I didn’t get a chance to send out an email or Facebook entry for the events in this update. Instead, I made of series of phone calls to friends, family and medical providers.
The weekend allowed Sarah and I some time to reflect and rest from the nearly non-stop medical appointments. We ended the week with the bad news from the MRI appointment followed by the good visit with Sarah’s brand new OB-Gyn. Sarah spent Friday evening with two high school students she had tutored in American Sign Language. They watched a movie and ate pizza. Sarah really needed this girls night out to relax and forget about her problems – best kind of medicine.
Over the weekend, Sarah called her family to update them on our most recent news. Her parents didn’t have email or access to Facebook, so phone calls gave them both information and allowed them to console Sarah. I called my family, too. We spent a lot of time on the phone that weekend.
I missed a much needed softball practice Friday night because we didn’t get home until well after the practice began and I still needed to run out for the pizza. Instead, I spent some time working on my studies for the six online classes (15 hours in graduate school) I had started in January. I needed to catch up on reading, watching the online lectures and writing papers. Spring break and Missions week started soon when I had no new assignments. I hoped for a quiet weekend to study.
Instead, Sarah’s nausea went off the charts and she developed a painful case of constipation. These symptoms occur regularly for pregnant women especially in the later weeks. Still, it caught us both off guard, so we called our OB-Gyn’s after hour number for help and advice. They gave us a list of over the counter remedies. I drove over to the local Walgreens and got two of everything. Then we worked our way through the list until Sunday night when Sarah finally found some lasting relief which allowed both of us to get some uninterrupted sleep.
Monday morning, I crept silently past the master bedroom hoping to enjoy breakfast without a fresh picture of bodily excretions in my mind. Sarah cried out in obvious pain and I didn’t eat anything until evening. The constipation came back with a vengeance. We worked together until the doctor’s office opened and I called their number.
The nurse made several more suggestions which I followed in detail. Sarah seemed relaxed until she had an uncontrollable urge to push. I’ve had these urges while fighting constipation – there is no worse feeling in the world. I worried that she might trigger labor so I suggested that she resist these urges and push more gently.
I called a second time about an hour later and received some more ideas. Sarah seemed to get better and then had another round of pain.
On the third call, I reported a sudden bout of projectile vomiting that caught me on the shoulder and hit the wall of the bathroom. This time the nurse told us to come immediately to the hospital – a 45 minute drive from our apartment. I checked the clock to let the nurse know when she should expect us to arrive.
We still didn’t have a suitcase packed for Sarah so she put together a few things into a bag while I got dressed and grabbed a 1 minute shower. We got into the car 5 minutes after putting down the phone with the nurse and Sarah cried out again as the car pulled out of the garage. I took a look at the clock.
Sarah cried out again while we stopped at a red light. I looked at the clock in the car while I reminded her that we would start moving again soon.
As I drove up the entrance ramp onto the freeway, I asked myself whether to take the HOV lane or navigate along with the rest of traffic. The time – 11:20 am – meant lunch traffic, but since this was Monday morning, I figured it wouldn’t be too heavy. Also, I thought we might be just early enough to avoid heavy traffic.
Then, it hit me – what if Sarah was in labor? In a second I recalled the events of the morning – Sarah’s painful out cries – and the relative times in between: 45 minutes, 30 minutes, 20 minutes, 15 minutes, 10 minutes, 5 minutes. She had two outcries in the car… 2 minutes apart. OMG! She’s in labor and the contractions are only 2 minutes apart.
By the time the car reached the end of the ramp, I had decided to take the most number of lanes in case I ended up trapped behind someone unaware of my newly discovered haste. Now, I longed for one of my previous cars. The PT-cruiser accelerated like an anvil and handled with all the grace of a row boat. I had four lanes of highway, medium amount of traffic, but a tricycle of a car.
I did fairly well negotiating traffic, but eventually came upon three cars running abreast at slightly under the posted speed limit. Although I flashed my lights and zigzagged in the lanes behind them repeatedly, none of the drivers noticed me. Eventually, one car finally inched ahead of the other two and I slipped in-between with one foot mashing the accelerator pedal to the floor, the other foot pushing the car forward like Fred Flintstone, and one hand pushing the other car over to give me enough room to wedge my way through.
I hadn’t told Sarah about my hunch concerning her labor pains. She had enough problems of her own. The contractions were coming at 1 minute increments now. Sarah held onto the chicken bar over the passenger seat groaning and crying out with increasing frequency.
I cursed the lazy drivers in their fancy cars who had blocked our way. If I had access to one of those over-powered engines with a real suspension system all you would have seen of me would have been a flash of light on the horizon. Now, I had some open road and only a few more miles before the hospital exit.
Except, two of the drivers I just passed must have become deeply offended at my underpowered car insulting their dubious manhood. As the PT-Cruiser struggled to accelerate from 55 mph to 80+ mph, these other two cars decided to race me. I spent the remaining miles dueling them and dodging other vehicles just trying to get clear. For some reason, they never noticed the pale and distressed face of the woman in my passenger seat clucking to the chicken bar and my emergency lights flashing. As I decelerated into the exit lane, the two other cars accelerated past 100 mph in some vein effort to regain what nature had neglected to provide their drivers.
Now, the hospital was new to us. We had been there just once, Friday evening, to see our new Ob-Gyn. However, I didn’t have a clue where to take Sarah. I remembered the ER entrance, but couldn’t recall exactly how to find it. The signs for “delivery” didn’t apply to our situation, so we ended up orbiting the parking lots and office buildings more times than I care to admit.
When we finally pulled up to the ER entrance, I ran in and called out that I had a woman in labor with contractions only a minute apart. They eventually sent a lad with a wheel chair and took Sarah away. Trying to make conversation along the convoluted path to the delivery rooms, he asked Sarah whether she was in labor. Fighting contractions, she nearly screamed out, “I don’t know! I might just be constipated!” He was emotionally scarred for life.
Meanwhile, I parked the car and called my brother to tell him that Julie was probably just about to come. I knew my phone wouldn’t work in the hospital (it didn’t Friday night), so I had just a few seconds to relay the message before I would lose the signal.