CN: TRAUMATIC BIRTH EXPERIENCES
A few minutes before I stood at the threshold that separates the dullness of the village-like maternity ward from the bright lights of surgery city, a person handed me some scrubs and a hairnet. I popped off to the toilet to get changed. I was paranoid in those moments. Very paranoid. I have a pretty intense fear of bacteria at the best of times. Some would call it a bit irrational. But I once heard someone describe the natural order of our planet as one where bacteria rule and where we are only alive because they allow us to be. That haunted me, so while I don't think it's irrational, it's certainly not helpful at these moments. Seeing all the warning signs about Covid protocols and handwashing as I was getting changed in a toilet, just before I was about to head into a room where sterility was of the utmost importance so that people literally don't die, was…challenging.
I steadied myself and tried to take a moment to process things. There had been so many of these moments over the previous 34 hours. Moments trying to appreciate the absolute enormity of how my life was about to change. It's one of those times you feel hyper-aware of your actions and feel like you're in a movie or TV series.
Should I splash some water on my face? Wait, nobody actually splashes water in their face. Do you know anyone that does that? You’ll get gross toilet sink water all over yourself, and then you’ll have to try and explain to someone outside that you splashed toilet sink water over your face and they’ll look at you like…why? Nobody actually splashes water in their face.
I left the toilet, face unsplahsed, to see Nikeeta and another midwife who had waited for me. We entered the OR, and as I stepped over the threshold, my throat swelled. I think the germ paranoia must have been the last straw. I was empty and at the end of my rope. I could feel the tears starting. If you've ever cried emotionally, you know what I'm describing. There's this split second where it's too late to turn back because the crack in the dam had exploded.
Part of me feels like I should have reprimanded myself for being so selfish and weak. Like, this moment should have been an epiphany where I got perspective and realised that my poor wife was the one going through everything. It would be a potent dose of masculine pride if this were the case, and I could retell the story with all kinds of added heroics.
But that's not what happened. What happened is something I'm prouder of. I was kind to myself at that moment. I understood that while Gemma was the one who had been to hell and back over the past eight months, witnessing that pain and being powerless to stop it had probably taken its toll on me as well. These moments were the toughest on my wife – OBVIOUSLY – but they were also hard for others around her. Everyone in our family was feeling some strain, especially those in other parts of the country who had to sit and wait on the phone. I wasn't a villain. I just loved my wife.
Somehow, someway, for the first time, I caught my tears and managed to physically swallow the feeling back down with an exaggerated gulp like I was in a cartoon from the 40s. In the space of just one second, I had gone from being on the cusp of a complete breakdown to pulling myself back together, and I honestly think it was all because I was kind. I don't know how it physically manifested, but I like to picture my body and brain coming to a truce. It's like the body told the brain that we were at the 41.5km mark of a marathon. If the brain could just run another 500 metres, the body would allow it to do all the uninterrupted crying it wanted, regardless of who was around.
The taps were shut off. The crack in the dam was patched temporarily with duct tape. I could walk into that room without missing a step, even though, in that single second, it could have all been so ugly and awkward.
That was at about 7 pm on Thursday night. But this part of our journey began on Wednesday morning. We rolled up to the hospital to get what felt like our hundredth ultrasound. Gems had a particularly troubled pregnancy. She had gestational diabetes, they thought she was at risk of pre-eclampsia, and she had to be off long-term medication that prevented her pituitary gland from growing a prolactinoma in her brain. Gestational diabetes meant that our baby was giant, so running parallel to the violent illness she was feeling, there was constant agony in her body from carrying around a small tank in her stomach. On top of all that, her waters partially ruptured early, which meant she had to go into hospital for nearly a week, but she wasn't in labour. They had to monitor her for infection, so she was stuck day after day, hoping that a baby might come when it stubbornly just sat inside.
They picked a day for her to be induced during that time, but for the week leading up to that, we had to go and get scans every second morning to check everything was okay. On this Wednesday morning, two days after being released from the hospital and about a week before the induction date, she couldn't feel the baby. By this point, she was physically and mentally wrecked – just obliterated. I honestly felt like I had lost my wife at this stage like she was just a shell of her usual self. One week in this state may as well have been one decade, so we were hoping they would decide to induce early.
Because Gemma was feeling so awful, they skipped the ultrasound part and put her straight on a monitor. Our nurse, who was quite pregnant herself, was sympathetic and was hoping for our sake that the doctors might call it early. While they could tell that the baby was okay, they could also tell she was engaged, and Gemma’s agony was not sustainable. This necessitated a trip to an observation room and the first of many rounds of waiting. Fortunately, there was a small bed-type thing that Gemma could lie on so that she could sleep. I just sat there, realising that I really did not enjoy the taste of whatever teabags they had in Waikato Hospital.
After a few hours, a friendly doctor came in. I am not a spiritual person. I don't tap into the universe or forms of energy to try and help me do my bidding. But at that point, it felt like most of my brain's power was funnelled away from operating my body and channelled towards telepathically convincing this doctor to make a call to induce the baby early. After retelling him the story of our journey up to and including that day, he finally declared with almost Keanu Reeves-level nonchalance that he was pretty risk-averse and thought it would be better to induce and get things over with. He said that he felt the baby would be fine and that the several days we would miss out on wouldn't make a massive difference in the scheme of things.
Despite my fear of germs, I could have kissed him at that point. He should be thankful for all the covid protocols in place. He left the room, and I don’t remember how we reacted. I think we both just breathed a sigh of relief, knowing that soon this part of the journey would finally be over.
Of course, when you're talking about inducing labour, though, soon is a relative term.
Here’s a piece of trivia for you. Sabu, real name Terry Brunk, is a professional wrestler legendary in wrestling circles for his work with upstart Philadelphia-based promotion Extreme Championship Wrestling (or ECW) during the latter half of the 1990s through 2001 (when ECW went out of business). However, Sabu's career could have taken a completely different path. In 1995 he wrestled on the second-ever episode of World Championship Wrestling's brand-new live primetime wrestling show WCW Monday Nitro. With the advent of Nitro, WCW would become an absolute phenomenon in the late 1990s. Its famous war with the then World Wrestling Federation (WWF, now known as WWE) propelled the industry to heights of profitability and cultural relevance never seen before or since. And Sabu was getting in on the ground floor of it. He was trusted to open the show with German worker Alex Wright, a young wrestler WCW was starting to push because of his incredible wrestling talent and good look. Sabu won the match, but the decision was overturned after he put Wright through a table – a gimmick that Sabu would become legendary for in the future.
By March 1996, he was out of WCW and wrestling in Japan. WCW was about to go nuclear, and he missed it. Maybe he could have been a part of the rise – perhaps he would have just vanished in the midcard. Either way, it's an interesting side note and a fascinating what-if in professional wrestling.
Now, if you’re wondering why I’m telling you this, it’s because when that lovely doctor called to induce Gemma early, we didn’t have a bed booked. And it turns out that the day isn't all excitement and drama when you’re getting induced for labour without an appointment in an underfunded medical system that is still dealing with a pandemic. The seconds quickly become laced with anxious tedium that could be weaponised into an effective form of torture. You must wait…and wait…and wait…and wait. As mentioned, Gemma thankfully had a small bed to lie on. I had a chair. So, she slept for a bit while I just sat.
When you're anxiously trying to kill a whole day without any accurate indication of when you might move to the next step in your journey, you can find yourself taking comfort in reading, listening, and watching all kinds of things. I happen to be obsessed with professional wrestling. It’s an obsession that is strong enough to compel me in the middle of this podcast about parenthood to stress that I'm not talking about WWE. I hate WWE, and if you understand wrestling and you also hate WWE, you'll know why I want that to be made clear.
It's also an obsession that led me to find enormous comfort in reading about wrestling, listening to podcasts about wrestling, and watching wrestling during these long stretches of hours. Anecdotes like the Sabu one are so imprinted on my brain that whenever I think about the birth of my daughter, amongst the stress, the worry, the guilt, the joy, the relief, and all the other thousand emotions I felt, I also think about wrestling. Wrestling helped me keep my sanity over that very long 34ish hours, from arriving at the hospital to meeting our baby girl.
Perhaps it was the nostalgia that I took comfort in. Maybe it was Freudian. Most likely, I am just a nerd who loves fake fights. Maybe because of all the uncertainty ahead, I found comfort in listening to an analysis of something that is controlled and predetermined by its very nature.
Gems arrived in that little room at about 11 am. It would be another thirteen hours until she got into the delivery suite. I had to leave at some point to run errands. This was as much for my well-being as for the chores that needed to be run. I desperately hoped that while I was out, I would receive a phone call telling me that Gemma had been moved - as if my presence was inexplicably slowing progress. As my absence ticked over to a couple of hours, I felt guilty, thinking that I was abandoning her and must have missed a call. But, no, she was just in that room napping. So I returned to join her in waiting.
I hoped that I had killed enough time that things would have moved along a little. But they hadn’t. I sat, read, watched, and listened to stories about wrestling while Gemma slept. I did all this while listening to Eric Bischoff and Conrad Thompson talk about WCW. I wandered around the hospital, getting food I didn't want to eat and making cups of tea with bags I had picked up from home during my temporary departure.
I knew I was on the cusp of life-altering change, and to be honest, even with the wrestling chat providing a soundtrack, I felt utterly alone in those moments. Gems was resting, nobody else was allowed into the hospital, and there was seemingly no end in sight anytime soon. A hospital is a grim place to keep positive and find comfort while enduring the sickening anxiety that comes with knowing that nothing in your life will ever be the same again. So, I desperately tried to find something to break the monotony and provide a distraction.
On one of my walks, I stopped and properly noticed the chapel that I had strolled by countless times over the past eight months. I figured this was as good a time as any to check it out. It was silent. I'm not sure if they put soundproofing in there, but it's very effective if they do. I wandered around reading the various plaques and flicked through the massive bible they had, hoping to just some words of beauty more than anything else. Nothing jumped out.
But while the good book might have been a bit of a letdown, there was undoubtedly peace in that empty chapel. I stayed there a while, thinking about all the people who had sought comfort there when dealing with the opposite experience of my own. I'd be lying if I said I had a serene moment where the anxiety and fear washed away. But I did find some gratitude, and that's about the best thing you can ask for when you're scared.
I went back to be with Gemma. At about midnight, we finally got shifted into a delivery suite. They started her induction and epidural and told us it would be hours before anything happened. There was an oversized recliner for me and a big bed for her. We were both just so relieved and so ecstatic. While it might not be the best sleep of your life in a recliner, it felt fantastic to rest knowing that all the waiting ahead wasn't just waiting for the process to start anymore. We'd have a baby when the next round of waiting was over.
But boy, did our baby make us wait.
By the time morning rolled around, any hopes that this would be a process that could be over by lunchtime were out the window. Part of me was devastated. Part of me also knew there was a live episode of AEW Dynamite (that's All Elite Wrestling for those keeping track of the different initialisms) at midday. Therefore, if things were that slow, I might be able to watch it while my wife was technically in labour. You might not think that's cool, but I sure did. It turned out that I was able to. God bless her, Gemma thought it was funny and even allowed me to take some photos and put them on Twitter (where I got a like from Brandi Rhodes, CBO for the company, just FYI).
I ran into Gemma's cousin's wife, Nikeeta, out in the hallway, Nikeeta was training to be a midwife and was on placement, and I could not have been happier or more relieved to see her. She came and checked up on Gemma, and when her shift ended, she stayed with us. Nikeeta has her own family and was working crazy hours, but she was selflessly there for us – an act of kindness I’ll never stop being thankful for. We started to develop a good little team. Gemma's best friend Rochelle had come up from Palmy to be her birthing partner (yes, I was there, but Rochelle is infinitely better in a crisis). We also had our completely overworked and completely shattered midwife Nicole. If I recall rightly, she had been up for about 30 hours when she arrived in our room, which is horrifying and still makes me feel like the worst person in the world for turning our day and a half of waiting into an entire podcast episode. But you wouldn’t have known it, given her professionalism and dedication.
Everyone was desperate to meet the baby, but she just wouldn't come out. She wanted to stay where it was warm and food was provided, which I empathised with completely. Finally, at about 4 pm, there was some progress, and Gemma could start pushing. I don’t want to talk about the failed attempts to get the baby out naturally. They were horrible. Gemma might have had an epidural, but that didn't make pushing easier. We all had to help her, and I felt like I was abusing her. We had to push her so hard I was starting to get tired – so I could only imagine how much force she was enduring from multiple people pushing her all at once. She was trying so hard to focus on the correct breathing while enduring colossal pain and frustration as the process continuously came to a grinding halt. It was hard to take after a while. Nicole must have felt my eyes burning through her skull with every push. I used the same telepathy trick I used on the doctor to give me some good news, but I must have used it all on the doctor because there was no good news to be had this time.
After a couple of hours, it was clear our girl was stuck, and there was nothing else for it – Gems would need an emergency c-section, and the wait would continue. Part of me felt relief that I would finally stop seeing Gems in such uncontrollable pain. But part of me felt shattered that the baby was stuck and surgical instruments would have to be involved. I swear this baby was doing everything she could to ensure she would be an only child.
So, it was time to head off to the surgical room.
(If you're wondering, by the way, Dynamite was excellent. The main event was a street fight involving Best Friends vs Proud and Powerful. It featured a cameo from Gemma's favourite wrestler - as much as someone who doesn't watch wrestling can have a favourite wrestler - Orange Cassidy).
Having avoided a near breakdown, I crossed the threshold into the surgical room, and it was beautiful. At once, there were so many things to take on board. The brightness of the lights was the first. But then the scale of the whole enterprise hit me. There were so many people in that room. I can't give you a number. It felt like forty. It was probably half that realistically. The room itself was enormous, too. I always pictured these things you see on TV, which seem so cramped. I felt like you could park about ten cars in there and let everyone open their doors comfortably.
I started noticing things I didn't expect because all the new stimuli bombarded my already overwhelmed brain. I noticed a table of beautifully clean instruments with someone seated behind them like they were serving scalpel sandwiches at a deli. I didn't even see it as a deli at the time. For some reason, all I could think of were the fences in Red Dead Redemption where you sold your stolen goods to shady black marketeers.
The nurses asked what music we wanted to put on, which was excellent – but I was distracted by the fact that they were using a UE Boom. We have one at home, and it hasn't worked properly in a long time. It felt like the kind of inconvenient device that had enough Bluetooth issues to create a battle every time someone new tried to use it. That seemed needlessly distracting in this situation.
The lines on the ground that I had to stay behind were just tape. I don't know what I thought they should be – but it felt so at odds with all the elite technology surrounding me.
When the surgeon came in, I swear he was talking on a cordless landline. Not an iPhone like all the other doctors – but an old-fashioned cordless phone with a landline number and a range of about 20 metres. I couldn’t be more focused on absolutely banal minutia.
I think part of it also came from feeling Like Dorothy in Oz - like I was a witness to a secret curtain being pulled. But rather than seeing a charlatan magician who probably couldn't pull a rabbit from a hat, there was a large team of highly trained, dedicated professionals working to remove a baby from a stomach safely.
I want to say that it was all light-hearted observational time. But it wasn't. For whatever reason, once everyone got cracking on the procedure, the doctor felt that they should have one more go at getting the baby out naturally. This first involved inserting a catheter which was incredibly difficult as the baby was in the way, and nobody could successfully do it. As long as I live, I will never be able to describe my nausea and stress as I watched person after person relentlessly fail to insert a piece of rubber hose into my wife's bladder. Each attempt got rougher and rougher. After minutes of this horror show, I noticed some blood on the floor. The blood looked like it was floating in the water-based lubricant. I was transfixed by it. I couldn't see what they were doing in detail because there were sheets up. But that bit of blood floating on the floor triggered some primal fear in me. It was like it gave away the secret brutality of what was happening.
I wanted to get up and scream at everyone to stop. But I couldn't. I just had to wait, knowing that this needed to be done, and they had probably done this a thousand times before. I knew Gemma couldn't feel it now, but I could imagine the pain she would be in later from all the trauma once the numbing wore off.
But that was them getting the catheter in. The forceps came next.
Childbirth is an ugly, brutal, terrifying phenomenon. Watching them try and fail multiple times to snatch our baby with forceps only increased the fight-or-flight syndrome I desperately tried to tame. Now, I could feel my wife and baby being beaten senselessly. I don't recall the sounds and the smells. But I vividly remember the frustration that came with feeling powerless and angry while simultaneously feeling completely vulnerable and trusting. Everything had taken so long already, and now we were stuck waiting once more to get us back to the point where we thought we would be starting from in the OR. This isn't a criticism of the staff, by the way. I can not say anything more positive about every one of them. It's not their fault that we aren't doctors and don't know best practices. My anger and frustration were never towards the people in the room – they were towards the situation that found us in that room in the first place.
Seemingly out of nowhere, the chaos ceased somewhat, and the forceps were dropped. It was time to go through the sunroof. There was a sense of relief in both Gemma and me, and it was at this point I realised I was so wrapped up in my anxiety that I had no support for her. I held her hand tighter, stroked her hair, and told her everything would be okay. Everything from that moment was a blur until they told me to stand up to see the baby. Or at least that's what I thought they said. I originally hadn't wanted to watch it, so I wasn't expecting it, but I didn't get a say. So, I stood up as I was demanded to. I cautiously looked down and saw…nothing. I was a bit perplexed as to what I was looking at. A couple of seconds later, this thing was suddenly there. Because I had leaned over expecting to see a baby and didn't see one, I was completely off guard.
I had never witnessed a c-section, so I had no frame of reference for what it looked like when a baby came out. What I saw in that second was utterly alien to me. My brain didn't know what it was looking at. For all I knew, it might as well have been a bag of laundry.
Memory is a funny thing. I know that this isn't possible how things could have happened, but this is how I see it in my head regardless. This still dark purple lump suddenly lit up and unfolded and screamed. It changed in a second from something otherworldly to my daughter. Before I had a chance to take in that moment and realise what was happening, she cried just to hit me over the head with the fact that, yes, she was here now. The wait was over, and that thing I had no frame of reference for was our real-life baby. Our baby.
So many people talk about how you fall in love at first sight, but that's far too simplistic. It wasn't love that rushed over me in those first moments. It was EVERYTHING. I've never felt feelings like that. Love is too essential, too trivial, almost to describe the rush that nearly knocked me off my feet when she cried. Within a maximum of five seconds, she had come out, unfolded, cried, and been whipped off to get cleaned up and checked that she was okay. And within those five seconds, Gemma had started bawling her eyes out, and I had collapsed into her bawling my eyes out, too. It was over. Dignity be damned, both of our internal dams broke, and we sobbed, and we sobbed like neither of us had ever sobbed before.
Nikeeta, our saint of the day, pulled me aside to cut the cord. I was still so shaken and confused that I seemed to forget how to use scissors and didn't even get it separated with one cut. They asked if I wanted to hold her, and I told them she had to be with Gemma through tears. There was no way I was going to get in the form of that. So, they wrapped her up and placed her on Gemma. We all held each other, bawling away with the kind of lightness and relief that I don't think I'll ever experience again, and honestly, I kind of hope not to. One of the nurses asked if we had decided on the name, as we floated a few to him at the start. Truthfully, though, we knew she was an Ava before she was born, and that's the name we gave her then and there.
She was Ava; she was real, safe, and against all conceivable thoughts I had carried with me for the longest time, I was a father. We were an island of serene dopamine and serotonin in a noisy ocean of life and death. We soaked it in, a family huddled together, utterly blind to all the people around us moving things and getting ready for the following procedure.
I couldn't stay at the hospital that night, so I left to go home alone after a few hours. It was late, probably close to midnight at this point. I stopped at a drive-thru to get some food, and even though I was shattered, I needed time to embrace the surrealness of everything I was experiencing. There was no turning back. There was no putting that baby back inside. Nothing would be the same; these were the last moments when our home would not be inextricably tied to our new family dynamic. As I sat on the bed, trying to make sense of everything, I did the only thing that made sense. I swallowed my pride, paid for a one-month subscription to the WWE network (something I swore I would never do again) and found the second episode of WCW Nitro. I cued it up, and I watched Sabu fight Alex Wright. At the same time, I ate my vegetarian chicken burger and drank my coke; reliving that moment, I first saw Ava repeatedly in my head. I was tired. I was thoroughly confused. But I was also happy in a way I had never been before.
The waiting was over. The wrestling was soon over, too.
I closed my eyes and fell asleep.