That Day in 1994

UTERUS!

That’s was I was thinking about when I woke up in the early morning hours of February 1, 1994. My ex-wife’s uterus, to be clear. For it was somewhere in there that what was to be my first baby currently was.

Babies are carried in the uterus, right? I know a lot of shit about a lot of shit, but I know very little about anatomy – especially female anatomy. And more especially about female reproductive anatomy. I know there’s a uterus (by the way,… since it begins with a vowel, shouldn’t it be “an” uterus?), and I know there’s a cervix, and I know there’s some sort of tubing up in there – it’s made of copper, if I’m not wrong. I guess I just have to declare my complete ignorance of female anatomy – I just know nothing about it…. Kinda like Canadian geography. I can point out just about any state in the U.S. on a map. But I couldn’t tell you the difference between Alberta, Saskatchewan, and Winnipeg if I had to. I just don’t care enough about the lay of your land, America Junior…. And, by the way, don’t those three provinces sound like a personal-injury law firm?.... “If you’ve been hurt in an accident, call the firm of Alberta, Saskatchewan, and Winnipeg. The insurance company is already working hard against you, don’t you want the comfort of tenacious representation working for you?.... Alberta, Saskatchewan, and Winnipeg: for the people!”

Anyway,… back to what was going to be my first baby (for the record,… still my only baby,… as far as I know and blood tests have been able to prove). Unnamed baby to come was sittin’ in the uterus (or somewhere close by, fuck you) on this chilly Tuesday morning. 5:30 am, and Johnny had slept as long as he could. I was a restaurant manager at the time down in Port Charlotte, and I worked the breakfast shift five days a week. I had to be there at 4:45,… so sleeping in until 5:30 was like a vacation, or a spa day, or something like that (What? A guy can’t have a spa day? I like people rubbing my feet as much as anybody.). My ex-wife and I had driven up from Port Charlotte to my mother’s house in Sarasota the night before because she had an appointment with her gynecologist at 8:30. We wanted to have the baby at Sarasota Memorial Hospital. Not because we didn’t trust the hospital in Port Charlotte,…. Okay, it was because we didn’t trust the hospital in Port Charlotte.

5:30 is still pretty fucking early, so I went about my morning routine as quietly as I could. Made some coffee. Read the sports page. Made some more coffee. At about seven, the ex-wife woke up, and I went to go get doughnuts. I should probably make clear that at the time, she wasn’t the EX-wife. I just can’t believe I was ever stupid enough to marry the woman, so there’s no way I can refer to her as my wife in writing this blog,… she will always be the ex-wife,…. Maybe I should come up with some sort of name for her, so I don’t have to keep referring to her as the ex-wife, huh? Dragon Lady? Aileen Wuornos? Delilah? Lizzie Borden? Plaintiff?.... Ah, fuck it, ex-wife will have to do.

I got back to my mother’s house with the doughnuts. The ex-wife ate two,… I had bought,… two. Nice. Fuck it. There’s more coffee, right?

We made it to the doctor’s office right about on time. Which is amazing, because I’ve known very few women who are on time consistently. I’m not saying ALL women are ALWAYS late,… you cannot be taken seriously if you make such general blanket statements about an entire group of people,…. Let’s just put the figure at 97. 3% and realize I’m giving you women some credit (although I think my estimate may be off a little,… on the low side).

We were at the doctor’s office, right? So, we go into the examination room. And the doctor comes in and does her poking and prodding down there,… by the uterus and close to the copper tubing,… and announces that the ex-wife is nine centimeters dilated and eighty percent effaced,… which means fucking nothing to me. So, I figure I have to come up with some sort of astute query whose answer will produce information that makes more clear to me exactly what the situation is,…. I came up with it! “What the fuck does that mean?”

“That means that this baby is coming today.”

“TODAY?” Shit. I wasn’t sure I was ready for “today” being the answer. But there it was. Ears beginning to ring and breath becoming shorter, I thought I heard the doctor tell me to go home and get the overnight bag that had been packed for a week already, and take the ex-wife to the hospital. The doctor told me she’d be by to yank the baby out in the afternoon. (Okay,… I don’t think she said “yanked,”… I think it was actually “lasso.”)

I drove the normal speed home. Kept asking the ex-wife if she was okay. She mumbled something about doughnuts bothering her stomach. (“Shouldn’t have eaten two then, selfish bitch.”) And then, I raced to the hospital! In my shitty little Chevy Spectrum, I floored it all the way to the hospital, and I was hoping that a cop would catch me, and I’d get to do that old 1950s spiel about driving a pregnant woman to the hospital and get a police escort or some shit like that. No luck. Just old people flipping me the bird. Fuck ‘em.

We got to the examination room in the maternity ward before ten o’clock. On the way there, we saw half-a-dozen fat women (okay, pregnant women is the correct nomenclature,… doesn’t mean they weren’t fat) walking around the halls with IVs in their arms. Fuck, did they look miserable. I asked the nurse what was going on with these women in the halls as she was strapping all sorts of monitors and electrodes on the ex-wife. She told me they were ALMOST ready to have babies, but that in order to induce quicker labor, they were told to get up and do some walking. (“What? Just through gravity? Should they, like, jump up and down? Should I get them a basketball?”)

One of the monitors apparently measured contractions. Every couple of minutes the arc of the display went up just a bit. Those were when the contractions were taking place, the nurse told me. The ex-wife reported that the contractions didn’t hurt at all – not even mild discomfort,… maybe just a tiny tightening. So I went outside to smoke a cigarette or two. Downstairs between the hospital and the Medical Arts building, I looked to my right across the street, and I saw my mom walking toward me. She was taking the rest of the day off to spend with me and the ex-wife (and, ostensibly I guess, new unnamed baby still in uterus, or WHEREVER). When we both got back upstairs to the ex-wife, Mom confirmed the contraction arc explanation.

The doctor eventually came by around three in the afternoon. She took a look around the ex-wife’s chassis and said “okay, you’re ten centimeters dilated and one hundred percent effaced.” Still fucking Greek to me,… back to the old stand-by,… worked last time.

“What the fuck does that mean?”

“That means this baby is coming now,” the doctor said.

“So do we get to go walk the halls and play basketball and shit with the other fat women?”

“No. Too late for that. I’m going to manually break her water, and I’ll be back in an hour or two to deliver (“lasso”) this baby.”

Water broken, she left with the attending natal nurse. Funny thing about the monitor measuring contractions the next time one came around. The tiny little jump in the arc now spiked all the way up the top of the screen. The ex-wife grabbed me by the brim of my Gator ballcap (“bitch, this is brand new!”) and squeezed while saying, at hair-band decibel level, “GET ME THE DRUGS!!!!”

I ran out the door to see if the doctor was still in the hallway. Nope,… but there was the nurse. I ran up to her and said, “she needs drugs in there, and I need another new fucking ballcap.” My mother told me to stay in the hall while they administered the epidural tap because she thought I would feint if I saw it. She would have been right too. I have tons of feinting stories,… but that’s for another episode.

After re-entering the room, the ex-wife seemed in considerably less pain,… and consciousness, for that matter. The nurse said it was going to be another ninety minutes or so, and in order to let the ex-wife rest, I should try and be as quiet as possible,… so I went downstairs to smoke some more and grab a sandwich. At least I’d be in the room for the birth. My mother tells me that when she gave birth to my twin sister and I, that my old man was downstairs in the parking lot with a quart of beer listening to the Red Sox game on the radio. When I went back upstairs, I brought the ex-wife a doughnut, and she threw up on my hand.

The doctor finally showed up again at about 5:30 and – upon probing the area again – announced that unnamed baby was coming out of the copper tubing soon,… like now. The ex-wife only had to push for about twenty minutes and, PLOP! Baby. We didn’t want to know the sex of the baby before it was born. I had picked out the boy name, and the ex had picked out the girl name. The most beautiful baby girl in the history of the planet was sitting there in the arms of this doctor, and I was never so happy to come up on the short side of an agreement. I cut the umbilical cord (like a very-thick, undercooked piece of pasta), and they rushed baby to the french-fry lamp.

I turned to the ex-wife to tell her how proud I was of her,… how she had been a trooper,… that she owed me a new fucking hat,….

And then I heard it. From behind my shoulder, the nurse,… examining baby underneath the french-fry lamp,… said, “oh my god,… do you know what she’s got?”

My heart sank. The ringing in the ears and shortness of breath returned. I felt feint (of course I did!). “What?!?” I thought to myself, “what does she have?!? Jaundice??? Six fingers??? Asian features??? WHAT?”

“She has really long eyelashes.”

So I punched that bitch in the back of her head…. Okay, I didn’t,…. I spit on her.

Still in the top three days of my life, that February 1.

Next Time,… Graduate School, Year One: A Recap.