I'll put this out there first for the ladies: You are the superior sex. Sorry guys, we don't have to grow a human and then endure pushing that human thru a 10cm hole for hours.
I'll try and keep this a bit shorter - I kind of feel like im a hypocrite for having a blog about pregnancy loss and then talking about child birth.
My wife's labour started on a Monday night. We went to the hospital only to be told to go home. To cut thru the tedious part - we made 4 other trips like this. The Foothills Hospital isn't exactly the nicest place to go when you're not actually dialated 4cm or your water broke. They just send you away to labour somewhere else. Actually, now that I think about it, our health system here in Alberta leaves a lot to be desired. They pump you thru there like it's drive-thru child delivery.
So we went for walks in our neighborhood to help speed up the labour, she drank this Lebanese chai tea that helped her labour move along, and no, we didn't 'do it' to help things go along faster. It's just weird and awkward. Put a basketball between you and your significant other, yeah, it's awkward !
Over 40 hours later, my wife goes into active labour. Go figure, when we had true-blue labour (2 days after she started labour) where you have to stay at the hospital, it was 1:30am. So not only were we both exhausted, we wouldn't be sleeping thru the night either. At the hospital, it was quite a different experience than I thought. I figured we'd be put into our own delivery room right away with a nurse. Nope. We were put into labour and delivery triage with a bunch of other women who were not quite ready for a delivery room, but too far along to be sent home. I had a few memorable incidents from the labour and delivery triage at the Foothills:
1) Someone backing into my truck at 2am (I could see it from the window in the room, but couldnt do anything about it)
2) Some girl in another bed was screaming "I can't take this, i've been in labour for 2 hrs". I thought April was going to tell her off cause April was over 40 hrs at that point
3) Getting into fights with the other husband/boyfriends there. First, it was over popsicles. April wanted one cause they stocked a public fridge with them. I picked thru and took all the non-deformed ones for April. Second, we hogged the only shower for about an hour. Someone was banging on the door, I said i'm here to look after my wife and not yours and promptly shut the door. I didn't hear a thing from him after that.
We were moved into our own room at 7AM. We were assigned this east indian nurse with a thick accent my mom in law couldnt understand. My first thought was, "oh great. I'll have to translate now". My second thought was "peanuts" [ see earlier blog post for this :) ]
The doctor who came in and checked up on us was interesting. Rainbow print bandana and pink crocs! There was an anesthesiologist who was offering drugs like it was going out of style; he gave her phentynol (spelling probably is wrong). Everytime she had a contraction he was like, "oh sounds like she needs more!". I eventually got sick of him and got rid of him by saing, "what are you paid per dosage or something?".
To go back to the doc, interesting thing... she was not supposed to be doing deliveries. We later fond that out. Needless to say, the doctor's name on our son's birth certificate is NOT the one who delivered him. Besides the fact she wasn't supposed to be delivering babies, she was a fantastic doctor/birth coach (sort of).
To be continued; including my wife telling me to 'STAND BY MY HEAD AND DONT LOOK'.
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