Cruise Control
Life as I had previously enjoyed it quietly melted and dripped away last Thursday night, barely attracting notice. There was no crescendo, no ironic twist, no standing O. Just an unprepared, worried guy sitting next to a bed, watching nurses come and go, eating graham crackers, and trying not to fall asleep while the wife's discomfort was growing.Labor was induced around 3pm, quickly introducing pain in clock-like intervals. By 6pm she was not much more dilated than she had been that morning. We began to accept that it would be a long, long night.
Sometime just before 9pm they put in the epidural as she was nearing 3cm dilated. The epidural worked on only one side, so they flipped her over and gave her a larger dose. We waited for that to work, and both drifted off for catnaps. We woke around 10:30 because the nurse said she was going to flip her over again at 1 and check her progress.
The nurse checked her for about 2 seconds and said, "We'd better call Dr. C, your baby is ready."
"What?" I said.
"Her head is right here, want to feel it?"
"Uhh, no. So, she's fully dilated?"
"Yep."
From that point on we had to actually go very slow to give the doctor enough time to get to the hospital. Dr. C arrived just in time, and at 11:05pm our new baby popped out with minimal effort. The wife felt nothing. The epidural worked so well that she had dilated from 3-10cm while she was sleeping!
The wife and I were both completely shocked that it had happened so fast and so easily. We'd taken the birthing class to prepare us for hours and hours of pain. We'd learned massage techniques, breathing techniques, body positioning, ...but needed none of it.
We'd watched the pregnancy shows on TLC and Discovery Health with a lot of concern, ...the pain, the numerous risks, the long hours, ...but we were lucky.
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