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08/28/2008
Voyage to the bottom of the C
Look, I hate to be the one to break it to you, but sweetbreads are neither sweet nor bread. While I normally despise evasive phrasing — this might sting a little... — preferring instead the plainest of speaking — ...as if you were being swarmed by a cloud of pissed-off bionic megawasps whose sacred nest you have just defiled — in this case I understand it. After all, many find sweetbreads either delicious or useful, gourmands and calves respectively, but the minute you start calling it what it is, well, I mean, how appetizing does baby cow thymus really sound? I'll tell you: it doesn't sound appetizing at all. It sounds glandular. And that goes double for animal fries.
All this is by way of advising you that when you are lying in your hospital bed a few hours after a C-section, minding your own business, fondling your own baby, blamelessly saturating a maxi-pad, and a cheerful nurse comes in and says it's time for some massage, don't get too excited. Oh, it may sound nice, but know her offer for the treachery that it is. There will be no warmed river stones or aromatherapy oils, and the only Vichy shower you can look forward to is what happens when your Foley catheter comes loose.
There will be, instead, a great and mighty palpating, an excruciating assault that will leave you breathless as the nurse tries to ascertain the position of your uterus. That uterus, of course, has been distended by pregnancy for quite some time. It has also recently suffered not only the insult of an incision but the unceremonious yanking asunder that has allowed your doctor to wrest from its confines a very young human being. You'd think it had earned a rest. But no: now it is time for it to shrivel meekly on back to its former modest dimensions by way of continuing contractions. And if it won't go quietly, the entire nursing team will have a thing or two to say about it.
Over the next few days, at least once a shift I would find myself subjected to this workmanlike handling. It was worst when a nurse had some doubt as to where my lovable trickster of a womb had gotten off to. "It's right where I left it," I'd protest, feinting back and forth as I tried to fend her off with my rolling tray table, but she would not be deterred, and would instead go get a colleague with an even firmer touch. (Once two nurses couldn't agree, so they called in a third for the tiebreaker. Didn't do much for my uterus, but it sure scared my duodenum straight.) Why they couldn't do this sadistic pummeling half an hour after my scheduled Percocet, I'm sure I don't fucking know. But those so-called massages were the most painful part of Ben's birth, so I do know I got off easy.
Not the scariest part, though. The whole affair was remarkably low key overall. At the appointed time I walked into the operating room and mounted the table on my own. Once I was connected to lead after lead for monitoring, I was introduced to the anesthesiologist, who didn't even crack a smile when I told him, "I'd like to try some of that newfangled twilight sleep I'm hearing so much about." Not only did he not smile, in fact, he looked more than a little alarmed, turning to my OB and stammering a bit. "I'm kidding," I told him cheerfully. "Don't worry. I brought my own chloroform."
So I think he probably spent the rest of the time I was in the OR getting his revenge. First I sat up for the local, leaning against a gowned nurse who was bracing herself in a matter most concerning. "This will sting a bit," the anesthesiologist advised. "Thanks," I said, glad to have some warning, figuring I'd manage the pain the way I always do: close eyes, relax, and think placid thoughts like HOLY CHRIST DOES THIS SHIT HURT. But "Don't thank me yet," he said with alarming relish. It had to have been revenge, unless the humorless bastard simply "forgot" to mention the squadron of hornets that immediately descended and started working the bejesus out of my lower back.
After the local took effect, someone else did something else with something else to my lower back; thanks to the wasps I couldn't feel a thing so I couldn't really tell you exactly what went down. I was then arranged on the narrow table in a penitent-thief-on-the-cross position, arms outstretched, while other people did other things: the anesthesiologist scraped various parts of my body to see how well the anesthesia had taken effect; a nurse erected a paper barrier between my chin and the rest of me; and I looked up at a strange plastic sack of royal blue fluid depending from my IV stand. "What's in the bag?" I asked the nearest UPiG (unidentifiable person in gown). "Wiper fluid?"
"Windex," she answered. "Or dye to help us ascertain the placement of your bladder and whether we've nicked it during surgery. One of those, I forget."
"Starts to work before you start to wipe," I agreed, and then we were in the thick of things. I started to feel very strange, and told the anesthesiologist so. "My shoulders feel weird," I told him, unable first to describe the feeling, and then to say much more than that as my blood pressure dipped. Professional that he was, he immediately abandoned all plans for vengeance and asked a long series of questions that culminated in the delivery of a helpful little hit of ephedrine. Then my lower belly was swabbed and shaved, or so I was told. My OB crossed over behind the paper barrier. A blue-clad Paul entered the OR and sat by my head. And I lay on the table feeling the unnerving sensation of someone doing something to somewhere, which is about as specific as it gets when you've had a spinal block.
Now here is where I say that I think every woman should have the right to a surgical birth if that's what she desires. I could wish that more women were better informed about the risks of same, and I could wish that doctors in general steered their patients away from wholly elective procedures, but that is unnecessary editorialization on my main point. My main point is this: a C-section is surgery, major abdominal surgery. Someone is going to cut your body open. And while it is a routine procedure that carries relatively little risk as far as surgery goes, it was, for me, a terrifying, unpleasant business, one that left me panicked, sweaty, and crying before and after hearing our baby's first angry squawks.
The fear kicked in the second time my blood pressure dipped. The monitor screen was right near my head, so as soon as I started feeling strange I turned to watch it, ready to alert the anesthesiologist if I thought he was too busy composing an eloquent anti-Julie manifesto to keep close tabs on what was happening with my body. Down, down, down, until it was at something like, oh, I don't know, 40/3. (I exaggerate for dramatic effect, and because I cannot remember what it actually was, but trust me: it didn't feel a single point over 50/10.) "Help," I whispered to Paul, unable to say anything more. He didn't hear me. I tried again, louder. "I need HELP," I croaked, terribly frightened.
Paul got the anesthesiologist's attention just as the monitor alarm began to go off. With another dose of ephedrine my blood pressure began to climb again. And I know I was in good hands, and that I was in no real danger, and that hypotension during spinal anesthesia is a relatively common occurrence, easily managed. But it scared me, made me think of that consent form I'd signed, and how stupid I'd feel if I were actually among the minuscule percentage of people who died on the table during a completely routine procedure. (Okay, if I were dead, I guess I wouldn't feel too stupid. Note to self: Make will. Bequeath stupid feeling to heirs and assigns.)
So that was the terrifying. And here is the unpleasant: seeing the blood splattering against the paper barrier, like driving through a giant puddle, splashing the mud up onto the windshield, only more...amniotic. (It didn't help that at least two people on the other side of the drape exclaimed, "Whoa!") Experiencing no pain, but still feeling things done to my body with an upsetting amount of force, pushing, pulling, and twisting, for what felt like a very long time. Wanting to urge them to hurry, hurry, to get me off the table and out of the room as they leisurely closed my incision. Thinking, I wonder if it's too late to choose an unattended waterbirth at home.
But beside all that was the baby, snorting and squalling, big and pink and slippery and ours. He was hastily wiped and shown to me; Paul followed him across the room while he was weighed, cleaned, and stuck, alas, in the heel. I lay on the table and cried while some more people did some more things to some bleeding parts of my midsection. (Lest you think I'd been completely blindsided by the resident's postpartum query, my own doctor was the first to broach the subject of contraception, leaning over the drape to ask me, "Are we doing a tubal while we're in here?" Gosh, I don't know, Doctor; did I consent to one?)
But: the baby. He was not out of Paul's sight for a moment, which meant I lay alone on the table while the doctors finished up. So it was a nurse who came over and asked me if I wanted to hold the baby, who'd not yet been named. And because I was so goddamned woozy, still scared and still strapped down, I had to tell her, "I don't think I can right now."
And that's the kind of thing that could make you sad for years. I don't have any regrets. I haven't second guessed our decision to opt for a C-section. And we had the best possible outcome, an uncomplicated delivery of a perfectly healthy baby. If I missed a few moments at the very start of Ben's life, I'm comforted by the certainty that it is better to have done that than to have risked him in any more serious way. So I am not sad. But I sure see how someone could be.
My only regret, in fact, is that I didn't milk it nearly enough. My recovery from the surgery was faster and easier than I'd ever have predicted. I went home on day 4 postpartum feeling very little discomfort thanks to a steady diet of Percs and ibuprofen, and was immediately climbing stairs, sitting at the table for meals, and letting an exuberant Charlie knee me square in the belly in his enthusiasm to get close. I was tired and prone to an unattractive Quasimodo hunch, but those factors didn't prevent me from being up and around. They just turned me into a humpity bitch.
Part of my speedy recuperation was due to my great good fortune in having help. Paul was, as ever, present and fully engaged in every aspect of child care and housekeeping. And my mother had arrived the night before my surgery to assume the care and feeding of Charlie, who was beyond thrilled! that his grandmother had come! for a surprise visit! just to see him! (You know, sometimes little kids are kind of dumb.)
But there was more to it than that. Because of my aunt's return to the hospital, I knew the day Ben was born that my mother would probably have to leave before the end of her planned two-week stay, so it was important to me that I return quickly to some semblance of normal activity. I might have been protectively curled over a weeping abdominal wound, but by God I would unload the dishwasher's silverware basket while I oozed.
And I did. By two weeks postpartum I was back in my pre-pregnancy clothes, hefting laundry baskets as if I were training for that contest — we call it the heavy schlepping contest. Oh, you know the one I mean, the one where a couple of guys situate their bodies inside a Volkswagen Beetle, poke their heads through the sunroof, and then lurch down a straightaway carrying the thing, like, in a race — and even, gasp, driving a car, an activity strictly prohibited according to my discharge instructions. Those instructions also said something I scornfully ignored about tub baths, which, since we do not have a gantry mounted in the bathroom, I'd missed most acutely during late pregnancy, and it's a good thing I didn't have Ben in November, because I'd swear there was even a clause denying me the vote. And Senator John McCain needs me!
A little as fucking if humor there, ladies and gentlemen.
At any rate, my mother did leave long before her original return date, so I'm not sorry I pushed myself back to productivity sooner. I do regret that the universe didn't allow me the opportunity for two solid weeks of lying on the sofa, holding the baby, and having someone else do all the heavy lifting around here, because, damn, what do they put in the engine compartments of those little German cars, anyway? Engines?
But as nice as a stretch of malingering might have been, it's been better to be back to normal, where normal entails fatigue, chaos, tasks left undone, e-mails left unanswered, a staggering lot of laundry, a baby with an elfin folded ear and a downy widow's peak, and Charlie who says to strangers, "Have you met our little Ben? He's my baby brother."
My heartfelt thanks to all of you for the kind things you said about my aunt and my last post.
