My Northern Alberta Baby

It was 10:45 on a Sunday night, December 27, 1992. I was more pregnant than I cared to be and the baby was four grueling days late (although the doctor told me three weeks earlier that I would deliver at any moment!!).

It had been a long day and I was tired of listening to my mother and my husband pretend to be nice to each other. Nobody was falling for it. We’d been waiting too long already, in the dead of winter, in a small apartment, and the novelty of the situation had worn off long ago.

Anyway, it was late and it was 35 degrees below zero outside—Celsius! I was glad to excuse myself and go upstairs. I washed my face, brushed my teeth, used the bathroom for the 23^rd time that day, and tugged a nightgown over my considerable girth.

Almost to the bed, I thought I’d listen to some soothing music and turned on the stereo that sat on a shelf across the room. I sighed the sigh of a huge, overdue, irritated woman and crawled into bed and onto my back (at this point I had no other options).

The baby was sleeping and I was grateful that “Lumpy the Wonder Fetus” had worn itself out kicking me to distraction. I lay there for a few minutes, listening to soft ballads and knowing I would have to get up again to turn off the stereo.

With the last morsel of resolve I had left, I swung my legs slowly over the side of the bed and hoisted my bulbous body to its feet.

As I gained my balance, which took a minute, I felt something inside, and low, give. Then a trickle of fluid made its way down the inside of my thigh.

“Oh my God,” I gasped.

“That’s it!” I heard Rob shout and then run up the stairs.

“What?” My mother echoed, disoriented. “What?”

I limped over to the toilet so as not to make a mess (how is that for conscientious), just to find them both framed in the doorway of the bathroom staring at me.

I would have been mortified if I wasn’t absolutely petrified.

“Are you okay?” Rob shouted.

I nodded. “Get my things. We’d better go.”

He went to get my suitcase and got as far as the video camera. My mother stayed where she was, hopping from one foot to the other.

“Get your coat, Mom. We have to go.” She was making me dizzy.

I stood gingerly and placed a thick pad in my enormous underwear. Glancing at my face in the mirror I grimaced. No make up and messy hair. Well, I would look a lot worse before this night was over.

I walked as if on broken glass back to the bedroom, pulled on some sweatpants and a sweater, and felt a stabbing pain.

“Rob! Something’s happening! It could be a contraction!”

“I’ll write down the time!” He yelled back, even though he was in the next room. We’d been taught to keep careful records.

I shoved my feet into shoes and felt another sharp pain. I thought I should report it.

“Rob! Another one!”

He appeared from somewhere. “Are you sure? It’s only been five minutes.”

“I don’t know! Maybe they’re cramps! Let’s go!”

As I stumbled to the door, he had the video camera rolling and trained on me and my mother as we put on our coats.

“How does the grandmother look?” Quipped my mother.

I rolled my eyes, then grimaced.

“Another one, Rob!”

“Really? Okay.” He was being surreally calm. We all were. Even then I thought it was peculiar.

We drove to the hospital, just up the hill, in what looked like a blizzard, and Rob dropped us off at the door of the emergency room. He then went to park the car. I took tiny steps to avoid slipping on the ice and giving birth on the frozen concrete.

“Hello,” I said to the nurse at the registration desk.

“Hello,” she answered politely.

“My water broke.”

She accepted that as if I’d said that it was fairly cold outside.

“Are you preregistered?”

“Yes.”

“Good. Then I’ll just take your card and call for a wheelchair.”

“Oh, I can walk.” I was a puffy pillar of composure.

One of her eyebrows shot up. “Maybe you can but you are officially in labor as far as we’re concerned.”

Oh.

At that moment, Rob walked through the automatic doors with the camera rolling! And once I was comfortably seated in the first wheelchair I had ever used in my 27 years of life on our planet, they rolled me to the elevator and up to the maternity ward on the second floor.

A pleasant-looking nurse met me in the corridor and walked alongside my wheelchair, chatting and consulting her clipboard.

“My name is Joyce and I’ll be helping you tonight. How do you feel so far?”

I beamed, proud of my gestational competence. “Pretty good. I’m having some sort of cramps every five minutes.”

“Cramps? Really? Well, we’ll start by checking the baby’s heart rate.”

She put us in a room that resembled a bedroom, except for the medical equipment piled high in one corner. I knew the bed converted into some sort of “birthing apparatus” and started to dread what was coming.

The nurse strapped a thick black belt around my belly and watched the monitor for a while.

“Very good. The baby’s sleeping.”

Now it sleeps! After doing nothing but roll and kick for months!

I was feeling the cramps more frequently now and they were becoming steadily more painful. The nurse checked the numbers on the machine one more time, nodded, and removed the belt.

I sighed with relief.

She examined me and announced that I was five centimeters dilated.

“Okay,” she stated briskly. She had a British accent, which makes anyone sound brisk.

“It’s going to be about another ten hours, so why don’t you walk around for a while and do some of the exercises you learned in pre-natal class?”

I stared at her in horror. Ten hours?? The cramps were really starting to hurt, and frankly, I was having a hard time remembering what exercises she was referring to.

“I’ll be on duty until seven in the morning, and then Mary will take over. She’ll be here when you deliver.”

“Ten hours??” The cramps were becoming more intense.

“Oh, at least—especially with a first baby.”

She patted my shoulder haphazardly and left the room.

I turned to Rob, expecting him to do something to get me out of this.

“Ten hours??” Now I was whispering.

“It really hurts already.”

“Do you want to try to walk?” He asked, seeming to realize at that moment that he was not going to be able to help me in any way.

I eased myself off the bed and took exactly four steps, gasped, and doubled over (or doubled over as far as I could, considering the bulge).

“I can’t walk. This really hurts.” I already wanted to flee my own body.

“What do you want to do, Anna?”

“I-I guess we could try the shower thing.”

We’d been told in pre-natal class that spraying hot water on my lower back would ease the pain of the contractions. Little did I know that this only helped (a little) with back labor, and I was not experiencing any form of back labor.

However, I was absolutely desperate already, so I crawled, naked, into the shower on my hands and knees, shaking from head to toe.

It was 1:00 in the morning and my body was wracked with pain. I had learned six levels of breathing but went straight to number six. Forget one through five—I was buckling under. I wanted to scream in despair because I knew I wouldn’t be able to stand that level of pain for ten hours.

I didn’t know that I was already in the transition phase—the last stage of labor.

Soaking wet, I mumbled something about needing to get back to the bed. The nurse stood in the room, watching me with a puzzled expression.

“If you’re in that much pain, I can give you something for it.”

“Yes, please.” I could hardly speak.

“I’ll just check you first.”

She checked me and gasped (that could not be good).

“You’re at seven centimeters! I have to call the doctor!”

“And the medication??”

“Sorry,” she called from the door. “You’re too far along!”

Well, I almost died right there and then.

The contractions were coming in waves now—there was no ebb or flow. One contraction began before the last one ended, blending into one, relentless, jagged assault. I knew that if I didn’t focus completely on breathing that I was going to give up and start screaming.

So even though I could hear women screaming from up and down the hallway, I panted like crazy. It would have been a great comfort to know that I was almost at the end of the process; that the contraction phase was almost over.

But I didn’t know that so I panted harder and faster, while waves of searing pain rolled through my body, one after the other.

At one point I was sure I was losing the battle. The contractions would ease for a split second, then return in full force, leaving me breathless and terrified.

When I was sure I would be pronounced clinically dead, the incredible pain faded and was replaced by a clear message from my body to my brain—push!

It was 2:00 in the morning.

At that moment, the doctor arrived and pulled off his heavy coat.

“I have to push!” He needed to know that.

“Hold on. Let’s see what we have here.”

He slipped on a mask and gloves. By then, the room was full of people (it seemed to me) and yet it struck me, even at that moment, that a woman gives birth alone.

I felt another contraction coming, more gently now, and pushed with all my might. Suddenly I wasn’t just surviving the contractions, they were helping me get this baby out!

Unfortunately, I bungled the first three pushes—my fault. Apparently you have to push with the contraction and then stop when it stops. And I only got four chances.

“The baby’s heart rate has slowed a little, so I’m going to use a suction cup to help it out.” I assumed that was the doctor.

Apparently it had all happened so quickly (three hours total) that I hadn’t stretched far enough for the baby to be able to squeeze through.

The doctor stuck a suction cup onto the baby’s head and literally lifted her out. I couldn’t see her because I was leaning back, but Rob could. He said the baby’s head was purple and her eyes bulged in greeting. Yikes.

I felt a slight gush and the baby slid out all the way. It was 2:22 a.m. on December 28.

Rob leaned toward me. “It’s a girl.”

I nodded vaguely and sunk into myself. I didn’t care if it was a long-tailed lemur (almost) as long as it was out.

The nurses took the baby away to perform some tests and my mother followed (oh, they wouldn’t get far without her).

The doctor and an intern (!) stitched me up, all 35 stitches, chatting amiably. I wondered what other indignities I would suffer that night.

The doctor commented that I hit the lottery with a three-hour delivery on my first baby.

Hurray.

When the hordes finally left the room, I thought I would collapse from exhaustion, but amazingly, I lay there until dawn, wide awake, listening to Sara’s plaintive cry from down the hall, cursing the nurses for not attending to her, marveling at what I had accomplished without dying, awestruck by the power of the female body, not feeling the least bit like a mother, and wondering why no one had bothered to convert the bed.