Debbie Does Drivel

THE TRUTH

A lot of women write their labor stories. God knows I read my share before I gave birth. But in all my reading, I never felt I had the real scoop on what happens when you go through childbirth. This could be because you can never truly know unless you experience it yourself or maybe mere words cannot describe the process...but after I had my child, I vowed I would do my best to describe the experience. That way, if there are others out there like me who want to REALLY know what childbirth feels like, they may get a better understanding. That said, labor and delivery is different for everyone...though I do think certain physical sensations are universal.

Please do not read further if you have issues with words like "rectum," "mucous" and words of this genre.

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I am most grateful that I did not know the day I was to have my baby. If you've read any of my past blogs you may know I am a hypochondriac, plus I despise needles, doctors and any sort of physical trauma to my person. If I knew when I were to deliver my baby, my anxiety about that day and its ensuing world of bodily hurt (of course counter-balanced by a universe of joy!) would plague me up until I popped little Alexa out.

Most people predicted I'd have Alexa on Valentine's Day because it'd be cute. But it was the Monday after VDay when my doctor told me I'd be delivering my baby. I'd gone in for a routine exam the day before my due date of Feb. 17 and planned to go to work right after my appointment. I withstood the horrific pelvic exam and found I was still at 1-2 centimenters dilated. I hadn't felt Alexa move much that weekend (as was the case throughout my pregnancy) so was grateful to hear a heartbeat and know all seemed well. I begged my doc to check my amnio fluid levels because they'd been low a few weeks prior and I was tiring of strangers telling me how small my tummy looked for nine months. In short, I was being a hypochondriac. He checked my levels, which were at a three (low, low, and LOW) and suggested I go to the hospital straightaway for an induction.

I felt muddled. I had to go to work for goodness sakes! These people need me! I didn't want to go to the hospital! I wasn't ready. I needed to contemplate my nervousness and agitation at entering a hospital and get good and worked up! I had to go poo! Someone told me you can't go poo when you get ready to have your baby! But then I'd poo on the delivery table (a mortal fear of mine). The doctor gently insisted I go to the hospital immediately, so ready or not (NOT), I walked across the parking lot to the hospital and Kev left to gather my things at home.

I called my dad, my doula and started quaking in my boots. I stood in the lobby for some time, thinking I'd just go home for awhile and come back later. I bought a banana. I contemplated. Then, in spite of myself, I entered the labor and delivery ward. I was put in a hospital bed and lay there alone until my doula arrived. Being alone for a bit worked out well and I was able to poo.

While waiting for Kev and the doula, I discover that I will be induced via a pill inserted into my cervix. Upon further investigation, I learn the pill is not FDA-approved and is the pill my friend Molly had recently told me terrified her so much that rather than getting induced with it herself, she forced her body to break its water and go into spontaneous labor. (I later research this pill on the 'net and find out its use in women can cause grave uterine explosion...thank GOD I did not have time to look up this pill prior to it being inserted into my vagina).

But I am rambling.

Soon, family arrives and I am staying quite calm. I've eaten a hospital lunch and am hooked up to monitors and all is well. At around 1PM, I need to have the IV inserted. Again, I'm thrown into a tizzy. I've never had an IV! It will hurt! An IV is a needle! In my vein! Debbie don't play that! Of course, the first vein collapses and the IV must be re-inserted (am I still rambling?)...

I'll move on. At about 2PM, the nurse inserts the uterine-popping induction pill into my cervix. We wait a few hours to see if my contractions increase and if I dilate. At about 5PM, I am checked. I am dilated to 3 and 50% effaced. I go walking. Kev and the doula walk the hospital halls with me in an effort to speed the dilation process along. I feel no pain. I am laughing and joking with ease (foreshadowing, my friends). My contractions are painless and irregular.

I return to my room at around 6:30PM and the doctor arrives to break my water (here is where I get descriptive). Gallons of warm blood, mucous and tissue pour out of me. It is most like wetting oneself except your pee is chunky. Soon, the contractions stop being fun. By that I mean they really motherfucking start to the hell hurt like shit. Each time I have a contraction, more fluid gushes out of me and I soak the mattress-sized sanitary pads they give you.

Soon, I walk again. We want to speed labor along and walking is our attempt to do this quickly. The doctor said he would start Pitocin if I didn't dilate to a 5 by 9PM and I really really wanted to avoid this. Once you get Pitocin, labor can hit mega hard and the ensuing pain can be difficult to handle without an epidural (I wanted to have a medication-free birth.)

So, I'm having shithole contractions in the hallway probably scaring the crap out of any soon-to-deliver mother-to-be within earshot. The contractions feel like a tightening of your entire midsection (akin to having every organ squeezed from your body) with pain radiating to the lower back. Then comes the rectal pressure. Man, do you want to poo. BAD. It's like you want to poo because you think you will feel better, but you know that if you do poo, it will be an anus-tearing massive, hard poo and this thought scares you. So, you try to hold in the poo (which is really a baby head) and this makes you cramp even more than the worst menstrual cramp you've ever had that you are now experiencing.

This goes on for awhile. After some time, I need to be checked again (and if you think the pelvic exam hurts when you AREN'T in the throes of laboring, you haven't felt a damn thing yet). They tell me that I am 100% effaced and dilated to a 5 (a 5? I think...THIS skin-tearing, organ-shifting, poo-cramping house of pain means I'm just at a 5????????).

It's now 9PM. Pretty soon, I enter a mind fog. It is very much like stepping into a '70s drug movie and its hallucinogenic dream sequence. Nothing is linear. Time has no meaning. People's faces blur in front of you and you transcend yourself. At around this time, I am spitting up ice chips and biting my doula.

I am shaking uncontrollably and throwing up. I am whimpering and moaning. I am in such a state that my doula calls the nurse in to check my progress. The nurse balked since I had been checked 15 minutes before...but the doula prevails thankfully, because I am dilated to a 9.5. In about 30 seconds, I am told I can push. I can now poo! The relief is immense! But no! I am going to poo a human head! This will hurt!!! (In fact, they call this the "ring of fire," and damn if it isn't just that.)

I push for about 25 minutes and Alexa's head is stuck. Then, her head emerges, but her shoulder is caught in the birth canal. This is when the nurse grabbed a hold on my pubic bone (internally) and performed an acrobatic feat (Kevin swears both her feet were off the ground with her pelvic-bone-pushing-upping effort) opening up my pelvis just enough to let Alexa through.

She emerges, but is very purple. They put her on the chest for a few seconds (my first thought: I can't believe I have a baby! And her butt is so cute!) then whisk her away. She had a hard time breathing due to her time in the birth canal and had to be taken to the intensive care nursery. This time is troubling. The poor thing also had the cord wrapped around her neck (the doctor had seen this on the ultrasound while checking my amnio levels that morning and this had been why he sent me to the hospital).

I see Alexa a few hours later and she is fine! I get to breastfeed her and she sleeps with us in our room. My 9-pound poo is a fighter! I love my little poo.

So you see: the pain is worth it. And this is the moral of my story. Still, I had to whine about the physical trauma to my person because that's my schtick, people.

IT'S A BIRD, IT'S A PLANE....

Obsessed as I am with sucking the boogers out of my unwilling daughter's nose, it completely serves me right that when releasing the air from the nasal aspirator, her enormous, hard booger flew free across the room, landing God knows where. I really like to know the approximate location of any and all boogers in my domicile. It's a thing.

It also brings back memories: Whenever my dad was out of town, I totally remember sleeping with my mom as a kid, picking my nose and wiping the boogers under the pillow I was sleeping on, which would have been my dad's...but seeing as he used to sit down at the dinner table in his underwear, farting throughout the meal, I feel justified.

THINGS WITH TEETH THAT BUG

Jennifer Garner:
She is so trying to mimic Julie Robert's buggersome and freakishly wide-mouthed smile, that I want to run from the TV screen every time I see her garish grin lest its fake bleachiness and souless mirth turn me into a zombie Alias devotee.

Jessica Simpson:
Did she borrow Celine Dion's vocal coach or what? Memo to all the World: It is important that Celine Dion's singing style not be copied and allowed to propogate. That lip vibratto thing and over dramatization of all hand movements makes a diva look like a crack-addled nutbag (Whitney Houston alert! Whitney Houston alert!).

That Crest White Strips commercial:
Don't TV commercials have directors? Why was there no one to tell that actress that "smile like you're in love" does not equate to "bare your horse teeth" and "nothing says passion like a good cud chew."

Julia Stiles:
I don't know. Something about her nose.
Also her teeth.

GOOD TIMES

Have I admitted my fondness for AM soft rock?
It's more of an obsession really, I love nearly any slow song from the '70s.
The '80s and '90s completely screwed with the genre I think (Thanks a lot, Peabo Bryson), but the '70s flavor remains pure and chaste.

Depending on the company I'm keeping, I either proudly proclaim my soft rock thing or I hide my Carpenters and Anne Murray CDs. (I'd never do that to Barry though. Barry stays out regardless of who is coming to dinner.)

I've often pondered why I love '70s soft rock so ferociously, how I still know every word to every song, what exactly this might all mean... And what I've come up with is this: it reminds me of high points in my childhood.

My mom played music in the house a lot. Marie Osmond's Paper Roses or Helen Reddy's You and Me Against the World blared often from our stereo system (a behemoth wood and red velvet speakered monstrousity). I loved this music so much that at age 8, I asked my mom how I could become a singer, so that I might write and perform these loopy ballads myself. "Just sing all the time!" she told me. "It will become a part of you."

Become a part of me it did in woeful spite of the tone deafness and off key soprano voice I'd adopted. But it didn't matter. I still sang along with every song I'd come to love and I still do.

Each time (rare though it is) I hear Barry Manilow, I think of babysitting Sarah Linn, hanging out in her living room, performing a spazzy interpretive dance to Daybreak. Or, Donna Bartelt bringing the Somewhere Down the Road single over, so that we may pay homage to her recent break-up.

But the real thrill came thanks to the 8-track player in our Buick Estate Wagon. Childhood road trips always made me so happy. My pillow, my book, my chips and Diana Ross' Touch Me in the Morning or Donna Fargo's Happiest Girl in the Whole USA. I still know what that car smelled like and how the seats looked. I still hear my mom telling my dad to shut up after a particularly rowdy game of Dirty Poetry (a game he loved to play with us kids who knew we would always get him to rhyme with our "luck" stanza).

Songs spark memories for me like no other medium. I amaze and mystify Kev with my "I remember the very first time I heard this song" stories often. A few examples: I recall listening to Captain and Tenille's Love Will Keep Us Together in 1976, standing about mid-sidewalk on our street in Foster City, California. I was alone, looking at our neighbor's rock garden. It was foggy.

Styx's Lady seemed too sexy for me when I first heard it. I remember being embarrassed when my friend's sister brought the album home and played it for us on the turntable one evening in 1980.

Then there was Air Supply. I was mid-nap, tired after going to see UHF's Svengali at a 24-hour telethon in a Chicago suburb. Making Love Out of Nothing At All pulsed softly from the stereo as I lay on my friend's sectional trying to sleep, knowing that the reason I couldn't relax was the Coke I'd recently consumed from the plastic white mug that sat before me on the coffee table.

These songs remind me of a secure childhood, when I knew I'd come home from school and my mom would be there, playing her Carpenter's album; when I could count on going to Janesville, Wisc. with my family to see my aunt and uncle for Thanksgiving, listening to Bread or James Taylor the whole way. And I hope I can give my daughter that same sense of security. I'm not so sure anyone can do that for their children anymore, but these songs remind me that every kid deserves to look back at their childhood and have something to sing about.

This is for my mom, in honor of her birthday, and the songs she played for me.