I settled into my room as my father pulled out his video camera and started recording the walls and view from the window. Quite displeased, I shouted at him to stop being so annoying. He left the room hurt, and I would have apologized, but wasn't quite in the mood for it. I continued to not be in the apologetic mood for three days.
"You're almost there!" the nurses would say after shoving something somewhere I hadn't seen in about three months. I wanted to do a natural birth because, quite honestly, I have problems with drugs. They have never served me well.
After the third day and an ungodly amount of contractions, I asked for the epidural. They shoved something inside my spine and it felt as if everything under my belly-button had vanished. It was surreal and terrifying.
The nurse gave me a red button to push that I could hold in the palm of my hand. "Push this button when you're in pain," she said.
Three days of labor made me ready for lots of button pushing. But I was so exhausted that pushing the button was too much work. Instead I held the button down.
"The machine is calibrated so that it can't overdose you," said the nurse tritely.
Well, I took that challenge and I think I did OD,
but just a little bit
a few times.
So the third night was painful but I was drugged enough not to care. On the fourth morning, a new attending doctor came in and asked me how I was doing. "Well, I have needed to poop for the past three days, but they tell me that is because there is something mechanical inside of me that makes me feel like a doughnut with too much creme inside which surprisingly makes me hungry, because I love doughnuts but, your staff says I can't eat nor drink. So, I guess I am hungry."
"Goodness," she said, looking at my paper charts. She then examined my organic chart and decided that even Alice, after drinking the shrinking potion twice, could not fit through my door. I just wished Alice could be on her way so I could get my Cheshire Cat back.
"Clear an operating room, we need a cesarian here!" she yelled over her shoulder to the lobby. Once again, I lost it. I lost my mind. It didn't matter that I was drugged out of it. I screamed and panicked and and begged them to not slice open my stomach to pull out whatever was growing in there. There is just something a bit too convenient about a C-Section.
My stomach had the outward appearance of a round ripened watermelon and slicing through it just seemed too crude and brutal.
Horrifying.
Just the thought of it brings me to tears, for example right now.
They may have needed to strap my arms and legs to the bed as they rolled me down the hall. If memory serves me correct, there were no straightjackets for pregnant women in the maternity ward so they improvised with gauze. Much after that became a blur.
I woke up under white surgical lights, spread eagle, legs fastened to a table manufactured to deliver babies. Thank you capitalism, I thought to myself. F-you socialism and Venezuela.
I didn't feel them slice open my stomach. They had a curtain preventing me from being able to see exactly what was happening. I had never been so thirsty in my life. I was probably dehydrated from crying those water-weighted tears and I, once again quite literally, cried for water.
A kind and empathetic nurse gave me an ice cube. I was so thankful until I started literally puking my guts out on the operating table. This operation is complicated, but should not take over 10 minutes, I believe.
It felt like over 10 minutes and I could hear the doctors saying, "Oh, here she comes!" Was I supposed to be excited for this? Did they have any idea the personal hell I had been living through to get this parasite out of my body? These doctors were so excited for my baby that I almost gave her to them.
Then I saw her face. She wasn't the most beautiful thing I had ever seen nor did I love her at first sight. I thought she was a boy because of her swollen baby parts. I thought she had too much hair and looked identical to her father. I was actually disappointed.
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