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?”

At this point, after nearly nine months of watching myself grow, of swelling up like a blowfish, of feeling nauseated, of having people shrink back into walls when they saw me approaching, of watching my mother cry every time she looked at my body, of having my husband take on some sort of manic fear reversal that mimics total control but is actually its polar opposite, all I could think about was the welfare of these babies.

Another nurse, an older, wiser, steadier one, marches into the room and pronounces:

“You’re going to have to calm down. It’ll be a much longer night if you don’t.”

I suppose this threat was made in some sort of attempt at empathy but it failed to hit the mark.

“Listen, bitch from hell.” Says I. “Find my husband and get him in here. I am a patient of Dr. [insert name of very bigwig doctor here whom everyone at this hospital completely adores and bows and scrapes to] and I want to see him and I don’t want to see you. Now check this baby and tell me if it’s all right. And then write down your social security number and check your badge at the door. You are history here.”

Well, I wish I said all that. In reality I had another contraction and Strong With A Spear showed up and took my hand and settled me down. The nurses left after fiddling with the monitor and getting it to respond normally and for the rest of the night and well into the next day I was too busy to remember to fire them. Now, some thirty years later, I think it’s too late.

Okay, here’s the part you’ve been waiting for. Delivery.

To review: I arrived at the hospital in that snowstorm just before four in the morning of January the seventh, nineteen hundred and seventy-seven, the year of the great blizzard that totally buried Buffalo and did a pretty fair job of bringing nearly everything in Washington, D.C., to a halt — except my labor.

Readers who like to track such events as hurricanes can put this on a flow chart and make little progress dots across the page.

At around eleven that same morning my doctor, who had arrived sometime around dawn and been monitoring my progress — let me amend that, he had been monitoring my lack of progress — came to my room with the following information based on any number of reports from interns, residents and other hospital personnel, presumably including the night trash man, all of whom had examined my cervix for the all important dilation report. In centimeters.

“Hi. How are you doing?”

Didn’t he know?

Me: huff huff. “Pretty good. It’s been a long night.”

Strong With A Spear: “She’s doing great. Just great. I’m really proud of her. And she’s beautiful.” He patted my hand as I have contraction number 10,348.

“Good.” Dr. Lovely Lovely said. He smiled at me benevolently. “Here’s the story. You are still dilated to four centimeters and you haven’t progressed. As you know, the contractions are supposed to move the dilation process forward until you’re up to nine or ten centimeters and then we would move you to delivery and you’d go into hard labor…”

I picture me on a rock pile at hard labor, twenty or so other pregnant convicts in a line, all of us chained together at the ankle, clanking along with our pick axes, singing Swing Low, or possibly Slow Hand if we were all Pointers Sisters fans. In my fantasy I am the largest, belly-wise. And not progressing. The chain seems to be holding me back somehow.

“… but since that is not happening we have to consider the alternative.”