After he’s pronounced a chunky monkey, and the doctor says, “He was definitely breech ... and definitely a boy” (I guess Buster presented with a big rump and typically swollen baby balls) I start bawling right there on the table, tears pooling around my oxygen mask. I’m trying not to choke on snot and shock and the weird mucus that collects when you’re on your back and huge.
He is held up in the air like a bunch of grapes at a Sunday farmer’s market, purple and shiny.
Until the second they bring him over to me and let me kiss his goopy red face, I am convinced that setting up a crib and buying a rug for his nursery and occasionally imagining he would be okay would all have cursed him, and that I would never, ever be lucky enough to get a real live healthy baby.
“Nine minutes,” my husband says, because he’s the kind of man who times things, and they hustle my husband over to cut the cord, calling him “Dad.” Buster and Daniel leave so the medical team can weigh the baby and check his vitals while I get sewn up.
No matter how many tests told me otherwise and no matter how often I saw the graph of his heartbeat, even moments before they removed him and I could hear his heart thudding steady and strong on the fetal monitor, I was sure this was all a big mistake and that something would be wrong and everyone had missed it.
It takes half an hour to stitch the opening he left (I know this because my husband timed that, too) and I never stop sobbing with relief.
A nice Canadian nurse with Disney characters on her scrubs greets me in the recovery room. She hands me the baby to nurse him. He’s all cleaned up, has a full head of light-colored hair, dimples on his cheeks. I know biology is supposed to make me think this way, but he really is beyond perfect. The Canadian woman helps me to nurse him for the first time, placing him on my chest, but it’s easy.
Breast-feeding easily is the equivalent of having a big dick—no one will admit how good it feels, because it’s really arbitrary and in no way means one is more of a man—but when that baby just takes to the boob, no pain, no trouble, I feel like I have a huge, swinging cock. I may have been so-so on nursing, and put off by all the wacky zealots who promote it, but I must admit, it gives me confidence. If nothing else, my baby, despite me, is doing something right. I’m feeding my baby, and all the nurses comment on his perfect latch and suddenly I want to pat myself on the back for taking that breast-feeding class and brag to anyone who will listen.
My baby is a chunky monkey and he has a perfect latch.
We go to our room, with a huge window facing out toward the mountains, and the baby “rooms in.” In other words, there is no nursery at our hospital. He’s an hour old and he’s ours full-time. I have a catheter, am on major opiates, can’t walk, have been sliced open and still have an IV drip of fluids, but along with my husband I am now responsible for another person. We have no clue what we are doing.
Nurses, like angels, bring me a special juice cocktail they’ve invented: apple, prune, grapefruit, orange, all the juice flavors thrown together with ice and a straw.
Every sound Buster makes is adorable and terrifying. He sleeps all swaddled in a crisp hospital linen, white with red and blue trim. It’s the “burrito” swaddle, a nurse tells us, as she places him in a bassinet across the room. Daniel is on a roll-away in the corner. I’m in a hospital bed, sedated and wired. And we’re just sitting there with our baby.
Our baby.
twenty-four
Four Days in the Hole
I
don’t want to say hospitals play fast and loose with the pills after a C-section, but the bill from the pharmacy is over five grand. Next time I spend five grand on drugs, someone better throw in a hooker.
Again, if you know you are having a C-section, you may want to skip this chapter, because while some people have no trouble at all with the procedure, my recovery was gnarly.
There’s no sleeping that first night.
For one thing, I’m staring at the bassinet, and back at my husband on a cot in the corner, and back at the baby, and I’m high on motherhood and narcotics and this is the best night of my life and I don’t want to miss a thing (or ever sound like an Aerosmith song ever again).
Sure, I don’t want to miss a thing, but being in the hospital after a C-section is not exactly conducive to rest anyway. The baby needs to nurse, my husband needs to change the kid’s diapers because I can’t move but Buster’s bowels can, pediatricians need to check on the little guy, and it seems like every hour or so a nurse or a doctor needs to invade our room, clanging around almost cartoonishly like someone “accidentally” on purpose waking up a hungover teenager who’s been sleeping twelve hours and should really be mowing the lawn.
Everyone has a job to do, which I understand, but it seems that job involves covering the hospital’s ass so it doesn’t get sued for not monitoring our vitals every four seconds.
They check my blood pressure constantly, which is painful because my upper arms are so swollen that the cuff squeezes the life out of me, causing my eyes to water until my dad begs them to use the old-school, crank-style BP machine. About every other time, they grudgingly succumb to my dad’s pleas, but my arm is red and bruised nonetheless.
There’s just overall a lot of barging. They barge in to take the baby’s temperature, to make sure my catheter is still taped to my leg, to wash my privates, which to my surprise bleed profusely even after a C-section. I’m wearing giant maxipad things the likes of which you’ve never seen and the sponge baths they give my lady parts are dehumanizing for everyone involved.
Baby and Mom need lots of tests, no question, but somehow the way the disruptions are spaced makes me feel like a sleep experiment subject who eventually becomes psychotic.
What happens if we wait until the subject hits REM and just wake her up every single time and see if she can solve a simple math problem? Let’s choose the perfect wake-up intervals to make sure her brain becomes scrambled and disorganized and her already fragile emotional state unravels and see how that goes.
I don’t want to say the protocol is like torture, but I’m pretty sure John Yoo signed off on it.
To illustrate how many medications I’m given around the clock, I will just tell you that not only was the pharmacy bill five grand, the itemized list of drugs we later request is four pages long, single-spaced.
They give me pain pills, stool softeners, injections for nausea, suppositories for the constipation caused by the pain pills, pills for the itching caused by the morphine, gas tablets, Motrin and more.
My ankles and hands continue to swell up like a corpse floating in the Hudson.
There’s a sudden piercing pain in my shoulder, like my clavicle is snapping, which convinces me I’m having some sort of heart attack. Since getting out of surgery, I have had pulsating pneumatic compression devices strapped to both my calves for the prevention of deep vein thrombosis, but perhaps they didn’t work (other than the excellent job they do making me itchy and irritated). Now, I’m sure the gripping, gnawing feeling in my shoulder is a heart attack, a blood clot, or the beginnings of a stroke. The nurse tells me not to worry, that it is just gas.
Gas in my shoulder?
That is some bad, bad gas. They encourage me to get out of bed with my IV and walk the ward to shake the gas free. It takes half an hour to go ten yards, my husband pushing the baby along in the bassinet, but anything to get rid of this damn shoulder gas.
After the stroll, I hand Buster over to my dad. He is holding the baby in his lap, the 49ers game is on in the background, the baby yawns, and the sunlight from the window is landing on the baby’s hair as he dozes in his grandfather’s lap.
Listen, I don’t want to miss a thing, but I’m kind of missing a lot of things.
Normally, I love opiates like Aerosmith loves ... well, opiates, but I want to remember the way the sun looks reflecting on my dad’s thick eyeglasses as he bounces my son and hums. I want to be less high.
What am I, high?
I ask for weaker and fewer pain meds.
Days go by in a blur of pills and burst-open doors and baby checks and blood pressure readings and trapped gas bubbles until a headache hits like a stiletto to the side of my head. The nurse says this happens sometimes when the spinal cord gets nicked during a nerve block; no problem, they just open you up and patch it.
That’s when, despite not having moved my bowels for days, I lose my proverbial shit. Before I even entered the hospital, I was sleep-deprived, and since then I have slept twenty minutes in thirty-six hours. I haven’t pooped, I’m peeing into a bag, I can’t even lift my own baby, my stomach is numb except where it burns, and now I might have to go back into surgery?
The heaving cries start, a few nurses materialize, offer to get a social worker, discuss giving me Xanax (yay!), which is contraindicated for breast-feeding (boo!) and I start having what feels like a bout of PTSD, flashbacks of losing feeling in my legs, of being sliced open, of the struggling for air, of the big old nothing that is supposed to be so routine. Can’t go back. Can’t.
“If you don’t have this meltdown, I’ll rub your feet,” says my husband, in the same tone he now uses with Buster. So I stop and he rubs. Suicide hotlines should consider this tactic.
“You’re just tired,” he adds, massaging, and the nurses take pity on us and offer to babysit for a couple of hours, wheeling the baby in his bassinet out to the nursing station.
There’s a chance the headache is actually a withdrawal symptom from not stepping gradually down off the dolls. The prescription? A large cup of medical-grade coffee that probably costs my insurance company $97, and it works. In your face, Starbucks, you ain’t the most expensive cup of coffee in town. One cure for a symptom caused by another cure.
Between the C-section and the chasing my own tail by treating ills caused by pills treating other ills, I feel this experience turning me against my sweet, sweet drugs and Western medicine in general (which seems unfair, being that a breech baby would likely have ripped me apart without the surgical intervention in the first place. I should consider myself lucky to be enjoying the age of modern obstetrics).
Ironically, after the coffee I sleep, with the baby under the care of a nursing assistant named Delilah, who I’m pretty sure is breaking a rule but is mending my psyche.
After a while, she brings the baby in to nurse. The breast-feeding is constant. At one point I think the baby has peed on me, but the rush of liquid is really just my milk coming in (as opposed to colostrum, the low-volume nutrient moms make first) and spilling out, gushing down my hospital gown. My boobs are engorged, a solid D cup if not bigger now, and hard as bone.
The baby has a little jaundice, nothing serious, but this means more barging and checking.
Buster gets a hearing test, during which he’s hooked up to a computer while wearing little headphones. He is so cute with his headphones, and my husband takes pictures of the whole procedure, including a shot of the computer screen that reads “Pass.”
Every day, a lady comes in wanting the boy’s name for his birth certificate. We got nothing. Everyone said we’d know when we saw him, but all we know is that he is not an Edward, a James, a Finn, a Mickey or a Shane.
My dad keeps us company, blathering on about everything from holes in the 49ers’ defense to his new part-time job tutoring kids, and the various challenging students he is attempting to teach math. He’s going on and on and my husband does something he never does. He cuts off someone who is speaking.
“What did you say that kid’s name was?”
“Huh?” says my dad. “Oh. Nathaniel. Anyway, Nathaniel was upset that he couldn’t figure out his times tables, so what I did was I—”
“That’s it. Nathaniel. Nathaniel James. That’s the name,” announces my husband.
Yes.
It’s not too common and it’s not too weird. And it suits him. Little Nathaniel.
We arrived as two people with a Frank Breech fetus called Buster and we are leaving as the parents of a boy named Nathaniel James, born seven pounds, seven ounces.
Despite the strain of constant tests and medications, we have fallen in love with our nursing staff. They help the baby latch, they know how to swaddle, they reassure us when he makes a funny sound, and they burp him with ease and confidence. We are terrified to leave and don’t feel ready, and we stay there until literally the last minute of our allotted four days has passed. We put the baby in his best outfit, a gift from my girlfriend Lynette, tiny white pants and a blue-and-white-striped kimono top with matching hat. We pack up the bag of time-fillers we thought we would need, a bag that was never even unzipped, filled with a deck of cards, a game of Boggle and a stack of brand-new books. They wheel me out toward the front door.
Legally, they have to wheel you out, but in my case, it’s not just for show. I’m still not walking very well. My husband leaves me with the baby while he pulls the car around and I’m alone with Nathaniel for the first time. There’s a four-day-old baby in a hat in my lap.
We get him into his car seat and I sit in the backseat beside him, holding up his tiny noggin as we drive home. With every bump in the road, my tender insides are screaming, and so is the baby.
Daniel is driving with the approximate speed and deliberateness of a stoner passing a police station, and my Gandhi of a husband has greeted fatherhood with a strange bout of road rage. “What are you doing, motherfucker? I need you to
move the fuck out of my lane
.” He’s in charge of our family now, the only one with full faculties, and Daddy has to get us the fuck home.
twenty-five
Day One: The Infinite Pint
I
t’s my first day out of the hospital and I’m feeling pretty wrecked.