My first child was born January 2018. It took me almost a year to tell that birth story in a public sphere.
It's a big story.
It’s so big that I knew I would go through another round of processing before Baby #2 arrived (guess date: October 31). So big that I put off looking at my colleague’s edits and comments on a rough draft for nearly a year. So big that these almost three thousand words still aren’t enough to capture the full dramatic structure.
Well, enough preamble. Onto pre-labor.
The year had been a busy one. Arthur and I married January 2017, the first of twelve weddings we would attend that year. In April, I took a pregnancy test. I was delighted (and shaky) to find it positive. We added “Interview doulas” to our to-do list, right under “Interview real estate agents,” because yes, we wanted to buy a house the same year as getting married and pregnant. The Minnesota Birth Center (MBC), our maternity care center of choice, has a doula internship program, and without too much trouble we found a doula intern with whom we clicked.
Baby Aaberg, aka “Baaberg,” breezed past her December 22 guess date. That gave us a little more time to settle into our new house, which we bought in November. With each day past her guess date, I tried more vigorous measures to bring on labor: walking, eating spicy food, scrubbing the floors. By Friday, January 5, I was ready to take a more direct approach. I stopped at Walgreens and picked up castor oil, orange juice, and ice cream. Castor oil is laxative that (maybe, probably) induces labor. Orange juice makes a tolerable mixer for the world's worst cocktail. And ice cream? The base for the world's worst sundae.
I called my friend and lay birth attendant Karen over. She brought a stack of lighthearted DVDs, a big heart, and sound advice; for example, “Have baby wipes handy!”
I took two doses of castor oil that afternoon. Arthur got home from work; Karen passed the baton and went home. Arthur and I went to bed at 9 p.m. But I got up again almost immediately because hello contractions!
Through the night, I labored and Arthur slumbered. I threw up once, worrying that the retching would wake him. Of course it didn't; he sleeps through everything. My water may have broken between 11 p.m. and 1 a.m., but who can be certain about these things? I sat backwards on the toilet, cooling one cheek, then the other on the tank lid.
By 6 a.m. Saturday, I'd texted a screenshot from a contraction timer to our doula intern, Byrd.
"Does this look like a pattern to you?" I asked.
"Call me," she texted back.
Now we begin our travels in Labor Land, where time bunches up and stretches out, like an accordion playing a tune with an indeterminate rhythm. I showered. Byrd arrived, stayed for a couple hours, then ducked out for a bit to get coffee and breakfast, having realized I wasn't about to transition or anything.
Time passed.
My dad dropped off my mom, then headed to South Dakota for a weekend of speaking engagements.
Time passed.
Arthur made me a grilled cheese sandwich with rhubarb ketchup. I ate it between waves. We called the on-call midwife. Tasha said to call back later, presumably when I was no longer interested in eating.
During some squeeze of the time accordion, I requested the album "I Love You" by The Neighbourhood to be put on. I told Byrd the story of the night I bought the album. It was a dark and snowy night to run errands. I’d navigated slippery roads, and the Department of Vehicle Services, and by the grace of a DVS employee, avoided contact with my ex-husband. Byrd listened, knowing how emotional the birth experience is. And she zeroed in on this lyric: "Let it struggle just a little bit more..."
Another squeeze of the time accordion. We walked around the block and I paused to lean against a tree. We went back inside. I stood in the shower again. We called the midwife again.
"Call back at 6:30," she said. Arthur made curry. I didn't eat it. We called the midwife back at 6 p.m. Mid-conversation, I breathed through a contraction. "OK, come in," she said, presumably convinced I was no longer interested in eating.
I was worried the car ride would be awful. Part of the reason I called before 6:30 p.m. was because I didn’t want the contractions to get more intense and then have to get into the car. But my body took care of me—my contractions slowed down for the 20-minute car ride to the birth center. When we arrived, I took a dollop of pleasure in finally pulling into the "Laboring families only" parking spot.
It's about 7 p.m. now, still Saturday. I marvel at how quiet and dark the birth center is after hours. Karen arrives with her big heart. And then I enter another time warp.
I remember walking through the main floor, up the stairs, and back down with an entourage trailing after me. On top of the entourage, I had to navigate around the cleaning person. Not trying that again, I thought.
I remember hanging from the room’s birthing sling. Not as comfortable as I imagined, I thought.
I remember suddenly waking up and exclaiming, "You guys! I was sleeping!" It'd been a good 24 hours since active labor started on Friday night. That means my last full night of sleep was Thursday!
Around midnight, I was ready to push.
Well, not really. I didn't feel ready for anything, least of all to bring a baby home. Baaberg wasn't ready either. She wasn't optimally positioned, despite all the walking, floor-scrubbing, and Spinning Babies exercises I had done.
After a while, Tasha recommended I stop pushing to save energy and try some specific positions, like Walcher’s. That position entailed lying on my back with pillows under my hips. It was exactly as uncomfortable as it sounds. "To help you relax,” Tasha said, “we can go across the road to the hospital for an epidural or give you some nitrous oxide here.”
Moving locations at this point in labor sounded horrific to me, never mind that I wanted an unmedicated birth. Nitrous oxide it was.
With the introduction of nitrous oxide, things got seriously confusing, and significantly harder. Not pushing during a contraction in the second stage of labor felt like trying to climb up a waterfall. Trying to follow directions about how to direct the energy in my body while basically high felt like I was drowning in that waterfall.
I looked into Byrd's eyes. "I don't understand what's happening anymore," I said.
I remember the loud hum of the nitrous machine. I remember feeling bad for all present who had to listen to my sounds of discomfort while I tried to not push, hips propped up in bed. I remember looking out from the birthing tub at the midwife, Arthur, dear patient Karen, all quietly waiting for the next contraction. I was making them all wait. “You don’t have to stay,” I told Karen. But like a good friend—or just a normal person?—she stayed.
The Minneapolis location of the Minnesota Birth Center has two birthing rooms. While I was in the tub, trying to make the most of each contraction with no evident progress, I heard another mother occupy the other room. I heard her moans. I heard the baby cry. I heard them leave. And I was still in the tub with my baby inside of me.
One of my Strengths™ is Input. This means that I collect things, particularly information. I read plenty of pregnancy literature, including Ina May Gaskin’s Guide to Childbirth. I knew that delivering a baby is part physical and part mental. And deep down, I didn't feel ready to bring a newborn home to our still-chaotic new house. Six hours of physical changes—pushing and not pushing, on the bed and in the tub, open and closed glottis breathing—hadn’t done it. So I knew I needed to change my mental narrative. Maybe I wasn’t ready to bring Baaberg home, but I was ready for her to come out.
"You have to come out," I muttered to Baaberg. "You just have to. You'll either come out here or across the road. Come out here."
I changed scenery, too. Around 6 a.m. Sunday, I got out of the tub to try the birthing stool. It didn’t take. So back into the bathroom I went. So familiar, so private somehow even when there's a midwife kneeling right in front of you with a flashlight.
Then I heard magical words: "The baby's coming!"
What? Really?! I started flapping my lips (the “horse-lips” technique developed by Ina May), remembering my friend who swore that had helped her not tear.
And then, more magic: Baaberg slipped out.
I started crying. She started snuffling. Tasha put a mini oxygen mask on her. I continued crying. Baaberg gave her first cry. I shuffled to the bed, still crying. Another midwife, Mary Signe, came on shift. She gave me a shot of pitocin to stop my slightly excessive bleeding. I paused crying long enough to push out the placenta. Mary Signe told me I had a tear and that she would stitch it up. Karen took breakfast orders.
The hustle and bustle soon faded away. People said their congratulations and good-byes.
And then things started to get strange.
The new nurse draws a bath for me. It has an herbal sachet. I've been waiting for this herbal bath ever since our orientation seven months ago.
I am getting into the tub. Now I am getting out of the tub. I am collecting my things.
Now I'm sitting on the couch facing a panel of medical personnel with different uniforms. When did I sit down? They are asking me questions. I don't have answers.
I look over at Arthur. He’s skin to skin with Baaberg on the bed. He doesn't look good—worried and white.
Now I’m transferring to a wheelchair. Now I am being wheeled out through the same door I entered twelves hours before. Now I see an ambulance in the tiny parking lot.
All the while, Mary Signe is talking, talking, talking. I understand the words she's saying, and yet they hold no significance.
Now I am in a bed, wheeling from room to room. Now I face more medical personnel in color-coded scrubs. I can tell by the looks on their faces that they are asking me questions. I still don’t have answers. Now I’m getting a scan. Now the sheets on the bed are twisted, don’t cover me well. I feel too hot and too cold.
Now the bed has stopped moving. Someone is affixing plastic squares to my head with a sharp-smelling adhesive. "Stop," I say. He doesn't.
A nurse leans over the side of the bed into my field of vision. He asks me to stick out my tongue, asks me my name. "Hannah," I say.
Familiar faces appear by my side and at the foot of the bed: My sister, her blue eyes so wide. (Why is she talking to me like I’m a child?) My godmother, corners of her mouth downturned. (Why does she look so sad?) A man I know I know, but cannot place. (Is he family?) My husband. (He does not look good, I think again.)
Unfamiliar faces appear through curtains I'm now noticing near the foot of the bed. These people in white coats want to know my name ("Hannah Aaberg"), what year it is ("20.....18"—it’s only January 7, so I can be forgiven the pause), who is president (*sigh* "Trump").
So many medical professionals come through those curtains. They congratulate me (That's right, I had a baby) and ask if it's a boy or a girl (nine out of ten times I remember correctly). They take my blood. They pump my colostrum. They keep. Asking. Questions.
And I have some answers.
Finally, in the wee hours of Monday morning, I regained lucidity. I understood where I was—the intensive care unit of Abbott Northwestern—and can tell that to anyone who asks.
I understood why I was there—severe hyponatremia; that is, low blood sodium or water intoxication. The normal range for blood sodium is 135-145 mEq/L (milliequivalents per liter). At the time of my admittance, mine was 118 mEq/L. My sister-in-law, fresh out of pharmacy school, told me that when she heard that number, she thought, Hannah is on her deathbed.
Hyponatremia can lead to altered mental status, seizures, coma, and death.
No wonder everyone looked so worried. No wonder that man glued electrodes to my head and, I later learned, trained a camera on me to watch for seizures. No wonder I was in the intensive care unit.
After delivery, I started to pass large amounts of urine—more than 8 liters in one day, and 22 liters overall. The bag of output sometimes filled up so quickly that sometimes my mom (When did she get here?) was concerned it would overflow before the nurse got to it. My sodium level increased rapidly to 137 mEq/L. I got a one-time dose of DDAVP (desmopressin) to slow down urine output and keep the sodium level steady.
With the return of my mental status, the questions got more complicated.
To monitor my blood sodium, phlebotomists came by every three hours to draw blood. One of them asked matter-of-factly, “Where is your baby?”
Yes, where was she? Not with me—an ICU room is not set up for rooming in. They banished a sympathy flower bouquet to the front desk; I doubted they’d accommodate a newborn. I’ve had to piece together the first few days of Baaberg’s life. This aunt held her at the birth center. Arthur drove her home. That aunt held her overnight.
When my mental status was no longer altered on Monday, on the second day of her outside life, I got to hold her and look at her and smell her for the only second time.
I nursed her. We confirmed her name. I tried to comb my hair and scrub the marker off my face to take the tired-but-happy-mom-and-dad-and-sleeping-newborn photo.
Then, I said good-bye to my baby. Arthur took her (and lots of colostrum) back home to her newly-minted grandma.
I did come close to being transferred to Abbott’s Mother Baby Center, where I would have been able to room in with my baby. Transfer was so imminent that the nurse packed up the room and had a wheelchair ready at the door. My mom texted the new room number to my sister. The twists and turns of the last 24 hours rendered me skeptical. I’ll believe that’s my new room number when I’m in that room, I thought. And then word came from the nephrologist—he wanted to monitor me another night. That meant more blood draws every three hours. That meant another night in the ICU.
The MBC midwives included me in their rounds, as did Abbott’s Mother Baby Center midwives. (So many medical professionals!) One MBC midwife asked me, with a wrinkled brow, “How are you feeling about your birth?”
I don’t remember what I answered. The whole experience was so muddled. I didn’t have a firm grasp on what had happened, and why. I did know that I was disappointed I didn’t get to enjoy the long-awaited herbal bath. “Ah, OK, I can help with that!” she said. She returned later with an herbal sachet, and a few peri bottles for good measure.
For how short a time I was in the ICU—early Sunday morning to late Tuesday morning—I had what seemed like an awful lot of visitors: All the people on Sunday who looked so worried but also so well-dressed (I realized later they’d come from church). Our doula. Our pastor. Our brothers.
My brother happened to be visiting while a doctor came with an update. Brian asked the question that I would obsess over later but I was too preoccupied to ask at the time: “What could have prevented this?”
First, what caused the hyponatremia? My discharge papers say, “We think [the hyponatremia] was due to high volume water intake and increased ADH [antidiuretic hormone] during labor.” Was I drinking a lot of water during labor? Well, I definitely drank water, instead of an isotonic or electrolyte-rich beverage. And I definitely drank freely. But no one knows exactly how much I drank throughout labor—no one was with me the whole time and I am not a reliable narrator of my excursions to Labor Land. Tasha had one impression of my intake; Byrd, another.
I struggled for weeks and months after my discharge to figure out who was to blame, and then to accept that assigning blame was impossible and unhelpful, and then to accept that sometimes, things just happen.
Early Tuesday morning, after a night of blood draws, the nephrologist was finally satisfied with my blood. We got me ready to go: IVs out, clothes on. We discussed where I could find a bathroom to use. Most ICU patients don't need an in-room bathroom, so the rooms have only a water closet for emptying catheter bags and bedpans. But in the end, it didn't matter. I stood up from the armchair and unintentionally voided. Thanks, cath.
I turned down a wheelchair, a foolish decision I regretted after only a few yards. My mom and I walked slowly to the hospital entrance. Arthur drove up. I got in the front seat. We embraced over the center console. He drove us home. I watched familiar landmarks go by. It was all the same. It was all different.
I walked into my home. I gathered up my sweet bundle. I cried.
It's a big story.
It’s so big that I knew I would go through another round of processing before Baby #2 arrived (guess date: October 31). So big that I put off looking at my colleague’s edits and comments on a rough draft for nearly a year. So big that these almost three thousand words still aren’t enough to capture the full dramatic structure.
Well, enough preamble. Onto pre-labor.
Pre-labor
The year had been a busy one. Arthur and I married January 2017, the first of twelve weddings we would attend that year. In April, I took a pregnancy test. I was delighted (and shaky) to find it positive. We added “Interview doulas” to our to-do list, right under “Interview real estate agents,” because yes, we wanted to buy a house the same year as getting married and pregnant. The Minnesota Birth Center (MBC), our maternity care center of choice, has a doula internship program, and without too much trouble we found a doula intern with whom we clicked.
Baby Aaberg, aka “Baaberg,” breezed past her December 22 guess date. That gave us a little more time to settle into our new house, which we bought in November. With each day past her guess date, I tried more vigorous measures to bring on labor: walking, eating spicy food, scrubbing the floors. By Friday, January 5, I was ready to take a more direct approach. I stopped at Walgreens and picked up castor oil, orange juice, and ice cream. Castor oil is laxative that (maybe, probably) induces labor. Orange juice makes a tolerable mixer for the world's worst cocktail. And ice cream? The base for the world's worst sundae.
 |
| Bottoms up! |
I called my friend and lay birth attendant Karen over. She brought a stack of lighthearted DVDs, a big heart, and sound advice; for example, “Have baby wipes handy!”
I took two doses of castor oil that afternoon. Arthur got home from work; Karen passed the baton and went home. Arthur and I went to bed at 9 p.m. But I got up again almost immediately because hello contractions!
First Stage of Labor
Through the night, I labored and Arthur slumbered. I threw up once, worrying that the retching would wake him. Of course it didn't; he sleeps through everything. My water may have broken between 11 p.m. and 1 a.m., but who can be certain about these things? I sat backwards on the toilet, cooling one cheek, then the other on the tank lid.
By 6 a.m. Saturday, I'd texted a screenshot from a contraction timer to our doula intern, Byrd.
"Does this look like a pattern to you?" I asked.
"Call me," she texted back.
Excursion to Labor Land, Part 1
Now we begin our travels in Labor Land, where time bunches up and stretches out, like an accordion playing a tune with an indeterminate rhythm. I showered. Byrd arrived, stayed for a couple hours, then ducked out for a bit to get coffee and breakfast, having realized I wasn't about to transition or anything.
Time passed.
My dad dropped off my mom, then headed to South Dakota for a weekend of speaking engagements.
Time passed.
Arthur made me a grilled cheese sandwich with rhubarb ketchup. I ate it between waves. We called the on-call midwife. Tasha said to call back later, presumably when I was no longer interested in eating.
 |
| From the track "Let It Go" by The Neighbourhood. |
During some squeeze of the time accordion, I requested the album "I Love You" by The Neighbourhood to be put on. I told Byrd the story of the night I bought the album. It was a dark and snowy night to run errands. I’d navigated slippery roads, and the Department of Vehicle Services, and by the grace of a DVS employee, avoided contact with my ex-husband. Byrd listened, knowing how emotional the birth experience is. And she zeroed in on this lyric: "Let it struggle just a little bit more..."
Another squeeze of the time accordion. We walked around the block and I paused to lean against a tree. We went back inside. I stood in the shower again. We called the midwife again.
"Call back at 6:30," she said. Arthur made curry. I didn't eat it. We called the midwife back at 6 p.m. Mid-conversation, I breathed through a contraction. "OK, come in," she said, presumably convinced I was no longer interested in eating.
I was worried the car ride would be awful. Part of the reason I called before 6:30 p.m. was because I didn’t want the contractions to get more intense and then have to get into the car. But my body took care of me—my contractions slowed down for the 20-minute car ride to the birth center. When we arrived, I took a dollop of pleasure in finally pulling into the "Laboring families only" parking spot.
Excursion to Labor Land, Part 2
It's about 7 p.m. now, still Saturday. I marvel at how quiet and dark the birth center is after hours. Karen arrives with her big heart. And then I enter another time warp.
I remember walking through the main floor, up the stairs, and back down with an entourage trailing after me. On top of the entourage, I had to navigate around the cleaning person. Not trying that again, I thought.
I remember hanging from the room’s birthing sling. Not as comfortable as I imagined, I thought.
 |
| Hip squeezes: Yes please. Birthing sling: No thank you. |
I remember suddenly waking up and exclaiming, "You guys! I was sleeping!" It'd been a good 24 hours since active labor started on Friday night. That means my last full night of sleep was Thursday!
Second Stage of Labor
Around midnight, I was ready to push.
Well, not really. I didn't feel ready for anything, least of all to bring a baby home. Baaberg wasn't ready either. She wasn't optimally positioned, despite all the walking, floor-scrubbing, and Spinning Babies exercises I had done.
 |
| Mood after almost two hours of pushing. |
After a while, Tasha recommended I stop pushing to save energy and try some specific positions, like Walcher’s. That position entailed lying on my back with pillows under my hips. It was exactly as uncomfortable as it sounds. "To help you relax,” Tasha said, “we can go across the road to the hospital for an epidural or give you some nitrous oxide here.”
Moving locations at this point in labor sounded horrific to me, never mind that I wanted an unmedicated birth. Nitrous oxide it was.
Excursion to Labor Land, Part 3
With the introduction of nitrous oxide, things got seriously confusing, and significantly harder. Not pushing during a contraction in the second stage of labor felt like trying to climb up a waterfall. Trying to follow directions about how to direct the energy in my body while basically high felt like I was drowning in that waterfall.
I looked into Byrd's eyes. "I don't understand what's happening anymore," I said.
I remember the loud hum of the nitrous machine. I remember feeling bad for all present who had to listen to my sounds of discomfort while I tried to not push, hips propped up in bed. I remember looking out from the birthing tub at the midwife, Arthur, dear patient Karen, all quietly waiting for the next contraction. I was making them all wait. “You don’t have to stay,” I told Karen. But like a good friend—or just a normal person?—she stayed.
The Minneapolis location of the Minnesota Birth Center has two birthing rooms. While I was in the tub, trying to make the most of each contraction with no evident progress, I heard another mother occupy the other room. I heard her moans. I heard the baby cry. I heard them leave. And I was still in the tub with my baby inside of me.
Crowning
One of my Strengths™ is Input. This means that I collect things, particularly information. I read plenty of pregnancy literature, including Ina May Gaskin’s Guide to Childbirth. I knew that delivering a baby is part physical and part mental. And deep down, I didn't feel ready to bring a newborn home to our still-chaotic new house. Six hours of physical changes—pushing and not pushing, on the bed and in the tub, open and closed glottis breathing—hadn’t done it. So I knew I needed to change my mental narrative. Maybe I wasn’t ready to bring Baaberg home, but I was ready for her to come out.
"You have to come out," I muttered to Baaberg. "You just have to. You'll either come out here or across the road. Come out here."
I changed scenery, too. Around 6 a.m. Sunday, I got out of the tub to try the birthing stool. It didn’t take. So back into the bathroom I went. So familiar, so private somehow even when there's a midwife kneeling right in front of you with a flashlight.
Then I heard magical words: "The baby's coming!"
What? Really?! I started flapping my lips (the “horse-lips” technique developed by Ina May), remembering my friend who swore that had helped her not tear.
And then, more magic: Baaberg slipped out.
I started crying. She started snuffling. Tasha put a mini oxygen mask on her. I continued crying. Baaberg gave her first cry. I shuffled to the bed, still crying. Another midwife, Mary Signe, came on shift. She gave me a shot of pitocin to stop my slightly excessive bleeding. I paused crying long enough to push out the placenta. Mary Signe told me I had a tear and that she would stitch it up. Karen took breakfast orders.
The hustle and bustle soon faded away. People said their congratulations and good-byes.
And then things started to get strange.
Postpartum
The new nurse draws a bath for me. It has an herbal sachet. I've been waiting for this herbal bath ever since our orientation seven months ago.
I am getting into the tub. Now I am getting out of the tub. I am collecting my things.
Now I'm sitting on the couch facing a panel of medical personnel with different uniforms. When did I sit down? They are asking me questions. I don't have answers.
I look over at Arthur. He’s skin to skin with Baaberg on the bed. He doesn't look good—worried and white.
Now I’m transferring to a wheelchair. Now I am being wheeled out through the same door I entered twelves hours before. Now I see an ambulance in the tiny parking lot.
All the while, Mary Signe is talking, talking, talking. I understand the words she's saying, and yet they hold no significance.
My Mind Is Lost
Now I am in a bed, wheeling from room to room. Now I face more medical personnel in color-coded scrubs. I can tell by the looks on their faces that they are asking me questions. I still don’t have answers. Now I’m getting a scan. Now the sheets on the bed are twisted, don’t cover me well. I feel too hot and too cold.
Now the bed has stopped moving. Someone is affixing plastic squares to my head with a sharp-smelling adhesive. "Stop," I say. He doesn't.
A nurse leans over the side of the bed into my field of vision. He asks me to stick out my tongue, asks me my name. "Hannah," I say.
Familiar faces appear by my side and at the foot of the bed: My sister, her blue eyes so wide. (Why is she talking to me like I’m a child?) My godmother, corners of her mouth downturned. (Why does she look so sad?) A man I know I know, but cannot place. (Is he family?) My husband. (He does not look good, I think again.)
Unfamiliar faces appear through curtains I'm now noticing near the foot of the bed. These people in white coats want to know my name ("Hannah Aaberg"), what year it is ("20.....18"—it’s only January 7, so I can be forgiven the pause), who is president (*sigh* "Trump").
So many medical professionals come through those curtains. They congratulate me (That's right, I had a baby) and ask if it's a boy or a girl (nine out of ten times I remember correctly). They take my blood. They pump my colostrum. They keep. Asking. Questions.
And I have some answers.
My Brain Returns
Finally, in the wee hours of Monday morning, I regained lucidity. I understood where I was—the intensive care unit of Abbott Northwestern—and can tell that to anyone who asks.
I understood why I was there—severe hyponatremia; that is, low blood sodium or water intoxication. The normal range for blood sodium is 135-145 mEq/L (milliequivalents per liter). At the time of my admittance, mine was 118 mEq/L. My sister-in-law, fresh out of pharmacy school, told me that when she heard that number, she thought, Hannah is on her deathbed.
Hyponatremia can lead to altered mental status, seizures, coma, and death.
No wonder everyone looked so worried. No wonder that man glued electrodes to my head and, I later learned, trained a camera on me to watch for seizures. No wonder I was in the intensive care unit.
After delivery, I started to pass large amounts of urine—more than 8 liters in one day, and 22 liters overall. The bag of output sometimes filled up so quickly that sometimes my mom (When did she get here?) was concerned it would overflow before the nurse got to it. My sodium level increased rapidly to 137 mEq/L. I got a one-time dose of DDAVP (desmopressin) to slow down urine output and keep the sodium level steady.
With the return of my mental status, the questions got more complicated.
‘Where is your baby?’
To monitor my blood sodium, phlebotomists came by every three hours to draw blood. One of them asked matter-of-factly, “Where is your baby?”
Yes, where was she? Not with me—an ICU room is not set up for rooming in. They banished a sympathy flower bouquet to the front desk; I doubted they’d accommodate a newborn. I’ve had to piece together the first few days of Baaberg’s life. This aunt held her at the birth center. Arthur drove her home. That aunt held her overnight.
When my mental status was no longer altered on Monday, on the second day of her outside life, I got to hold her and look at her and smell her for the only second time.
I nursed her. We confirmed her name. I tried to comb my hair and scrub the marker off my face to take the tired-but-happy-mom-and-dad-and-sleeping-newborn photo.
 |
| I really hadn't wanted our first family photo to include a hospital bed. |
Then, I said good-bye to my baby. Arthur took her (and lots of colostrum) back home to her newly-minted grandma.
I did come close to being transferred to Abbott’s Mother Baby Center, where I would have been able to room in with my baby. Transfer was so imminent that the nurse packed up the room and had a wheelchair ready at the door. My mom texted the new room number to my sister. The twists and turns of the last 24 hours rendered me skeptical. I’ll believe that’s my new room number when I’m in that room, I thought. And then word came from the nephrologist—he wanted to monitor me another night. That meant more blood draws every three hours. That meant another night in the ICU.
‘How are you feeling about your birth?’
The MBC midwives included me in their rounds, as did Abbott’s Mother Baby Center midwives. (So many medical professionals!) One MBC midwife asked me, with a wrinkled brow, “How are you feeling about your birth?”
I don’t remember what I answered. The whole experience was so muddled. I didn’t have a firm grasp on what had happened, and why. I did know that I was disappointed I didn’t get to enjoy the long-awaited herbal bath. “Ah, OK, I can help with that!” she said. She returned later with an herbal sachet, and a few peri bottles for good measure.
‘What could have prevented this?’
For how short a time I was in the ICU—early Sunday morning to late Tuesday morning—I had what seemed like an awful lot of visitors: All the people on Sunday who looked so worried but also so well-dressed (I realized later they’d come from church). Our doula. Our pastor. Our brothers.
My brother happened to be visiting while a doctor came with an update. Brian asked the question that I would obsess over later but I was too preoccupied to ask at the time: “What could have prevented this?”
First, what caused the hyponatremia? My discharge papers say, “We think [the hyponatremia] was due to high volume water intake and increased ADH [antidiuretic hormone] during labor.” Was I drinking a lot of water during labor? Well, I definitely drank water, instead of an isotonic or electrolyte-rich beverage. And I definitely drank freely. But no one knows exactly how much I drank throughout labor—no one was with me the whole time and I am not a reliable narrator of my excursions to Labor Land. Tasha had one impression of my intake; Byrd, another.
I struggled for weeks and months after my discharge to figure out who was to blame, and then to accept that assigning blame was impossible and unhelpful, and then to accept that sometimes, things just happen.
Going Home
Early Tuesday morning, after a night of blood draws, the nephrologist was finally satisfied with my blood. We got me ready to go: IVs out, clothes on. We discussed where I could find a bathroom to use. Most ICU patients don't need an in-room bathroom, so the rooms have only a water closet for emptying catheter bags and bedpans. But in the end, it didn't matter. I stood up from the armchair and unintentionally voided. Thanks, cath.
I turned down a wheelchair, a foolish decision I regretted after only a few yards. My mom and I walked slowly to the hospital entrance. Arthur drove up. I got in the front seat. We embraced over the center console. He drove us home. I watched familiar landmarks go by. It was all the same. It was all different.
I walked into my home. I gathered up my sweet bundle. I cried.
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| After an eternal two days. |
Well written and compelling! What a story. Thanks for sharing it ❤️
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