A Diplomatic Incident

I don't know what it is but, from personal experience and three other cases I have observed, there seems to be something about having a first grandchild that somehow makes women really angry. I don’t know if it is because they feel like they are finally losing control of their child, or if they think they should be the centre of attention, or if its just a menopausal thing.

I’ll explain.

Lynne’s mum is cross with me and do you know what? I’m pretty pissed off with her as well. When they moved Lynne from the recovery room down to the ward I went home to get some sleep. On the way I phoned our parents to tell them the baby was born, that both Lynne and the baby were healthy, it was a girl, and the birth weight and time. I left out the grisly details. As far as I was concerned it was nobody else’s bloody business, especially since Lynne was sleeping off the diamorphine and I had been up for two nights straight. I was dog-tired and feeling pretty wrung out and tearful. Neither of us was in any shape to talk to anybody. We had arranged with the grandparents before-hand that they would come and see us after Lynne was home from the hospital, and she could tell them as much as she wanted to then.

I got back to the flat, ate all the bacon in the house with a slice of stale bread and a triangle of Laughing Cow cheese, and went to bed. I meant to only sleep for an hour or so and then go back to he hospital where I was needed, but when I woke it was 2pm. I had slept longer than I meant to so, thinking shit, shit, shit, I had a quick shower and rushed back to the Queen Mum's. I stayed until after nine at night, went home and tried to put some pictures on Facebook but my internet connection kept dropping and I was too tired and cross to work it. I watched some crap telly, drank some milk and went to bed again.

In the morning I checked the phone messages. There were lots of well wishers, which was expected. All day my mobile was filling up with texts as fast as I could delete them. There were also a series of messages from Lynne’s mum, growing increasingly snippy, asking how things were. I don’t know why she thought I would be in the house waiting for her to phone me instead of being in the hospital with my wife and child, but there you are. Among other things, she wanted to know if Lynne had any stitches, and if so, how many. Cheeky cow, I thought. What’s it got to do with you? I didn’t even know how many stitches Lynne has, and I was there when she fucking got them!

When I went to the hospital that day, I told Lynne she had better phone her mum. It was peaceful on the ward, despite the other howling babies, and Lynne was enjoying having no visitors and time to bond with the baby by herself, but she sighed and agreed it was time to let the outside world in. She phoned her mum and told her she had had a c-section. Her mum was pretty clipped on the phone, but that seemed to be that.

An hour later my dad turned up at reception. His eyes were rimmed red and I thought what the fuck is going on here? Lynne’s mum had called my mum in hysterics. Had Lynne had a blood transfusion? What hospital was she in? I was keeping the truth from her! I was hiding things! Then she slammed the phone down. When I heard this I was absolutely fucking raging. So that’s how I told my dad about the c-section, standing in the hospital lobby among all the crappy plastic seats with a fuzzy telly burbling from a bracket on the wall beside us. My dad said that my mum was ok, just a bit bemused, but that he wanted to warn me before things got out of control.

Unfortunately, I can’t just fall out with my mother-in-law. I’m not allowed. That night I went round to Doctor P’s house to use his computer. I emailed all the pictures I had taken of the kid to Lynne’s folks and then phoned them up. I let Lynne’s mum tell me off and hang up on me. Doctor P said ‘Aye, whenever something good happens, there always seems to be someone who just has the knack of spoiling it.’ I laughed a lot at this. It was exactly what I needed. Lynne folks drove down the next day, and at visiting time they came in to see the baby. Lynne’s mum was glassy-eyed, her smile fixed on her face, but when she saw Lynne and the child she snapped out of it. Nothing was said about what had happened. We all played nice.

I phoned my mum to tell her the crisis seemed to have been averted. She said that when I had put her off from visiting the hospital, at first she had suspected that it was because Lynne wanted her parents to see the baby first.

Christ Almighty, I thought. Don't you start.

No Fireworks After All

We were in the ward until about half seven. Lynne dozed on the bed but I could tell she wasn't asleep because every couple of minutes she would toggle the TENS boost button. I sat by the bed trying to do the sudoku in Take A Break!, but I couldn't even do the easy one. I had Lynne's dinner, I wasn't supposed to, the food is ONLY FOR PATIENTS, but Lynne was too wasted to eat. It was canteen roast beef and tatties, anemic with salty gravy. Mmm. There is nothing quite like canteen food, a friend of mine once said that you can't make macaroni cheese like they do in a canteen. You make it too good yourself. And canteen lasagne and chips, come on, admit it. You love it.

At seven thirty the midwife came and checked her again. I went out and paced in the corridor. Then the midwife came back out and said, 'It looks like your wife's going to have a baby really soon!' I had begun to relax over the afternoon, but now things were happening again. The midwife went to get a wheelchair while I stopped Lynne from putting her jeans back on. Easier said than done, she was still under the effects of the diamorphine and was insisting on being fully dressed at all times.

The labour suite is on the third floor, small blue rooms, hot enough to send you to sleep if it wasn't for the adrenalin. The midwives work twelve hour shifts and were just changing over as we turned up, so we got a fresh one, Kirsten. We plugged in an mp3 player to listen to some music, we weren't supposed to use stuff that hadn't been checked by the hospital technician, but we decided we would just say we did plugged it in when no one was looking. They are closing the hospital in nine weeks anyway.

And then things slowed down again. Lynne was still getting regular contractions, but she still wasn't fully dilated. So there we were in the labour suite, Lynne on the gas and air, Kirsten writing up her notes and checking the baby's heartbeat, me drinking the hospital coffee, which tastes exactly like flat cola when its cold. We listened to Elbow, then Ben Harper, then Beth Orton. Out in the corridor you could smell cordite and see the fireworks bursting over Govan and Partick. It got closer and closer to midnight, and there was still no sign of the baby.

Lynne chuffed her way though an entire tank of gas and air and they had to get her a new one. Midnight came and went and it wasn't until 2 in the morning that she started getting the urge to push. By this time Lynne was absolutely exhausted, and I watched helplessly while she strained to push with each contraction. I hadn't realised this before, but apparently pushing is only useful during a contraction, and Lynne was so tired by this time that her contractions were slowing down. Even worse, the midwife suspected that the baby was the wrong way round, trying to come out chin first.

Suddenly, even though it was 4am, the place was full of people all doing stuff. The registrar came in and talked about trying to turn the baby with forceps, but if he couldn't then Lynne would have to go to the theatre for a caesarean. Lynne only wanted to know if she would feel anything, she was exhausted and had given up on any ideas of keeping control over what happened to her body. She just wanted it over with.

They couldn't get in with the forceps, so they took Lynne to the operating theatre. I wasn't allowed in until the anaesthetist had given Lynne a spinal, which would numb her bottom half completely. I changed into scrubs and sat outside in the shabby corridor, too tired to be terrified, just dully wondering what could go wrong next. A doctor came up the corridor, eyes bloodshot, and told me they would get me soon as the anaesthetist had finished. Then she yawned a massive yawn.

Finally they came and got me. Lynne lay on a table the middle of the room, her arms and legs pinned out like starfish, with a green screen across her chest so that, when I sat on the stool next to her head, I couldn't see what was going on. Lynne looked happier than she had for hours. 'You look very handsome in your scrubs,' she said. 'This is just like ER, if ER was in 1982.' After ten minutes of activity on the other side of the screen, there was a strangled, gurgling squawl. Lynne and I looked at each other. And that's how my daughter was born.

Birthday Fireworks?

You read all the books and you go to all the classes but you still don’t have any idea what its actually going to be like.

We got back to the Queen Mum’s about two in the afternoon of the 5th, and waited in triage while the staff ran around after a girl who had had an asthma attack when she went into labour. She was behind a curtain, making a horrible noise, while people wheeled gas cylinders in and out. Lynne didn’t make a so much as a whimper, she just stood by the bed and when she had a contraction she would press the boost button on the TENS machine, tip her head and close her eyes until it passed. As always in moments of crisis my bodily functions had come to the fore and I was desperate for a piss, but I didn’t want to leave her.

After what can’t have been more than twenty minutes but felt like hours the midwife came to check Lynne over, and I headed for the toilet. If the Queen Mum’s maternity unit has any failing it is that there is only one gent’s, and it is way back at the entrance. As the night wore on and we progressed deeper and deeper into the building, it became more and more of a mission to get there, my bladder’s insistence constantly being balanced against being needed where I was and the length of the journey.

When I got back Lynne was going to be admitted to the ward until she was a bit further on. The midwife said she would check her again in two hours. Lynne had been in labour for nearly twelve hours now and was in a lot of pain. She hadn’t been convinced by the TENS machine at first, but now that the contractions were getting stronger it seemed to be having more effect. Even so, she had decided to have a shot of diamorphine. I was glad; it isn’t often that I have seen Lynne in that much pain and it just made me want to make it go away. Or hurt someone. I hated it.

I grabbed our bags; Lynne’s handbag, my bag, Lynne’s bag of clothes, the bag of baby clothes and blankets and Lynne’s coat, and then stumbled after her into the ward. There was space for four beds, but we shared the room with only one other girl. She had a pink dressing gown and a bammy family who sat around eating crisps and swearing. We drew the curtain around the bed and Lynne got her shot. She was still in a lot of pain and was only comfortable standing, but after about ten minutes she leaned against me, closed her eyes and let me lower her onto the bed. She kissed my neck. That’ll be the morphine, I thought.

‘This is a big adventure,’ she said, her pupils like pinpricks. ‘You’re my Sherpa. What was his name?’
‘Tensing,’ I said.
‘I always felt sorry for him. He was the one who took them up the mountain. I bet he did it himself all the time, in an afternoon.’

I’m not sure that he did.

Maternity Leave Starts

Lynne doesn’t really know what to do any more; instead she looks confused until she starts to giggle. She had her last day at work last Friday, which is just as well because it seems that all her energy is being directed to her womb and starving her brain of blood, or oxygen, or whatever it is that the brain uses to think about stuff. This new vagueness isn’t annoying; it’s a nice change. It used to be that we only went to the supermarket together so that she could shout at me in front of other people, but now she follows me around as meek as a lamb and I decide what goes in the trolley. I decide! On the down side, I have to carry all the shopping home.

She hasn’t quite adjusted to not having to go to work yet. I let her sleep in and she says she feels guilty for being in bed at noon. She doesn’t get up though, so I suspect its all talk. I say she needs plenty of rest to cook up the baby.

She is going to the doctor’s every two weeks, but now the hospital want to see her every two weeks as well. It alternates, like the Olympics and the Commonwealth Games. This seemed an important new development, so I went along too. We were at the Queen Mum’s at 9am, quite a feat to be out of bed so early when you’ve been unemployed for as long as I have, and we saw a tiny, almost inaudible doctor from Manchester. It’s her first day, we were her first patients, and she didn’t know where anything was. She takes Lynne’s blood pressure. She checks Lynne’s urine sample on the windowsill by the sink. She puts a device on Lynne’s belly that makes the baby’s heartbeat sound like overhearing Aphex Twin played too loud on someone else’s iPod. Everything is normal.

The doctor says something.
What was that?
She wants to know if we have discussed our birth plan with the community midwife. We tell her that we haven’t seen a community midwife yet. She doesn’t seem bothered by this.
This is normal too.

Ante Natal

Ante natal classes get a bit samey after a while. Each class is split into two parts, an hour with a midwife pushing dolls through plastic pelvises, and an hour with a physiotherapist who talks about breathing. We put ourselves down for the evening classes so that Lynne doesn’t have to take afternoons off work. They run from 6 to 8 on Tuesdays. The midwife keeps telling us that if we are coming straight from work we should bring sandwiches. The hospital provides horrible juice and custard creams. I haven’t seen custard creams for years. They probably buy them especially to fit in with the Queen Mum’s seventies idiom.

Don’t get me wrong; the Queen Mum’s is good. Everyone is nice and the place is clean. But the truth is that they are running it down. They were going to sell it, merge it with the Southern General, knock the building down and build flats, but then the bottom fell out of the economy. Now it just sits on Yorkhill, desperate for some love and attention. There are blue and brown walls and scuffed orange lino floors, single pane windows rattling in their peeling frames, dingy corridors lit by grainy yellow bulbs, cheap plastic seats worn white by years of arses. The ultrasound machine looks as out of its time as a spaceship in an Egyptian tomb. The place is a maze and it echoes as if it is already dead.

There is life on the maternity ward. At the fourth class we are taken on a tour of the wards. Everyone keeps telling us it’s hot in there, and they are right, it is hot. We queue up at a bright green antibacterial hand rub dispenser on the way in. Women in labour shuffled about in dressing gowns, hands on the small of their backs. A nurse smiles from behind a desk. We take turns to peer through a glass door a newborn baby, 45 minutes old, pink, tiny, sleeping. This is all starting to seem pretty real now.

Pain Is Coming

At the ante natal classes the main impression is that everyone is terrified. How much will it hurt? Will I be able to stand it? What’s going to happen to my body? It’s all right for me. The guys all just sit there, not saying anything. There’s nothing growing inside us, pushing our organs aside, softening our pelvises and altering our centre of gravity.

Pain relief. This is important. There are several methods from the full-on epidural through ‘gas and air’, down to simple controlled breathing. The midwife shows us a fuzzy video explaining it. I think the vertical hold on the telly has gone. Keith Chegwin is presenting the video, and it’s so old that he is still with Maggie Philbin in it. I know this because she’s in it too. They aren’t having the baby; they leer over some woman who is sweaty with labour, inhaling from a facemask. The expectant father has a fine moustache.

The upshot seems to be that if you don’t put ‘ I want an epidural’ down in your birth plan, you aren’t getting one. This is because they are such a pain in the arse to set up, what with a tube going into your spinal column and what-have-you, that if you leave it to the day to decide, then, by the time you’ve made up your mind it will be too late to put it in. They don’t say this of course. Epidurals are brutal anyway, and Lynne says she doesn’t want one. Well, that’s what she’s saying for now. Maybe I should write ‘no epidural’ in the birth plan, in pen just to make sure.

‘Gas and air’ is actually stuff called Entenox, which could more properly be called ‘gas and oxygen’ and seems good and harmless. You can also get a shot of morphine, which sounds good to me, but they are a bit nervous about this because it can make the baby come out all woozy. Moving away from the chemicals, a TENS machine works by putting an electric current through pads attached to your back. The hospital used to have some, but they lent them all out and nobody gave them back. We are going to get one from someone at Lynne’s work.

Still, all the girls still seem terrified. Looking around the other people at the class Lynne and I make up little stories about them, making guesses about their lives. The tall, glamourous girl in the good boots sits next to this big pudding with a shaved scalp and sloping forehead. Surely that’s just her friend...? No, look, they’ve both got wedding rings on. No way! The ginger girl next to the guy in the suit. They sit there grimly and later on I see them arguing in whispers beside the door. The next class, she’s there on her own. Oh-oh. The third class and he’s back again, wearing a t-shirt and jeans. They both look happier. See, it’s all there for you. It’s like a soap opera.

Slightly worrying, they keep talking about things we should say to the community midwife, but we haven’t seen one yet.

20 Week Scan

Tuesday 16 Jne 2009.

We have just been to the hospital for Lynne's 20 week scan. Like the previous scan, the screen was filled with vague grey blobs, while occassionally something recognisable would flash into view. The skull, with the faint butterfly of the brain inside it, a wee pair of legs, and what the nurses described as a 'beautiful spine'. I think thats the only time anyone is ever going to say a thing like that about your backbone, but it was good to see. Lynne said she thought it looked like a sardine, while I was reminded of the chicken-spine curries that old Indian woman used to bring into the shop for Sam.

But the upshot is that the Mark II is going to be a fully functioning human being, with the right number of hands and feet and everything. Hurray!

So thats it. We are halfway through the pregnancy and I still don't have a job. I'm not even worried about it any more, I've been through that and out the other side. It'll help if we are both there when the baby arrives. I don't think Lynne is that worried either, though she does spend her time buying maternity dresses off Ebay by the thousand. Maybe compulsive shopping is a symptom of inner trauma. It could be. In my limited experience of women I have noticed that their worries are a tree-like tangle of 'what ifs' branching off in infinite regress. Then again, maybe she just wants to look nice.