Weekends at Bellevue (22 page)

M
onday, May 15, 2000. I leave Bellevue to head to the Upper West Side for an appointment with my midwife; I am thirty-seven weeks pregnant, but the baby’s head has already dropped into position. I never thought I’d complain so much about having a head between my legs.

Later that same day, while reading a
New Yorker
in Mary’s waiting room, I have some cramps and my underwear becomes wet. I get very excited, believing this to signify the onset of labor. I leave Mary’s office before our hour is up, too excited to sit still. Jeremy is in Indianapolis on business, taking pictures of various tourist destinations in the city for an ad campaign. I call his hotel to let him know what’s going on. “I’ll check the flight schedule,” he promises.

For the rest of the day I feel only cramping that is irregular and mild. Still, I stop by the birthing center for a quick exam. The midwife on duty confirms that I have lost my mucous plug and warns me that there may not be much time between my water breaking and the delivery because the head is so low. She agrees that I’m in early labor but can’t say how soon I will deliver.

“My husband is away on business,” I say. “He’s shooting a baby elephant at a zoo tomorrow.”

“Shooting?” she asks.

“Photographing,” I explain.

The rhythm of our speech resonates with something in my psyche.
Then, like a bomb exploding in my face, I have a flashback of the assault that happened years ago.
“Feigning?” he asks. “Faking,” I explain
. And then the fist.

I call Jeremy during the cab ride home and give him an update. He decides to fly back early the next morning, skipping the baby elephant. Once home, I follow the midwife’s advice for stalling labor and pour myself a couple of fingers of Bushmills. Lying in bed, I worry about all the things that can go wrong with my baby. Most pregnant woman fear birth defects; I fear schizophrenia. I know how fragile the brain is. My child will be fine until turning eighteen or so, and then everything will slowly unravel, and I’ll be powerless to stop it.

The next day, Tuesday, I cancel all my plans for the week, including my private practice patients on Friday. I put my friend Kate, a veteran of two home births, on standby in case Jeremy doesn’t make it home in time. I am all set to deliver. Only nothing really happens after that. Jeremy lands around noon and things have quieted down with my pelvis.

“Those contractions sound like classic Braxton-Hicks to me,” Joan tells me when I call her to check in. “You’re not in labor at all. It still could be weeks until you deliver.”

This is unacceptable to me. I ask her about ways to help speed labor along. “Listen, Julie, I’m not going to advise you on how to induce labor. You’re only thirty-eight weeks. The longer you can gestate, the better for the baby.”

I know she’s right, but I am discouraged. I talk to Kate who tells me that childbirth is like a ride; I can’t drive it. I have to let go and allow my body to be in charge.

A week goes by. I speak to everyone I have ever known on the phone. I cook and freeze enough food to last us a month. I work incessantly on a book I’m editing about the drug Ecstasy, and have long meetings on the phone with the editor in Vermont. Tonight there’s a party at Grand Central Station celebrating the 150th anniversary of
Harper’s Magazine
. We know it is our last chance to go out as a childless couple, and we are glad, for once, that the baby hasn’t yet arrived.

At the party is Spalding Gray, an actor who performs wonderful monologues off-Broadway and in films. I am a fan who has become a friend. When I met him at an earlier
Harper’s
party, I was too shy to
speak to him for very long, but I did manage to ask him to blurb my Ecstasy book, and he graciously agreed. After that, I ended up spending most of my time talking to his wife, Kathie, who was vivacious and garrulous. Over the years, we have become friends. She is with him on the dance floor now, and we go out to join them. Spalding is pretty spazzy and entertaining when he dances, and I laugh a lot while trying to keep up. I feel as if I am shaking the baby down, helping it to drop into place with every shimmy.

The next morning I have another appointment with the midwife. I go home and have some mild cramping which intensifies later in the day. When my water breaks, I immediately call Joan, who says, “Okay, call me back when your contractions are four minutes apart. Wait until the contractions last a full minute and are so intense you can’t do anything during one. Make sure you’re hydrated. Check back in with me around six o’clock.”

It is two-thirty in the afternoon. I call Jeremy and my mother, then I figure I’d better grab a shower before we go to the birthing center. During the shower I have four contractions. As I towel off, I have yet another contraction.

How long was my shower if I’ve had five contractions? Even if it was a twenty-minute shower, they’re four minutes apart, and I wasn’t in there that long. I start to take notes, recording the time and length of each contraction. By three-fifteen, I realize they are coming every ninety seconds or so, and consistently last thirty-five to forty seconds. They are picking up in intensity, so I decide to call Joan again.

Since she just heard from me less than an hour ago, Joan thinks it’s still early in my labor. She is very focused on the fact that my contractions are not lasting a full minute. “Lie down and do your hypno-birthing exercises and relax for a little while.”

“Joan, I need to be where you are. I’ll relax once I’m at the birthing center. These contractions are coming fast, and they’re intense, and I would feel much more comfortable if I could labor at the hospital instead of at my apartment. I’d feel better getting into a trance there instead of here.”

She is still resistant, challenging me. “Isn’t the whole point of doing hypnosis that you can relax anywhere?” But I am not to be dissuaded. Reluctantly she tells me, “Look, if you really want to come in, you can,
because there’s nothing much happening here at the center. If you’re only two centimeters, I’ll send you down the street to see a movie.”

“If I’m only two centimeters when I get there, you can send me home,” I tell her.

When I get off the phone, I stand staring for a moment, replaying the conversation in my mind. She is acting like me, the way I do at the hospital. She’s being tough and defiant, downplaying my experience, and I am cast in a different role, the one where I have to defend my symptoms, and I have no power. I still have to convince Jeremy, who’s home by now but wants to believe the midwife—the professional. She knows her job, and if she’s telling me it’s too early to come in, then maybe it is.

“We need to go
now!”
I tell him.

We finish packing our bags and head down to the street to find a cab. It is three-thirty in the afternoon, the Thursday before Memorial Day, and the traffic is heavy on Ninety-sixth Street. I lean against a parking meter and then a fire hydrant during my contractions. When they hit, I am doubled over in pain. They have a crescendo to them, and a long plateau. Then, just as I feel I can’t take it another second, they subside, and I can straighten up and walk.

Two Caribbean women walk by, pointing me out in their lilting island accents, “She look like she ready to drop.” They see me hunched over and ask if I need any help, telling me I should take an ambulance, not a cab, to the hospital.

“I’m fine between the contractions,” I say to them, and they smile and nod vigorously with understanding. I am about to join their club. Millions of women have done what I am now doing. I’m being hazed into a sorority, the League of Women Birthers.

The cab ride to the hospital takes around fifteen minutes, and I have at least five contractions as we careen down Fifth Avenue. Each one is getting more intense, coming on the heels of the previous one, and I am getting more irritable.

At the entrance to the hospital, I have to stop in the middle of the lobby before the security guard’s station, because I am having another huge contraction and am paralyzed. A young nurse shows us to a birthing room. I walk in and start to take off my shoes, my watch, my clothes. I need to be naked, and I can’t stand still. I alternate between shifting
my weight from leg to leg and shaking out each leg in succession. I am the size of a manatee, but I can still do a great shimmy.

“Relax,” the nurse tells me. “You’re too tense,” she says while massaging my shoulders and neck.
I’m a teepee, I’m a wigwam
, I think to myself, the oldest joke I know. My shoulders are bunched up toward my ears, it’s true, but I am experiencing a vice gripping my pelvis, and I’ve had no success unwinding so far. All the hypno-birthing preparation and the reading about relaxing through the contractions has been wasted on me. It’s just not possible.

Joan comes in to examine me, and she is wearing scrubs. “Okay, let’s stop playing around now,” she says. I have no idea what she’s talking about. “You’re eight centimeters.”

Those three lovely words. “So you wanna send me to a movie now?” I ask her, a tad angry, but trying to keep it light. She is in the scrubs, and I am naked. Clearly I need to subordinate myself to her and to the process at hand.

And right there, in the birthing center of Saint Luke’s Hospital, I have a medium-sized epiphany that has nothing to do with labor and delivery. She didn’t believe me when I called her. My clinician has failed me, and it hurt. Finally I realize, like never before, that I absolutely need to listen to my patients better, to be more open to believing their side of the story, trust that they need my care, and not always assume that I know more than they do. Just because I’m in a position of power does not mean I have to wield it, creating an impenetrable fortress.

Needless to say, I can’t dwell on this revelation. I am already feeling an urge to push, and I ask her if it’s okay.

“Do what your body tells you,” she coos.

With the contractions, I sneak in a squeeze here and there, a way to push against the pain.

“Let the baby come down,” she whispers.

I move around on the bed, but I can’t get comfortable. No position brings any kind of relief. The nurse wipes a cold compress on my head every once in a while and I keep thanking her, because it feels so good.

I have only put in a few pushes, sometimes waiting out a contraction or two before I push again, and already Joan is telling Jeremy to look so he can see the head.

“Camera,” I wheeze, and my photographer husband obliges.

It takes me a while to get better at pushing. It is exhausting, and it hurts, and I have a strong instinct to avoid doing something that both requires energy and brings me enormous pain.

“Charley horse!” I groan, as my left thigh seizes up, hard and tight. It distracts me entirely from my all-consuming task, forcing another person out of my body. The nurse massages my thigh expertly as the pain subsides.

“I don’t want to tear,” I remind Joan.

“Just don’t push if you feel a burning,” she replies.

After a few more pushes, it burns, and I tell her so.

“Wait. Breathe. Don’t push.”

I wait. I pant, just like they do in the movies. Pretty soon I can’t not push. I have to push, the way I would have to breathe if I held my breath. There is a white hot ring of fire between my legs and I need to extinguish it. Joan tells me to go ahead and push, even though it is burning. And then I feel myself tear. It is unmistakable—a separate, serrated layer of fire-engine red pain on top of the white-hot searing pain.

“I’m tearing, aren’t I?” I ask her, unable to conceal the panic in my voice.

“Yes,” she answers matter-of-factly. She tells me where, and I ask her a few questions, slipping into doctor mode for just a minute, to make sure all the important parts are still intact. She assures me they are.

“What do I do?” I ask her.

“Push!” she answers.

The head is out. I can see it between my legs as Joan tells me to stop pushing for a minute. I pant again, glad for the respite as she suctions the baby’s mouth. But I know from my obstetrics rotations in medical school that the shoulders are the killers, the widest part of the baby. I start pushing again and, sure enough, the pain becomes even more intense. “Joan, I don’t care what you have to do, just get this thing out of me!” I am yelling, panicking, on the edge of something, tipping, falling.

And then the baby is out, slippery, bluish, covered in mucus, blood, and creamy white vernix.

“It’s a girl!” Joan announces.

I had forgotten that we didn’t know the sex of the baby, or even that we get to find out; it had been obscured by the pain. A girl. It’s what we both wanted. I break into a wide grin as I meet Jeremy’s eyes.

Onto my chest is placed my baby girl, all purple and cheesy and slimy and warm, with her eyes wide open.

Jeremy cuts the cord once it stops pulsating. After Joan is done sewing, I can finally sit up and relax with my baby girl.

Later, as I unpack my overnight bag, Jeremy and I have a good laugh at all I had stowed in the bag to occupy our time during the labor: scented candles, massage oil, relaxation tapes. Molly, my lovely, perfect, beautiful new daughter, took all of forty-five minutes to come into the world from the moment we walked into the hospital.

I
take three months off for maternity leave, and we spend part of the summer on Cape Cod. When I return to the city, I stop by Daniel’s apartment, one block from my own, to show off my new baby. When she starts fussing and I begin to nurse her, I am surprised by Daniel’s blush as he turns away. Any dirty jokes we may have shared over the years as I pretended to be one of the guys are now completely off-limits. I have become a mother in his eyes, and if there’s one thing I know about Daniel, he reveres his mother.

I start back up at work in September, delighted to see how Lucy’s cancer has responded to a new medication called Herceptin. It puts her into a remission of sorts, and so she continues to come to work nearly every day. I get the feeling that she is pulling back from our friendship, though, and I take her cue. As the months go by, I work my weekends, see her briefly on Monday mornings, and pull back as well. With a new baby at home, it’s easy to lose touch. Too easy. And too convenient an excuse not to do something that is painful for me.