Read Part 1 of Luke's birth story here.
Beaumont Hospital has only private delivery rooms, which is lovely, and as I'd heard, they did have that I’m-kind-of-in-a-hotel feel. They're basically a hotel room with a bunch of medical equipment and really uncomfortable furniture. After I plunked myself on my bed, my first nurse hooked up my fetal monitors and told me she’d be back soon with my cervix softener. Most women take a pill-form of softener, but when the baby is small, like Luke was, they like to use a cream directly on the cervix. I’m not quite sure why, but in any case, the nurse scurried off to get me a dose of the cream.
Soon enough, she returned to tell me that they were having trouble finding the cream. Actually, they had one dosage... but it was expired. So they were going to keep looking. This, I thought, was odd. We’re talking about a drug used to help women begin labor at a major hospital, not a pair of cute heels that are never really worn because they don’t go with much. It seemed kind of amateurish. We don’t know where the meds are! Whoops! This something-is-amiss-here sensation only worsened when the nurse returned to say they definitely couldn’t find what they were looking for, but the people in the lab would whip up a batch as soon as they could. Now they were just searching for the “recipe.” I don’t know a lot (read: anything) about the medical industry, but is this how it usually happens? Drugs are made out of recipes in hospital laboratories?
The good news about this wait was the nurse told me I could go ahead and eat since it might be a little bit longer. Best news of the night! I still wasn’t really hungry since I’d gorged on pasta only three hours or so earlier, but Jen just happened to have an extra Asiago Cheese Bagel from Panera Bread. See why I brought her with me? At first I tried to be all modest, saying, Oh, why thanks, I’ll just eat half since I’m not really hungry and just gorged on a heaping plate of pasta. I will admit I was also worried that I might see it again later, mid-push, if you get my drift. And I’m sure you do since, yeah, I’m not exactly being subtle here. But then the entire bagel was gone approximately 45 seconds later. Those bagels are delicious, what can I say?
Since our wait seemed to be dragging on, Jen then whipped
out her laptop and informed me she had brought movies for us to watch. She also had magazines and a book for me, knowing I love me some reading materials. Pretty
much, the beginning of my delivery was like a sleepover. Not a bad way to
start. She popped in Girl in the Café, a British film starring some pretty girl
I can’t remember and the creepy old musician guy from Love Actually. We dimmed
the lights and cuddled together as much as we could and started watching. This is so fun! I thought. Movies
and bagels and fake hotel rooms! Having a baby is a blast!
Before long, a nurse interrupted our viewing pleasure with another piece of news. Turns out, the lab couldn’t find the “recipe” for my cream. First the cream itself went missing, then the recipe. And with no other real option, they decided there was only one route left – start me on a low dosage of Pitocin. They assured me that a low dosage of Pitocin is pretty much the same thing as a cervix softener. They told me I wouldn’t really have contractions until the morning, when they would turn it up a notch.
They were wrong.
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