by Lauren Sams
Almut shrugged, which she could do – it wasn’t her body that was literally tearing itself apart. ‘Sometimes we have one, sometimes we have three or four. Anaesthetists are very expensive, you know.’
Oh really, Almut? I wanted to scream at her. Like I could care less that a man who has the knowledge and necessary resources to take my pain away isn’t cheap. At this point, I would have sold Lucas to fund my little trip down Epidural Lane.
‘Just lie down on the bed and try to relax,’ Almut said, with all the warmth of a dead fish.
I hobbled over to the bed as best I could.
The room was huge. All I could think was: at least forty anaesthetists could fit in here. At least.
I held on to the bed as another contraction roared through me. I remembered crazy Jana from the calm-birth class talking about ‘letting the pain wash through you’, but I was having none of it. The contractions didn’t wash, they crashed onto me like I was being tackled by an invisible force that clearly hated women.
I breathed out a sigh of relief as the contraction passed. It had felt like ten minutes had gone by while I was in the grip of the pain, but when I looked up at the clock opposite the bed, it had only been sixty seconds or so.
How long would this last? An hour? Two?
Almut strolled back in – ambled, really – with the urgency of a sloth. ‘The anaesthetist has been called.’ She started feeding paper through a machine near the bed like she was fixing the photocopier. Nothin’ to see here, folks.
‘Great, great. When will he be here? Quite soon?’ I said, between deep gulping breaths of air.
Almut nodded.
‘Where’s my friend? My friend. Ellie. Do you know where she is?’
‘She told me to tell you that she has gone home to wait for her husband.’
‘Ellie’s gone?’
Almut nodded.
‘How long will she be?’ I needed someone here with me.
Almut shrugged.
‘Did she say anything about another friend? Nina? She’s –’ Another contraction pulled at my insides and silenced me. Fucking fuck fuck fucksticks, where is that fucking anaesthetist? In a few minutes the pain would be too much to bear and I wouldn’t be able to say the word ‘anaesthetist’, let alone ask for one to come visit me.
‘Yes. She will be here soon.’ It was like she was on a word diet.
‘Can you please,’ – deep breath – ‘please call Nina? My birth partner. She should be here by now. I need to make sure she’s coming.’
Almut nodded and went back to her machine.
I was clearly in an alternate universe, I decided. A strange place where pregnancy wasn’t seen as a medical condition and birth was nothing to concern oneself about, even if that oneself was, well, about to give birth.
‘Almut?’
She glanced over at me, one eye still firmly on her great hulking machine, which was now making beeping sounds that threatened to send me over the crazy cliff.
‘Almut, can you please give me something for the pain? Please?’
I clutched at my stomach and tried to lift myself onto the bed.
Almut shook her head furiously.
‘No, no! You wait for me to get on the bed. I will help you,’ she shouted.
I couldn’t quite bring myself to apologise to this woman who had blatantly ignored my plea for pain relief, so I just nodded. She came to me and gently lifted my legs like they were the approximate weight of pipe cleaners and set me down on the bed. Immediately, I felt the pressure on my back bear into my whole body. I sprang up, as fast as one can spring up when one is carrying another human around with them and currently birthing said human.
Almut was not impressed. ‘Sit! You must sit! It is too dangerous!’
‘I can’t sit! It hurts too much! Stop telling me what to do and get the anaesthetist!’
Almut’s eyes widened ever so briefly. A change flickered across her face and her features seemed to soften. ‘Georgie,’ she said, calmly, ‘you will have to do this by yourself for now. The anaesthetist will be here as soon as he can, but until then you will have to do this yourself.’
She stared directly into my eyes. She had hazel eyes with dark flecks of brown dotted around her irises, and faint lines at the corners. She was pretty, in a sort of late-’80s-German-gymnast way.
‘George,’ she said, close to a whisper now, ‘I know you can do this. You will be OK. I am right here.’
And then she went straight back to her precious bloody machine.
More and more contractions came and went, and eventually I couldn’t stop myself from crying. I was desperate from the pain now. It was all over my body, in places I hadn’t expected to feel it. My legs were deadened with the burden of it, my back burnt with the intensity. I tried to watch the clock to see how long it had been but I kept losing track. It didn’t matter anyway. It wasn’t over, so it didn’t matter how long it had been.
Tears fell and fell and fell … and then suddenly, there he was. The anaesthetist. My knight in a shining white coat.
In that moment, this bald, bespectacled gent was the best-damn-looking man I’d ever seen. He would take my pain away. I loved him. I felt like we could get married and be very, very happy together.
I had, as they say in the classics, totally lost my shit.
There was a lot of document-signing and rights-waiving and the like, all of which I agreed to like it was cake for dinner (yes, yes, yes, stop talking, just give it to me) and then finally, the anaesthetist, obviously imagining I had nerves of steel and similarly fashioned balls, told me to keep ‘perfectly, perfectly still’ as he administered the epidural.
‘Why?’ I asked, suddenly terrified.
‘If you don’t, the needle can slip, and that’s bad news,’ he said in a measured voice. Like it was nothing. Like a needle that ‘slipped’ and ‘missed’ my spine wouldn’t scare the hospital gown off me.
‘OK,’ I managed to whisper, my chin wavering with fear. I gripped the bed tightly and flinched when I felt his cold hand meet my back.
‘Calm down, Georgie.’
I nodded.
‘Stop tensing up. You have to remain very calm and very still.’
How exactly is that possible, when you are holding a rather large needle at the base of my spine and I am having contractions that spasm my body every three minutes? I took a long deep breath and focused on Almut’s hands, still fiddling with the machine. She had a turquoise ring on her right hand, which seemed very Byron Bay for a German gymnast. It was pear-shaped, on a pewter band. I imagined Almut as a young backpacker, making a living from … picking fruit? … in Byron, stopping to buy herself a pretty souvenir one afternoon.
‘OK, that’s done,’ said the anaesthetist.
‘What? Really?’ I hadn’t even felt it.
‘Yep. You’re done. Should start to feel it in about ten minutes, I reckon.’
Suddenly, when he was done wielding scary medical instruments in sensitive places, my knight had become an ocker Aussie bloke.
‘Thank you,’ I whispered, breathing a dramatic (even by my standards) sigh and letting myself fall back on the bed before remembering how much it bloody hurt.
‘How many centimetres, Al?’ he called out, like the width of my vagina should be public knowledge.
She shrugged. ‘It was only six centimetres when she came in. That was, uh, half an hour ago – I don’t think it would have changed too much.’
‘Six centimetres, ay? You’ll be right, love. Got a ways to go still.’
‘How much longer?’
He shook his head. ‘Couldn’t say for sure, I’m no expert. But you’re in good hands. Al here is one of the best. Couldn’t ask for better, in my opinion.’
I was finding that increasingly hard to believe. Save for her ESPN-documentary-style pep talk, Almut had all but ignored me since we’d met. My knight left – not before telling me to ‘give it your bloody all, love’ – and I felt the beautiful, blissful, paralysing epidural flood my body
with relief. It was a miracle.
Free of the pain, I lay down on the surprisingly comfortable hospital bed and found my phone. I had ten texts and seven missed calls. The calls were from Ellie, then Nina, and the last five were from Mum. Her landline, obviously.
From: Ellie
Simon coming home from
work now. Dropping Lucas
off with him. Will be there
soon. Hang on xxx
From: Simon
Heard the news, George!
You’ll be great. Don’t worry!
Ellie will be with you soon.
From: Nina
Be there ASAP. Text me if
you need anything. Love
you love you love you.
From: Colin
Hi Georgie. Just wondering
if I got the time wrong. Or if
you’re just standing me up.
Er, either way, let me know!
From: Jase
George, Ellie just rang. I’ll be there
as soon as I can. You can do this.
From: Colin
No worries, Georgie. I think
I may have seen something
between us that perhaps
wasn’t there for you. Best
of luck with it all. Colin
From: Ellie
On my way. There’s been a
bit of an emergency but no
need to worry. All OK.
An emergency? What was going on? I closed my eyes and told myself to be strong, like Nina. Knowing Ellie, the ‘emergency’ was that Lucas had watched more than his government-approved ten minutes of television that day.
Still, her last text was from an hour ago. How had an hour gone by? And where was she, if she’d left her house an hour ago? It took – even in spectacularly bad traffic – less than twenty minutes from Ellie’s place to the hospital.
My head felt like a Venn diagram, with all these conversations overlapping one another. I felt dizzy trying to take it all in. Colin thought I had stood him up: bad. Jason was coming: good. I wanted him here for this. He was a good guy – the very definition of a good guy. He deserved to be a dad, and to do all the amazing dad things that came with the territory.
I replied to Colin.
Colin, I’m so sorry. I’m in labour!
A pretty good excuse, I think, for
missing a first date. Sorry again.
I’ll make it up to you. George x
To Jase:
Thank you. Nobody
here yet. Please come
quickly, need you. G x
I settled back against the pillows, relieved that Ellie and Nina would soon be here. And Jase. I had known I’d need Nina here, but I was surprised to be wanting Ellie, too. Regardless of our fight, I knew she’d be just the right mix of bossy and understanding when it came to the process of human baby extraction. I closed my eyes and must have drifted off, because when I woke, the lights had dimmed and the clock read 9 pm. What time did I get here? And where the hell was everyone?
The door burst open. Nina! Finally.
No.
‘Hello, hello … who do we have here?’
I felt my breathing quicken. It couldn’t be. It wasn’t. Oh fuck, it was. Tim Kane?!
‘Hi, Tim,’ I said, pulling my hospital sheet up to my neck in a mostly redundant display of modesty.
‘Having a baby, are you?’ he asked, walking into the room and surveying the machine Almut had been fiddling with all afternoon, instead of helping me.
No, Tim, I’m just here having a little rest. Getting away from it all, you know?
‘Yes,’ I said, through gritted teeth.
‘Alright, let’s have a look up here then,’ he said, ready to lift up my sheet.
‘No!’ I yelled. ‘No, no. No.’ I shook my head, mouth agape and eyes wider than my dilated cervix.
Tim raised his eyebrows. ‘Something wrong?’
‘I don’t want you … I don’t want you down there. OK?’
He looked at his clipboard, then back to me, tut-tutting.
In labour. He was tut-tutting me in labour.
This man could not be more repellent if he had scales for skin.
‘I’m your doctor, Georgie.’
‘What? Aren’t you, like, a brain surgeon or something? Go remove a tumour and leave the real work to someone else, please Tim.’
He smiled indulgently, like he was about to pat me on the head.
I may have stopped years ago, but I hoped my intermittent viewing of Billy Blanks’ Tae Bo DVDs had left me with the reflexes of a very young, street-savvy cat.
‘Nope. Always been an OB. Money’s in obstetrics. And, uh, you know, so’s the miracle of life.’
I rolled my eyes. ‘Please let someone else do this. Please. I can’t have a baby with you, Tim.’
He threw up his hands, dumbfounded. ‘Georgie, I thought we were friends!’
Even stone-cold Almut had tuned in at this point, and, while pretending to be engrossed in her charts, was listening to every word.
I shook my head. ‘No, Tim, no. We are not friends. You are constantly a dick to me. You never remember who I am, you always say the most insensitive things and you are so far up yourself, you could administer your own enemas.’
He cocked his head to one side, patronisingly. ‘Is this your way of asking for an enema? Cos we don’t really do that anymore, Georgie.’
‘No! Get out of here! I don’t want you delivering my baby. And where is Nina?’ I said, turning to Almut, who immediately put her head down like she hadn’t been listening and shrugged, walking out the door.
‘Nina, hey? Is she alright?’
‘Yes. I mean, she and Matt are taking some time apart, but … yeah, she’s fine. Anyway, Tim, please. I am begging you. Please find me another doctor. Please.’
I used my best begging eyes, the ones I used at Ruby’s when they told me they were ‘out of blueberry muffins’. But something shifted in Tim’s eyes.
‘No, I mean … shit, you don’t know. I, uh … I just saw on Facebook. Ellie wrote something about her accident.’
‘What?’
He shook his head and started to back away. ‘Uh, shit.’ He wiped his brow. ‘Shit, I shouldn’t have said anything. Look, it didn’t sound bad. They were taking her to the hospital. She’s probably upstairs now. Look, don’t worry about it.’
‘Who? Who’s upstairs now?’ As I said it, the pain started to come back.
‘Nina,’ said Tim, his voice uncharacteristically soft and serious.
‘What happened to her? Please tell me. Please.’
But he shook his head and the next thing I knew, he was gone. Fucking Tim Kane.
The pain was definitely there now, in my back again and spreading down my legs. It was so intense that I didn’t notice when an alarmingly tall Aboriginal woman stepped in, holding a clipboard in one hand and a Diet Coke in the other. Almut trailed behind.
‘Georgie? Georgie Henderson?’ she asked.
I looked up. ‘Yes?’
‘I’m Dr Gardener. Just call me Rita. I’m going to check your vitals and see how you’re doing, OK?’
‘OK.’ I tried to calm my mind. I closed my eyes. Focus, Georgie, focus. Have the baby. Nina will be OK. Nina will be OK because she is strong. I tried to push away the thought that, her whole life, Nina had been strong for me, and now she needed me to be strong for her and here I was, literally paralysed. When I opened my eyes, Tim was gone.
Rita moved around me calmly and efficiently. She asked Almut brief questions and seemed satisfied with her economic answers. Finally, she asked me to lie back and lift my knees. I laid down and did as Rita said, but my legs, despite burning with pain, were still dull with the epidural.
‘Gee, they’ve given you a good dose. Alright, here we go,’ she said, and lifted my legs over her own shoulders, using them as a ledge. She peered down at my undie-less crotch. I couldn’t feel a thing, but she must have had a good old CSI-worthy in
vestigation because when she surfaced, Rita had news.
‘Well, you’ve done a great job so far, Georgie. You’re ready to push.’
‘I’m sorry, what?’ I was ready to lie back for another couple of hours, maybe finish the book I’d stashed in my handbag on the way out of Ellie’s house. I suddenly felt a flash of panic. What if I never get to finish The Corrections?
Rita smiled, her glossy red lips spreading across her face. ‘It’s time to push. The epidural will wear off pretty soon. Almut, when did Georgie have the epidural?’
Almut checked her notes. ‘Six o’clock,’ she answered, near robotically.
‘Shouldn’t be too much longer now, Georgie,’ said Rita.
‘Wait … why is the epidural wearing off? Don’t I need it?’
Rita tucked her hair behind her ears and smiled. ‘No, you can’t push with an epidural. And we need you to push. We’ve got to get this baby out. Agreed?’
I nodded weakly. ‘Agreed.’
I closed my eyes. Of all the things I had not imagined, this was the absolute limit. About to have a baby with nobody around. Nobody to help. Nobody to hold my hand. Having a baby – that was unimaginable enough. Having a baby alone, without Nina here to help me – I had never given it a single second’s thought. I had always seen us walking into RPA together, me looking frazzled but still chic in jersey pyjama-style pants and a silk tee, Nina commanding the situation like she was Russell Crowe in all those Russell Crowe movies.
‘Rita?’ I asked in a squeakily high voice I didn’t recognise. ‘Is there anyone … is there anyone outside for me?’
She shook her head. ‘No-one I know of.’
‘OK.’ I paused, wishing a contraction away. ‘Um, do you know anything about an accident?’
She gave me that look that Australians give to Americans when they ask us if we know that friend of theirs who lives in Adelaide. ‘Hon, there are lots of accidents going on in this hospital. I need you to focus here, though. When we’re done, I’ll go look for whoever you want me to look for, OK? But right now, I need you here.’
‘Nina. Her name’s Nina.’
Rita nodded. ‘Alright.’
I didn’t know how to steer the ship. I was barely even on the ship, let alone capable of taking the wheel. I looked to the machine Almut had been playing with earlier. It was now attached to me by way of a belt that stretched around my stomach, keeping track of the baby’s heartbeat and my contractions. I felt the now-familiar surge of pain that meant a contraction was nigh. Sure enough, a spike appeared on the paper. Oh god. Help me do this, help me do this.
