After you read his version, you can also read that of the mother, which he links at the bottom.
The Amazing Story of Gus's Birth
In my last post, I mentioned Gus’s esophageal atresia. Well, one of the side-effects of that is that he could’t process amniotic fluid. So while most women have two pounds of amniotic fluid, Sherry had more like six or seven pounds. Like a whole extra baby’s-worth of fluid. The reason I mention that is because, despite Gus coming a week before his due date, we had been expecting him to come basically at any point in the past month. Sherry certainly looked full term, and she’d been dilated for about a month before he was born. She was 4 cm on her last appointment. Now, my company is about to release a new version of their flagship product, the transrectal ultrasound prostate scanner. (Just for the record, “transrectal” means the device enters what is otherwise usually an exit-only area) Before we go to market, we have to do some clinical trials on live human beings. So the call went out among the employees for volunteers. For the sake of science! For the good of the company! For a cash payment!
This call went out a week before, and we weren’t getting much interest. In fact, we had had only one sign-up. So, I decided I’d sign up myself. Why not? The baby was going to come any day now, and when he or she did, I would start a week of leave. What are the odds we still wouldn’t have had a baby between now and then? I’d get credit for literally putting my ass on the line for the company, but I wouldn’t actually have to deliver. What could possibly go wrong with that?
Well. The big day rolls around and still no baby. As the morning worse on, I was really starting to get nervous. Which was making me tense. Given the procedure in question, “tense” is the last thing you want to be. For not the first time in my life I was wondering what the hell I’d gotten myself into.
I had walked by the office which they had converted into a makeshift exam room. All the equipment was in place. The performing physician was chatting with the marketing person. The machine operator was doing a final inspection. The only thing they needed was a patient.
Then, at 10:43, I had this IM exchange:
Sherry: Still feel cruddy!
Me: No good, that!
Sherry: my body is falling to pieces
Me: Not too much longer, now! (Editor’s note: J said this a lot. But what else can you say? I’m sure in this particular instance, there was a bit more hopefulness than usual)
Sherry: OH S$&%
My water just broke!
Me: Holy crap!
Sherry: Like, no warning!!!
I think you better come home!
She didn’t have to ask me twice. I clicked my heels together, snatched up my stuff, and announced, “The water has broken! I have to go home! Enjoy the clinical trials! Sorry I won’t be here for them!” And with that, I marched out the door.
As it happened, I could probably had time to get my prostate imaged, recover a bit, and then have it done again. Most of the real action happened with me making phone calls on the way home, arranging for the other baby, Charlie, to get picked up and calling the doctor.
One of the people I called was Julie, our doula, or “birth helper-outer”. When I talked to her she was apparently heading into a birth right then. She said she had a feeling it was going to go very quickly, but just in case, she was going to call with her backup. Well, her backup was out of town, so she put us in touch with her backup backup. She seemed really nice on the phone, but we hadn’t met her. So that part wasn’t ideal, but we were sure we could work around it.
Once I got home, there really wasn’t anything for me to do. Usually the water breaks after you’ve been having contractions, but sometimes the water just breaks. That was the case here.
This was even true for Sherry. I mentioned the seven pounds of water. This is almost a gallon. It didn’t all come out at once. So most of my time after I got home involved me fetching towel after towel.
Once that settled down, I was at a total loss. Giving birth is like baseball, a few minutes of action and hours of sitting around waiting for something to happen.
So I cleaned the kitchen. Then I finished the homework assignment I was putting off until Friday night (Does this guy know how to party or what?) Then I shaved and changed shirts. I recalled that when Charlie was born, I looked like I’d been sleeping under a highway overpass for the last few days. I wanted to look good for this baby’s pictures. Or at least a bit less homeless,
So I learned something about myself: the way to make me really productive is to give me something great that will be happening in the near future that I just have to wait for. The excitement will get to me and I’ll end up doing odd tasks just to keep my mind off it.
Around 1:40, the contractions started. They were somewhere between 4 and 6 minutes apart, but extremely mild, apparently. Like I wouldn’t have known Sherry was having them if she didn’t say so. After she’d had a few, I knew what to look for, but they didn’t seem like anything I myself couldn’t handle. And I’m a total creampuff.
At 2:15 or so, we got a call from Julie. Turns out her other birth was really quick after all. She showed up about a half hour later. And, as we’d planned, Sherry’s friend Courtney also came by. She is also a doula, but she wasn’t there in a professional capacity, more just there to watch and take pictures.
We had a pretty good plan, I thought: if Sherry’s contractions got more intense or more regular, we would head to the hospital. And we’d head over regardless at 4:00, so we wouldn’t get stuck in rush hour traffic.
Well, my mom had picked up Charlie and she came over at 4 so we could say goodbye one last time. Then Sherry’s friend Mandi came over to take the dog. The dog is kind of a handful, so I walked out to the car with them. When I came back inside, something was obviously up.
Sherry and Julie disappeared into the bedroom and came out about two minutes later, saying “We need to leave. Like right now.” And then everything kind of turned into a blur.
It was about 4:55 when we got Julie, Sherry and I loaded into my car, with Courtney following in her car. The best way to get from Shrewsbury to St. John’s hospital wasn’t possible because the highway was still under construction. So I took a back road through residential Webster, up Brentwood Blvd, and onto the highway there.
I don’t know how, but we made the trip in 20 minutes. In rush hour. It seemed to be going a lot slower than that. We didn’t hit very many red lights, but ever one we did it felt like we would sit there for an hour or so. It was agony for me, and I wasn’t the one trying to hold a baby in.
Sherry thinks that if Julie wasn’t there, she would probably have given birth on the side of the highway. It takes a lot of concentration to not push when that’s all your body wants you to do, but Julie coached her through it.
I pulled into the loading zone and Courtney and Julie got Sherry into a wheelchair. Then we took off like O.J. Simpson in that old Avis ad. Or was it Hertz? In either case, we were running as fast as someone pushing a wheelchair can go, yelling at slow people in our way, until we made it to the elevator.
Sherry’s mother gave birth to Sherry’s younger sister in the elevator of the hospital. So when the door opened on the second floor and we got off, I made a nervous quip that at least we’d done better than that. Although if Labor and Delivery were on the tenth floor, it might have been a different story.
Julie had called ahead to the doctor, and the doctor had called the hopsital to arrange a room. So, after turning the wrong way once, we got ourselves into Labor 26, and a pack of nurses converged on us.
One of them said, “Sherry, we need you to get in the bed here.”
“I can’t,” she responded. “The baby’s coming.”
I think she took it as the usual prenatal hyperbole. So she said, “I understand, but you need to get into this bed.”
Sherry somehow got from the wheelchair into the bed, but she was on all fours facing the wrong way.
“We need you to turn around.”
“I can’t.”
“Well, can you at least turn on your side?”
Sherry kind of fell over, and the nurse and I then noticed the baby head that was poking out of Sherry’s woman parts. I let out a surprised expletive. The nurse noticed the cord was around the baby’s neck a bit tighter than anyone wanted, so she asked Sherry to push.
Sherry pushed one time and the baby was born, at 5:23 p.m.
I had asked not to know if we were having a boy or a girl, so the first clue I got about that was seeing the baby’s boyhood live and in person. I was happy we had a boy. As close together in age as Charlie and the next baby were going to be, I thought it would work better if they were brothers. I’m sure I would still have been happy if it was a girl, but we’ll never know for sure.
I was a bit worried that the baby seemed a bit purplish when he came out, but he wasn’t so purple any of the nurses were worried. And he turned a nice pink color a minute later.
I wandered over to the table where the nurse and physician were cleaning up the baby. The physician asked if I wanted to cut the cord. I said, “Oh, hell, no.” I’m sure some people would be honored. I’m not coordinated when I’m not feeling emotional. In this case, I would be so nervous I’d end up cutting off something I wasn’t supposed to.
Charlie had let out a loud cry the second he was out, but Gus didn’t do that. Because of his esopheal atresia, the saliva and snot and what not had no where to go. So he didn’t make any noise until the nurse cleaned out his nose, but it was still kind of faint.
Then we brought him back to Mom. She got some quality time with the very cute baby and Courtney took some pictures. But the sniffling and snortling got to be too much, so we gave him back pretty soon after that. They carted Gus down to the NICU and Courtney and I followed.
He was weighed: 6 lbs, 3 oz. Then they inserted a tube in his nose to automatically vacuum out the aforementioned saliva, etc. It was kind of sad to see, but it had to happen.
Once I was pretty sure they had that scene under control, we went back to the room. Our OB had finally arrived and he was helping the resident do stitches. Apparently he had gotten stuck in all the traffic we had lucked out of. Although if you had to choose, I’d rather he get the traffic than us. He gave me a hug and lots of congratulations.
I don’t know how long everyone was in the room, but eventually they all went their separate ways. The room looked pretty bad. I kept expecting Gary Sinese to walk in looking for clues. But they got everything cleaned up, and eventually left Sherry and I alone and in a bit of a daze at what had just happened.
And that’s the story of how Gus was born. In a hospital room. About 20 seconds after we got there.
****
Postscript: Sherry has written her own version of the story of Gus’s birth, which you can read here. In the interest of getting two different perspectives, I haven’t read it. I didn’t want to be biased at all. So her story will probably talk about different things, and we may disagree on some basic facts of the story. Although if any facts in my story cast me in a suspiciously better light than in her story, my story is still probably correct.
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