Every single time they fire up that sonogram machine, I just think about the ultrasound technician, and how she puts on those Crocs and lavender scrubs and intersects with the best and worst days in people’s lives. I wonder if she gets sick of people making the same idiotic jokes about their male fetus and his giant penis (because I notice all boy parents joke about the huge phallus they think they see). And I wonder if she has some sort of script she uses for the dead baby days. Most of all, I wonder if on those dead baby days she stops by Chili’s on the way home for some fajitas to go, grabs a bottle of $10 pinot from the corner liquor store and drains her DVR of old episodes of
Oprah
while bingeing on flour tortillas, because that’s what I would do, perhaps capping off the night with half an Ambien.
I’m splayed out with that clear gel smeared on my stomach repeating my usual silent prayer, “No dead baby. No dead baby. No dead baby. No dead baby. No dead baby.” For a second, just reading her face, I’m convinced this poor woman is going to have to slowly walk her Crocs out the door after saying something innocuous, but obviously doomsday, like “I’ll be right back” before getting the doctor to break it to me about the
dead baby
.
So you can see why I’m distracted when trying to process this Frank Breech thing. As soon as I stop envisioning the tech scraping the remains of her Chili’s dinner into the trash and tucking in for the night with her cat, Mr. Whiskers, I realize I’ve heard the word “breech” before. I remember from one of my pregnancy books that breech is bad, something about the baby being in the wrong position.
The doctor comes in and explains that a frank breech baby is one whose rump is aimed toward the birth canal, the legs sticking up in front of the body with the hips flexed and feet near his ears. The boy is supposed to be head-down.
This explains all the hiccups I have been feeling up near my ribs, because the baby’s head is right up there, where it shouldn’t be.
The doctor tells me she can try to turn him, a process called external cephalic version, during which she manually rotates the baby—a process that’s nearly always attempted in a hospital in case an emergency C-section is required because of fetal distress. It carries a small risk of cord entanglement or damage to the placenta, it can be quite painful, and when I ask her how often it works, she tucks her hair behind her ear, bites her lower lip and answers, “About half the time.”
This is the first appointment I’ve gone to without my husband and I wish he were here, because what my doctor has called a “one-page” pregnancy—meaning there have been so few complications my whole chart doesn’t exceed one page—is about to be continued on page two. I can tell it’s a big deal, because the doc is now settling in on a vinyl stool near the window and she has that “we’re going to be here for a while” look. She cracks open a Diet Coke.
The umbilical cord could be wrapped around his neck, she says, or there could be some other reason my baby is all ass-backward.
I feel protective about my boy, Frank, and I don’t understand much about the situation but I know for certain I don’t want to start shoving him around.
She calls in the receptionist. We schedule a C-section. Just like that. It’s on the books.
If the key to happiness is wanting what you have instead of having what you want, I need a locksmith. While I was dreading the torn taint, the mad dash to the hospital, the unimaginable pain of labor and vaginal childbirth, now I feel horribly cheated out of all those things. Before I had my very own C-section on the docket, scheduled like a routine dental exam, the whole idea of a Cesarean section was actually pretty appealing, taking something wildly unpredictable like childbirth and making it controlled and contained. Now, I’m sure that I’m getting the shaft; that this is the worst c-word of all. As I maneuver my car out of the parking lot of the doctor’s office and call my husband to tell him about our son, Frank, my voice starts to crack.
Saying I cry a lot is like saying Lindsay Lohan has been exposed to a lot of unfiltered UVB rays; it’s patently obvious, so it’s difficult to discuss my emotional lows and lows without being redundant. Suffice to say, I bawled through my explanation and vowed to look into some of the alternate, noninvasive methods of turning him mentioned by the doctor: acupuncture, yoga, bags of cold peas and music.
The rest of the day I spend stewing in jealousy for every woman who has given birth the way nature intended. I want my water breaking at Pilates or in the middle of the night. I want to rush out the door with my prepacked hospital bag and the Mister nervously speeding along his rehearsed route. I want my own gory story, hours spent pushing, epidural, no epidural, eating ice chips, cursing, rolling on one of those giant plastic workout balls with my doula gently coaching me to breathe. I want reports on how I’m dilating and effacing so I can Tweet the whole event between contractions, exploiting my baby as he enters the world. I want to walk around and around the block to help the contractions along, have sex to bring on labor, eat this special salad they serve at a restaurant in the Valley that’s supposed to make your water break. That moment when the painful pushing is over, and the little guy squirms out into his father’s arms, I won’t have that moment. If one could give birth to self-pity, however, I would be delivering a litter at this point.
Pooooooooor me. Just a small percentage of women have breech babies, and I am one of them.
Even though my gut tells me this is it, frankly, there is still time for the baby to turn, so I try to encourage him to do so.
Moxibustion is a Chinese technique that consists of burning sticks made from the herb moxa on or near an acupuncture point on the little toe of each foot. This is supposed to stimulate the production of maternal hormones, which make the uterus contract, which can make the baby turn. People love acupuncture, and I love it in theory, but every time I’ve tried it there’s a whole lot of expensive sitting around with needles in you and frustration you have to choke down like the bogus fistfuls of Chinese herbs they give you. Seriously, I don’t want to go all Western medicine on you, but if a lady with a medical degree isn’t sure she can physically turn my baby with her well-trained hands, burning some herbs near my toes half a dozen times just feels like something that’s likely to cause more disappointment than baby flipping.
There are yoga positions recommended for turning breech babies—getting on all fours, getting in a modified plank. I try all that stuff, but mostly just find it brings on acid reflux. Then there’s the theory you can coerce the baby out by putting frozen peas up top so he’ll want to escape the chilly climes and inch downward. That pea enterprise is as cold, long and sad as
Dr. Zhivago
. I even combine the two, getting on all fours with a bag of frozen peas strapped to my ribs. While this makes a spectacular “How would I explain this to an alien?” moment, it doesn’t seem to be a baby turner.
Some experts say another way to cajole the baby into a head-down position so he can safely dive out vaginally is to place headphones toward the mom’s pubic bone and play music for ten minutes, six to eight times a day. Could the right song list played near my girl parts save me a major surgery and an unsightly scar? If I lure him down south through the majesty of song, will I get the chaotic, exciting, vaginal birth I suddenly feel I must have?
This begs the obvious question, what songs? I ask for suggestions from my blog readers and Twitter followers and get some excellent selections.
“Into the Great Wide Open”
by Tom Petty
“Down in the Hole”
by the Rolling Stones
“Jump Around”
by House of Pain
“Follow You Down”
by the Gin Blossoms
“Hold On, I’m Coming”
by Sam and Dave
“Head On”
by the Pixies
“Heading Out to the Highway”
by Judas Priest
“Relax”
by Frankie Goes to Hollywood
“Upside Down”
by Diana Ross
“We Gotta Get Out of this Place”
by the Animals
“Turn! Turn! Turn!”
by the Byrds
My V has a DJ, but still, that baby does not spin.
The doctor tells me that right before they slice you open and remove the baby, they do one last ultrasound to check his position. Every once in a while, you get a last-minute reprieve; the kid has turned and they send you home to wait for labor or induce you right there on the spot. Now, all there is to do is wait. Wait and blast House of Pain and hope that I won’t be living in one.
People I Want to Punch: Barkley
I
n the middle of the night, I feel something wet next to me in bed.
If my water breaks before my scheduled C-section, it could be trouble. To prevent infection you’re supposed to get the kid out within a short amount of time after the amniotic sac ruptures. With my baby breech, we would need to rush into an operating room to pry him loose stat. Now, I’m in a panic trying to figure out the genesis of this mystery moisture.
I quickly rule out any kind of standard pregnancy discharge, because the liquid is neither viscous nor colored in any way. If I had wet myself, and trust me, I was a hard-core bed wetter until my early twenties, so I’m familiar with the sensation, there would be the warm stinging of urine on my inner thighs and, of course, the stench.
I wake Daniel.
“Dude, I think my water broke. Look,” I whisper, showing him the wet spot on the white sheet, near my stomach, about the size of a place mat.
He smells it. It’s not pee, he agrees. We scramble around for
What to Expect When You’re Expecting
, head toward the trusty index and look up “water breaking.” Heidi says amniotic fluid should smell like bleach. We sniff the spot again with this in mind. Daniel rouses from bed in his T-shirt and plaid flannel pajama pants and rips the sheet from the bed so he can investigate it further.
The color is clear, as amniotic fluid often is, but we don’t really smell the bleachlike odor that the alkaline liquid is supposed to have.
“Give me your panties,” demands my husband. I wince.
“No. You are
not
smelling my panties. Please don’t make me let you smell my panties. What if there’s something gross going on?” I plead, standing there in my black maternity nightgown with crazy hair looking like a combination troll doll-bowling ball. I don’t even like him touching my dirty laundry and I generally feel strongly about trying to maintain some of my feminine mystique.
“This is a medical situation,” he says sternly. “Give me the panties.”
“Fine. I’ll smell my own panties. You stay away,” I say, slipping them off and turning my back to him as I sniff. Nothing. My extra-large flesh-colored cotton underpants are dry with no notable scent.
So how does a patch of odorless, colorless liquid end up on the sheet right under me in the middle of the night when I’m a full-term pregnant lady? This must be significant. It must be something. If it walks like a duck, quacks like a duck, it’s a ... cat? Could Barkley, my no-good nuisance of a tabby, have been responsible? Daniel notices an empty plastic tumbler that has rolled under the bed. It doesn’t take Nancy Drew to figure out that Barkley knocked over the cup of water that had been on the nightstand. With feline grace, she managed to dump all the contents right on the bed and let the cup gently roll over the side without waking either of us up.
You know how on the morning news they regularly feature animals from a local shelter and encourage viewers to adopt them? I was doing that very segment one morning on
Good Day New York
, holding a three-week-old orphaned kitten and asking viewers to visit the shelter in Queens and give her a good home. When we threw to commercial, the cat was still on my shoulder, nervously digging her claws into my blazer, and I thought, “Oh, shit. I guess she’s mine now.” I took her home, got her a tiny bottle because she was too young to eat solid foods, and raised her up to be an obese and troublesome ingrate who has now aggravated me on both coasts. The first week I had her, she tried to jump into a hot bath twice, stuck her whiskers into a lit candle and ate so much milk she toppled over. Okay, that one was my fault for overfeeding her, but her troublemaking ways earned her a name inspired by one of my favorite basketball players, Charles Barkley. The Round Mound from the Pound has ripped my arm to shreds when she didn’t care for being placed in her cardboard carrier, she has hissed at delivery people just trying to pet her head, she has refused all but one brand of food, and she once barely missed my eye while gouging my cheek when I tried to brush out her matted fur.
Now, she’s really done it.
I dole out my usual threat about taking her back to the pound to be put down. “One more stunt like this and you’re off to Meowschwitz, lady.” I cool down a bit. “All right, Barkley, any more shenanigans from you and I’m taking you to a nice no-kill shelter in the suburbs.”
She’s woken us up, made me smell my own panties, made us rush around in the wee hours thinking the baby was coming and all because she thinks it’s delightful to swat objects from the table and watch them fall. I should have named her Newton, because she seems to discover gravity every day.
I can’t get back to sleep now, and it’s the usual fidgeting around, trying to shove my pillows and my body into a comfortable position. Instead of restorative sleep, I kind of fantasize about getting revenge on Barkley. Not punching her, of course, because for one thing that’s cruel and for another I would never get in the ring with that beast because she’s fourteen pounds of fury, but I wouldn’t mind locking her out for the night and letting her experience the biting cold chill of Los Angeles in September, a frigid sixty-five degrees.
To keep her from coming back into our bedroom, we wedge one of my husband’s flip-flops under the door, which she has figured out how to open.
We’re not worried she’ll attack the baby, as she seems to be very scared of children and generally avoids them. But if Barkley is any indication of the type of parent I will become, look out, juvenile hall, because my disciplinary style, at least when it comes to bad cats, is a mixture of blind love and empty threats. My water hasn’t broken, but my resolve has. After a few minutes, I pry loose the shoe and let Barkley back in, where she takes her usual spot across Daniel’s knees.