Dude of the House: Get Ready to Rumble

Monday, November 7, 2011

Get Ready to Rumble

Marathon + Childbirth = Loco

In honor of the Little Dude’s 2^nd birthday, I’ve been thinking a lot about the day he was born. In movies you always see immaculately dressed women’s water breaking in the middle of the street. Maybe you heard the recent story about the woman who ran the Chicago Marathon and then a few hours later delivered a baby girl. Our story was not hugely exciting like those ones. Actually it was sort of boring. Relatively.

Because BC had been breach for much of his gestation we scheduled a C-Section in advance. And because we lived 20 miles from the hospital (long story) we scheduled it for a Saturday morning so we could hopefully avoid insane LA traffic. I already told you about my biggest fear related to the pregnancy in "A Sticky Situation". Even I think it’s pretty sad that my 2^nd biggest fear in regard to the birth was that my wife’s water would break and we’d have to fight traffic on the 405 to get to Santa Monica at 5:00pm on a Friday.

Little Dude ~ 20 weeks in utero. Looks cozy.

Fortunately that didn’t happen. The whole process was actually pretty painless. For me at least. That’s not to say there weren’t complications. Things actually got pretty scary for a few minutes in the operating room. They told us the whole surgery would take 10 minutes, but it seemed to be going much longer. I thought I was imagining it, like how anticipation makes a short drive somewhere seem like it’s taking an hour. But then I checked my watch and it actually was taking a while. I heard the doctors conferring and they sounded concerned so I got concerned. So I did something really dumb. I looked over the barrier drape they put up so that you won’t look at what they are doing. Bleccccccchhhhhhh. After all the ultrasounds we’d had over the prior 9 months I thought I knew what my wife’s insides looked like. Boy, was I wrong! I’m not going to get too graphic but now I know to respect the drape and keep my eyes off the prize. And the intestines on the table.

The complication was nothing big. It turned out that BC’s umbilical cord was only about 12 inches long and normally it’s double or triple that length. I hope that’s not a sign of things to come for him. Anyway, the doctor was having trouble getting enough leverage to remove the Little Dude from his cozy sac of a home. I soon learned why the doctor was covered head to toe in saran wrap before entering the OR.

As I said earlier, when people give birth in movies it’s always way over-exaggerated. There was one thing that you see in movies that I actually wanted to do. In movies the father always gets to announce the baby’s gender. We had waited 39 weeks to find out the baby’s sex and I wanted to be the first to know. Or at least one of the first two. Nope. That was squelched when the anesthesiologist had to open her big yapper and say “oh, he’s perfect” after the OB had finished playing tug of war with my wife’s uterus. Of course the anesthesiologist was the person who made sure my wife didn’t feel anything that happened that day so I couldn’t completely despise her. But I was pissed. Of the 7 or 8 people in the room, I was 7^th or 8^th to find out.

Once everything was OK the nurses let me cut the umbilical cord, have a photo op with the Little Dude and take him over to my wife so she could see the fruits of her labor, sans labor. The end result was that my wife did an amazing job of laying on the table and we suddenly had a beautiful baby boy. Everything went smoothly, we eventually picked a name and now two years later we have a toddler. I can’t imagine life without him, nor can I really remember life before him: BC, BC if you will.