Our Weekend

Here is an excerpt from the play by play. 9:30 PM-The Westin was beautiful. I was so excited. Brandon had arranged for us to have a beautiful view from our room. Since we arrived after dark, we turned off all the lights and opened our huge window wide to look out at Seattle. We exchanged cards we had written for our anniversary. I had flowers coming on Monday that Brandon had ordered (they turned out beautifully, by the way) and like Obama to England, I gave him a couple of great DVDS: “Madagascar 2” and one of his all-time favorites, “Dances With Wolves.” Brandon pulled out a map and we started making our itinerary for the weekend. However, I couldn’t make it even 5 minutes without having to get up and use the restroom, the pain was so bad and the urge to use the restroom so much.
11:30 PM-At that point, the pain was wrapping around my lower back and definitely unbearable. But since I still had 8 days before my due date, I worried that I might be dilated only as much as 2 cm’s and as a result, not taken seriously about my abdominal pain and sent home with Tylenol, unless these pains were actually labor contractions, which I still wasn’t sure.
Brandon was amazingly calm driving me to the hospital. He set “cruise control” because the speed limit was 60 almost the entire way and neither of us wanted to make time to be pulled over for speeding. The overhead light was on in the car and Brandon was using his wrist-watch to help me get through the contractions, which were almost exactly 6 minutes apart and lasting for 50-60 seconds. Brandon would count me through them. I soon realized that wailing and crying were not helpful for pain and so I tried my best not to do that but to breathe as I’ve been told so many times to do. Again, it was a 90 minute drive.
2 AM-When we got to the hospital, I was put in a room to be monitored. However, the contractions were so painful that the device monitoring them kept slipping off me because I could not lie flat. The nurse checked me and said, “Wow, you are dilated to a 6 already.” I was moved into a birth room and the coolest thing was that I felt like my baby’s birth was brought to me by some sort of International Nurses’ Group because my anesthesiologist was from the Czech Republic, my nurse was from Mexico and my other nurse was from Ireland. My anesthesiologist teased me in a voice that sounded like Count Dracula, “Anesthesia, anyone???” I was confused because I had just come out of the restroom for the 5th or 6th time and I was in my hospital gown, holding my robe closed in the back with one hand and holding my IV on wheels in the other and I thought he was suggesting that I had dementia. So I told him, “No I don’t have dementia.” That confused him and made everyone laugh, except my doctor who asked me if I was okay. Then I wondered to myself, “Maybe I really do have dementia.”