She's Having My Baby...from a Land Down Under

I know most of my regulars read for the humor. I’ve decided to break up my ramblings on the delivery of my baby into two posts; one will be funny and the other will be serious. You decide which is which…..

When we showed up at 6 a.m. for our inducement, my wife was placed on a Hill-Rom bed. I used to be a Public Relations manager at Hill-Rom. I took it as a good omen.

I went to work for Hill-Rom, which is out in bum-fuck Indiana, in 2003 with the promise of huge bonuses. The company had hit its bonus numbers something like 35 out of the previous 38 years and its bonus structure would have paid me as much as 36 percent of my annual pay in one check. Some people pay cash for a new car with their bonus checks, I was told. While I could have bought a Hyundai, I was thinking more along the lines of a deluxe hot tub, with a built in television so I could soak my muscles in style.

But shortly after I got there, the structure was changed and I could not earn that much. Then, the company went in the tank and in my few years there, we did not hit bonus once. To top it all off, gas went up to about $4.50 a gallon and my hour-long commute each way sucked up a good portion of my paycheck. Another example of great timing by Brian.

So I quit.

But I always had great respect for their products. Until inducement day. The bed did not work properly and my wife's big day was starting on a bad note. Five years after I quit, Hill-Rom managed to stick it to me again.

That was the start of a 33-hour odyssey. When I first arrived at the hospital, I saw a man in the hallway who looked like Nick Nolte after a wild night of drinking. His eyes were red, his face unshaven and his hair wild. He could have been on a three-day bender for all I knew, but since he was on the labor floor, I figured him for a dad who had just been through a delivery that was the equivalent of a snake-mongoose fight.

Little did I know, I would soon be in his hospital scrubs.   

My wife was given some strong drugs to start dilation and then contractions. One doctor told her she could begin labor as soon as three hours later. Sure. And Snooki could someday be president. One friend who had been down this road told me to “pitch a tent,” that inducements take awhile. I could have parked an RV.

I’ll never experience contractions, but they tell me they hurt. My wife seemed to think so. I think her description was, “It feels like someone is trying to shove a baseball bat out of my anus.” She said something else about a “ring of fire.” I’m not a sexist, but some days I thank God I am a man.

So you can imagine what it’s like to spend a whole day and nearly half of another trying to bring on the contractions that will result in a child emerging from your birth canal. I was reduced to feeding my wife ice chips (she can have cup after cup of ice chips, but not a few sips of water? What sense does that make?) while it seemed like the whole world had unfettered access to my wife’s vagina. Doctors. Nurses. Janitorial staff. MY MOM! They even brought college students in for awhile to study on her. My wife’s body became the equivalent of a field trip.

I tried to keep her entertained. Our baby was scheduled to be born on Michael Jackson’s birthday, so I sang Michael Jackson songs. I even moonwalked to Billie Jean. Brooke did not smile. Sydney did not emerge.

When the King of Pop’s birthday faded from possibility, I began crooning Paul Anka’s “She’s Having my Baby.” In another testament to our age difference, Brooke had never heard the song and did not know Paul Anka. Sigh.

Finally, at a friend’s suggestion, I turned my voice to the Australian band Men at Work’s Land Down Under. After all, our daughter would be named Sydney, which happens to be the most famous city in Australia and she was, indeed, “coming from a land down under.” Or so we thought.

All the while, my wife is in what she calls tremendous pain. However, our nurse corrects her. “What you are feeling is discomfort. Pain is when it hurts so bad you are willing to cut off another body part to make it go away.” Ouch.

Speaking of nurses, we had a tremendous one. Nurse Nicole held our hand through the whole process. She and my wife shared a love of Aussie Country music star Keith Urban, and when Nicole showed Brooke a picture of him from a recent concert she attended, I swear the monitor hooked up to my baby’s heartbeat raced. Great. Well, at least he’s from the Land Down Under.

Nurse Nicole spent much of her time trying to determine my wife’s dilation level. Ten means you are ready to have the baby. Brooke spent hours and hours at levels two and three. How do they determine dilation level? Well, it involves placing your hand in the mother’s vagina. Like I said, we became quite close to Nurse Nicole. We spent so much time together, we became Facebook friends when it was all over. Seriously.

A little aside on nurses: First, after walking through the hospital for five straight days, I can tell you most of them are hot. If I had known about this back in my early 20s, I would have made sure I suffered more softball and basketball injuries that necessitated trips to the hospital. Instead, I spent my time at banks, which was not so bad. But it is no wonder so many porn movies contain nurses. Nurses and teachers are the female versions of pool guys and pizza delivery boys in porn. If one shows up, you know the action is about to start.

Second, nurses do ALL the work when it comes to delivery. The doctor shows up at the end and takes credit, but the nurses put in the sweat and tears. It’s kind of like Ashton Kutcher riding Charlie Sheen’s coattails to Two and Half Men success. The doctors get the Porsches and country club memberships, while the nurses get a paycheck that can buy a few Grand Slams at Denny’s. Where is the fairness in this world?

So, with Nicole’s help, we trudged through day one. After hours of the dilation drug that they shoved at my wife's cervix, they threw in Pitocin to start contractions. It became a long, painful process that I mercifully watched from the comfort of my nearby hospital chair with ice chips at the ready.

Eventually, they gave my wife an epidural. I’m not sure if they thought she was close (if they did, that was a serious miscalculation) or if they just felt sorry for her. But she took to that epidural like she was Yogi Bear and it was a pick-ahh-nick basket.

If she was Yogi, I was her Boo Boo. I was in total agreement on the epidural. I didn’t care if it might start her down the drug-addicted path taken by the likes of Amy Winehouse or Anna Nicole Smith. It wasn’t that the pain was making her mean. I just wanted to clear that baseball-bat-out-of-the-anus picture from my mind and that would only happen when she was under the peaceful control of some powerful drugs.

As day one wound down, it was clear birth was not happening. Sydney was stuck. Remember how I told you my wife had a huge head? Well, it was becoming clear my daughter had inherited her mother’s noggin.

By early evening, they decided to let her rest into day two. Under the influence of an epidural, she was ok with that. I got the feeling she was in a Bob Marley-state. She would have been ok with anything. Ya, Man!

That meant I had the pleasure of sleeping over at the hospital. Luckily, there was a Hill-Rom chair in the room that niftily folded out into a bed. It was an engineering miracle. It was also a step down in comfort from those old army cots that used to be standard issue as temporary beds.

Thanks, Hill-Rom. You win again.