Dan gad one arm and Sarafina had the other, and they lifted me up and over onto my back while the midwife held the baby's head in place. (What was particularly lovely is that they had put this gigantic garbage bag type thing down on the bed to catch the rest of the amniotic fluid that gushed out with her head, and that bag was positioned in such a way that when they flipped me onto my back, I landed in it... I remember thinking, "Wow, something is really wet-- oh, is that me?" Ahh, labor la-la land...) With one more push, her body flew out, and she roared instantly. She came out my body bellowing away, bright red. My girl had spunk from minute 1.

And then the midwife put her on me:


Isn't she perfect? Yeah, I thought so, too :) Still do :) OK, you can't really see much of her in this picture, but trust me on this one :) More happy faces :)
And yes, they never had time to get me into a johnny-- that's Dan's Google Mentor t-shirt. Oops. I was technically admitted to the hospital at 3:58, and she was born at 4:07 a.m.

I can't say enough how different this birth experience was from Chickie's. The midwife kept the baby on me for what seemed like forever, even through the (very short) repair process. At one point, I even asked, "Wait, how much does she weigh?" and the midwife said, "We don't know-- you've been holding her this whole time! Tell us when you're ready for us to weigh her." Fabulous.

So, it was great. Really, really great. Everything I had wanted, except for the insane, crazed rush to get to the hospital, and except for having to leave Chickie alone. He slept through everything, of course, and my parents arrived 15 minutes after we had left.

And that's it. I guess she really was going to come when she was ready, and not until then. And when she was ready, she was READY, huh? She's got a fun story to tell one day at cocktail parties.