Hurry Up and Wait

When last we left this story, it was with the expectation that things were about to move forward quickly. On Monday, one day after my due date, I lost the famed mucous plug after which my friends went immediately into labor - their membranes (or water) breaking, heading straight to the hospital for a few hours and then the text message later: Baby girl XXXX has arrived (all of them were girls)!

This was the story with all of the summer babies born to my friends over the past three months. No less than 5 babies, each of them early, some as little as a week, others as many as four weeks.

Our little one was not so fast which confused me given that my sister's three kids and indeed myself and my siblings had all been either on time or early ourselves.

When the first friend had her baby, due okay, I reasoned with myself, she was nearly a trimester ahead of me anyway; by the time we went to visit my friend with the four week premature delivery, whose date was AFTER ours, I was going slightly insane.

Conflicting emotions rolled through me: between a small tinge of pleasure that our son was happy where he was and healthy but mostly irritation and a growing sense of disbelief that I would ever get to meet this creature I had carted around for nearly a year.

I've already talked about my dismay and surprise at passing my due date (mom here visiting to entertain me and keep me from scratching my eyes out). As the week wore on, everyone was getting restless. I had used up three of the six weeks of maternity leave legally available to me; any further delay and my mom's four week trip was also slipping by.

Sand was spilling through the hourglass.

Tuesday night, nearly 24 hours after the 'bloody show' that started in the morning, we decided to go to the hospital. The bloody show is described as two teaspoons of blood and a sign that labor is imminent. I had changed maxi-pads at least four times during the course of the day and increasingly there were membranes and tissues emerging. (If this makes you queasy: pregnancy and delivery are not for the faint of heart).

We went to the emergency room, wanting to avoid the OBGYN clinic for their administrative lacking and obvious reasons previously discussed on this blog.

I walked into the emergency room and of course a Qatari gentleman was served before me; then I handed my paperwork to the woman.

"What's the problem?" she asked.

"I'm pregnant and bleeding," I said.

"How many months?" she asked.

"Nine," I said.

They told us to take a seat. My mom, husband and I sat in the 'male' waiting area because while women can sit in the men's area, men cannot sit in the women's area in the gender segregated culture of the Arabian Gulf. Two other men were in there with a few toddlers who were bouncing off the walls.

"You're not nine months pregnant," my mom said, "you're ten months pregnant," pointing out one of the grand ironies of pregnancy that it actually goes 40 weeks instead of 36.

Then a nurse came with a wheelchair.

"I can walk," I said, but they insisted not wanting to take any chances. They wheeled us straight up to the labor ward and got me onto an exam table. The nurse's bedside manner was limited to data related questions.

How many weeks pregnant was I?
When was my due date?
When had the blood started?

They were insisting only one person in the room with me at a time and so I had a Sophie's Choice moment: my mother or my husband? In the end, we decided they should take turns. My husband had his iPhone with plenty of games to keep him entertained.

They hooked me up to the CTG monitor and my contractions were there but over thirty minutes apart. The familiar thump, thump of the baby's heartbeat reassured all of us.

The doctor came in and got gloved up. One of the dreaded exams which are so painful they should be billed as good birth control.

"This is the cervix softening," the doctor said, "a good sign. We can induce you or you can go home and wait for the labor to progress."

I nearly burst into tears from relief. At that moment I realized how stressed I had been all day each time the blood had shown up. I had carried around the worry that the placenta had ruptured or was leaking or there was some other destructive force at work on our baby, slowing killing him, while I ignored it as normal.

Having been coached to resist the words "induction" or anything related to it and it also being Tuesday night, a week from the following Monday when my doctor had said we would look at options, the three of us decided to go home and get more sleep.

We were relieved that the baby was healthy, that the amount of blood was more than normal but not a cause for concern.

The mood in the car on the way home was slightly jubilant. We went through the Dairy Queen drive through for blizzards and home to wait some more.

Prickly Heat

For the past 8.5 months, pregnancy has been really good to me. Other than having to wake up early to go to the bathroom and the occasional leg cramp (which are a frightening window into labor) I have fared well compared to the stories I read, hear, and imagined.

Then, this weekend.

Thursday morning I could tell from the sweat beading lightly across me as the sun peeked into our bedroom that the air conditioning was out (again). Every ten weeks or so, the filters get clogged (only in our room) and then we have a few days of stale air. Up until now, the temperatures in our desert state stayed below 40 degree Celsius (over 100 degrees Fahrenheit) so this was not too huge an inconvenience.

But now that it is summer and I'm carrying around my own heater wherever I go with 34 week old baby boy, the air not being on was not a good option.

I was in a hurry to work and thought that I could get the maintenance guys to come on Saturday - Friday being the Muslim holiday - so only one more night.

Needless to say on Thursday night when I still hadn't fallen asleep by 6 a.m., right next to my blissfully snoring husband (who would want me to say gently, barely snoring) I was kicking myself for not having made the time.

Saturday came and went with the guards on the compound who deliver all the information to the work crews and like to keep tabs on our lives shaking their heads at us. After nearly three weeks of visits by the water crew to fix our water heater, we now had even more problems? They had that South Asian disbelief my parents raised us with when we said we had a headache or had been in a car accident.

Why? You could almost hear the question forming on his lips.

I stayed home from work on Sunday after a second sleepless night; waiting for the maintenance crew. Luckily I used the time to do what many would refer to as 'nesting'. Having another crew of carpenters in to assemble the Pack 'n' Play, move furniture, get the nanny's room ready, move the crib upstairs.

Still no sign of the crew.

I wrote 2,000 words for a manuscript long over due.

No air conditioning guys.

I dropped my car in the industrial area (a separate city from where the rest of us live) and came home.

Nobody but the busy carpenters, hanging shelves in the nanny's room. Why couldn't they fix the air?

I took a nap downstairs where the air was working, on one of the sofas. And then the doorbell rang.

At 6:00 p.m. they came.

And said they would come back today to double check it was working (it isn't) and they didn't.

Additionally because of the heat, I have a strange itchiness on my feet from flats I bought that apparently made my feet sweat. The open toe shoes or the mostly leather ones I've been wearing my adult life were too high for this late in the pregnancy. Though people say there is no way to avoid the leg cramps, I was all for trying.

Instead I now have a strange heat rash that the nurse at my husband's work says is 'prickly heat'. Bless him, he's swabbed my swollen toes with rubbing alcohol (which a friend was promptly worried about getting into my blood stream and into the placenta).

We bought some powder today and calamine lotion.

Hoping it will work (the powder has taken away some of the burning already but I feel it starting again as I type0.

The air hopefully is much cooler now than it was the last few nights.

And so it continues, marching towards the end of this journey -- which is only the beginning of our little one coming into the world.

No one said it would be easy. And I know most people would not consider this hard.

I felt proud of myself today when someone came into the office for a meeting and said:

"I thought you'd be much bigger. You're okay."

I repeated my Facebook status to her that I had up a few days ago.

"We don't care what you think about us."

And that's true. I haven't actually embraced being pregnant until this last month. And the truth is there: we don't care. We are too busy with powder on our feet, sleepless nights, and leg cramps.

And this is before the baby shows up!

Yes? No?

It's strange to think that after three years of dreading the possibility, I'm now reading every sign of my body to be affirmative. The idea that I could be nurturing life inside is a fascinating and hopeful one. I don't want to get too excited as we are about to go away on vacation with a couple that has a two year old as well as one on the way. Facing the fact that I might start menstrating again while with them is not that exciting. But the idea that I might not, is. That is the most unbalanced part of this journey: not knowing. It's been a long time since I had this uncertainity -- since applying for jobs, or waiting for the results of my PhD defense. That's why it's called faith.