| A Journal of a Journey Savannah V. Derien 9 AM. They're finally taking me off the drugs. It's the moment I've been waiting for. For the last week I've been lying here in what feels like a waking coma, my right arm burning like a holy flaming pincushion every time they change the IV. Both arms are bruised and no viable vein has been left untouched. I can't see straight and whenever I manage to fall asleep - between the pain, the repeated automatic inflations of the blood pressure machine, and the beeps on the monitor to my left (on which flat lines are a *good* thing) - they wake me up to take my blood again. I'm exhausted and my back hurts and the entire room smells waxy and sweet. The only good thing is that they're taking me off the drugs. But now what? I'm scared and I've hardly slept for days and no one can tell me what to expect next. My life has been a changing shift of faces and voices and pains and I can only tell day from night by how much my eyes hurt. It's like being hung over with none of the pleasant memories. .....Ow. Oh shit that hurt. Pains have been ripping through my stomach all week, more or less, but that really hurt. Shit. That really, really hurt. What's going on, is something happening? Calm down. They know what they're doing. Right? Anyway, I heard you're supposed to get rest breaks from the pain, so any minute now I'll find my breath and I won't be hurting so much anymore. 10 AM. No. The pain isn't stopping. I'm hot. No - I'm cold. There's no rest. I haven't not been in pain for quite some time. I think things are happening.... Um, can you call someone in? Quicker...please! I need someone in here! And please call my husband - now. Just this morning I was telling him not to worry, I wouldn't deliver in the next 24 hours. Now my baby is coming, ready or not. 10:20 AM. My husband has arrived and luckily by now the nurses are taking me somewhat seriously. There's no way back now. This is it. Holy shit. Just a week ago when they checked me in I heard a woman screaming down the hall, over and over again. I made some wisecrack or other, never once connecting those screams with what I would eventually experience. I never made that correlation. Until now. OW, more contractions, and they won't give me any pain medication because the child is premature. Okay, sure, I like it natural, we'll work through this somehow...but god it hurts so much, and it never stops! It's supposed to stop, they said, it's supposed to give you a break! And one minute I'm so hot I need cold water splashed on me and someone to fan me with paper, the next I am so cold I want to burrow down in the sweaty sheets. Now they're telling me to push, but when I push I can't breathe. I don't get it and I'm terrified of pissing off the nurses and doctors if I do things wrong, but I can't breathe. They say I'm holding my breath too high, it's in my face. I can tell it is because my cheeks are puffed out and I'm seeing stars when I close my eyes, okay so I have to try to keep my pushes "low" whatever that means. Damn, I fucked up again; I bet they all hate me now. I close my eyes and one after another glowing stars form across my field of vision and it's all I can see or feel except fear - fear that I'm doing this wrong and I won't ever figure out how to do it right. Voices are distant and foggy somewhere off in space and all I can see is this clean line of stars that pops over and over again, brightly and so straight in a line till I hear my husband saying something like "keep your chin down" and a multitude of strangers crying "push." I push and I hold for ten and when I can catch a breath I do it again and again. There's a pattern, I understand now. Three times we hold breath for ten counts. It sounds so easy, why can't I do it? Why is it so terrifying and difficult? Oh shit someone said my IV popped out, I was gripping my hands too hard, there's blood. The smell of flowers and blood fills my mouth and nose. I'm not going to survive, I am going to die. But I don't feel pain. Pain is far off in the blackness beyond the rows of bright, popping stars and the vague, foggy feeling of confusion. Someone is screaming now - perhaps it is someone else, for all I can feel or understand. But there is a scream in the room, a single, two-tone scream and it last a long time, an archetypal blood-curdling scream. Why is the scream there? I am in the blackness, I don't comprehend pain. I feel something moving. 11:48 AM. Is that it? I expected this to go on for hours... are we actually done? It's over? Can someone see my baby? I can't see a thing and I don't know what I *want* to see; there seems to be a lot of blood and I'm not sure I want to see that. Oh my god.... I hear something crying, is that my baby? I always wondered what my first words would be after giving birth and now I know: "Holy shit.... holy shit...." It is the amazement of a live little precious being coming from my body and out into the world. It is a boy, and I am already delighted and in love and the little tyrant is peeing all over everybody and all I can do is laugh and be proud. The spotlight may be on my private parts and I may be hovering waist-high to a doctor, swimming in blood and naked and sweaty and exhausted and unfinished and strange and crazy, but that there, that little boy, that is my son! They give him to me briefly and for the first time he stops screaming. He makes a tiny little noise and he opens his eyes. He looks at me. The room smells now, as my husband eloquently sums it, like finding a pound of raw meat in a candle shop. How gothically romantic, I think, and inhale the scent deeply. Sweet, like funerary flowers. As, at last, I can rest, I know that scent. The scent of near-death, the scent of birth. Publication Credits - Savannah V. Derien |