This Was Not in the Birth Plan

Thursday morning at 8:00 a.m. and my mom is with me to check in to the OBGYN clinic where I've done all my prenatal care (my husband is parking the car in anticipation that this will be the day). She has been the faithful husband surrogate and come with me to two other appointments so she knows my frustration with the administrative/bureaucratic haze of the place.

The receptionist does not greet us, say hello, or make eye contact when I hand her my insurance card.

"Don't you want to tell her?" Mom whispers to me. I shake my head.

"She doesn't care, Mom," I said.

The woman makes what has to be the 100th copy of the same insurance card I've used since December. They make a copy each time, at each visit. Yet somehow at the pharmacy, they can look up in the computer that you have insurance. Part of the bizarreness.

"The nurse will see her," the woman says, confirming to my mother that I am just another file in the long hours that will be her day.

Instead of taking a seat in the faux-velvet sofa lined waiting room, I knock on the door to the patient area which is locked by a key pad.

A nurse opens the door.

"I'm having contractions," I said. They took me in and hooked me up to the CTG, the same monitor I've been on for 20 minutes during my last four visits, and that I was on Tuesday night in the ER.

The contractions are sharp and my mom and husband are sitting with me, waiting for the doctor. My doctor, while being a very nice person and having delivered two of my friends' babies, has been the 10 minute appointment variety, particularly here in the end. She has not yet arrived to the clinic, even though they gave me an 8 a.m. appointment and it is now nearly 8:30 a.m.

Someone else examines me; she says I am now 1 cm dilated which in delivery terms means my body is not yet serious about forcing the kid out.

My doctor appears: she doesn't examine me again because someone else already has. She decides to admit me. These are the magic words we'd been waiting for. Finally something is happening that will take us closer to having this child see daylight.

The hospital admissions officer comes. We say we want the second room option, the "deluxe" room which has two sofas as opposed to the one in the standard room, so that both Mom and hubbie can sleep in the room with me.

"There are none available," the young woman informs us. This of course is not according to plan.

"Well, we have a problem," I said, "because when we did the tour, I asked about this possibility and they said that it couldn't happen. There are always rooms."

We waited for thirty minutes to see if one would become available: nothing happened because the hospital is like a hotel, most people weren't going to leave until noon or later. We debated going up yet another category of room and then back down if one become available. I tried my best to evoke their sense of customer service and ask them to give us the next room at the rate of the deluxe room. No dice.

My doctor saw us waiting and said she would go up to the ward and see if anyone was being discharged later that day. Another thirty minutes and we were still sitting: I was fuming at the woman who had done the hospital tour who was now out of the office on vacation. Her flippant "oh, I can even change the curtains and all the bathroom fixtures if you want" and assurances that we would receive the best in care were now useless.

Finally we decided to go into a standard and wait for a deluxe to open up later in the day. This may all sound silly, but it was a sign of things to come, had any of us been paying attention. Nothing would go according to plan.

We went up to the room to wait, laptops, Soduku at the ready, as contractions continued to roll throughout my body. My doctor said she would check on me in a little while. We decided to order lunch from Chili's.

A few hours went by; more contractions, the nurse moving us to another room across the hall that had more light and a closet (the first one missing both) and my husband arriving with my favorite foods for lunch and our luggage. Poor thing he was dripping with sweat, somehow having missed the bellhops that the hospital provided in his trek from the parking lot to our temporary bunker.

Most likely because of his Asian-Philippino looks, people thought he was a driver and left him to it.

We ate (the nurse being confused that I was on a normal and not liquid diet). I was getting antsy. Why hadn't anyone been to see me? It was now past 2 p.m. and we were told that a deluxe room had been made available -- it was just being cleaned.

I was walking the floor to ease the pain of the contractions which were coming every five minutes now and lasting for about 30 seconds. The magic medicine ball was in the car if I should need it.

I asked the nurses when I would see a doctor. Soon they said. I lurked outside the site of our soon to be room which had a huge flower arrangement out front that say MYTHA in pink velvet letters. There were four women sitting on the two couches, all of them wearing nikab, or the full face veil.

On another sweep, the nikab wearing women were gone, replaced by two slow moving custodians who were clearly having a catch up gossip while doing anything but cleaning the room.

I kept walking the floor.

"Is it a boy?" One of the custodians asked, as I passed her.

"Yes, and we are trying to get into that room!" I told her. She seemed surprised but this did galvanize her a bit; we were finally in thirty minutes later. My mom and husband unpacked; I needed more hangers but also was in enough pain at this point that I couldn't be bothered to do much.

At 3:00 p.m. my doctor showed up. She wanted to do one of the dreaded exams but this time I welcomed it because I wanted to know what was going on with my body. This involved me getting back on the bed and hooked up to the CTG which I was starting to hate because it meant not being able to move at all when the contractions came. And walking or standing was the best way to combat the rolling waves of pain.

She hooked me up, watched for a while, and then with the five fingers pressed together of a glove covered with some of my blood announced:

"Still only one centimeter."

This is when I disregarded any ideas about inducing being a bad thing: essentially it had been 24 hours since my first contraction and yet I was still nowhere near active labor.

"I can give you a tablet," she said, "but you said no drugs."

"I'll take it," I said.

She failed to mention it was a vaginal tablet but I was game.

"I'll check on you in a few hours," she said, "and if the pain is bad, I'll write up some painkillers for you. Keep walking."

I unhooked from the machine, asked for the magic ball, and started walking again. My husband came back from the parking lot saying he had seen one of his colleagues on the floor. He and his wife had gone on the hospital tour with us; he had been the most vocal about being unimpressed by the cruise director attitude of the hospital customer service person.

His wife was due August 8th. I remember joking with her.

"If I'm late, maybe we'll both be here together."

Since she was a Muslim woman who covered her hair, my mom and I went to her room alone, to make sure that my husband didn't walk in on her uncovered.

What we found demoralized me even further: there she was, sitting on the bed, holding a tiny pink bundle of a baby in her arms. She had also delivered early, by about two weeks, in the spirit of the all the summer babies in Doha (but ours).

I braved a smile; we commiserated about the various hospital issues. I listened without gnawing my fingernails or any other part of my body as she described arriving on the labor ward already 5 centimeters dilated; she advised me to take the drugs, told me about the laughing gas they gave her to numb the pain, and then the birth of her baby.

We returned to our room and I sent out a text in all capitals to my closest friends: She HAD HER BABY! Texts came back sympathizing, laughing at the situation with me, sharing my frustration at the universe and my body, and of course this stubborn baby who was refusing to descend into the real world.

At seven thirty, the pain was so severe, I asked the nurse for one of the painkillers. She wanted me to lie down on the bed; I refused, asking for it to be given to me standing up. Lying down was now not only painful, it was hard for me to get back up because of knot that my back had become.

The painkiller helped and Mom and I watched a movie; at least we made it through half the movie and dinner arrived. The immediate relief made me want to sleep but I stayed awake; if I had known the ordeal ahead, I may have taken advantage of the opportunity to get a few minutes of rest.

"If the pain increases, let us know," the nurse said cheerfully. This had been a repeated refrain over the course of the day so it was now meaningless to me. What did she mean, if it got worse? Isn't that were all of this was going?

In typical fashion Gulf fashion the food was ordered via a form and included everything from salmon, to steak. But I had no appetite.

"You have to eat, so that when the baby is born he has glucose."

Mom took this to heart and so I ate fatoosh, a Middle Eastern salad which I normally love, but tonight it had no taste for me. The toasted pieces which give the salad variety were missing. I ate it to keep everyone in the room happy.

We tried to watch the movie again but the pain was so great that I couldn't take it; Mom continued on alone. I sat on the ball and gritted my teeth.

There was a knock on the door - and instead of nurses - our neighbors' big smiles filled the doorway. The youngest at 3, the middle boy at 8, and the only girl, the oldest at 14, with their handsome father, came in. They were a sight for sore eyes; all summer the youngest and oldest had come over to play board games and kept me entertained. They had also bonded with Mom in the two weeks she had spent with us waiting for the arrival of baby.

Their visit was a brief respite from the monotony of waiting; I was able to put on a brave face while they were visiting.

After they left, I asked for the nurse again because I wanted another painkiller. The doctor came to see me: CTG again, and by now I was wondering how we put a man on the moon but not managed to find a way to measure these signs in an upright position.

"You can't have another one until 11 p.m.," the doctor said. The clock facing me on the bed said this was in an hour. I didn't know how I would be able to do this, but I saw the light at the end of an hour. Another injection.

By eleven and the time of the injection, I was crazed by pain. I wanted to see a doctor; I wanted to know if my body was opening up to let the kid out. I wanted information.

The nurse told them I needed to keep walking. One doctor was on an emergency, the other was in the labor ward. It would be some time before anyone could come and see me.

"The painkiller isn't working," I told the nurse.

"It only helps with some pain," she said, "it can't help you with real labor pain."

"I want to go up to the labor ward," I said.

"Can you walk for ten more minutes?" Mom asked me.

I shook my head. Since no one seemed to understand the enormity of the situation, I was going to take it into my own hands.

I went to the door, as our room was directly across from the nurses' station.

"I need to see the doctor," I said to the three pink uniforms at the counter; they were all young, skinny, and sweet. And about to tell me the reasons why they couldn't make good on my request.

I gagged. But unlike the previous time when Mom was trying to get me to eat the KFC my husband brought for his dinner, this time I couldn't keep down the bile. It filled my mouth. For someone who can remember each of the times she's thrown up in her life (and never once during pregnancy) this was a distressing event.

1. Eight years old on a Greyhound bus in Canada; overly warm in the streaming sunlight and warning my mother I was going to throw up. This was on the way to get immigration paperwork completed and we didn't have a car. A few seconds later I proved that I wasn't kidding around. And one of the other passengers was kind enough to offer me some gum.

2. Feeling sick during a trip in Turkey, not realizing that overseas medication is much stronger, and waiting for lunch, I rushed to the bathroom and threw up for the first time as an adult.

3. Waking up with a stomach virus or food poisoning (we never determined which) and throwing up steak for the first time as an adult.

4. July 29th, 2010: twice in a row the fatoosh I had for dinner.

Now the nurses went into action; another wheelchair, with speed to the labor ward.

It was nearly midnight. And the real fun was about to begin.