The Big Fix (17 page)

“What?” I asked. “You don't remember much?”

She continued, “They knocked me out, Trace. I woke up and they handed me the baby all cleaned up.”

I laughed to myself. My mother had presented herself all
my life as this super-straitlaced person. However, it seemed like a wide variety of her parenting stories from the '60s and '70s had involved drugs. She had diet pills to lose the baby weight (stimulants), nerve pills to “deal with the stress of my brother” (benzos), and now I found out she was knocked out during my birth. I guess she didn't see them as being
drugs
since the doctor had given them to her.
It's no wonder I got hooked!
I laughed to myself. Okay, maybe there was my whole picking-up-a-needle thing, too. It was a passing thought.

Her top-notch childbirth advice: Take the drugs. Birth was this natural thing involving some mild sedation. A few pushes—voila! They hand you a baby, you put it in cute clothes, and you live happily ever after with your child. That was the way my mother made it sound. Between her advice and a few episodes of those daytime television shows about childbirth, I felt somewhat prepared. It wasn't until my friend took me to see the movie
Knocked Up
that the reality crept in: One, I was actually going to be having a baby, and two, I had no idea what the fuck I was doing. Mild panic set in.

By thirty-nine weeks, I had really gained
way
too much weight. Apparently, cookies are not a cure for morning sickness, especially when ingested at 2:00
AM
when you can't sleep because your stomach feels ripped apart. When you are a fatty and of advanced maternal age, a.k.a. old, every doctor's visit feels like it's about creating fear in the heart of the crazy old lady who dared to fight biology and get
pregnant
rather than read an article on hot flashes from AARP and enjoy her plight as a crone. See? We told you, fatty. You
are too friggin' old. Now you have to come in for regular monitoring. Every time without fail, the
thought
of going to the doctor would send my blood pressure through the roof. Between the morning sickness and prenatal testing blues, I couldn't control it.

The doctor shook his head in disapproval.

“Your blood pressure is too high,” he told me.

“I hate coming here,” I explained. “It makes me nervous.”

He pulled the cuff off my arm.

He told me, “If your blood pressure doesn't come down in an hour, we are going to have to induce your labor today.”

“Today?!” I choked.

TODAY as in now as in today. What the fuck was happening?!

There would be no laboring at home, no late-night water breaking in my flannel nightgown as I had pictured it. Today was the day! That alone sent my pressure to the ceiling. I was to waddle over to Labor and Delivery immediately.

At this point, I had trouble believing they were going to let me leave the hospital with a baby. The main reason was that every person there seemed to know that I used to be a junkie. And I felt them judging me. I wasn't the mom from the baby catalogue. I was the one with track marks. I was flabbergasted to discover that the process of inducing labor starts with a vein.
Oh LORD,
I thought to myself. Here we fucking go again. Every single staff person in Labor and Delivery that night seemed to find out about me because they could not find a vein.

“Excuse me. Those veins are gone,” I told them. “I used to be a drug user.”

“Here,” they would tell me as they pointed to the next nurse. “Let her try.”

This same process was repeated for nearly two hours. Search, poke, quit. Search, poke quit. NEXT! Search, poke, quit. There were people constantly coming in and out of the room. Trying to hide my body during this already mortifying ordeal was impossible. The gown they gave me was open in both the front and the back. I could not tell if the staff here were simply inexperienced or just determined not to listen to me. My frustration was growing with each passing moment.

“It isn't just that we need to get blood out of your veins,” they explained. “We need to be able to get fluids
into
them.”

That was a new one for me. Of course, I knew absolutely
nothing
about sticking things into my veins.
Should I laugh or cry here?
I thought to myself. I could hear some whispering just beyond my line of sight. It was a discussion about putting a central line in my neck. I blew a mental fuse. How am I supposed to push out a baby with a line in my neck? At this point, I was in angry tears.

GET SOMEONE ELSE IN HERE,
I thought.
Now, stat, code blue, or whatever the fuck the term is for it.

There was a general feeling of concern building among my group at the hospital—my friends, my husband, and of course, myself. This was my first time having a baby. This trip to the hospital was supposed to be the exact opposite of the miscarriage. I was going to be experiencing life. I was getting more and more restless. I felt as if everything was spinning out of control.

Finally, the anesthesiologist came in with an infectious swagger. He tapped me gently on the shoulder as if to say, “I
got this.” He had that same bravado as the guy in the porn flick who talks about cleaning pipes.

“I heard you were having a few issues, Ms. Helton,” he said as he sat down.

I perked up at his confidence. “Yes,” I told him, “that is an understatement.”

He pulled my left arm toward him. “Just hold still,” he asked gently.

In less than five minutes, he had a working line in me.
Here we go.

The pain started as the Pitocin flowed. I could feel my labor starting. It reminded me of when I had impacted bowel movements while I was on heroin. There was this uncomfortable feeling as if my body was trying to push a boulder out of my lower regions. Soon, there was the offering of refreshments. I would have killed for this easy access to my veins in my prior life. Fentanyl: yes please. My pain score was around a “Fuck yes I would like some more medicine.” The epidural going in was as I had expected. Having a needle shoved in my spine was as frightening as anything I had ever experienced up until that point. It made me question my decision not to have natural labor. I couldn't feel the contractions, I couldn't feel the pushing, and I could not feel anything below my chest. Why didn't I go to the childbirth classes? Why did I take the drugs? Why didn't I walk around more? Why did I spend so much time watching
A Baby Story
on television? I believed all the hype. I thought that nature would take some beautiful path and my vagina was a garden that would produce a beautiful flower.

After twenty-five or twenty-six hours, they turned off my epidural.

“We need you to be able to feel when you push,” said one perky doctor. Then she ran out of the room.

I hadn't realized so much of my time would be spent with nurses. It seemed as if they did most of the work. It was as if my labor was a television show, and the doctor just came in to do some cameo appearances while getting all the credit.

“FUUUUUUCCCCCCK!” I screamed at the top of my lungs.

My two friends who came for the birth were trying to hold my hand. They were tired and ready to go home. I didn't know what to do except yell, at least partially in their faces. I hurt too much.

The attending nurse asked me, “Do you think you could keep it down?”

“What?!” I asked.

“What?!” my friends asked.

She patted me and told me, “You are frightening the other patients.”

After three and a half hours of pushing, I was begging for the C-section. I had heard that childbirth was the number one cause of death for women in the U.S. until fairly recently. I believed it. My baby was stuck. After the birth, a friend of mine told me that the midwives of the past would have had few choices in that circumstance: let me bleed to death or snap the baby's neck. They would pull the baby out, then tell me I could have others. The C-section was actually a relief. The end of the long journey that had started
on that vacation to Sonoma County. After thirty hours in labor, three hours of pushing, and one C-section, I was presented with one little screaming red-faced alien I was told was my daughter. The first thing I told my husband after I saw her was, “I want another one.” I was in love.

I had watched hours upon hours of shows on various cable channels to learn about what life would be like with an infant. I did not realize I was going to be doing all these things while recovering from major abdominal surgery.

The first thing that surprised me was all the screaming involved in the day-to-day handling of my daughter. I was told by everyone who cared to give me advice that babies have different personalities. I learned within the first few days that her personality involved hysterics—it seemed she cried over every single thing. It was clear by the fourth day that I was the lucky recipient of a pristine baby who would cry the second her diaper got wet or soiled in any way. The nurses tried to calm me down by informing me this would make potty training so much easier later on.

I guess I was having trouble understanding the whole process. I was under the assumption the nurses would whisk the baby away to some special room for a few hours so I could rest. Oh no; I was heartily mistaken. Within forty-five minutes of my surgery, I was being handed my child to feed despite the fact that I had not slept for a few days for more than a few minutes here and there. At one point, I looked over at the baby swaddled next to me.

“Katie,” I whispered. “It's your mommy.”

I tried to reach closer to the bassinet without pulling the tubes out of my arm.

“It is just me and you now, baby,” I told her. Her dad had been sent home by the hospital until they could switch my room.

Katie looked in my general direction with those “I can't really see you” saucer-like newborn eyes. Then, she started to scream her head off. SCREAM.

She screamed bloody murder as I tried to scoot myself over to her.

It would be pretty typical of the first three months with her.

I was discharged from the hospital with a tiny baby, a bag full of painkillers, and a complimentary diaper bag full of paper underwear and pads the length of my arm. My instructions were to not lift anything heavier than the baby. I had been stepped down from one opiate to another, but I knew the pain that would be in store for me when the medicine ran out in a week or two. They explained to me in painstaking detail that I MUST take this medication. If I did not, the consequences could be serious as the pain could impact my healing. My plan was for my husband to manage my pills. I would taper myself off as my pain subsided. I could call if I needed more or dispose of what was left if I needed less.

Baby Kathryn was named after my mother. We called her Katie or Katie-bear. She was so incredibly tiny. They had estimated from her ultrasounds that she would be close to eight pounds when she was born. When we left the hospital, she was less than six. We didn't realize that her weight would fluctuate. Because of the induced birth, my body was not catching up with milk. I felt weird when I was visited
on my last day at the hospital by a male lactation specialist. When he grabbed my boob to show me how to feed the baby, I knew it was time to get the fuck out of the hospital. Things had been too stressful there.

After two weeks of sleepless nights with a baby who wanted to be up every forty-five minutes, I really started to wonder what the fuck I had gotten myself into by having a child. How did I ever think I could take care of another human? There were times I forgot to feed the cats. To add insult to injury, I started having serious withdrawal from the opiate-based medications. I envied women in my online support groups who talked about
finally
being able to have a glass of wine.

On top of tending to my newborn, I was handling the few weeks' worth of work the teachers in my graduate program gave me to stay caught up. I was up working on my finals projects for graduate school with a runny nose and a baby hanging off my boob. My legs felt like rocks again for the first time in close to a decade. I was having hot flashes and cold chills while trying to do statistical analysis on my final research project. This was my last semester—the culmination of nine long years. I had to find a way to push through. If there was ever a time I wanted to curl up in a ball and cry, this was it.

“I think you should go to a meeting,” my husband told me. “Get out of the house for a while.”

I had to agree with him. “Okay,” I agreed. “I can leave the house for a few hours.”

I felt as if what he really meant was
he
wanted to leave the house. My husband was sharing feedings, changing all
the diapers. He was a fantastic partner. Unfortunately, he was going to have to return to work soon. He wanted to come up for air and so did I. We agreed I would go to a meeting with a friend and the baby while he went to play music for a few hours.

As I pushed Katie in the stroller, my legs felt like they weighed a hundred pounds. The meeting was only ten blocks away, but it felt like miles. While I sat in my chair, I felt as if everyone was looking at me every time the baby made the slightest noise. The room was in the back of a church with acoustics that projected the smallest noise clear across the room. When Katie started stirring, I whipped out my boob and fed her in the meeting. I needed to be there, I needed to stay. When I walked out of that place, I couldn't have told you what the speaker had said, but somehow I felt a tiny bit better. I had passed the first test. I made it out of the house without losing my shit. That was quite an accomplishment.

I put my feet up on the kitchen stool and decided to call my mother.

“When are you coming to visit?” she asked me. She cut out all the small talk. She wanted to see the grandchild she had thought would never happen.

I stroked Katie's hair as she lay on my chest. We'd had a big day. We were both tired.