Labor, or Why I’m Glad I’m Not a Woman
I hate hospitals. Have you ever been to a hospital and thought to yourself, “Hey, this hospital has way too many doctors and nurses! I’m getting way too much attention! They should leave me alone in my room for hours on end without telling me anything about what’s wrong with me or what’s going to happen next!” No. No one’s ever said that. And if they ever have, it’s because they’re in the psych ward.
Mrs. Drew was induced into labor yesterday, but that was after 24 hours of sitting there, after being “induced” to be induced. I wish I were making this up. More importantly, Mrs. Drew wishes I were making this up. Not so. A gel was applied to Mrs. Drew to get her to have contractions for 12 hours, PRIOR to being induced. And the gel had to be applied twice.
Waiting in a hospital is like being in your 7th grade Spanish class. Time ceases to pass, and in fact can often go backwards. All you want to do is leave. All the hospital wants you to do is leave so they can move on to the next patient. And yet, you can’t leave. Why? Because no one in medical school teaches doctors how to speak to human beings without sounding like an aloof jerkoff. But it seems they do teach them to never speak to nurses, ever. The majority of doctors I’ve met assume that I too went to medical school. As you can tell from this blog, I did not. Every question I ask a doctor gets treated rhetorically. I hate you, medicine men.
Anyway, Mrs. Drew spent the better part of 12 hours in complete and utter agony because her nurse said the pain medication available to her probably wouldn’t dull the pain and could, in fact, make her nauseous as well. We later found out that nurse had two children without the benefit of drugs. Her career objective, apparently, is cruel, twisted revenge.
Once Mrs. Drew got the drugs, she said “I should have done this ages ago,” which is the first thing that pops into my mind whenever I myself have drugs of any kind. By noon the next day, she was ready to push, except the baby was facing up coming out of the womb, already psyched to play peek-a-boo. This makes delivery harder. Now here’s where it gets bloody.
To get the baby out, the doctor decided he needed to use the forceps, i.e. the jaws of life, i.e. the salad spoons, i.e. the pitching wedges. The nurse then proceeds to roll in a host of equipment that, to me, looked like the kind of equipment used to cure women in the 1600’s of witchcraft.
There was no partition at Mrs. Drew’s bedside. In fact, there was a TV up on the ceiling that hit Mrs. Drew at precisely the wrong angle. I moved the TV. If it had weighed 74 tons, I still would have moved it. I stood at the side of bed at Mrs. Drew’s waist, facing her head and staring right at her. This worked well for the most part, except for the few occasional glimpses I got. Peripheral vision is useless and horrible.
They made Mrs. Drew push for a half hour. By this point, she had had an epidural, which had numbed her below the belly. Hard to push down when your lower body is paralyzed. But hey, that’s just the logic in my head talking. Pushing failed (shocker!), and they dug in with the forceps.
I won’t lie to you. Before your kid is born, you aren’t expecting it to be pretty. You know the birth will be a little messy. But it’s fairly shocking when the doctor holds up your baby and it looks like a prop from one of those horror flicks that gets called a “cult” flick because 42 fat dipshits on the internet like it a lot. The baby was covered in blood, head to toe, screaming. Screaming, I assume, for a shower.
That's what surprised me the most about the whole labor process. It takes forever, and when it's finally over, you're shocked that it's over, and that there's a baby sitting right there. When I first saw my daughter, I had the same reaction people have after seeing David Blaine perform a magic trick: "Oh my God? How did you... I'm so freaked out right now!" I still have a hard time believing it's our baby. I assume it's a baby we're borrowing from someone else who doesn't have the time for it, like an NBA player.
They cleaned my daughter off. She looked better. Beautiful in fact, bruises and all. She looked at me. I looked at her. I looked at Mrs. Drew. And Mrs. Drew looked at both of us. And we all agreed, in an unspoken fashion, that being stuck in a hospital blows.
Mrs. Drew was induced into labor yesterday, but that was after 24 hours of sitting there, after being “induced” to be induced. I wish I were making this up. More importantly, Mrs. Drew wishes I were making this up. Not so. A gel was applied to Mrs. Drew to get her to have contractions for 12 hours, PRIOR to being induced. And the gel had to be applied twice.
Waiting in a hospital is like being in your 7th grade Spanish class. Time ceases to pass, and in fact can often go backwards. All you want to do is leave. All the hospital wants you to do is leave so they can move on to the next patient. And yet, you can’t leave. Why? Because no one in medical school teaches doctors how to speak to human beings without sounding like an aloof jerkoff. But it seems they do teach them to never speak to nurses, ever. The majority of doctors I’ve met assume that I too went to medical school. As you can tell from this blog, I did not. Every question I ask a doctor gets treated rhetorically. I hate you, medicine men.
Anyway, Mrs. Drew spent the better part of 12 hours in complete and utter agony because her nurse said the pain medication available to her probably wouldn’t dull the pain and could, in fact, make her nauseous as well. We later found out that nurse had two children without the benefit of drugs. Her career objective, apparently, is cruel, twisted revenge.
Once Mrs. Drew got the drugs, she said “I should have done this ages ago,” which is the first thing that pops into my mind whenever I myself have drugs of any kind. By noon the next day, she was ready to push, except the baby was facing up coming out of the womb, already psyched to play peek-a-boo. This makes delivery harder. Now here’s where it gets bloody.
To get the baby out, the doctor decided he needed to use the forceps, i.e. the jaws of life, i.e. the salad spoons, i.e. the pitching wedges. The nurse then proceeds to roll in a host of equipment that, to me, looked like the kind of equipment used to cure women in the 1600’s of witchcraft.
There was no partition at Mrs. Drew’s bedside. In fact, there was a TV up on the ceiling that hit Mrs. Drew at precisely the wrong angle. I moved the TV. If it had weighed 74 tons, I still would have moved it. I stood at the side of bed at Mrs. Drew’s waist, facing her head and staring right at her. This worked well for the most part, except for the few occasional glimpses I got. Peripheral vision is useless and horrible.
They made Mrs. Drew push for a half hour. By this point, she had had an epidural, which had numbed her below the belly. Hard to push down when your lower body is paralyzed. But hey, that’s just the logic in my head talking. Pushing failed (shocker!), and they dug in with the forceps.
I won’t lie to you. Before your kid is born, you aren’t expecting it to be pretty. You know the birth will be a little messy. But it’s fairly shocking when the doctor holds up your baby and it looks like a prop from one of those horror flicks that gets called a “cult” flick because 42 fat dipshits on the internet like it a lot. The baby was covered in blood, head to toe, screaming. Screaming, I assume, for a shower.
That's what surprised me the most about the whole labor process. It takes forever, and when it's finally over, you're shocked that it's over, and that there's a baby sitting right there. When I first saw my daughter, I had the same reaction people have after seeing David Blaine perform a magic trick: "Oh my God? How did you... I'm so freaked out right now!" I still have a hard time believing it's our baby. I assume it's a baby we're borrowing from someone else who doesn't have the time for it, like an NBA player.
They cleaned my daughter off. She looked better. Beautiful in fact, bruises and all. She looked at me. I looked at her. I looked at Mrs. Drew. And Mrs. Drew looked at both of us. And we all agreed, in an unspoken fashion, that being stuck in a hospital blows.
posted by Big Daddy Drew at 10:41 PM
1 Comments:
Being stuck in a hospital sucks
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