William’s Progress. Matt Rudd
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like a space shuttle, I will kill you,’ she replied. ‘Now call the midwife back and tell her to get round.’
The midwife arrived. Four centimetres dilated, she said. Only four? Six whole centimetres to go. Six! Jesus. I mean, blimey. Sorry, God. I started another prayer, but the midwife interrupted, telling me to make myself useful by pumping up the birthing pool. Yes, of course, the birthing pool. Must pump up the birthing pool.
BIRTHING POOL: INSTRUCTIONS FOR USE
1. Important: make sure you unpack the birthing pool and inflate it prior to use to ensure that you are familiar with the equipment and there are no faults. Aquasqueeze Ltd will not offer a refund if any pool malfunctions are only discovered during the birthing procedure.
(Frankly, it was a miracle I even read the instructions on the day, let alone prior to use. I mean, seriously, as if it’s necessary to have a trial run of a glorified paddling pool.)
2. Plug in pump.
3. Pump.
Why didn’t I do a trial run for the paddling pool? It’s childbirth, for goodness’ sake. You don’t muck about with childbirth. But it was one of several things I hadn’t done. I hadn’t read any of the baby books Isabel had asked me to read. I hadn’t got in an awful lot of lie-ins. I hadn’t painted the bathroom, the horrible old bathroom with its horrible old paint. I had painted the nursery, but badly. The birthing pool was the least of my worries. Except, it wasn’t.
It took forty minutes to inflate the pool, during which time the foot pump and I fell out on several occasions. I twisted one ankle and had room spin twice. Shouldn’t have had the whisky. It took another ninety minutes to fill the pool with water using a complicated, improvised, ever-so-slightly panicky siphoning system I devised with the garden hose, a colander, a plastic bag and the bath. Why hadn’t I worked this all out earlier? Idiot, idiot, idiot.
The leak was discovered at approximately 0400 hours, long after the helpline at Aquasqueeze Ltd had closed. Mind you, they were probably closed for the entirety of the Christmas period, anyway. That’s the trend these days, isn’t it? No one’s going to turn up for work at a birthing pool company on New Year’s Eve, even though it’s a Monday. Even though people still might be giving birth. That would be far too much to expect, now wouldn’t it?
Only once the pool was full did the pressure begin to force water through the until-then-unnoticeable tear right at the base. From then on, it was like a crack in a dam in a 1970s disaster movie. It got bigger and bigger and bigger. I was already too tired and dehydrated to cry proper tears, and Isabel and the midwife were too busy doing grim things in the front room to notice.
I put a finger over the hole and looked around the dining room. Why we had decided that Isabel should give birth in the dining room and not somewhere one might find the necessary equipment to mend a leak, I have no idea. Next time, we’re doing it in the garden shed. Plenty of appropriate mending equipment in there. Back in the dining room, all I could reach was masking tape. Masking tape is porous, but it bought me enough time to find the Sellotape. Which bought me enough time to explain to Isabel, between contractions, that the pool was ready, but that she couldn’t bounce around in it or anything because, well, it was a touch, erm, faulty, darling…
She didn’t like this idea.
‘I told you we should check the effing pool out before I—bbleeeaaaaaaaarrrrrrrrrgggggggggghhhhhhhhh’.
There are at least some advantages to regular strong contractions. You can only get shouted at for the ever-decreasing periods in between.
7 a.m. Six centimetres dilated. Could it go any slower?
10 a.m. Seven centimetres. But maybe still six because things are getting a bit swollen down there.
‘Keep going, darling, you’re doing wonderfully,’ I told her, while reflecting that God really could pick up a bit more support if he answered the odd agnostic’s desperate prayer every now and again.
By midday, we were on to our third midwife and the pool was starting to sag. Sellotape can only go so far.
By 4 p.m., I had given up trying to keep the water in the sagging pool at a comfortable temperature because Isabel was now roaming around the house like an injured animal. Absolutely no point sitting in the dining room with a thermometer and a kettle when your wife is in a dark corner of the bedroom growling at anyone who tries to offer her a biscuit. And then it was 10 p.m., and the two latest midwives had decided that she was eight centimetres, but Isabel had had enough.
‘I’ve had enough,’ she said quietly and I had to look away because I didn’t want her to see how frightened I was.
So we went to the hospital…her in an ambulance with blue flashing lights and everything, me following in the Skoda without blue flashing lights, the baby bag, a change of clothes or anything. Idiot.
Drugs, gas and air, epidurals, something that sounded like Sanatogen, more slow progress, baby in distress, mother in distress, me shaking my fist at bloody non-existent God for the ridiculous, stupid, impossible nature of childbirth. And then, suddenly, at 5 a.m., I hear the phrase ‘fetal distress’. Isabel is barely conscious. The bump is in trouble.
‘We have to get this baby out. You’ve been going long enough, dear,’ said a no-nonsense midwife with arms like beanbags. And Isabel burst into tears of sheer exhaustion and resignation.
I can’t remember much about the Caesarean, except that it was quick and there were slurping noises like when you’re at the dentist and the assistant sticks the vacuum cleaner down the back of your mouth and you try to keep it away from your epiglottis because you were already very close to gagging but she’s not paying attention because it’s almost lunch and she’s bored, and, oops, a little bit of breakfast has come up and now the dentist doesn’t like you, which is annoying because it wasn’t your fault, it was the bored assistant’s.
At the point of incision, Isabel had to tell me to stop squeezing her hand so hard because it was hurting. Then the doctor made a joke and I made a joke and Isabel had to tell us all to stop joking. ‘Gallows humour,’ I said and immediately regretted it. Three or four seconds or minutes or hours later, there was a piercing, gurgly scream from behind the turquoise curtain: our boy, beautiful, grumpy from all his efforts to escape Isabel. My turn to burst into tears.
And that was forty-three minutes ago. Now I am lying in a bush and an old lady is prodding me with her Zimmer frame and I’m laughing and crying at the same time.
I phone the families. They are equally pleased that we are all alive.
Isabel’s dad says, ‘Bloody home births. Bloody ridiculous. This isn’t the Crimean War.’ And I have to explain, not for the first time, that these days women are empowered to make choices and that Isabel didn’t want to give birth in hospital. He points out that she did in the end. I point out that he’s right and I don’t care…the main thing is that everyone’s alive and he is now a grandfather.
‘A grandfather? Yes, I suppose I am,’ he replies more warmly. ‘About time, too. I was beginning to think Isabel was past it. Everyone leaves it so late these days. I mean, in my day, you got married and you got on with it. None of this work–life balance nonsense. As slow as a giant panda, but you got there in the end. Well done, my boy.’
I then have the same conversation with Dad before he puts on Mum, who is immediately hysterical and then tells me her birth story, which I’ve heard a thousand times before and don’t want to hear this morning. Not now that I have my own which is just as gory.
‘I have to go, Mum. I need to check on Isabel and the bump.’
‘You can’t call him “the bump” any more. Doesn’t he have a name? Please tell me you’ve decided on a name. Please tell me it’s not something trendy.’