This is totally fair, and I really should have kept my mouth closed about my birth canal opening, but I was just so tickled.
So, let’s see. First, Buster gets me in the door by making me relax and not care if I’m any good; then he (okay, and my opening my mouth about my opening cervix) buys me a one-way ticket back to my hometown of Obscurity.
I’m disappointed, because it would have made a great story and because I do need to get a job, but I’m also relieved. There’s a time for hustling and this obviously isn’t it. No more clipping in my hair extensions and shoving my feet into presentable shoes and trying to impress. And to be totally honest, it feels like a reprieve, because it means I get to avoid performing again—especially for one of the most successful men in the history of television. Phew. I don’t have to worry about the audition tomorrow. There is no longer anything on the horizon but getting the baby out safely.
I’ll just put this Seinfeld thing on Buster’s tab and perhaps consider that the baby is mocking the title of this book. Still, I intend to continue using him for a little “Serenity Now,” to take his existence as my cue to accept that this latest career setback isn’t a big deal in the big picture, the one in which Buster is now starring. Taking on this outlook is surprisingly effortless, not because I’ve become a better, more selfless and more grounded person, but because I’ve organically pulled some sort of George Costanza—in some ways, I’m kind of the opposite of who I used to be, going against all of my former instincts and habits. Buster Frank Breech is turned around and so am I,
yada, yada, yada
.
twenty-three
An Even Worse C-Word
I
t’s the morning of my scheduled C-section, and I’m watching my dad and husband eat breakfast. I’m starving, but you aren’t supposed to eat anything before surgery, so I sneak one bite of my dad’s banana and gnaw the corner off my husband’s bagel. I also may have chewed the end off a protein bar, but other than that, I didn’t eat a thing or even drink water.
We drive to the hospital in Glendale in silence, after having taken a few snapshots on our front stairs. On the way home, four days from now, we will be parents.
The night before, my dad arrived from Northern California and we all went to the latest Michael Moore movie,
Capitalism: A Love Story
. I’m sure it was deeply stirring and educational, but it’s hard to focus on the flawed nature of derivatives and ballooning mortgage payments when you are hours away from being sliced open. Eating my tub of popcorn, I couldn’t help thinking about how vaginal birth is a much more compelling metaphor than a Cesarean, even when it comes to movie titles:
A Star Is Cut Out
or
C-Section of a Nation
or even
Unnaturally Born Killers
just doesn’t sound right. I don’t know how exactly Vietnam veteran Ron Kovic came out of his mother’s womb, but the movie about his life is not called
Sliced Out on the Fourth of July
. Bruce Springsteen doesn’t sing about being “Surgically Removed to Run,” and “Removed with a Scalpel to be Wild” doesn’t quite capture that rock-and-roll spirit.
Still, I’m sitting pretty, or as pretty as I can be having gained fifty-five pounds during my pregnancy, because earlier in the day I had my hair blown out and false eyelashes glued on. I won’t be all glistening with sweat like the girls who get to wear the Vag of Honor, but at least I’ll look my best in the first photos with baby. I’ll look my best, or like a fat-ass drag queen, but either way, a scheduled C-section does allow one to enter motherhood with decent hair and a fresh pedicure.
We check into the hospital, and it’s now two hours until surgery. I’m given a hospital gown, hooked up to a monitor to track the fetal heartbeat, stuck with an IV line for later and interviewed by a brusque intake nurse.
“When did you last eat?” she asks.
I look up at my dad, as if to ask him with my eyeballs, “Is this one of those times I’m supposed to lie?” but instead I let her know I took one bite of a banana.
“What? You ate a banana? I have to call the anesthesiologist. No eating before surgery. You were told that,” she snaps. I decide this lady hates pregnant people, hates babies, hates life and surely has a thing against bananas.
“No, not a banana. A
bite
of a banana. I was nauseous, it was nothing, let’s do this thing. Please,” I beg the nurse.
There’s a long, idiotic, dead-end discussion about whether I had a bite or bites, but she isn’t budging and she tattles on me. They make me wait two more hours for the banana to digest, and a combination of the nerves and the hunger and the entire thirty-nine weeks of waiting for this moment only to have it pushed back by
two whole
hours has me on the verge of tears. Only the fear of dislodging my false eyelashes and my dad’s measured tone keep me from tipping over the edge.
“Some rules are there for a reason,” says my dad, softly. “It’s for your own good. She’s just doing her job. They don’t want you to asphyxiate if something goes wrong and they have to put you under general. It’s only two hours. Two hours is nothing.” He pats my hair, which is sweet and strange, and so comforting I don’t mind so much that he is mashing my do.
My dad is terrified to fly, and once he gets on an airplane, he gets very silent, drinks two glasses of wine in short order and goes glassy-eyed with a thin film of sweat on his upper lip. He looks like that now. Because he sees the baby’s heart rate is normal, and because none of the medical professionals buzzing around seems worried about the baby, and because he is not filled with hormones and catastrophic ideas, and because he is not, as I am, insane, he isn’t the least bit worried about the baby. He is worried about me. I am his baby. I’m thirty-nine years old, I have some crow’s-feet and an IRA, but I am still his baby. I am to him what Buster is to me, a notion I’ve never fully understood until this moment.
“Dad, until you have kids, you don’t understand anything about anything,” I say, which is the kind of vague and meaningless statement that sounds deep when your glands are shooting an eight-ball of cortisol, adrenaline and endorphins into your system and you’re high as hell on fight or flight.
The doula, Margie, arrives, in her faded jeans and embroidered shirt. It might seem strange to have a doula for a C-section, but, well, we already paid her and I like her and it can’t hurt to have someone along who isn’t a first-timer. We make small talk for two hours, and after one last ultrasound proving Buster is still Frank, it’s time to wheel me into surgery.
Margie and my husband are asked to wait outside and get into some scrubs while I go into the operating room alone for my nerve block, so that I won’t feel the lower half of my body when they cut into it. The anesthesiologist asks me to sit on the table sideways, with my feet dangling over the edge, and hunch over with my back out like a cat. He pokes around for a while, and says my “dura” (the membrane around my spinal cord) is tough and he can’t quite get the needle in there.
Slouching over the table, I recall that in medical situations it’s helpful to warn people that you might freak out. They take it pretty seriously.
“I don’t want to alarm you, and I’ll probably be fine, but there is a small chance I might freak out.”
They are hesitant to give me any kind of anxiety-reducing drug, which could mess with the baby, and I am hesitant to ask for one, but I just need everyone to be on their toes in case I get the shakes or something. The forced cheerfulness in the room immediately increases by at least 27 percent as the team assures me I’m doing great. I’m not actually doing anything, just slouching and breathing, but I’ll take any validation I can get. The doctor finally pokes through what I can only imagine is my fat dura and they lay me down and wait for the medicine to paralyze the lower half of my body. My arms are strapped down.
At this point, Margie and Daniel are allowed to come in and watch the show, though there is a big green medical sheet obscuring the business end of my body as they stand near my head. The medical team is chatting it up, they have some doctor friends in common, it’s all very chipper, very ordinary, just another day at the office, another routine procedure, my body being sliced open to reveal a live baby for which I will be responsible the rest of my life, before and after which all manner of things could go wrong. I picture lots of rushing around, codes being called, the baby in an incubator, but the medical team is calm, doing their jobs, a carefully choreographed dance they’ve done hundreds of times.
If you know you are going to have a C-section and it’s unavoidable, please think twice about reading the rest of this chapter. You will be fine, but maybe the less you know in advance the better.
As I start to lose feeling in my legs, it gets harder to breathe. The sensation in the lower half of my body—or lack thereof—is so disturbing, I keep asking where my legs are, as if being able to visualize their coordinates would make this less troubling. They give me an oxygen mask, but I still feel like I can’t get air.
Margie assures me I’m not suffocating. “I’m looking right at the oxygen monitor. You’re fine. The baby is fine.”
It’s hard to communicate through the oxygen mask, but I manage to inquire as to the location of my legs half a dozen more times.
I need distraction. There are way worse surgical situations than not being able to feel your lower half when you are totally awake. I know this. Still, it’s so unbearable emotionally that it’s unclear how long I can take it. This is hard to explain without sounding like someone who cuts her forearms and reads too much Plath, but I’ve never been afraid of dying. You leave the party and it’s ashes to ashes and funk to funky. Being paralyzed, however, has always been my biggest fear. This paralysis isn’t permanent, as it was for the aforementioned heroic vet Kovic, but the experience is beyond unpleasant.
Margie, seasoned birth professional that she is, warns me never to look up at the surgical light fixture, as the metal provides a reflective surface and I will be seeing the C. I avert my eyes and ask Margie to just describe the proceedings. She lets me know, right in my ear in her dulcet doula voice, that they have made the first cut. There might be the smell of burning flesh soon when the wound is cauterized, she explains.
Good to know.
“Talk to me,” I say to my husband, who is nothing if not laconic.
On our second date, I asked if I was talking too much and he begged me never to stop yammering. We made a deal that I would talk 85 percent of the time and he would fill in the rest for the duration of our relationship. He doesn’t like to talk about himself and just isn’t a loquacious guy. Now, he’s blinking too much, looking a bit faint and mumbling, “Um, what should I talk about?”
I feel so bad. It’s like asking a kitten to tap dance.
The doula delivers. I mean, she doesn’t actually have to deliver, just deliver on her promise to make things easier, which she does by filling in the conversational gap, telling me how the incision looks, how the baby is doing, what to expect next. That was the best $1,500 we ever spent and I feel guilty that this is probably boring for her compared to a vaginal birth, but I’m grateful she’s here. I wish there were doulas for everything difficult in life—job interviews, final exams, home buying, Thanksgiving with my family. I would like to grab Margie by the denim pant legs and never let her go. Looking into my husband’s eyes, I love him for his quietness, because as much as I would enjoy a constant prattle, I know he’s focused and present, and he’s the kind of guy you want around during an emergency, emotional or otherwise. In the movies, when the woman is in labor, she curses the father for putting her in this position, and although I can’t actually feel what position I’m in, I’m not cursing Daniel. I’m madly, painfully, achingly in love with him for the blinking and the terror and the forced preservation of a calm demeanor, because all of these things tell me how much we matter, Buster and me.
“Is it almost over? Where are my legs?” I ask again, still thinking knowing would make the paralysis more palatable. I tell myself it’s just a few more minutes, that I’ll get through it, that so many women have done this before me and I’ve never heard a single one talk about the creepy, helpless terror of a nerve block. What’s that quote?
Whatever doesn’t kill you just makes you wish you were dead.
No, it’s supposed to make you stronger. Right. Right. This is making me stronger as I grit it out. It certainly beats the nerves firing at a time like this, and I should delight in the medical miracle of spinal blocks, but this is stretching the space-time continuum because I could swear my legs have been frozen for hours.
Small talk. Small talk. Small talk. Margie on the weather. The medical team continues to chat breezily like they do during surgeries on medical TV shows. Margie on whether we’ve chosen a baby name. Daniel blinking a lot. Margie reassuring me I’m getting enough oxygen. Daniel blinking and peering toward the sheet obscuring the procedure. Margie on how great this hospital is, because they let doulas in the operating room and because Adventist hospitals are known for their excellent food. Me on the leg thing again. Daniel finally grunting out the first syllable of a word, rest of word still unknown. Daniel looking longingly toward Margie when there is a brief silence. Margie reengaging small talk. Me willing to listen to any manner of conversation to forget that my skin, muscles, uterus are probably cleaved apart at this very moment, internal organs shifted aside, some set on top of my stomach for safekeeping to be returned after the baby is removed. The doctor’s fingers are getting close to Buster. Frank No Name Buster. He is inside of my body and in minutes he will be out.
More blinking. Margie warning me the baby might not cry right away, so don’t panic if we don’t hear anything for a few seconds.
I don’t know who it is, maybe a doctor, a nurse, the anesthesiologist, someone announces, “He’s a chunky monkey,” and I’ve never been more relieved than I am to hear the first fat joke about my son. I know no one would be joking if he didn’t have all of his fingers and toes and appear to be in good working order. You don’t start rhyming and referencing Ben & Jerry’s flavors when things are going awry. Even someone with a spinal block, restraints and a nasty case of alarmism knows this on some visceral level.