Babyhood

On the morning of Thursday 9th June 1994 I woke up in the maternity hospital at St Germain en Laye feeling very excited and nervous. This was the day my son would be born by Caesarean section, a decision made after x-rays and scans revealed that his skull was too large to fit through my pelvis. I felt secretly relieved that I wasn't going to have to suffer any labour pains.

I was also hungry, as I hadn’t been allowed any dinner the night before. I had been too excited to sleep much and I was also sharing a room with a young woman who had given birth the day before, whose baby cried noisily all night. A nurse came to shave my pubic hair off (dry! with no soap or foam or ANYTHING!), which tickled greatly, and I was told to take a shower and wash myself all over with disinfectant, before putting on a hospital gown. Just as I was on my way to the shower, my husband arrived in my room which was a really nice surprise. Of course he planned to be in the waiting room during the operation, but I wasn’t sure of seeing him before they wheeled me off to the operating theatre.

After the shower I waited on my bed and a nurse came to attach a catheter to my urethra, which was a VERY PECULIAR experience. At 8.30 am an orderly came with a stretcher. I climbed on and someone put by my feet the baby clothes Kevin was to wear. They started to wheel me off down the corridor towards the lifts, P. walking alongside, when a nurse noticed that I had nail polish on my toe nails. She halted the procession and sent someone to find a bottle of polish remover, explaining to me that they needed to be able to see the colour of my toes after the operation to make sure I was recovering properly! She said “I suppose you painted your nails especially for today?”. Of course I had, and shaved my legs too! I got quite a scolding and felt quite silly, but was also annoyed that nobody thought to tell me that important detail when the date for the operation had been fixed. It was the first time I’d ever been in hospital for God’s sake, how was I supposed to know something like that? So she scrubbed away at my toenails right there in the hospital corridor with all sorts of people rushing past. P. and I found it funny, at least it gave us something to laugh about.

The orderly pushed me into the lift to go down a couple of floors and then through a labyrinth of corridors. He was really chatty, but I can’t remember a thing he said. We arrived and P. kissed me goodbye as he was left behind in the waiting room. I was taken first into the recovery room where a shower cap was put on my head, yellow disinfectant painted on my belly and all sorts of electrodes attached to my chest and arms. An intravenous drip was inserted into each hand which was quite painful and left impressive bruises afterwards. At some stage I asked when I would first see my baby and I was told that he would be beside me in the recovery room afterwards. I was wheeled into the operating room where there seemed to be dozens of staff members in green robes (probably only about 6 or 7), all busy doing things with various equipment. The bright lights were quite dazzling.

A woman anaesthetist in white came and introduced herself, and while she was fiddling with her tools, asked me where I was from, as she had obviously noticed my accent straight away. When I mentioned New Zealand she was delighted, as she said she had friends living in Auckland. Then I had to sit up with my legs hanging over the edge of the operating table and she prodded my back and swabbed the part of my spine where the needles were to go in. She injected me twice, one for each side (a rachi-anaesthetic). The needles hurt quite a lot going in, and it was very strange to feel my legs going numb. Of course I couldn’t lie down again by myself after that, a nurse had to come and swing my legs back onto the table. The electrodes on my chest were plugged into a heart monitor and some other machines, I found it all quite fascinating. Green cloths were draped all over me and a kind of tent was rigged up at chest level, so I couldn’t see anything past my shoulders. However I could see my own reflection (tiny) in the metallic lampshades above me, so I decided to look elsewhere while they were cutting, but to try and watch Kevin being born.

I started to feel quite woozy and far-away, in fact throughout the whole procedure I kept wanting to drift off to sleep. A young nurse sat behind my head, often rubbing my temples and from time to time she put an oxygen mask over my face, to keep me awake, I suppose. She frequently spoke to me and asked me “Ca va? Ca va ?” over and over again. A man in white with a moustache came and said hello to me, then quickly got to work. I soon realised he was the surgeon. The first part of the operation took place within half an hour. I couldn’t resist glancing up at my reflection from time to time and was quite fascinated to see, after the initial incision was made, a layer of bright white fat under the skin and then a lot of red. Although I was completely numb from the waist down, I soon felt my body being jerked about a bit as the surgeon reached right in to pull Kevin out. These vigorous movements seemed to last quite a long time, and I can’t help but wonder now if Kevin got a fright to be pulled out feet first, and perhaps that’s why he breathed in some amniotic fluid. Stupidly I had imagined that, in a Caesarean, the baby would simply be lifted out through a large cut, but of course he was dragged out through a very small incision. No wonder I was sore afterwards!

So I felt them pulling and jerking, it seemed like quite a struggle and I looked up at the lights and vaguely saw a blue and red bundle. Someone said “Le voilà!” and I felt an incredibly heavy weight plunked down on my chest. The green tent was pulled down and I had a two second glimpse of the back of Kevin’s head. I said “Oh il est là!” All I can remember his that his hair was wet, dark and curly. During that fleeting moment I suppose they were cutting the umbilical cord, then he was lifted off me and a nurse started to carry him out of the room but someone else called her back and told her to show me my baby. I was thinking "Yeah thanks for remembering me, I'm just the bloody mother after all..." She came to my left, level with my head and bent slightly, but as Kevin was facing her, all I saw was the back of his head again. Then they were gone and I hadn’t even touched him.

The rest of the operation seemed to take a long, long time. The sewing up is more complicated of course, than making the incision. At one stage I remembered asking to see the placenta, as the midwife who ran the prenatal classes had told us that, although one side of it is just red and bloody like chopped meat, the other side is smooth, comprising an intricate network of veins and arteries. Apparently some women think it is quite beautiful and are moved to see the organ that kept their baby alive for 9 months. Naturally I was curious to see mine. Well when I asked, the bloody nurse looked at me as if I were crazy, but brought it to me in a dish anyway. Again, I only had a glance before it was whisked away and I realised that the stupid woman had shown me the wrong side.

When the operation was finished a sheet was put over me and the electrodes unplugged. As I was being wheeled away I said thank you to the surgeon and then saw that there had been a second surgeon - it was in fact Madame E. whom I had seen just once, the week before. It was she who decided I would need a Caesarean, based on my pelvic X-ray. She was taking off her surgical mask and she said goodbye, but I was amazed to realise that she had been there all that time. Perhaps it was she who delivered Kevin, I don’t even know! She hadn’t even come up to see me or say hello at the start of the operation. Yet another disappointment, but of course the worst was yet to come.

As I was being wheeled out of the room, the staff behind me were busily cleaning up, and another pregnant woman on a stretcher was wheeled in. A veritable baby factory. I was taken back to the recovery room opposite and I think the electrodes were plugged back into a monitor. I was naked under the sheet and started to feel quite cold and shivery. My arms were crossed over my chest and a blanket was put over me, but the stretcher was so narrow that my arms kept slipping off the sides and my shoulders were constantly exposed. There were three other patients on stretchers recovering from their operations and we were crammed into the tiny room like sardines. The one next to me was obviously waking up from a general anaesthetic and she kept trying to sit up and get off the stretcher. She wasn’t coherent at all, she moaned and talked quite wildly and the male nurse who was checking our monitors and vital signs kept scolding her. She coughed a lot and he told her quite nastily that she shouldn’t smoke so much.

I felt weak, cold, disoriented and the whole atmosphere was so unfriendly and alien that I wanted to cry. I just wished for some kind of comfort. It seemed that they were taking a long time to weigh, bathe and dress Kevin. I eventually asked when they would bring my baby in, and the nurse said he would try and find someone to explain it to me, which sounded very ominous. Meanwhile the new-born baby of the woman who was wheeled into the theatre AFTER me, was brought into the recovery room and I realised that the area where they bathed and checked the babies was just around the corner. I could even hear the midwives noting its height and weight. So Kevin had been in there just before me. I later found out that he and P. were in a little room just next door with a paediatrician.

Eventually a midwife came and said to me “Your baby is fine, Madame, but he swallowed a bit of amniotic liquid as he was being born, so he’s in an incubator and will be taken to the Neonatal ward where we can keep an eye on him. A paediatrician is with your husband now”. I didn’t know what to say, it was such a shock. I had to lie there for a long time feeling very unhappy, just wanting to see P. and get the hell out of there. After a couple of hours someone decided I was fit to leave, but there was no orderly around to take me back to my room. The nurse made a few phone calls but no-one was available, so I had to wait some more. I felt frantic, begging silently "Someone, anyone, get me out of here!" Finally the same old chap came and pushed me out and P. was there at the waiting room door. I burst into tears and stretched out my hand, which he took as we were taken into a lift. I said “What’s happening? Have you seen him? Is he all right?” He tried to reassure me, he told me Kevin was beautiful, but P.'s own voice was wobbling too. I can’t remember much else until we got back to my room and a couple of nurses helped P. to lift me from the stretcher to the bed. He saw how cold I was, all blue and covered in goose pimples, so they put lots of blankets over me and plugged a bottle of painkiller into one of my drips, knowing that the anaesthetic would soon start to wear off.

P. sat with me and told me that he had been taken in to see Kevin and had even filmed him with the video camera when he was just 20 minutes old. He said that he had been over to see him in the Neonatal ward, which unfortunately was a long way away, up and down several flights of stairs and along a labyrinth of corridors. He told me not to worry, because although Kevin was suffering from temporary respiratory distress, he looked so big and healthy compared to the premature babies, and that he had the most beautiful skin, a lovely golden colour. I was able to look at the miniature black and white screen on the video camera and see the film of Kevin. I was amazed to see that his hair was straight after it had dried. I also noticed he had P.'s nose. He was just beautiful, but it felt extremely unreal to see him on a TV screen. He had a tube in his nose and a drip in his hand, like me. I felt like I was dreaming. I wanted to know how Kevin was going to be fed, I wanted to get him onto my breast before he lost his sucking reflex, but P. told me that the urgent priority was to get him breathing properly on his own and that he was being fed through the drip. P. said he had already rung his parents and mine. I was very grateful that he had done it so quickly, as I knew Mum and Dad would have been sitting up late by the phone. P. jotted down the extension number of the Neonatal ward and said I could ring them anytime I wanted to ask about Kevin’s progress.

The rest of the day is now a blur. I know that at one stage a friend Stephanie rang the hospital just wanting to ask about me, but of course the switchboard immediately put her through to me. I couldn’t even reach the phone, and as P. wasn’t there, the husband of the girl sharing my room passed it to me. Steph apologised for disturbing me and said she just wanted to know if everything was all right. Of course I burst into tears and explained briefly. She said “Yes but is it a boy or a girl?” When I told her, she congratulated me of course, but I felt cross that she was delighted when I was so unhappy. She said she and Belette would come and visit if I wanted them to, but as I didn’t even know when I was going to get Kevin back, I preferred that they ring P. in a couple of days to find out what was happening. My room-mate’s husband hung up the phone for me, and her mother-in-law came and stroked my forehead, as I was still crying and just couldn’t stop. It seemed like a nightmare.

A couple of times that day I tried ringing the Neo-natal ward, but the line was always engaged, so I gave up, knowing that my baby wasn’t really very sick, and that there were probably other parents of very ill babies needing to get through.

P. must have gone back and forth several times that day to see Kevin and film him and then back to me to tell me how he was progressing. It was only recently that P. actually told me how scared he was when the doctors said they just weren’t sure what kind of progress Kevin would make. He took that to mean that there were doubts as to his survival. Of course he never said that to me at the time, thank goodness.

I think it was the following day that I realised Kevin was dressed only in a nappy in the incubator and I wondered what had happened to his baby clothes that had been taken down into the operating theatre with me. I had to make several enquiries to different nurses, all obviously very busy, who said they would try and find out. We did get them back eventually but I took it badly, considering it yet another thing that had not gone smoothly.

On the morning of that second day, the Friday, two nurse-aids came to make me get out of bed and try to walk a bit. The catheter had been taken away, but I was still hooked up to a drip which they wheeled alongside me. I was told to breathe slowly and deeply, and to look straight ahead to avoid dizziness. I felt very feeble and shaky, as I had only been given hot chocolate, a roll and jam for breakfast, and when one of them said to me quite crossly “Why are you shaking like that?”, I snapped “Because I’m starving!”. She replied “Well you should have told us!”, and later she brought me an extra croissant! I was told that the more I walked around, the better it would be for my circulation and thus the faster I would heal. So I got up a couple of times that day and walked to the toilet by myself.

I was still very upset and crying a lot that day. I asked to have my name put on the waiting list for a private room, thinking I would probably have to wait a couple of days for one to become available, but I was moved just a few hours later. I couldn’t stand hearing my room-mate relating the details of her labour over the phone for the nth time, I could just about recite it along with her! She also had quite a few visitors, who invariably asked me where my baby was, which just set me off again, naturally. Poor Mum and Dad must have been worried sick, because they rang me every night and I just sobbed down the phone every time.

I remember asking if I could be taken in a wheelchair to see Kevin and was given some excuse about the lifts being out of order. Then to my amazement, P. arranged for Kevin to be wheeled over in his incubator to my room that afternoon. I half sat up and was allowed to hold him, wrapped in a blanket, for the first time. He was sleeping and it was quite miraculous to actually see his little face in my arms. He yawned and made gummy sounds with his mouth. I kept bending my head to try and kiss his ear, but the blanket got in the way. After about 15 minutes P. got worried that his feet were getting cold, so the nurse put him back in the incubator and wheeled him away. Separated again. More tears from me. Again, it all felt unreal, like a bad dream.

On the Saturday I walked around the corridors a lot more to speed up the healing process. Unfortunately I must have overdone it, because when Kevin was brought to me in the afternoon, I was exhausted and could barely stand. The nurse tried to show me how to change his nappy and at the same time was talking to me about giving him so many millilitres of the milk I had pumped, but I just couldn’t take anything in and cried again. It was so nice when they left us alone with P. and we could all just relax. I lay with Kevin beside me in the narrow bed and finally felt that things were as they should be. What a lot of progress we’ve made since then!