Oomph! Contemplating life as a citrus fruit

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?

“I have to catch a plane at twelve-thirty so I won’t be doing the actual surgery. But any competent surgeon can do it. The hard part is behind us.”

I get a faint image of the hard part that’s behind me except that in my mind I can’t see anything behind me because every time I try to turn around to look all I can see is my own belly and it appears to be dissociating from me and wandering around on its own. I can’t move but the belly that looks like it ate the Bronx is having a fine time. We’re quite a pair. Me and my belly.

But wait a minute. Slow down just a fraction of an instant so I can get my breath here. We’ve waited these long, hard, heavy, swollen, nine months. And now Dr. Lovely Lovely is telling me he’s not even going to deliver this matched set?

I would like to tell you I argued him down from his plane trip and required that he stick with me through all the mucous membranes ahead, but he left soon after that and frankly, I was pretty busy being able to do absolutely nothing but lie there and have things done to me.

And then events began to move along on their own with no concurrence from me nor consultation about any other potential options.

Two nurses hauled me off the bed in the labor room and onto a gurney. Well, to be precise, an intern had to come to their aid in this lifting endeavor. But they got me moved. Then one of them wheeled me into prep. This is a term that stands for preparation or preparatory. But not as in prep school. As in getting ready to slice one open. They do not tell you what they are about to do.

In walked a new doctor.

And at the moment when I need him most, Strong With A Spear has been banished to a waiting room.

After all the Lamaze classes and the he-he-he breathing and the sponges and the ice chips and the towel between the legs and the sphincter exercises, it comes down to me alone on a gurney in a room with about ten beds, each with a track above them where a curtain is pulled back from the bed area. I am splayed out on my back with the baby monitor belt around my stomach and the other one stuck up my you-know-what, wearing one of those hospital gowns with no back.

This new doctor introduced himself.

“Hello, Mrs. (he looks at my chart then massacres my name, but so does everyone else I ever meet so I don’t bother to correct him). I’m Dr. Gonzalez, your anesthesiologist. I’m going to be administering the epidural today.”

What are you going to be administering? My mind whirls back to Lamaze class number five and the discussion of alternate birthing experiences.

Wasn’t that the one where everyone agreed it was a failure not to deliver naturally? Or was that just the blond woman who seemed so hell-bent on no medication, ever, no matter what? Or maybe it was the class about having a “section” and that somehow you miss something if the baby doesn’t come out the Port Of You Know What. And wasn’t some husband talking about video taping and what should he do if the wife had to be sectioned?