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| Delivering Big Baby Naturally |
Gentle music, soft lighting, massage, minimal pain relief- gas and air - ending in a painful but smooth, swift and beautiful birth in the warm water of the pool. I, the tired but elated father, cutting the baby's cord when it stopped pulsating naturally. A tired, blissful mother cradling the baby in the pool.
The reality was more like Stalingrad. Witnessing a human being suffering 22 hours of excruciating pain. The birth helper disagreeing with the midwife and, aside, trying to persuade me to make a decision in her favour. Me vaguely thinking, Surely you're the fucking expert? but too stupidly polite (and bewildered and headfucked after two sleepless nights) to articulate it.
The midwife reluctant to admit defeat when it must have been obvious that T had a head the size of an elephant and was STUCK, rhymes with FUCK. Running out of gas and air. The midwife driving off to get some. My wife on all fours in the back of the birth helper's car. The birth helper reluctant to exceed the 30 mph limit on the mile drive to the hospital. Me telling her I think the police might understand in this instance. The birth helper reluctant to park by the admissions door in the spot reserved for emergency vehicles. Me, cross-eyed and almost speechless with exhaustion, pointing out that if this car isn't an ambulance I don't know what is. The admissions doctor writing "distressed and abusive" in my wife's admission notes. The absence of staff on the bank holiday weekend.
My wife howling for That Fucking Epidural Now as we wait for the anaesthetist. The camp and sniffy anaesthetist who is damned if anything is going to make him hurry casually getting his stuff ready with no apparent signs of urgency and chatting amiably to the birth helper, who turns out to be an old friend of his, over the slumped figure of my wife. Hearing him say to the birth helper, 'We must have lunch sometime.' Hearing my wife, at this, expressing her opinion of doctors with a crazed but impressively articulate torrent of swearwords. Witnessing her on the trolley being wheeled into the arc lights and alien machinery of the operating theatre.
Seeing green curtains go up around her abdomen while the registrar and crew get ready. Sitting at my wife's head talking her through our favourite walk in Crete to distract her while her whole body is rocked from side to side by the unspeakable carnage being performed three feet away. Feeling my wife rebound as the baby is wrenched out. Glimpsing the still-pulsating cord being diced through at once as the pinkish-blueish-greyish baby is whisked off, barely seen, to another part of the room.
Standing and glancing over the curtain and seeing what looks like something in the back of a butch's shop. Sitting down very hastily. Hearing the anaesthetist impatiently say, 'Please everyone, can we get this one finished?' as my wife, now utterly gaga from exhaustion, trauma and a bucket of chemicals, lapses into full-blown Tourette's syndrome. Hearing the baby cry for the first time, somewhere among strangers and machines. Being presented with the baby by a smiling female doctor.
Almost too tired for joy, tearful but sensing that I had to keep it together a little bit longer. Pledging the strange blotchy little creature all my care and love forever. My wife, finally stitched up, rather reluctantly holding the ten-pound big-headed monster that has sent her to the depths of hell and not quite back. Saying goodnight to mother and sleeping baby in a side ward at about eleven at night, 48 hours after the first pre-labour cramps, about 22 hours after the onset of the real thing. Walking home with bag of chips. Thinking Jesus Christ, I'm a dad. To find out more, you can check out Delivering Big Baby Naturally.