House Of Laughter Begins

Well, it’s been a week and three days since things became very interesting. I have tried to write several times, but ended up dozing off to sleep or had this very small person crying in my ear.

One bit of housekeeping before I begin. I will still periodically send out e-mail updates on the status of our nuclear family, although not with the frequency of the pre-birth updates. If you would like to opt out, or add an e-mail address to the list at any time, please let me know.

Also, I will occasionally send out small digital pictures to the names on this list. If you would like to be excluded from any photos in e-mail, please let me know. My computer is very slow, so the pictures won’t be very large or frequent.

With that taken care of, I present the beginning of a new chapter.

4:30 a.m. the alarm goes off. I’d been asleep for about three hours. Nancy and I went out to dinner with Marnie and Daniel the night before, had ice cream afterwards, and tried to watch some comedy movie. The movie didn’t do much for me, so I laid in bed for an hour doing a crossword puzzle until I fell asleep. I don’t know what time Nancy came to bed.

4:30 is really early in the morning by the way, and I’m not much of a morning person. I got a quick shower, and we hopped in the car to go to the hospital. We had two errands we had to run on the way to the hospital. First, we had to return the DVD from the night before to the video store. Second, we had to put some sort variation on the theme of biscuit, egg, sausage, and coffee in my belly.

Biscuitville is not open at 5:00 in the morning. I was so pissed about that, that I missed the video store, had to turn around in the hospital parking lot, and go back to return the DVD. I was now hungry, tired and frustrated, and we hadn’t even gotten into the hospital. We found out that Hardees and IHOP are also closed at 5:00 in the morning. Nancy urged me to go back to Bi-Lo or find a gas station and buy some donuts, but at this point I was ready to get the show on the road.

We parked at Women’s hospital and carried our luggage into maternity admissions. It reminded me of going to an airport for an early flight. We were tired, we knew we were going to have a long trip ahead of us, but be happy when we finally arrived. There was only one other couple in the waiting room when we arrived. CNN was playing on a TV quietly in the corner. I pushed hunger and tiredness out of my head to try and savor the moment. Nancy and I joked a bit while we waited.

The nurse finally called for us and a second couple. The female half of the second couple was clearly not as comfortable as Nancy was. I bet the other husband that my wife would deliver faster than his wife. The nurse led us back to our room and told Nancy to undress and get in bed. The room was larger than a typical hospital room. It had a rocking chair and a couch that converted into an uncomfortable bed. There were a few foreign pieces of medical equipment around, and a computer monitor that
would keep an eye on contractions, hear rates, blood pressures and such.

By 6:00 they hooked Nancy up to the machine that goes “Ping” and started her IV. The medicine she got was called Pitocin (Pit-OH-sin). The computer showed regular contractions even before the medicine was introduced.

Then we waited.

By 8:00 the contractions were regular. About four every seven minutes. Nancy couldn’t feel any of it though. It isn’t that she got any drugs, she’s just Wonder Woman. Our doctor came in and broke the water. This is the point of no return. When the water breaks, you have 24 hours to deliver a baby. Nancy still felt nothing.

During this time, our friend Carrie (sorry if I spelled it wrong)stopped by and visited and was pretty much amazed that Nancy was not feeling anything. She was doing word searches and reading. Daytime TV is pretty awful, so we ended up listening to N.P.R, and bluegrass c.d.s.

Around 1:00, Marnie and Daniel brought me some lunch. Mmmmm Cuban sandwich from Roly Poly. Around this time, Nancy was starting to feel a little uncomfortable. I got into bed with her around 2:00 and napped for about an hour. By three, she was miserable. I asked her if she wanted some pain medicine, and Nancy said calmly, “I may ask the nurse for a little something the next time she stops in.”

Nancy would have made an excellent Spartan. I immediately called the desk and said, it’s time to call for some pain meds. I knew if Nancy was asking for relief, it had to be pretty bad. The nurse came in and decided Nancy needed the epidural and put in a page to anesthesia. There was a high census at the hospital, so it would be about an hour. The longest hour in the history of creation.

Continued tomorrow