opinios

Dad's Perspective

Update: Apologies folks, comments weren't disabled on purpose. Just technical difficulties that should be resolved now!

The girls have had their say; it's Dad's turn. This is my view of how things panned out on the night of Saturday, January 21st and the following morning. It seems so long ago now, and I don't plan for this to turn into a baby blog. But I'll dump it all for posterity and then move back to blogging about geek stuff and web thingos and the usual random nonsense.

On that fateful night, Kim started complaining of "gas pains" while watching the TV, but the whole while she had been writing them down in her little diary, diligently recording the frequency with which these "gas pains" were arriving. All I can presume is that her brain actually knew that she was experiencing contractions and that it was all about to happen very soon, but her heart was in denial about the enormity of what she was about to face ("If I do a big fart, they go away!").

At any rate, by the time The Iron Chef had finished and Rockwiz had begun, we'd had a couple of phone conversations with the midwife on duty at the Family Birth Centre, and were pretty convinced that it was now a matter of when, not if Kim was about to enter the advanced stages of labour.

We rigged up the TENS machine that we had picked up that afternoon and Kim was buzzing herself with a little electrical current high each time a new contraction hit. This seemed to do the trick, but halfway through Rockwiz the intensity of contractions started to crank up a notch and the pleasant tingles of these mini electric shocks weren't doing enough.

Kim started to venture into her own little world, and gave me less and less feedback about how much pain she was in. Up until this point it was pretty obvious whether she was in the middle of a contraction or not, but from that point on I couldn't really tell. She seemed to draw on an inner strength to deal with the pain when a contraction hit, and spent time between contractions recuperating, so I found it hard to tell the difference. She found walking around and standing up on her tip toes while leaning against the wall the most effective way to pretend that there wasn't a wave of sheer agony making its way down her body.

She tried hopping in the shower, but it didn't seem to bring much relief. I massaged her lower back and brushed her hair, but Kim was obviously getting close to the point of finding it difficult to cope. I told this to the midwife on our third phone conversation, and she suggested it was time to bring her in. And so while I finally lugged the 5 bags that had been sitting packed and ready to go for a couple of weeks out to the car, she gingerly made her way out to the front. I did think for a second when I came back to get the last bag that I should post a quick blog entry to the effect of "we're heading into the hospital, not long now!" but as this thought process ticked over, I heard Kim moan out the front as another contraction hit and decided it was probably a bad idea.

The car ride apparently was hell for Kim. I drove our little Daewoo in that zone that lies somewhere between responsibly adhering to speed limits and safely speeding. It's a grey area. At any rate, we didn't have to wait for a train which I half expected, and the bump over the train tracks that I thought might induce a yelp was a bit of a non-event. What was troublesome was finding the entrance to Emergency when we finally got there. Up until now we had only ever entered the hospital via the front entrance, and so after missing the turn-off and looping around the back of the hospital we eventually arrived... only to discover that there were no parks! There was a guy sitting in his car in one of the parks, I was furious! I double-parked and propped Kim up on my shoulder and we slowly got her through the doors and into the safe haven of the Family Birth Centre.

Once I had Kim in the capable hands of the midwife on duty I dashed back to the car and moved it into the regular car park. By the time I got back and had carried all the luggage in (including the laptop so that Kim could in theory "play tetris" during labour. Ha! What folly!) Kim was on the bed and clearly distressed.

The TENS machine was just getting in the way at this point, so that came off and in its place we convinced the midwife to hook Kim up with some nitrous oxide gas. This is where Kim seemed to regain a bit of control as I could tell she was starting to get a bit panicky as the pain was clearly way worse than she had expected. A few deep breaths of the good gas when the next contraction came, and it did the trick. Things were manageable once more, and the task at hand for her became resting between contractions, but not sucking in the gas too late because it took a while to kick in. Kim seemed to actually fall asleep in a few intervals, but unfortunately those were the contractions that she was late in getting the gas inhaler to her mouth, and so by the time the gas did its thing the pain had already hit.

Keep in mind that for these several hours it was really just Kim and myself. We hadn't really realized that labour at the Birthing Centre was not a process of hand-holding, explanation and encouragement by the staff. It was just Kim and me, with the midwife checking up on us every hour or so. At this point our midwife finished her shift and we were introduced to Julie from the maternity ward upstairs who would be taking over and actually staying with us for the rest of the ride. It turned out that night was the night for having babies, and the Birthing Centre's 4 rooms were all full up, so they had shipped a couple of midwives down to help out.

Julie was everything we needed her to be: decisive, encouraging and empathetic. She immediately turned on the shower and stated with an air of authority that it was the best place for Kim. I donned the Speedos to save Julie any embarrassment, so that I could play water boy, directing the shower head at Kim's back during the contractions and handling the gas supply for her. It seemed to raise the bar for the amount of pain Kim could bear but after an hour or two of standing in the shower I could tell she was starting to crack. The contractions had moved beyond a pain that she could grit her teeth and ride through, and were wearing away at her.

Julie sensed this and offered Kim some pethidine, and Kim reluctantly agreed that she needed something. However, before it was administered Kim said that she would need to use the loo as she had to do a really big poo!. This prompted Julie to perform a a quick check and her response was "Sorry, I can't give you any pethidine... you're about to have your baby! You're a legend!"

And so we came to the "push" stage. None of this "How far to go? How much am I dilated?" business, just "push as much as you can". It was these 45 minutes that I saw my wife draw on an inner strength that I didn't know she had. What she had been through in the preceding 6 hours had drained her. I could tell she was lethargic and frustrated because all she wanted to do was go to sleep. But Julie's experience saw through all of this and she stepped up her "encouragement". There was no "OK dear, have a rest for a bit to recharge your batteries". Julie channelled the ghost of Ted Whitten and coached Kim, convincing her that yes, she could do it and that "I know you want to sleep dear, we're nearly there: just one more push" (about 7 or 8 times).

The final few minutes are a bit of a blur, but things happened in a pretty much textbook fashion - a little person eventually made her way out into the world, took her first gasps of air, and let out a big cry. Julie held up this little creature for me to announce "it's a girl!", then very quickly wiped her clean and popped her up on Kim's chest for her to hold. I got to do the "cut the cord" thing and most memorable from those few seconds was the look of Kim being absolutely overwhelmed as she cried "Oh my god!" over and over and gaped at this beautiful little thing that somehow we had made and now had arrived in the flesh.

Kim and I exchanged a few words of mutual amazement, toyed between "Sophia" and "Abigail", and decided on the former. Sophia Scout stopped crying and was wrapped up into a bundle for us to admire. She looked up at us with enormous, inquiring eyes and we both had a good old cry. And then we both fell asleep with her between us while she continued to watch us with her big cute eyes.

And that, my friends, is how it all went down! One month later, things are settling into a routine and little Sophia isn't quite so little any more. She has put on a kilo or two and is shaping up to be a real porker. Photos of her big fat gut to come.

Tags: birth, labour, dad, sophia, wrigglepot