Sunday..SUNDAY..SUNDAY..the d-day loomed larger than life over our heads.. err but of course my hospital bag wasnt completely packed as yet. So on Tuesday evening, after the doc’s visit Ma and I headed to complete the purchases. And we walked some more ð Went to the city to grab a few bites, stopped at the mall to stuff our face with Maggie Moos sundaes..basically just went the slightest bit loony. Ok so I did. Ma for most part kept giving me apprehensive looks and every stitch, every twinge was questioned. But after the initial shock, I decided to let loose and just live it all up. The only way to live according to me ð
August 6, 2008 – K had reached home the night before and was fast asleep as I stood in the bathroom and felt the periodic twinges which were now intensifying. But surely that was my imagination, the doc lady had told me that the D-day was Sunday. Maybe it was just something I had eaten, maybe it was just plain ol’ indigestion. I was not going to send everyone in a tizzy now just for this. Yea right…. within 5 mins of me walking out and Ma seeing my face, she knew something was up. I hemmed and hawed and coughed my way through the inquisition. sigh I should have known better. The next thing I knew was that Ma and K who was looking bemused have being shook awake by Ma, both were standing over my head with a watch timing the contractions.
Ha! Were these little itty bitty things contractions then, I thought smugly. Labor was going to be easy-peasy. I breathed my way through almost all of it feeling absolutely sure that I was going to breeze through it. By 2.30 pm that afternoon, there was no more denying that I was having was indeed full-on contractions and we made our way to the hospital.
By the time I had settled myself into the car, the contractions were coming fast. Not hard, just that the time between them had decreased leaving me breathless. I was feeling euphoric and on top of the world. Whether we all were ready or not, my baby wanted to come out and that too today. Screw the doc lady’s predictions!
Oh yea, what would normally take us 15 minutes to get to the hospital, that day took us around an hour – courtesy a road which had been blocked off.At that time, I was pretty certain that the baby was going to be delivered in the car prompting K to take hairpin bends and forego his usual tortoise style of driving for what would have made any F1 driver beam. You see at that time, my sense of humour was still intact given the fact that the contractions were yet to tickle anything more than a groan out of me. And I have the lowest threshold of pain in my family. A nick with the knife makes me sweaty and leaves me groaning for better part of the evening when I do decide to enter the kitchen.
We managed to reach the hospital but at the LDR reception, we were told that there was a short wait. Apparently that day so far there had been 17 deliveries and the staff was going ballistic. As I sank into the comfortable sofas to patiently wait, I was hit by a wave of pain unlike anything I had ever experienced in my life.It was 2 whole minutes of sheer agony and I almost twisted K’s fingers out of shape.
We waited for 15 minutes outside – what was undoubtedly the longest 15 mins of all our lives. In between the horrendous pain, I was paranoid that the baby was going to pop out right there in the reception area. First the car and now here – this baby was enjoying every minute of the ride.
Before I could get up and growl much like poor LInda Blair in The Exorcist, nurses came and quickly whisked me away. In the haze of pain that was threatening to envelop me, I heard them ask whether it was my first delivery. Having confirmed that it indeed was, there were talks of how this was just going to be a case of 4 cms dilation and in which room to put me in. Having being hooked on to the IV and the fetal monitors, the nurse was lecturing me about the various stages of labor when she conducted an internal exam. Right at the time, when I was about to lean down and bite her hands off, she exclaimed – Oh my lord, but you are 8 cms dilated!
There was pin drop silence for a minute, punctuated by my harsh breathing, before the room exploded into a riot of furious action. K and Ma forgot me as they beamed at each other across the bed. Yanked them back to reality by painfully twisting both their hands. Even in that pain, I do remember Ma kissing my forehead and going outside to start the calls.
The contractions now were less than a minute apart and In the next half hour, my water had broken and I was feeling as if I had been crucified in the Saharan desert in the mid-day sun. My throat was parched, the breathing all but forgotten, the lips were cracked and dry and K didnt want to leave my side to even get the lip balm for me.
As the transition phase started, I was keenly aware that K was fanning me with some cardboard flap and that whether the world was ready or not, I was going to push and I decided to make that very clear to all present there. Just as the nurses were trying to make sense of my growling and K looked on haplessly, the doc lady sauntered in very much the lady-of-the-manor style. I couldnt have been more grateful.
I really have no words to describe any more of the time spent after that. Anything I say would be small and meager in comparison to what I was feeling and what happened there in LDR Suite no. 4. Suffice to say that for me this was no candy coated pink fairy tale, this was a dark and a bloody but glorious battle fought just by me and my baby. With K chipping in words of encouragement and desperate hand squeezes every now and then. But he neednt have said anything. I understood it all. I concentrated like I had never done before in my life and every pore, every breath was focussed on getting the baby out. I had declined the use of the epidural a long while back and now it was too late to go back to it. With what felt like the weight of the world on my stomach, with the nurses and the doc lady yelling and encouraging, Baby Nutty arrived with a bang at 6.47 pm that evening.
The bloody aftermath,the episiotomy, the painful stitches, the uncontrallable shivering, K’s eyes shimmering with tears, Ma;s jubilant , tearful arrival in the room – everything paled as they placed the bloody, indignant, squishy faced red baby on my chest. My baby- my beautful baby boy with a head full of dark hair and my snub nose, with K’s eyes and mouth..there he was.
You know, you see it in the movies, you read it in the books about how the new mother is sitting rosy and pink in the recovery room with all beaming around here fondly. And they ask whether she would do it again and her answer is instantly yes – well it isnt true. Not for me, it wasnt. If someone had asked me at that time, if I was going to do this again, I would have seen to it they would have been in some sub-terranean prison with no clothes or food and just dankness and the dark for a long time to come.Now that it has been 15 days, I can at least calmly listen to that. But back then, I do not know.
What I do know is that somehow, somewhere we have done some good. There can be no other reason for God blessing us with this little cherub otherwise. Now the initial chubbiness is gone, the skin is peeling and on days when he is screaming his head off -for this little one has his own mind and a temper to match- but he remains our little miracle. Our little Nutty ð
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