Hello World

It’s a rainy morning on the way to the hospital for Amanda’s induction. We were pleasantly received on arrival by a witty intake nurse even though we were about an hour late, who, when we apologized for such tardiness, quipped “As long as she’s still in there we’ll still take ya!” It seems a lot of inductions get scheduled these days, and even if it’s not scheduled the hospital is typically aware of at least a window of when someone would give birth. An immediate placement into a room with what is borderline concierge service as we get taken to a nice little antepartum room we sit and wait in for the next 26 hours.

Most of my preconceptions regarding giving birth are from pop culture, in which most of the time the pregnant ladies water breaks in the worst situation imaginable, labor starts immediately, and she gets rushed to the hospital emergency room in the nick of time to give birth as the dad concurrently rushes back home from some far away business trip or something and also gets to the hospital either just in the nick of time as the cord needs cut or even better, he rushes into the maternity ward and stops in front of the nursery glass full of children and he so desperately tries to figure out which one is his, until a random nurse comes by he can ask, who points at his baby. As anyone with an actual kid (turns out, a lot of people) would know, it’s (hopefully) not nearly as dramatic.

Some, I presume new, Dad paused his phone conversation to wish me a congratulations I haven’t yet earned when I was bringing additional bags of ours upstairs on my second trip. I said thank you anyway. I never know how else to respond in those situations.

The first night I learned she was pregnant I couldn’t sleep. Now that she’s almost here I’m strangely ambivalent. It might be that I’m on psych meds now (fun ones at least), and rarely feel intense emotional swings these days like I used top. I think I’ve also gotten used to her presence, even just floating inside my wife’s uterus.

Sitting and waiting. Dreadfully boring.

Cafeteria - AI self checkout - didn’t we figure this problem out years ago with barcodes? I’ve been using self checkout for decades without AI at my local grocery store. Why bring more cameras and CPU power usage into this than necessary to scan products that already have barcodes? I understand the need to look cutting edge at a major metropolitan hospital, especially in a well trafficked central area like a cafeteria. Meanwhile back in the hospital antepartum room the TV situation remains as archaic as it was as a child in the 90s. A scrolling TV guide and manual channel input. Even the shittiest of Airbnbs I’ve been in has had a smart TV I can login to plex on.

I opting to read instead. I am in the middle of David Foster Wallace’s essay on David Lynch’s Lost Highway from the collection “A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again”. And I can’t think of anything more Lynchian in real life than having a baby.

Waiting and waiting. We spend the entire time here unsure of every next move after every next step, waiting for hours between each nurse and doctor stopping by. Caught in-between my urge to check on the house, the cats, and my need to stay by Amanda’s side.

I run the needed errands once I realize progress has not been made w/r/t her cervix, and that I’m reaching the point where leaving later than now would be an even worse idea. I feel guilty, but not. It’s likely good I stopped home. I picked up her crosswords, did the cats litter, and discovered a likely clog in the bathroom sink I will have to deal with later. I slam a quick shot of tequila to take the edge off my nerves.

Walking back inside I encounter a much different experience getting back to my pregnant and induced wife than the concierge level service we experienced previously. The original door we first entered is now locked. A remote voice tells me to enter through the emergency department, and for a place with a lot of directional signs this particular route I need to walk lacks them. Of course eventually I access it from the main road, and encounter gruff armed police officers and security guards at the entrance. A little stunned by the days (well, lack of) events, I stand nonplussed, at an authoritative but abandoned lecturn stationed at the automatic sliding glass doors, and I’m unsure if I can proceed without some form of clearance for passage. And the relaxed cop stationed adjacent to but not at it, scrolling away on his phone got seemingly offended by my extended uncertain presence before using the gruff voice that typically accompanies this sort of appearance to ask “Do you need help with something or something?” I nervously explain the case of needing to get to my wife in maternity, and he points out the obvious check-in station right in front of me my fried brain couldn’t comprehend.

My wife has had a stain on the front of her standard issue let-my-ass-breath hospital gown since dinner last night. It reminds me of the way my grandmother would always drop food on her shirt at the dinner table and my pop pop without missing a beat would say “we can’t take you anywhere” and we’d all laugh. Except my wife doesn’t find it funny when I say it at home, so I haven’t said it here. But let the record show I think it’s cute. It makes me wonder what my pop pop was like at my dads birth. And my dad, at mine.

We just got a bit of a spook. Everything is fine right now for now I guess, but there was a weird dip in fetal heart rate and like five docs rushed in. With how uncomfortable my wife was yesterday during contractions she kept moving around losing the fetal heart monitor every now and then. The nurses would come in and fix it, but it didn’t seem like the biggest deal. I guess as soon as they pump you full of narcotics via a spinal tap like IV shit gets more serious, every second seems vital all of a sudden. It’s nice to know they respond so quickly, but it wasn’t nice to have to find out. We went from cruising along with virtually no anomalies and very few worries for nine months, visited once every few hours by a nurse to now suddenly being watched and monitored vigilantly by a team of OBs, with constant check-ins and reassurances by our nurses. I wasn’t worried when no one was telling me “don’t worry, we’re all keeping a close eye on her”. Now It’s all our nurse is saying.

Luckily my wife is quite rational. (It’s only unlucky for me at home, she wins most of the debates.) We knew the risks and different possible outcomes, and thus didn’t create a grand vision of a single one specific birth plan. We were told in our online orientation to absolutely feel free to bring a birth plan, but to also be flexible. So when we were told by our doctors that “we might be thinking about a Caesarian section” after a couple of their attempts to fix the issue didn’t go away we understood we’d need to make a serious decision, and quick. And luckily we both felt comfortable with it, because it was a very short interval between the “maybe” and the “we should really take you now, before this becomes an emergency”.

There must be something in a human brain that allows you to submit when needed. My wife and I both, are total hypochondriacs. We also run anxious, perhaps a little short fused. Oh yeah, medical fears too, out the wazoo. At least for me. You could see it during our antepartum phase at the hospital. Second guessing anything remotely concerning, though perhaps clarifying is the better term. One instance I still regret missing myself in antepartum was when the nurse hooked up a new IV bag, my wife asked about some sudden but significant swelling around the IV site, and more often than not these anxious concerns we have turn out to be “totally normal”. This one was not. My wife’s vein had been infiltrated, and was caught before a whole bag of fluids ran into her arm. It’s hard to place the blame for this incident on this nurse, she was the most thorough and thoughtful nurse we had during our 26 hours in antepartum. She diligently fixed the issue and apologized thoroughly, though it wasn’t even her who ran the line 20 hours ago, and my wife had been writhing around in pain so much during her contractions, who knows how it happened. Yet, here was my wife, faced with the daunting decision and anxiety of an unscheduled, unplanned, very invasive abdominal surgery under local—not general—anasthetic, while 41 weeks pregnant with a child you’ve already done so much to care for, doped to the gills on narcotics. I’m sure the narcotics helped her anxiety, but what else do you do in that situation? If the doctor was not going to give her the pitocin, pushing and natural labor was simply out of the question. You submit. You let go and give absolute strangers who’ve dedicated their professions and much of their life to treating humans, understanding this process, and facilitating this traumatic human bodily function your trust.

I’ve never felt my wife was in safer, better hands than in that of these incredibly knowledgeable women. They listened to her, like really listened to her. And even me, when she was being put back together like some sort of Lynchian Humpty Dumpty and didn’t really want to speak too loud. Our favorite OB doctor from the office that we saw throughout her pregnancy was one of the two doctors performing the procedure. I had said to my wife earlier when I found out she was on the floor that day that I “really hope it’s her that delivers the baby”. I guess I got my wish.

We truly live at the razors edge of medical science. I felt today as if the life of my wife and daughter were saved by the knowledge of the billions of births throughout history that came before her own. What a truly wild time to be alive! I can’t put into words but Gaia, I am trying—how grateful I am for literally all of the women of history, the things they must have sacrificed and gone through over the ages for us to have gotten so far, I don’t want to even consider. Today I witnessed the past informing our present humanity’s understanding of this miraculous and primordial process. As far as we have come, and as much as I admire the technological advances that allowed my wife to be rolled away conscious after such a procedure, I still think those AI-looking self checkouts in the cafeteria downstairs can get bent.

Even though things didn’t quite go according to plan, I’m sitting here with my wife asleep in her mechanical bed sawing the softest of logs with a leg compressor machine humming with air throughout a spaghetti of tubes to prevent her legs from developing blood clots. Her nurse empties her catheter bag and changes the bloody bad underneath her a few times this evening. I’ve never seen my wife in a more vulnerable position, yet the strength and resilience she showed today during one of the most terrifying 3 hours of my own life was nothing short of inspiring. Our daughter is swaddled up in a mobile crib next to her within arms reach. We leave on a rainy Saturday the same way we came in. Now just to get these girls home. They’re my life now all of a sudden, and it’s now changed forever. A new adventure is about to begin for us.

A brand new Chloe Juniper :) entering the world at 1514 on 20260923 at 7lbs 13oz & 19”