A Birth Story

I’m going to post this now, even though it’s Grumble’s second (second!) birthday on Sunday, as we have a super busy weekend, what with parties for her etc. I’ve always loved reading the birth stories of others, and have wanted to share my own, but for reasons you shall soon discover have been a little trepidatious about it. So consider this your warning: if you are in any way squeamish, and cannot handle gory, grisly details, go have a hunt through the archives and read crafty goodness. For the rest of you: A Birth Story.

The Galumph and I were lounging around at home one Tuesday evening. Actually, Galumph was lounging, and I was doing my best beached whale impersonation. The main topic of conversation that week has been: when is our little one arriving? At some point in the evening I visited the toilet, and had finished my business and was pulling up my pants when I felt a tiny trickle. “Oh my sainted aunt”, I thought. “It’s finally happened, just like the books said it might – I’ve lost control of my bladder!”. After cleaning up, I went back into the lounge room where I felt yet another trickle. My face must have said what I was thinking, because Galumph immediately said: “What’s up?” My answer (embarrassing in hindsight, I can now admit) was “Well, I thought I’d wet myself, but maybe it’s… happening!” "Happening?" said Galumph. Gush. "Happening", I said.

So, we rang the hospital and they told us to come on in so they could check me out. All the way there I was “Gee, I thought when your waters broke it would be this big gush everywhere, but this is nothing!”. Ahem. A walk around the block to the entrance of hospital soon helped the gushing on it’s way – so much so that when we finally got into the building the second thing the nurse said to me was “Would you like a nappy?” Oh yeah, I guess so.

After being checked out, and the nurses ascertaining that although I was having contractions they were so minute that even I couldn’t feel them, we were sent home, and told to come back either when the contractions were five minutes apart, or Thursday morning.

Ahh, the innocence of first time parents. Neither that night nor the next was there much sleep to be had, as every twinge was timed and noted. However, nothing major did happen (besides me getting tired – oh, why didn’t I sleep whilst I had the chance!) so Thursday morn saw us, bright and early, at the hospital. We were shown into our birthing suite, and by 11 that morning I was hooked up to the inducement hormones. For our entertainment we had brought along the latest Harry Potter book to read, plus Trivial Pursuit cards, but thanks to the trigger happy finger of the nurse who kept amping up how much hormone I was receiving, it wasn’t long before they went out the window.

As those of you who have been induced know, it’s a fairly painful way of giving birth as your body doesn’t have time to adjust to the hormone levels properly. It wasn’t long before I was gasping “Gas, gas, gimme the gas!” and breathing in as hard as I could when it arrived. This continued until 6pm that night, by which stage I was feeling both majorly vomitty from all that gas and in so much pain from the contractions that I couldn’t even stand up – my legs were giving out from under me. I asked a nurse how much I had dilated – after all, how much longer could this possibly go on for, and cried, actually cried when she said “3cm”. Three? Seven more to go? NOOOOOOOOOO! This pain must cease, now!

Due to an allergy, Pethidine was out of the question, so the cry had changed to “Epidural! Epidural! NOW!”
And then it came. Like a hand from above, flicking a switch, the pain went. I have no recollection of this, but am told by a reliable source that I actually had a snooze! Soon, however, it was all action stations go. I had dilated, by 3 am, to the full 10cm, and now it was time to push!

So I pushed. And pushed. And then, just to make things fun, pushed some more. Every two minutes, in thirty second bursts, for over two hours, I pushed. The nurses weren’t happy – this child need to come out, they were saying. Finally a doctor came in, assessed the situation, and said to a nurse “Right – hold these forceps. I’m going to get the vacuum pump”. As soon as she left the room the nurse looked conspiratorially around, muttered “I don’t think we’ll need to be doing THAT”, whipped out her scissors and did the fastest episiotomy this side of Texas. And then, in the blink of an eye, my beautiful daughter was out in the world.

I’ll never forget those few moments. She was so quiet, and oddly still. She seemed to just want to lie quietly, and take in the world before uttering a sound. She lay on my chest, and rolled her huge big eyes over to me. “Hello, Bump!” I said. The Galumph stood over us, doing one of his monster huge grins, then I handed Grumbles to him, so the nurses could inject me with the hormone to speed up the delivery of the placenta.

So there I lay, waiting for the placenta to come out. The nurses began to look a bit worried when it didn't emerge, and started physically contorting my torso, trying to get it to come out. Finally, somebody saw it, and gave a huge pull, and out it came. Actually, most of it came out. I’ll never forget the horrified look on the nurse's, and doctor's, faces when they saw the huge chunk missing from it. I’ll also never forget the sound of my blood, suddenly flowing in a huge big hemorrhage, hitting the ground. Suddenly the room, which only moments before had been full of peace and new life, was action stations. A nurse frantically wrapped gauze around the unused forceps, and inserted it into me in a bid to stop the bleeding. For a few moments all was quiet, then that huge gushing splattering noise when she removed them and more blood hit the ground. In the midst of all this a code orange was announced somewhere in the hospital. Most of those in the room left frantically, fearing the worst, but in a few moments were back by my bedside. I asked one of them what a code orange was, and the answer was “It’s bad. But you’re worse”.

This is where things started to get blurry. I was losing so much blood, and so quickly that I was beginning to shut down. Around me things were happening in a crazy hurry – nurses were unhooking me from the hormone drip, a bed was being brought in, somebody was telling my husband that I would need surgery, now, the beautiful anesthetist who had earlier given me the epidural was by my side, telling me that he was going to do some stuff, but not to worry, it wouldn’t hurt. I latched on to him, and told him what was worrying me the most: I was so cold. So, so cold. I know everybody has stuff to do, but could he please fix the cold?

Thank goodness he kept his cool. He knew what the cold meant. If I hadn’t had been going into shutdown, I would have known what the cold meant. It was the strangest thing, the losing blood, and the beginning of the end. I’d always imagined that you remained fairly clear mentally when death strikes, but I now know this isn’t the case. It was like all parts of me were resigning themselves to the fact that they were going. My sense of humour, my curiosity – in fact, all of my thoughts, all the bits that made me me were disappearing. I had no questions about what was happening to me – I just wanted somebody to make the cold go away. The anesthetist took me by the hand and told me that he’d just sent somebody out to the warming machine, and that they were going to get me some warm toasty blankets. Could I wait? Of course I could. And I held onto that thought has hard as I could.

The next second I was being moved over onto the bed to take me down to surgery. In my second last moment of clarity I looked down at the nurse who was trying to take my singlet top off, even though I was hooked up to drips and the like, and calmly told her to just cut it off me. She gave me a funny glance and then did so. In my last moment of clarity, I quickly took off my wedding rings and gave them to the Galumph, who had been standing in a corner, horrified, the whole time. I told him I loved him as they wheeled me out of the room, but, alas, didn’t even hear his answer. This bugged me the whole time I was going down the corridors, but I was distracted as they wheeled me into theatre. As they were setting up around me, another team came in with an emergency caesarian. “We need this theatre now!” they said. “Tough luck”, said one of my surgeons. “It’s OURS!”. My very last thought, before they put me under, was ‘Yay! My team won!”

To work they went. They cut me open to find out where the bleeding was coming from. It turns out that the placenta had been embedded in the uterus, so when it was ripped out it created a huge wound. For three hours they operated, trying every trick in the book to stop the bleeding. Finally, they began to sew me up, thinking the op had been a success. One of the surgeons had a last peek in before they finished the sewing, and was mucho alarmed to discover that the hemorrhaging had recommenced. Quickly undoing me, they tried again. By this stage I had been given over 18 units of blood – not bad considering that the human body only has 14 units in it. I’d drained myself one and a bit times over! Unfortunately, with all this blood loss, I’d also lost all my platelets, and the other goodies that enable the blood to clot. As one of the surgeons told us afterwards, every time they tried to stitch me up, it just created another hole for the blood to spurt from. I was, literally, a human version of a sieve.

The call was made: the only way to save my life was to remove the entire uterus, and fingers crossed at that risky move. Whilst the surgery was under way, one of the team was downstairs, telling my husband, who at this stage had been left in a room by himself with Grumbles for over three hours, that ‘your wife only has a 50/50 chance of making it out alive’. The Galumph, understandably, sat down and cried. Alive, however, is how I came out. I remember waking up, and seeing all these faces hovering over me. One doctor was actually stroking my hair, prompting me to think: Good God, it must be bad if they’re touching my hair. I’m sure they never do that in the movies! The head surgeon came over, and gently told me that she was sorry, but they’d had to do a hysterectomy. I said “Ok. Thank you!” She looked puzzled, and explained exactly what one was, to which I replied “Yep. Thank you!” I instinctively knew how close it had been, and was just so pleased to be there that they could have cut off an arm and I’d have been cool with it.

That night, however, was the most horrifying night of my life. I was put into the high dependency unit, and, even though there were two nurses there the whole time, for some reason I couldn’t see them, and thought I was all alone. The room was very very dark, and I was attached to a machine monitoring my breathing, as my lungs had become quite depressed due to all the anesthetic. Each time I was about to nod off, my breathing would become quite shallow, and the machine would beep at me until I breathed normally again. And each time I thought I was going to die, all alone. The Galumph came and visited at about 3 in the morning, and after that I perked up. Soon it was morning, and that afternoon I was moved to a room of my own and soon began to make huge progress. I must admit, however, that it was a huge shock to discover that I couldn’t physically walk for a few days. I’ll also never forget my dad’s face when he came to visit me – he looked ten years older, and all I could think was how sorry I was to have put him through it.

I’m going to end this by saying how lucky I am. I’m lucky I was in a big metropolitan hospital – if I had have been in a smaller one I would be dead for sure, as they wouldn’t have had enough blood to give me. I’m lucky I had such an amazingly talented team of 16 to operate on me. I’m lucky to have my husband, who was just so indescribably wonderful during the entire ordeal. I’m lucky to have my super sister-in-law, who did Subway runs when I couldn’t stand the hospital food any more, and helped my dad through it all (no wonder he has such a huge crush on her!). I’m lucky to have my sister, a nurse, who explained the situation beautifully to everybody, banned all visitors until she thought it was prudent for me to have them, and did lots of organising on our behalf. And I’m especially lucky to have my Grumbles. Sweetie, I’d go through it all again in a heartbeat, just to have you in my life. Happy birthday, my love.

Myself and Grumbles, 1 day old.