Sparrow Lorelei photo gallery

labour and birth, 8 and 9 May, 2009

This is my as-pregnant-as-it-gets belly, at three days under 40 weeks. At this point it's about 11 am, I'd been having "back pain" since around 7 pm the night before, had got grumpy by about 9 am that not only hadn't it gone away but was getting hard to ignore, had worked out around 9:30 am that the pain was coming in semi-regular waves and this might be a labour thing, and then my waters had broken at about 10:10 am and I'd left a green slime trail across the carpet several metres long. So the belly doesn't get any bigger than this.

Look, it's Cable Girl! At this point I have an epidural in my back, a fetal heartbeat monitor electrode screwed into Sparrow's head and coming out my vagina, a catheter on my bladder, a labour hormones drip in one hand, an automatic blood pressure reading cuff on my other arm, and I'm wearing a wireless contractions monitor so they can graph when the contractions are coming and how strongly. The latter is so they can contrast the contractions against the baby's heartbeat to make sure she's coping, but also see from the periodicity of the contractions what my body thinks it's doing about this labour thing. I think Scott took this photo. James was getting a bit squeamish about a lot of this by this point.

This is just after she's come out via Caesarean-section and has been put straight on the pediatrician's trolley for a checkover. No, there's no operation photos. Neither James nor I watched that. The long green-white-squid-tentacle-like thing is the umbilical cord that James needed to cut. It's not normally green, but she'd taken in a lot of her own meconium.

Once they'd checked her out (with James hovering), they brought her, still mostly slimed up but in a towel, and put her on my chest so we could meet. Behind the screen I'm still being stitched back up, layer by layer, all six or seven layers or how many it is.

After we'd met for a little, they took her back to what would be my wardroom, with James wheeling her trolley. She and he stayed there and waited for me while I was in recovery getting tanked on more drugs and then drugs to combat the effects of the other drugs and so on and so forth. The anaesthetist was pretty good - she was the one who was allocated to tell us what was going on at all times. She sat with me and James during the operation, looking over the screen and telling me what I might be feeling. I liked her phrase of "it's been described as like someone washing dishes inside your abdomen". That was pretty apt. She also knew from the epidural that I only seemed to need extremely small doses of drugs, and wasn't surprised at all that they made me throw up all over myself after the baby had gone and the adrenalin had started to wear off, or surge back up, or whatever it was doing. She got me on the recovery fluids after the operation, where they feed you more hormones so that your body knows to start doing the "ok, I've had the baby now" thing even though you didn't finish labour. So by the time I got back to Sparrow and James it had been about an hour since she was born. James had spent that whole hour going goo-ga over the baby while Scott laughed at him.

Her first feed. Not terribly ept on either part - she didn't really know what she was looking for, and I was very groggy and sleepy from exhaustion, the late hour and the drugs so I wasn't helping the cause. But she is beautiful. You can see the electrode monitor things they had stuck to me during the operation. I didn't even know they were there until the next morning.

This is just before James and Scott left for the night. The birth rooms they use for vaginal births are double beds so the partners can stay, but the caesar patients get put in a single patient room to recover. I barely noticed them leaving - I could hardly keep my eyes open at this point. I think I managed to say something, but I don't know if it made it into audible-land. I just wanted sleep. And I got it, for at least a few hours.