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.

Bricking It, Big Style.

But then freaking out is my job at this point. Last night I went round to Jeff's to watch the football. I had 4 beers and smoked a couple of rollies, which I really shouldn't have done, because Lynne woke me at 4am to tell me her contractions had started. My mouth tastes like shit and I have cleaned my teeth 3 times today already. Pineapples and raspberry leaf tea work like a fucking dream it seems.

Lynne had been up since 3.15, and had been meticulously noting down the time and duration of each contraction. If we had thought sooner we could have had a spreadsheet, she says. I hooked her up to the TENS machine, which was a bit of a struggle coz she wouldn't keep her hands out of the way while I stuck the pads to her back. Then I took her back to bed, but she couldn't really lie down comfortably, so I made her a little nest of pillows. She dozed off here and there through the night, but we kept up with the list, including anotations of when I went back to bed.

In the morning I nipped out to get some milk and a paper, for something to do more than anything else. I bought blue-top milk instead of green and didn't notice until I was putting it into the fridge. Lynne is a bit pale, feels a bit sick, but seems ok. The contractions are starting to hurt a lot now.

About 10.30 I phone Jeff and he gave us a lift to the hospital. Lynne's contractions are 5 minutes apart and lasting for about a minute each time, but they had been pretty much since 5 this morning. But the midwife reckoned Lynne was only 2-3cm dilated and sent us home! That's where we are now, we are going back in a couple of hours.

Unleashing My Inner Pedant

Pregnant women at full term are often described as being ‘hot and bothered.’ You ask an expectant father how his other half is and this is the reply, ‘Oh, she’s feeling a bit hot and bothered, she just wants it over with.’ ‘Hot and bothered’ in this case seems to be a euphemism for being a sweaty, bloated, red-faced, screaming monster. Lynne is not ‘hot and bothered’; rather she is ‘glowing.’

Reading through yesterday’s post I realise that far from sounding unconcerned I seemed to be verging on moderately-concerned-to-slightly-hysterical. My apologies, concern is not the aim of this blog. Lynne is healthy and happy, ‘glowing’ as I said, and the baby still has room to kick about. But we still want to avoid having her induced if we can help it. The free book from the hospital Ready, Steady, Baby! contains only 3 lines on inducing pregnancy. This could mean that, hey, there’s nothing to it, but it seems more likely to me that they couldn’t think of anything good to say about induction so they left it out. Your Pregnancy Bible is more forthright, mentioning vaginal tablets and gels, and also a ’25-cm (10-inch) long plastic instrument with an end like a crochet hook.’ Mmm, maybe give that a miss, thanks all the same.

So, with that in mind, today’s mission was to find a pineapple and some raspberry leaf tea. Curry for tea tonight, and possibly a bit of nipple tweaking, but Lynne says this is too silly. Old wives’ tales are the way forward, no matter that this article says they are just myths. What the hell does the Telegraph know anyway? It’s a right-wing comicbook!

The pineapple was no problem, but just try finding some raspberry leaf tea in Glasgow. Every shop and supermarket has some kind of raspberry flavoured tea, but made out of dried fruit or some silly shit. Now, I like a herbal tea as much as the next hippy, but you don’t make tea out of fruit. You make juice out of fruit. Juice not tea. (I would allow banana tea though, because as any pedant knows, a banana is a herb).

I was getting quite cross, it was raining and everything, but I kept my cool. I have a rule never to moan at people who work in shops, since I worked in shops myself for so long, and I have stuck to that rule, even that time in Iceland when the girl tried to tell me creme fraiche was just a posh name for cottage cheese. I finally tracked down the tea in Napiers on Byres road, a wee packet of spongy green leaves for the reasonable sum of Fucking Hell! I mean £4.50.

The girls in Napiers are very helpful. Aparently the curry thing is nothing to do with fenugreek, which I had a vague idea it was, but is all about the spices stimulating something and getting the bowels moving. It's important to keep the bowels open. Lovely. Pineapple is meant to help release some hormone in the cervix that brings on labour. The girl steps closer to me and lowers her voice. I'll not shout this across the shop, she says, but sperm has the same effect on the cervix.

Interesting.

'Get Your Godamn Hands Off My Membranes!'

Another appointment at the hospital. The baby is now four days past its due date and, apart from a couple of twinges in the night, the little fella seems happy kicking about in Lynne’s belly. There is still room to move in there, for now. The midwife checks Lynne’s blood pressure and we listen to the heartbeat. It sounds like a train. Healthy. Spontaneous labour could start at any time.

The midwife offers Lynne a membrane sweep to hurry things along. Lynne politely declines and the midwife agrees that she would probably leave it too. It is only effective 35-40% of the time and if Lynne is still comfortable and we are in no rush.... However, if spontaneous labour doesn’t start in the next week or so then somebody is going to have to go in and get the baby. Thank Christ that I’m a guy; my bits are simple, I don’t have to put up with all the indignities and minor infections that come with a furry front bum. Men are only required to show their tackle to medical staff in extreme cases of absolute fucking disaster. Have a look at this picture, detailing the measurement of fundal height during pregnancy:

See? Awful. I think you will agree there is something disturbingly callous about this open-palmed insertion. The words 'full bladder' also seem particularly unsympathetic. I think this diagram comes from more primitive times, when women were thrown on their backs, had their muffs shaved and their feet shoved into stirrups, while a doctor yanked the baby out with a cruelly gleaming pair of forceps. Ahhhh, the 70s. Those were the days.

Lynne has escaped such horrors so far, but the baby needs to move fast if she is going to get away unscathed.

Not Much Happening Here

It is the day after Lynne's due date. The bag is packed for the hospital, we are ready to go, mentally prepared and so on, but nothing else is happening. Lynne has the odd twinge, she reckons that's her cervix is thinning, but nothing that could be described as a contraction. Right now she is asleep.

I don't know what to do with myself. Waiting is always the hardest part. The doctor told Lynne on Wednesday that he thought the baby would come before the weekend, but the weekend is here and there is no sign of it. What the hell does he know, he's only a GP. The only other useful thing that he said was to smuggle some gin and tonic into the hospital, because it would be nice to know it was there.

Our parents are phoning excitedly everyday. Lynne has finally convinced her mother that we do not need to put sterilizing fluid in the steam sterilizer. This has been a long running arguement, conducted mostly out of my hearing, but which Lynne assures me has been going on since we got the sterilizer 3 months ago. Lynne's mum said she was sorry, she is just worried.

Aren't we all. My dad rang up yesterday morning, purely to see if there was any news, but somehow we managed to get into a huge arguement about immigration. My dad is an old-school bigot and self-confessed Little Englander. We ended up yelling at each other and I told him what he was saying was pathetic. Just when I thought we were on the point of saying things to each other that there was no coming back from, he said, 'Well, thats the world set to rights then. Just phoning to see that the pair of you were alright. Bye.' Then he hung up, leaving me wrung out and wondering what had happened.

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.

Family Planning

I quit my job in the middle of 2008 to try and do something better with my life. Then the bottom fell of the global economy. Who would have thought that would happen? I have applied for hundreds of jobs, most of the time not even getting a rejection letter, you know the story. I have done bits and pieces of work here and there, but nothing permanent has turned up, and increasingly I have been staring out of the window with a cup of cold coffee in front of me, and talking to myself as I do the housework.

It’s not all bad. Being unemployed is a lot like being on holiday, only a holiday where you never see anything new or have any money to do anything. We are not totally skint though, my wife Lynne has a good job and she is happy to have a househusband because she hates doing the dishes. However, I draw the line at dusting. Dusting is for girls.

We have talked for years about having a baby, but never really thought too much about how it would actually work. Lynne is really happy with her career and I used to work pretty long hours and most weekends, so we let the subject slide by. But after a few months of joblessness we thought, fuck it, if I was going to be in the house doing nothing anyway, I could bring up the baby.

There was no method, no scheduled couplings, calendar watching or maths involved. We are both in our early thirties (though Lynne tells people she is twenty-six), and pretty healthy (though I am struggling to quit smoking). Lynne was pregnant in no time. There was a miscarriage, which I don’t really want to go into. It happens more often than you think, one in three early pregnancies miscarry, but lets just say the difference between relief, disappointment and grief seems to be about a week and a half.

When Lynne was pregnant again, we kept it quiet until after the twenty week scan.