Meanwhile, I stood there holding my wife’s hand, being like, “It’s okay, dear.” And it so wasn’t okay. I was of no help whatsoever. You never feel more useless than when your pregnant wife is screaming her brains out and you know that there’s nothing you can do verbally or physically to make it better. The fact that you’re standing there like an idiot—having the dumb luck to be born with a penis—only makes it worse.
The worst part was that the Cervidil was merely the beginning. The drug doesn’t even induce labor. It only induces the inducement. You have to get it inserted overnight, wait twelve hours, have your cervix checked again, and THEN you get the Pitocin, which is a drug meant to speed up the process. After the first application, we sat there bored out of our minds for half a day. I turned on the TV in the room.
“Oh, hey,” I said to my wife. “It’s House! We haven’t seen this one!”
“I don’t wanna watch a hospital show. I’m IN a hospital. Right now.”
At that moment, one of the patients on the show started coughing up blood in her hospital room, and my wife nearly threw the remote at me.
She was strapped to two different machines, one that monitored contractions and another that monitored the baby’s heart rate and blood pressure. The cheap Velcro straps began to dig into her skin. You can’t lie flat on your back when you’re in the late stages of pregnancy because it can restrict blood flow to the fetus. As a result, pregnant women have to contort themselves into a variety of positions, none of them optimal. My wife couldn’t stand the discomfort one second longer. I stared at her belly and it seemed like it was its own separate entity, just this massive orb of flesh divorced from her body. I kept waiting for it to float away like a hot air balloon. Every time she wanted to take a leak, she had to rip the monitor equipment off, go to the bathroom, ask the nurse to resquirt her tummy with clear goo that looked like a porn film money shot, and have the monitor electrodes strapped back on. At one point, her eyes lolled back inside her head.
“I feel dizzy,” she said.
“Are you okay?” I asked.
“I think I’m gonna pass out.”
Her blood pressure began to drop precipitously and I ran out of the room to grab a nurse, only one was already walking over because nurses can monitor patients from the front desk, which is helpful for them because then they don’t have to actually talk to patients. The nurse strolled in and looked at my wife.
“Hmm. That’s weird,” she said casually. “Her blood pressure is NOT supposed to be that low.”
“Is she dying?”
“Huh. Why is this machine being so silly?”
I tried to strangle the nurse with my eyes. “IS SHE DYING?!”
The amazing thing about hospitals is how blasé the nurses and doctors can be about everything. An exploding heart is no more interesting to them than a bad sandwich. It’s not like on TV, where doctors run EVERYWHERE, their asses tightly clenched and their faces grim with the determination to save lives, no matter the cost. In a real hospital, everyone just plods along. A patient is an item on a to-do list. If a patient is stable enough to be left unattended for twenty straight hours, then they can be left unattended for twenty straight hours. There’s no constant sense of urgency.
Of course, doctors and nurses have to be this way. They can’t be emotionally attached to every patient. They can’t be screaming out for defibrillators every waking second. They’d end up doing their jobs poorly. I understood all that while we were in that room, and yet it was little comfort when my wife’s blood pressure was dipping down to corpse levels and the nurse was acting like the fucking cable box was on the fritz.
She administered new meds through the IV and my wife shot back to life. Then the nurse left us to process what had just happened.
“Was I dying?” my wife asked me.
“The nurse never really made it clear.”
“Because that felt . . . bad.”
“You didn’t look happy about it.”
“Somebody needs to come take this goddamn baby out. I’m dying of thirst.” When you’re in labor, you can’t eat. You can only suck on ice chips instead of drinking straight fluids. And ice chips are terrible—tiny little nuggets formed from what tastes like old dishwater. It’s like chewing on a handful of frozen teeth. Refilling the ice chip cup every half hour was the only useful task I could perform for her.
A few hours later, the nurse came in and said the Cervidil had to be applied a second time. My wife nearly passed out hearing the news.
Sixteen hours after arriving at the hospital, she was finally ready to be induced. The anesthesiologist came by to administer the epidural and my wife greeted him as a liberator. Soon after, the ob-gyn came into our room for the delivery, followed close behind by my father-in-law, who had popped in for a visit.
The doctor looked over my wife. “Okay, so I think we’re about ready to—”
“Excuse me, Doctor,” said my father-in-law. “Are you Dr. Kleinbaum of the Rockville Kleinbaums?”
“Oh, yes.”
“I think that your daughter is our neighbor at the beach!” My father-in-law is a wonderful man who hates waking up before 1:00 P.M. and loves having extended conversations with absolute strangers.
“Really?” asked the doctor.