Wednesday, December 5, 2007

What's a Little Pressure Between Friends?


We arrived at the hospital at 7:30 Monday morning. By 8:30 the doctor had broken her water and pitocin was being administered intravenously. All set, just waiting for the baby. By 12:00, a different doctor was on shift and checked things out, nothing happening. Of course, Wifey is having contractions the entire time, I gather that it was pleasant. By 5:00 PM, doc #2 checked in again and decided to up the pitocin dosage after evaluating data she had taken from an internal monitor (exactly as medieval as it sounds). This was interesting to me because she apparently went against the standard protocol of the hospital regarding frequency of contractions and dosage. I admired the ability to independently assess the situation and make a hard decision. As it turns out, this may very well have ultimately averted a C-section. Bravo.

In the meantime, doc #3 came on shift around 8:00 PM. He came in, showed us the data tracking contractions and the baby's heart beat, checked out Wifey, and confidently declared that the baby would be arriving around 10:00 or 10:30. He was very polite, and very wrong. About 30 minutes later the nurse was rushing to make preparations and paging doc #3 because that baby was storming the gates. Wifey had to resist pushing for a bit, but a flurry of activity and less than 10 minutes passed and, voila, a child is born. Wifey did a great job pushing the baby. Git'er done!


Two observations:

1) Doctors use the word "pressure" interchangeably with "sharp pain", "throbbing ache", and "You will pray for the sweet release of death". I'm not saying they're doing the wrong thing, I'm just sayin'. Comedian Brian Regan has also discussed this cultural phenomena.

2) Sweetness was introduced to Sarah Joy. It went about as well as Al Gore addressing the American Petroleum Institute (see below). After bringing Sweetness up for over 2 years, Sarah's cries barely even register. I could do long division with her howling on my shoulder and it wouldn't bother me. It drives Sweetness crazy, though, probably because the "only child" party is officially over. We'll be working on our child-to-child orientation over the next few weeks, I'm sure. Note that I bought Sweets a necklace to make her feel special about her sister arriving. I didn't know it would be so large as to make her look like Flava Flav.

5 comments:

Michelle said...

Flava Flav Nice..:-)

Just me said...

That picture is priceless.... it encapulates sibling rivalry at it's beginning! LOL. LOVE IT! Hey don't worry, I didn't care much for my siblings most of the time, but I like them now. Just give it 30yrs. ;)

Sarah said...

Emily does not look impressed.

My mom said to tell you this:
One day when Jerry was little, he was pitching a fit and basically being a brat. My mom told him that he hadn't been very happy lately and he needed to work on being happy. She asked him if there was anything she could do to make him happier.
He replied that yes, there was. We could get rid of Joel.

In Light of the Truth... said...

Love it! =)

Anonymous said...

Well just watch emily closly make sure she doesn't try to prepare the younger sister for marriage the same way my sister did!!!!!!! :) (Cute girl by the way)