early on the calendar, early on the clock

April 13th, around 8:45pm
Labor is pain. Various positions and techniques have been used to help deal with the pain and encourage baby to line up in the right position for delivery. An epidural was not desired, so it won't enter the picture. Other drugs were not desired as long as things remained the slightest bit tolerable.

Pain got worse. The call for drugs is about to go out. Pushing begins. Nuts, that means we're flying without a net of pain meds. At this point, I realized that if I were to give birth, I'd be preemptively requesting a triple morphine poured into a black russian. Every hour.

Next door, the midwife's other patient is about to deliver, so she lets us know that things are progressing well with us, so there's nothing to worry about with her heading off to catch the other baby first. She'll be back in plenty of time to deliver our baby. Of course, baby had other ideas.

Earlier that evening, it looked like a storm was rolling into town. As labor progressed, I could hear some rain and thunder, and saw the occasional lightning flash through the curtains. At this particular moment in time, however, I had little concern for the meteorological sciences. The weather didn't matter, we were giving birth. Well, as we would later find out, the storm that hit during our delivery came with hailstones reaching tennis ball size. Hundreds of cars had their windshields smashed by iceballs falling from the skies, signaling the birth of our baby. Now THAT is foreshadowing.

OK, now we're around 8:50pm, and there's just us and a nurse in the room. The nurse is adjusting the monitors. Bonus pain was described, so I looked for progress, not expecting to see any. I saw the top of a tiny head.

There's not much that I know about birthing a child, but from all the TV shows I've seen, I was pretty sure there's supposed to be a large cadre of medical types, each with their own specialized piece of equipment. While most of this equipment is meant to look expensive and go 'ping', I knew there should be a lot of it, so I bumbled out something like "we need help over here". The nurse peered over. STUFF was about to happen.

The nurse franticly pushed every button within arm's length. She soothed us by saying that she could deliver a baby if she had do, but it's only something she's done 3 times in her 30+ years of nursing. This soothing was not particularly effective to begin with, and then she followed up by yelling out "we've got a head, get in here, we've got a head".

Keystone cops. That's what came to mind when people boiled into the room, each with their own piece of equipment and job to do. Within seconds, stations were set up for tasks beyond my comprehension, and there was a whirlwind of activity, including the impossible advice of "if you can, stop pushing now". In a matter of moments, everything was ready. People were in place, machines were going 'ping', there was great order and organization. There was also excitement since the only piece of the puzzle not in place was the person designated as the baby catcher.



In actual time, it was only a minute or two before the midwife reappeared, and helpers got her prepped with a chorus of "get gloves on now". The perceived time that we were in need of the main delivery person was about 17 years.

Baby did not kick into labor 19 days early just to have a long, drawn out delivery. From the time her head unexpectedly poked out to the time that she inflated her tiny lungs for the first time was just a handful of minutes. Euphoria.