After our walk, which included a four lap run around the track, we left for the play and arrived around 8:30, twenty minutes into the show. Soon thereafter I began to feel what I thought might be regular contractions, but I didn’t want to get my hopes up because I’d thought the same thing about six times in the past two weeks and nothing had come of them. But by 10:30 that night, when they were still coming regularly, I decided that I should probably tell Steven. As I was walking up the stairs to our bedroom, I called down to him, “Could you bring your phone?” When he asked, why, as it was a weekend and we don’t usually set the alarm on weekends (we don’t have any clocks in our house), I explained that he might need it to start timing contractions. The excitement in his voice when he replied made me smile.
For the next few hours we stayed up watching “Office” episodes and timing contractions that were coming about 10 minutes apart. Knowing that we wouldn’t be going anywhere until they were less than four minutes apart, we finally called it quits around 1:00 a.m. and went to sleep.
When I woke up the next morning, the contractions were still there, regular, but not at all painful. As we timed, we found that they were four minutes apart, three minutes apart and then two minutes apart. I still wasn’t sure that this was real because there wasn’t any pain and I had been expecting pain. I called my parents and asked my mom her opinion. She said that she didn’t remember feeling any pain until she went to the hospital, so we decided that it must be the real thing. Then as I watched, my normally calm, laid back husband because to run around the house making sure we had everything, insisting that we should be leaving – right then – to the hospital. I still wasn’t in any pain and wasn’t in any rush to get to the hospital, but he convinced me that two minutes apart was too close to keep waiting at home, so I got myself ready to go and we both called our parents to let us know that their grandchild was on the way.
Because I still wasn’t in any pain and time seemed to be of the essence, we opted to take the motorbike over waiting for a cab, which would take longer if there was any traffic. As we drove, we recorded a quick video to show Hazel later on as her "Ride to the Hospital."
We arrived at the hospital around 7:30 and went straight to the maternity ward on the fifth floor. When we entered the ward, we found five nurses standing around the nurses’ station and no other patients in sight. They all looked at us a bit strangely – or so I thought – so I began to explain that I thought I was in labor and that my contractions were two minutes apart. The nurses all looked at us and then at each other and then one of them looked down at a file down on the desk and said, “Ms. Sharon Patricia Brown?” and I said, “Yes.”
She replied, “That patient is not here yet.”
Confused, I explained, “I am Sharon Brown.”
The nurse looked at the file again and said, “You’re not supposed to be here until Monday” – the date of my second scheduled induction (having been pushed back from Friday at our request).
“Yes,” I agreed, “but that is for a scheduled induction. I think I am in labor now.”
She looked at me again and said, “You were supposed to be here on Friday.”
At this point, I looked at Steven incredulously and asked him if he thought he could deliver our baby.
Finally one of the nurses seemed to figure it out and motioned for us to follow her. We gratefully followed her out of the maternity ward, to the elevator and down to the second floor to Labor and Delivery where we should have gone in the first place. Once I realized my mistake, I understood the 5th floor nurses’ confusion, as women don’t usually go up to the Maternity Ward until after they have their babies, but I still found the whole situation quite comical.
Once in the correct place, we were led into a double room where I was asked to lie down and was hooked up to a machine that monitored the baby’s heartbeat, movement and any labor contractions. The machine immediately began recording a heartbeat and movement, but, to our surprise, no contractions. I laid there for about half an hour and the contractions did come back, but only at the rate of about one per ten minutes and still not at all painful. After another thirty minutes, they were coming a bit more strongly and were accompanied by somewhat of a sharp pain, but were still not more than eight minutes apart. After another thirty minutes, a doctor came in and told us that we could go home. Both the doctor and the midwife told us to come back one they were coming at a rate of three in ten minutes, or otherwise, just come in on Monday for my scheduled induction.
As I was walking out of the room I felt a strong contraction that made me pause in the hallway. Another one came on down in the lobby. By the time the next one came on as we walked out to the parking lot, I voiced my concern to Steven that perhaps it wasn’t the smartest thing for them to send us home. I reminded him that my mother had told me that she had relatively quick labors and that maybe I would be the same. Steven agreed, but also suggested that it might be better for me to labor a bit at home where I was more comfortable and where we could get something to eat and drink and move about. I agreed and we headed home, with a quick stop at the store for a box of pancake mix – after all, I was still pregnant and craving some pancakes.
Because my contractions were now much stronger and all a bit painful, the ride home couldn’t have gone fast enough and once we arrived home, I was even more sure that the hospital, even if just the lobby, was where I should be. I walked back into the back bedroom while Steven called his mom to let her know that we had been sent home. I called my parents and gave them the news as well, hanging up, only to call them back five minutes later to let them know we had decided to go back after only about 30 minutes at home.
Back on the bike, we shot our “Ride to the Hospital Video – Take Two,” as Steven retraced our original route from earlier that morning. Once at the hospital we decided to sit in the lobby for 10 minutes to make sure my contractions were indeed coming three in ten minutes and that the ‘hospital fear’ hadn’t set in and put a stop to them. Eight minutes and three painful contractions later, I was ready to go up.
When we walked back into the Labor and Delivery Ward at 11:30, the midwives seemed a bit surprised to see us, but once she checked my cervix, she saw that I was already dilating and effaced and that my contractions were much stronger and closer together. She brought me a birthing ball and suggested that I sit on it and hold on to the end of the bed, hooked me up to the machine again, and left us alone, telling me to let her know when the pain got worse.
While I labored, Steven went down to pay the bill and arrange for a room. By the time he got back, I asked him to let the midwife know that the pain was worse and that she should come and check. At that point it was about 12:30 and I was 80% effaced and about 3 cm dilated. They had me lay back on the bed and continued to monitor me as the contractions came in increasingly painful waves. When I had planned for this event, I had stressed that I had wanted to do everything naturally – no drugs, no machines, no IV, and no stirrups, but as the contractions came longer and stronger and infinitely more painful, all of my preplanned ideals became less important than getting through the ordeal alive.
I’ll spare you the detailed blow by blow of the culmination of my rather rapid 2 hour labor process, but will say that it included a lot of shameless screaming on my part mostly about the fact that I couldn’t do whatever they were asking me to do: a) breath, b) don’t push, c) push, e) not scream; a room full of Vietnamese woman repeating, “Don’t cry, don’t cry, don’t cry” and “You try, you try, you try;” Steven’s reassuring hand on my arm and voice in my ear counting down the dilation reports and telling me how good I was doing; and a small Vietnamese woman standing on my bed pushing down on my stomach to “help me get the baby out. “ After what was undoubtedly the most painful experience of my rather painless life, Hazel was born at just under 8 pounds.
Our natural birth plan, had also included a ‘post birth’ plan, which specified that we wanted to be with Hazel for the first hour after birth, allow her to breastfeed immediately, etc., but none of that was to be. When she was born she was whisked off to another room to pump the fluid out of her lungs and Steven went with her, leaving me to the continued poking and prodding of my doctor and the midwives who had to stitch me up and do all those other post birth tasks that I was glad I wasn’t privy to, laying down as I was. As much as I wanted to see my daughter, I was still in a bit of a daze from the pain and wanted the doctor to go away and leave me alone and just let me recover.
After about 30 minutes, the doctor was finished and I asked to see Hazel, but was told that she was still being observed and that I could see her in 30 minutes. I then asked if I could get up and go to her, at which point the midwife actually laughed at me. I later wrote it off as a cultural misunderstanding (in a lot of Asian cultures, laughing is a sign of nervousness or other emotion, not at all meant in the mocking tone I took it in), but at the time I wanted to smack her. Half an hour later, when they finally brought her to me – Steven having been with her the whole time by only solace – the midwife came back five minutes later and said that they had to take her down to the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit (NICU). I glared at her and said that I had barely seen her and that she was not taking her and she left us alone for another 10 minutes, at which point she came back and insisted that she had to take her down. Needless to say, not at all the happy family time that I had imagined. But all in all, we had a healthy baby – despite the fluid in her lungs – and I had survived and it was all over. As Steven left to follow Hazel to the NICU, I finally drifted off to sleep.
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