I learned I was pregnant in a hotel room outside of Paris, France. On a business trip with my husband.

While he was out businessing, I practiced my high school French on the maid, who turned out to be Spanish, and busied myself feeling nauseous. When this feeling lasted more than two days with no other symptoms, I got suspicious. Can’t put much over on me.

Even in those days, you could get a pregnancy test to do in the privacy of your own hotel room. My husband got me one. Instructions in French of course. I waited for the little circle to appear at the bottom of the dish. (more…)

All the Austrian relatives were happy about our good news on the baby front. And looking back on it, I should have been delighted with simple seasickness. Because back in the States and a few months later I got a real surprise.

Here’s how it happened.

After the usual doctor visits, I had reached month seven and a girth that put the Hindenberg to shame.

(more…)

When Dr. Lovely Lovely arrived he took one look at me from the other end of my feet, came around to my head and told me, “You’re enormous. I’m sending you down to X-ray for an ultrasound. I want to know what’s in there.”

Well, that certainly helped me in the self-confidence department. If he didn’t know what was in there, we were all in for some tough explaining.

Now, in 1976 ultrasound was a new procedure that doctors only used when they suspected something odd. I certainly qualified. Mia Farrow in Rosemary’s Baby was cute as a button compared with me at seven months.

On the monitor the first swipe across my jellied abdomen showed two heads. Then two little beating hearts. Four legs. Four arms. This explained a lot. (more…)

So there I was lumbering around trying to negotiate the stairs with my towel, pillow, bag, wearing my husband’s ski parka, his shoes, the only jumper I could still get on because it was shaped like a tent with a long zipper up the front, and of course my thin stretchy black knee socks that looked like leftovers from a nun’s convention. Yes. I was a rare beauty. So large and swollen that my husband’s size in shoes and jackets were now just perfect for me.

Arriving at our front door I flung it open to see the now infamous blizzard of January 7th, 1977 in full progress. At least five inches on the ground and you couldn’t see more than two feet in front of your hand. What they call whiteout conditions. In the South this is not good. (more…)

At Dermatology, the chief of the department carefully examined each crimson welt. Baffled, he called in his chief resident.

“What do you make of this, Chuck?”

As Chuck was doing an in-depth appraisal of the angry looking red area on my prize pumpkin-size midriff, the rash began to spread. Right there with two doctors looking on. So they called in a few backup doctors. Seven more arrived in total. Me, my belly and nine doctors all watched as the killer rash spread slime mold-like on the outside of each thigh, then on my ankles and up my shins.

“Dr. Elgin look at this.” Chuck pointed to my thigh as red blotches began to appear.

“Hey, it’s starting down here.” Another doctor pointed to my left ankle.

“I see it starting over here now.” A youngish one came over to my left calf.

“Wow.” They were very impressed. (more…)

When we arrived at the hospital, Washington, D.C. was under a thick blanket of snow and it was still coming down. No vehicles were on the roads. No people were out. But there we were, finally, at the end of my long road, my weary journey, my life-giving mission and, dammit, the hospital door was locked.

But we did not panic. Not yet. Strong With A Spear jumped out of the car and took action. Which is to say he promptly disappeared.

So I climbed out of the car with my towel still between my legs to absorb the water that was still gurgling forth, clutching my bag with the pillow and the sponges for sucking and the wash rag and whatever else I was supposed to bring and began my march through the blizzard to the fort.

I wound around to the back of the hospital where the emergency entrance was located and headed through the swirling snow toward a dim light.

Suddenly the double doors swung open and my brave mate emerged pushing an empty wheelchair as if he was at the Indianapolis Speedway.

“Look I got you a wheelchair.” He was so proud of himself, all puffed up in the chest. (more…)

Now the fun part began. The waiting for full dilation. And the measuring thereof. What I want to know is, what happened to the birthing hut in our culture? I know why we got rid of the menstruation hut. But there’s still a whole lot of embarrassing leakage in the birth process. Anyone who’s about to take this step and thinks it’s not a fully functioning fluid fest had better study up. What are we, over ninety percent water? And then the two babies are also mostly water. And the sac, or in my case sacs. And then all that blood. When you are carrying a baby your body creates an extra third of your blood supply to feed the baby. With twins that’s double. I will not begin to contemplate more than twins.

On the subject of fluids I won’t discuss what happens with some women when they go into labor. Suffice it to say that a bad fast food meal could do to you what labor sometimes does in the fluid department.

But women are used to dealing with liquids. (more…)

Now I started wondering about this “foot” he had felt. A foot means the baby is facing upside down. This is known as a breach position. The baby will have to be rotated to come out head first. This means some degree of difficulty in the next phase of baby making one-oh-one, The Delivery. I may not know much but I do know how they’re supposed to be arranged in there and a foot right at the port of my you-know-what is not part of the configuration specifications. The way twins are supposed to be arranged is one head at the top of the uterus, knees bent, and the other baby upside down facing the first one’s knees. There should not be a foot anywhere near the Port Of You Know What.

Three weeks later, after the elevator ride and the blizzard, strapped around the “waist” and inserted with a monitor in the you-know-what, lying on that bed in labor room ten, my husband having disappeared again briefly, watching the screens for the two baby heartbeats that these contraptions are supposed to be monitoring, one of them suddenly flatlined.

“Help.” I screamed. “Help nurse.”

No one came.

“Nurse. What’s happening? Somebody please come here.”

Then some contractions which kept me busy for a few minutes. These were not painful. Just exhausting after three weeks of them. Then I started yelling again and in walked a nurse who was almost young enough to be my daughter.

“What’s wrong?” She bent over the huge lump that was my stomach, peering into my face.

“The monitor. It stopped. Is my baby okay?” (more…)

Strong With A Spear inquires in a nervous voice: “What alternative?”

“A Cesarean Section.”

Now I’m a grapefruit. About to be sectioned. My fantasy shifts to a luscious smörgåsbord (Note the optional use of the umlaut previously discussed in this chapter. I don’t know what that little thing over the “a” is called.) where I am spread out on a very long table smack between the macaroni salads and pickled herring. My belly protrudes proudly above all the other offerings, nearly grazing the domed plastic that protects the food from the human breath and microscopic dust mites swirling in crazy abandon in the air above us. Around my girth, grapefruit sections make a symmetrical pattern and in my mouth a large apple keeps me from protesting this treatment. Also I am smothered in some sort of red sauce, which turns out to be a prophetic image.

“I think that’s the only course at this point. You are definitely in labor. But with multiple births often the uterus is so distended that the contractions can’t build up the necessary oomph to achieve total cervical dilation.”

Oomph? Would that be textbook oomph? Four years of medical school and six years of residency and $250,000 in student loans to pay for your medical education oomph? (more…)

“First I’d like for you to roll over onto your left side if you will.”

Right. Back to reality. The land of no choices.

“We’ll be giving you a small shot to numb the immediate area and then we’ll be inserting a catheter along the lower spine that will allow us to keep a nice steady drip of anesthetic going during surgery. This will numb you from the waist down so you won’t feel a thing during the actual operation. But you’ll be fully awake throughout the procedure and will be able to talk with us.”

I was so excited about the prospect of getting a shot in my back, becoming numb from the waist down, and having my stomach sliced open that I could barely contain myself. If I had been in any kind of normal shape I’m sure I would have catapulted off that gurney and danced around the room hugging everyone in sight, my gown flapping wildly half open at my back. Of course lying there like a flipped turtle I couldn’t do that. So, being basically an accommodating person, I tried to roll over onto my left side, as Dr. Gonzalez had requested.

“Uh,” puff puff (I am still having those contractions every seven minutes) “I’ll try.” So I try. (more…)

Nurse Picasso walked away, taking her paper and wrappers with her. Leaving me lying there, unable to move, feeling like a piece of meat hanging in a store window. Orderlies, nurses, doctors were all walking past me as if I didn’t exist. Finally I yelled to anyone within earshot, “Hey. Will somebody close this curtain.”

They looked around as if I was demented.

A young doctor looked over at me, surprised by the voice coming from this orange lump with legs wide apart like a drumstick that got pulled off with a wad of meat attached. As he walked by he took hold of the edge of the curtain and gave it a casual tug. It slid easily halfway around my bed, its little steel rollers going wheeeeeee along their track. Then they stopped and he continued out the door.

In a few minutes a nurse came to wheel me down a short hall and into a surgical theater. Halfway down the hall she tossed a sheet over me saying:

“We don’t want you to get cold now.”

Once in the operating theater, two nurses slid me from my royal conveyance onto a steel table. Now this was comfy I must say. Then they started what’s known as “draping.”

Now if any reader is considering a career move about now, I strongly advise either the laundry or the pill concession at any metropolitan hospital. In 1977 when I birthed these babies, a Tylenol was going for $2.50 per pill. When I saw that I spit the last one they tried to pop in my mouth right back at them. They must be about $500 a pill by now, making a hospital headache perhaps the most expensive illness to treat on either an in- or out-patient basis and therefore a hell of a good way to make a living if you’re the concession holder. (more…)

See, they all know you’re wide awake and in a rather hyper state, so they can’t really engage in the banter that usually accompanies an operation. Since this was a teaching hospital, I got the full complement of staff. Let me do a quick head count for you:

The OBGYN/surgeon. Not mine. But the Associate Chief of OBGYN. By this time my doctor, Dr. Incredibly BigWig Lovely Lovely, was on a plane for California where he was delivering a lecture the next day, presumably on delivering twins when the woman’s body simply refuses to let them out.

Two pediatricians (one for each baby)
Two surgical nurses (one for each baby)
Two baby nurses (one for each baby)
Two anesthesiologists (one for each of my arms)
A medical student
An intern
A resident
The OBGYN chief resident
And Moi.

They would not let Strong With A Spear into the operating theater because there were so many people in there already. And they thought it might be a bit crowded. They set up a two-way speaker so he could hear what was going on and talk to me. He never said a word.

They keep surgical theaters at about fifty-two degrees because, around the time that Americans were slaughtering each other in a civil war, Louis Pasteur, using a newly upgraded invention called a microscope, proved that germs, unseen by man’s naked eye, were swirling around everywhere like a cosmic cloud. Germs, it seems, like a warm moist environment. To keep them from reproducing like micro-rabbits, especially where surgery is performed and people’s insides are laid open to possible invasion by just about anything, hospitals keep surgical theaters pretty cold.

I remember my arms feeling chilled, but the rest of me was just hanging there as if not of my body. It was still snowing outside, I found out later. I was lucky all these people had shown up for my big event. It was one p.m. on January seventh when the doctor made the incision. Of course I didn’t feel a thing. And I didn’t hear a thing. And nobody said anything. It took just three minutes, I also found out later, to remove the first baby. Four minutes later her sister arrived. The rest of the forty minutes of total surgical time was taken up sewing me back together, layer by layer — seven of them, I was told.

Now, some thirty years later, I look down below my stomach and wonder how they ever got those babies through that three inch vertical incision scar which is the remnant of the knife slice through my lower abdomen halfway between my belly button and the hair that covers my you-know-what. Two babies and just that little bitty opening. Some women get a scar that goes from hipbone to hipbone, horizontally across the bikini line. The doctors sometimes call this the smile line. Some get cut clear from the belly button all the way down almost to the you-know-what itself. And others, like me, get these innocuous little scars that could easily be covered by a bikini, if we ever had the guts to pummel ourselves into one after all that body abuse. Which by the way I never have. And I’m sure you would support that decision if you could see for yourself just what happened to my lithe young body.

And it sure was quiet in there.

The only thing the doctor said was, “The first one’s a girl.”

“Is she all right?” I asked.

He only said: “The second one’s a girl too.”

So I cried out to the void: “Are they all right? Where are my babies? Are my babies all right? Why aren’t they crying? What’s happening?”

You expect to hear the classic newborn howling as if coming into the world is a universal shock felt the same way by all humans since time began. We forget that when animals give birth their baby goats, cats, deer, dogs, horses, tigers, mice or whales never yowl in pain. That’s probably because no moose doctor is standing there waiting for the little baby moosey to come sliding down the moose chute ready to be slapped on the rump.

I don’t know how many doctors still do this — hold the baby upside down and whack it one just to see if it’s paying attention — but my babies just got bundled off to the weigh-in station, like little trucks on the highway off ramp.

They arrived at a neat five pounds eight ounces, the first one out, and six pounds eight ounces. The first born was twenty inches long. That’s pretty long and lean. Not an ounce of fat anywhere on her. The other was a plump dumpling at eighteen inches.

There is nothing more lonely than a roomful of people who are all ignoring you. Especially when you can’t move. And want to scream.

After what was actually a very short time but what seemed an eternity to me, two nurses showed up, one on either side of me, each holding a tiny bundle tightly wrapped in cotton swaddling, each head topped with a tiny wool cap. They bent down and laid the babies on either side of me as the anesthesiologists unstrapped my arms so I could hold the bundles.

And at that moment a surprise thought came to me.

“This is forever.” (more…)