It was 1 a.m. last Saturday.  Jessie and I were watching a South Park marathon on Comedy Central and were getting ready to go to sleep.  I got up to use the bathroom and felt a gush of warm liquid.  I clenched my knees and hobbled to the bathroom as quickly as I could.  I discovered that I was soaked from the waist down by a clear odorless liquid.  All my pregnancy books told me that that meant that my water had broken.  I yell to Jessie to call the hospital because my water had broken.  I called my mom and told her what was going on.  Jessie was freaking out.

We get tot the hospital and get checked in.  My doctor orders me to be put on a pitocin drip to get labor in full kick.  Jessie goes to sleep.  I wake him up at 6:30 a.m. when the contractions started to really hurt.  I start puking around noon and I request an epidural.  The epidural was wonderful and I went to sleep.  My doctor checks me at 2 p.m. and tells me I am fully dillated and we start practice pushing.  His head was too high so they let me sleep for another hour.  At 3 p.m. I start pushing for real because my back was really hurting and I felt like I had to go #2 very badly.  I push for two hours.  The doctor tells me I am doing a great job pushing and that it is not my fault that he is not moving down.  His head was wedged in my pubic bone.  The doctor has a vacuum brought in.  On my next contraction I push while she has this vacuum suctioned to his head and tries to pull his head loose.  It not only hurt like hell, but it didn’t work.  We tried again, and Jessie tells me that the doctor was pulling with all her might.   That might have explained why I was so positive that my pelvis was going to snap in two and fly out of my hoo hoo.  The only way this baby was going to be born was through c-section.  No Lincoln Tunnel for me.

They give me a spinal block which numbed me from the bottom of my rib cage down.  The drape a bunch of sheets up so I won’t see them butchering my body.  Jessie sits beside me.  I feel the doctors touching me, but I’m not sure what they are doing.  Then I see a purple faced screaming baby in front of me.  It seemed that fast.  The doctor is yelling about how heavy and big he is.  Jessie leaves me to go off with the baby.  I puke again.  They tell me he weighs 9 lbs. 10 oz.  I was shocked.  All those jokes I had made about carrying an elephant baby were true!

They take me back to my room and I puke several more times and have to endure nurses massaging my uterus painfully because they thought I was hemorrhaging.  I didn’t get to hold my baby until after 7 p.m. and he was born at 5:36.

After having the pregnancy from hell, a 16 hour labor, and a c-section, I think it is safe to say that his has been the most painful and miserable experience of my life.  Yet when I look at my baby I know that it was totally worth it.  Everything I went through was to bring this precious creature into the world.  How can I regret that?  I’m madly in love with this little boy and I’m so happy to have him here with me.  I’m also very glad this pregnancy thing is done.  Now I can start trying to feel human again.

On a side note, for those of you having problems with leaving comments, leave me a specific description of the problem so I can have Jessie fix it.  mail[at]merrywifeofcanon.com.  We’ll get that taken care of.