by Joanna Coles
Wednesday, 27 January
Joanna
At 8 a.m., the phone goes. It’s Meredith. ‘I was just calling to ask if you’re planning to breastfeed?’ she asks bossily.
‘Meredith, it’s eight o’clock in the morning. Why are you calling so early and more to the point what are you doing up?’ I mutter blearily, knowing she frequently doesn’t surface until midday.
‘Darling, don’t ask,’ she sighs dramatically. ‘But listen, I’ve got to get you the number of this brilliant breast-milk bank.’
‘A what?’
‘Have you met my friend Teddy? You know he and his boyfriend adopted a bi-racial baby last year? Well, listen, they had bottles of frozen breast milk flown in once a week from California.’
‘I think I’m going to feed it myself.’
‘Jo-anna, be honest, how much do you know about breastfeeding, honey? What about engorgement? Cracked nipples? Bleeding nipples? This is a much better way. Just thaw and feed. The baby still gets all the anti-whatevers.’
‘Antibodies.’
‘Huh?’
‘The baby still gets all the antibodies?’
‘Sure. Whatever. Exactly. It’s perfect.’
‘Who does the milk come from?’ I ask.
‘Oh, I don’t know. Mexican peasants probably, but don’t worry, it’s all screened for HIV. The main thing is you’re not tied down, honey. You can still go out and party with me. Let me know if you want the number, OK?’ And she hangs up abruptly.
Thursday, 28 January – 3.30 pm
Peter
Our entire day has been given over to medical probing. At Roosevelt a silent Chinese technician carries out a sonogram to check that the baby is still dunked in sufficient amniotic fluid. Apparently it is. Then on to an appointment with the obstetrician on Central Park West. I stand in the corner of the surgery, facing the wall, pretending to inspect a family-planning calendar while Joanna clambers up onto the examining chair. Each of the stirrups, I notice, has been thoughtfully sleeved in a striped oven glove.
‘If there are still no signs of labour by early next week, we’ll have to perform an intervention,’ says the obstetrician. This, it seems to me, is the language of special forces, up there with surgical strikes. With phrases like operating theatres and theatres of operation, areas of infiltration and target cells, the vocabularies of medicine and war would appear to be converging.
3.30 p.m.
Joanna
‘Great progress,’ exclaims the doctor, peering up the paper skirt the nurse has draped over my lower body. ‘You’re three centimetres dilated!’
‘Thank God,’ I say, relieved that at last something’s happening.
‘Didn’t you feel any contractions?’ she asks. ‘Your cervix is seventy per cent effaced.’
‘Is that good?’ asks Peter doubtfully, looking up from the family-planning leaflet he has been studiously concentrating on throughout the internal.
‘Sure it’s good,’ she says. ‘Last week I was kinda worried because it all looked a bit tight. But something’s moving. And, you know what, if we still need to do it, it will make induction easier.’
Sigrid’s remedies of lavender oil and foot massage notwithstanding, I fear induction because I’ve heard it’s a particularly painful way to start labour.
‘So this is a good sign,’ the doctor continues. ‘But if nothing happens, how about next Wednesday for an induction?’ She reaches for her diary as if we’re planning supper and a movie. ‘How does that sound? We could wait another coupla days until you’re officially two weeks overdue, but the baby’s putting on weight every day and it’s already a big one…’
‘Fine,’ I nod, both apprehensive and reassured at finally having a finishing line by which this marathon will be over.
‘We could bring you in at lunchtime, put you on an IV and get the Pitocin set up. By Thursday you should have a baby.’
4.00 p.m.
Peter
‘Could you tell me something?’ I ask the doctor as we leave. ‘Is there breastfeeding after nipple piercing?’
‘I didn’t notice that your nipples were pierced,’ she says, reappraising Joanna.
‘No, no. They’re not,’ Joanna says quickly. ‘He’s just curious.’
‘Well, yes, there is breastfeeding after nipple piercing,’ the doctor says, looking a little puzzled. ‘Of course, you’d need to take out any, ah, mammarian jewellery.’
Joanna insists that we walk home, hoping that the exercise will help to bring on labour. So we inch along, with me towing her like a blimp behind me. So slow is our pace, in fact, that we are unable to get across Broadway within the span of one flashing green walk sign, and are marooned on the narrow traffic island. We stand there, railed at by the hobos’ convocation that has gathered on the piss-stained bench, and buffeted by the slipstreams of delivery trucks and buses, until the next walk sign frees us.
4.30 p.m.
Joanna
‘Good-oh,’ says Peter, as we lumber slowly back from the surgery up Central Park West, its grand apartment buildings basking like ageing roués in the winter sunshine. ‘Three centimetres, wow. Only seven to go.’
By the time we reach Oppenheimer’s, the butcher’s on 98th and Broadway, I am exhausted and have to sit down on their radiator.
A man comes in with a little girl sitting astride his shoulders. She is eating a Ben and Jerry’s chocolate ice cream, which is dripping slowly on to his greying hair. ‘Yup,’ he says, surveying me, and reaching up to wipe off some of the chocolate with his fingers, which he then licks. ‘You look like you’re just about due.’
I roll my eyes and grimace. ‘Don’t worry, it’s the best thing you’ll ever do,’ he beams, as his daughter absently wipes her own sticky fingers on the neck of his jacket.
We pick up lamb chops and stop next door to buy a bottle of South African red from the sour Chinese vintner at Hong Liquors.
6 p.m.
Peter
When we get home Joanna’s Gymnic ball-bouncing is particularly frantic. She cannot bear the humiliation of having to be induced. To take her mind off things I offer to cook her lamb chops for dinner. But my manoeuvrings in the kitchen are even less successful than usual. I stoop to open the grill, ludicrously placed at floor level, below the oven, and as I pull at its handle to slide it out and inspect the chops, the entire front comes away in my hands and I fall back onto the greasy kitchen floor tiles, sitting heavily among a colony of black roach-bait pods.
8 p.m.
Joanna
Though I still cannot feel any contractions, I do feel odd. The smell of the lamb sizzling under the grill makes me nauseous. But Peter, normally a stranger to the oven, has gone to such trouble, laboriously spiking each chop with individual needles of rosemary, that I feel I must finish mine so as not to hurt his feelings and discourage him from these rare forays into the kitchen. I also knock back two large glasses of red wine very quickly, my first alcohol in months.
9.20 p.m.
Peter
Joanna comes into my study, pale faced. ‘I think I may be having contractions.’ This is not an especially noteworthy remark, however, as she says it most days.
10 p.m.
Joanna
The theme tune to ER has started and I know I am experiencing contractions. But they are not as I expected. They don’t peak and tail off as my pregnancy manuals and Sigrid promised, but rather they peak and then sort of shift sideways into a dull, grinding backache. I spend another twenty minutes on the Gymnic bouncy ball before retreating into a hot shower. Neither remedy reduces the steadily expanding pain.
10.30 p.m.
Peter
Following Sigrid’s instructions I am putting together a final selection of CDs for Joanna to give birth to. She is insisting on including Keith Jarrett’s Köln Concert. But I am worried about Jarrett’s unconventional keyboard antics, whereby he ventilates his piano playing with frequent and urgent porcine grunts of concentration. Might not these
grunts be mistaken by the medical staff for Joanna’s urgent grunts of pain?
11.45 p.m.
Joanna
We have worked through our entire repertoire of supposedly pain-relieving manoeuvres. Sigrid’s ‘doula houla’, where I lean forward on the sofa and Peter grips my pelvis between his knees and squeezes as hard as he can, has no discernible effect. Neither does inhaling lavender oil, another of her suggestions. Nor does spritzing my face with orange water. The hot shower she espoused so vigorously makes me feel more nauseous, as does the hot-water bottle pushed against my back alternated with an ice pack, made by hurriedly stuffing ice cubes into a yellow rubber glove.
At some point, remembering my yoga, I struggle down on to all fours and launch myself into the Angry Cat, exhaling, arching my back, then inhaling and stretching out. When this fails I curl into a Child’s Pose, arms forward, knees splayed, trying to ‘breathe through the pain’.
Nothing helps.
The only thing which brings relief is to take off all my clothes and walk naked round and round and round the apartment, holding my belly and counting. Kitchen, study, bedroom, hall – kitchen, study, bedroom, hall. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight … But my count bears little relation to the length or frequency of the contractions, which begin to fold into one long, swaying pain.
Forty-six, forty-seven, forty-eight, forty-nine … the pain remains. Fifty-one, fifty-two, fifty-three, fifty-four … It is still there, dark and awful, sweeping me up and making me vomit and tremble violently.
‘I’m in labour, I know I’m in labour,’ I groan repeatedly to Peter, who looks stricken.
We ring the doctor’s answering service and leave a message.
11.50 p.m.
Peter
I know it’s too late to pull out of my somewhat accidental role as labour coach, but I do wonder if the presence of men at the birth is really such a good idea. I mean there seems to be an almost universal cultural taboo against it, broken only in the last generation by Western man.
11.55 p.m.
Joanna
The doctor-on-call phones me back and I describe my symptoms.
‘Try to relax, you want to spend as much of your labour at home as possible,’ she says, clearly thinking I am premature in demanding pain relief. Embarrassed that I’ve phoned too soon, I agree to keep doing breathing exercises and hang up, unsure of what to do next.
‘She says I shouldn’t go to the hospital yet,’ I moan.
‘Why don’t you have another hot shower?’ asks Peter. ‘What about using that lavender shower gel Sigrid suggested?’
Friday, 29 January – 12.40 a.m.
Peter
Joanna is gasping with the pain of it, pacing about and trembling uncontrollably. I try to time the contractions, but I appear to have forgotten even the most basic tenets of my Intensive Lamaze Birthing Course. Do you time from the beginning of one contraction to the end of the next? Or from the end of one to the end of the following one?
2 a.m.
Joanna
We call the doctor’s answering service again.
‘You’re going to the Birthing Center, right?’ asks the doctor groggily, when she calls back.
‘God no, I need an epidural,’ I gasp. The thought of natural childbirth now seems laughable.
‘Why don’t you set off to the hospital? They’ll call me when you get there.’
I have been dreading this moment. For the last four hours I’ve been naked and must now, dizzy with the fug of pain, get dressed, but I can’t bear the idea of anything next to my skin. Only the lure of pain relief makes me haul on leggings and a hideous, oversized T-shirt. In the hall mirror on the way out, I catch my face. It’s swollen from vomiting and grey with uncertainty and fear.
Hobbling across the lobby, I realize I’ve never seen this night doorman before. He’s young and courteous and I promptly feel guilty that we failed to leave him a Christmas tip.
2 a.m.
Peter
Joanna can bear the pain no longer and I buzz down to the doorman and ask him to hail a cab. We stand silently in the descending lift surrounded by sufficient baggage for a long-haul holiday, and I realize that we will, if all goes well, be returning with a third person. The overnight doorman is girded against the freezing damp in a uniform that would earn the envy of a Ruritanian general on a Gilbert and Sullivan stage.
‘The very best of luck, sir,’ he wishes. He pumps me cordially by the hand and holds open the cab door. As I duck into the cab I see that the illuminated neon wedge on its roof features a pair of cuffed wrists. ‘1-800-Innocent’, its caption touts, ‘when you’re only allowed to make one call.’ The taxi driver tips up the peak of his baseball cap and checks out the scene in his rearview mirror. Joanna emits a long quavering groan, and his eyes widen in alarm. ‘You havin’ a baby?’ he asks incredulously, as though no one in Manhattan could be so primitive as to procreate.
‘I bloody well hope so,’ pants Joanna and the driver roars off, savouring the moment of drama on an otherwise sleepy weekday night. Soon we are hurtling down the deserted concrete canyon of West End Avenue, dismissing the string of late amber lights and early reds against us like so much surplus Christmas decoration.
2.10 a.m.
Joanna
At 84th Street we swing onto Broadway and, convinced I’m going to vomit again, I wind down the window. The cold air is briefly refreshing and I concentrate on the store fronts which punctuate the Upper West Side. Origins, Barnes and Noble, Banana Republic. The famous trio of delis, Zabar’s, Citarella and Fairway rush by. At 70th Street, opposite Relax the Back, where we bought the Gymnic bouncing ball, another contraction takes hold and I press my lower spine against the hot-water bottle I have brought with me under my coat. The heat makes it worse. I want to do nothing but curl up and close down.
2.20 a.m.
Peter
Staggering under the weight of two kit bags and a small turquoise backpack stuffed hopefully with tiny outfits, we arrive at Roosevelt Hospital to have a baby. We take the elevator to the twelfth floor, where we are ushered into an ‘observation’ cubicle with a gurney bed, a sink, a bin and a chair. A nurse straps monitors to Joanna which measure her contractions and the foetal heartbeat, and then leaves us alone. The contractions are coming fast and hard and Joanna is complaining of acute back pain.
‘I’m going to throw up again,’ she gasps. I help her to the sink, patting her heaving shoulders as she hugs the cold porcelain and retches violently.
‘Why you throw up in the sink?’ demands a nurse from the doorway.
‘Where else were we supposed to do it?’ I protest.
‘The bin,’ she scowls.
‘Well, we thought that at least we could rinse out the sink,’ I counter crossly.
‘You should have used the bin,’ she insists.
‘Listen,’ I say, feeling a fury bubbling up inside me, ‘we have come here to have a baby, not to argue about where to vomit.’
I regret my little outburst immediately, when the nurse’s shoes squeal on the lino as she wheels round and stalks out, leaving Joanna to her haze of unmoderated pain.
2:25 a.m.
Joanna
‘I need an epidural,’ I groan to the sulky nurse, sensing another contraction and start on a loud hissing breath which Mary Barnes, our yoga teacher, had assured me would help. ‘SSSSSSSSSSSSSSSS.’
The monitor to which I am hooked up records the contractions and spews forth a sheet of paper revealing a series of perfect U shapes. I give another hissing breath, ‘SSSSSSSSSSSSSSS’, and a different nurse bustles in, examines the data and promptly hurries out. ‘Don’t worry, we’re not sending you home,’ she says over her shoulder, though this thought had never occurred to me. ‘I’m going to get the resident to examine you now.’
3.05 a.m.
Peter
All thoughts of using the Birthing Center and having a ‘natural’, drug-free labour have already been jettisoned. The stroppy
nurse explains that the epidural can’t be started until our own obstetrician arrives, but that in the meantime she will set up an IV drip, which is necessary in advance of the epidural, to boost the blood pressure.
Joanna looks away while she stretches a rubber tourniquet around her arm and inserts the IV needle into a bulging vein. The needle pops straight out again. The nurse tries again. And again. Each time the needle slips out with a shocking crimson blotch on the white hospital linen. I stare, appalled at each new blood patch, and find a new shape in them, like some macabre Rorschach test. They resemble continents: Africa, England, America – the tripod of our child’s cultural heritage. Maybe this is a good sign, I rationalize, even in the nurse’s incompetence.
‘Your veins – no good,’ the nurse complains.
I compose an angry riposte about her lack of skill, her transformation of Joanna’s arm into a junkie’s runway, but I swallow it all unspoken for fear of further punishment. She wanders off, returning shortly with a gloomy, green-smocked Russian doctor whom I overhear scolding her for using the wrong needles. He manages first time.
3.30 a.m.
Joanna
We are finally assigned a delivery room, the last one on the corridor. It has a pink floral frieze and a matching floral pelmet, whose pleats I start counting to distract me from the pain. Only now do we follow one of Sigrid’s instructions and close the door, pull the curtain across the room and unpack the CD player.
‘What music would you like?’ asks Peter anxiously.
‘SSSSSSSSSSSSSS.’
I don’t really care what music we have, but he is trying so hard to get it right that I pick the first one which comes into my head, Adiemus.
‘Ah I know this track,’ says yet another nurse, pulling back the curtain and fixing me up with an automatic blood-pressure cuff. ‘Dammit, what IS this? I know I recognize it.’ She starts humming along.
