Twenty-Seven Years Ago
October 09, 2008
This morning I sent SonnyeBoy a text message:
Nothing like a little guilt to start a birthday off right, I always say! He texted ("texted"? Oh my God!) me right back:
This just goes to show what a wonderful son he is.
WARNING: Do not read the rest of this entry if you are pregnant, or squeamish, or SonnyeBoy.
It's true, though; I did almost die.
SonnyeBoy was a big boy -- 9 pounds, 12 ounces -- and took his own sweet time getting here. After three days of slow labor and two hours of pushing, the OB said he wanted to try a forceps delivery.
"Forceps hurt," he said helpfully, "do you want an epidural?"
Oh. Hell. Yes.
Anyhow, the birth itself went just fine. Joe got to go into the the nursery with SonnyeBoy and do the footprints on the birth certificate; I got rolled into the recovery room, where the new OB (the shift had changed -- love that HMO!) worked on massaging my belly to deliver the afterbirth.
And then I started bleeding. A lot. A whole, whole lot. So the OB hustled me back in the delivery room. As the nurses rolled the gurney into the room, I saw Joe coming out of the nursery. I yelled, "They're taking me back in!"
So they settled me onto the table and started doing... stuff, trying to stop the bleeding. Meanwhile, I got really, really cold; the nurses began covering me with heated blankets.
The original OB stuck his head in the delivery room and inquired as to the progress. The new OB hollered, "I think it's an inversion! I've never seen one before!"
This admission did not fill me with confidence. I turned to a nurse and inquired, "Am I going to be all right?"
I figured it would be good to know, in case I needed to make a good Act of Contrition. She nodded and put another blanket on me, as the original OB jumped back into scrubs and took over.
Basically, a uterine inversion is where your uterus turns inside out, so the two doctors pushed my uterus back where it belonged, stuffed it full of gauze, and sewed it up tight. I had to get two pints of blood to replace what I lost. Joe came in when the fun was almost over and got to hold my arm to warm up the blood streaming into my arm.
But you know what? I'd go through it all over again in a New York minute, without a second thought, because when it was all over, I had SonnyeBoy.