The Husband's View of Birth, part I

On the Matter of Labor:

We awoke on Friday morning at about 8 a.m. after a good night's sleep. Claire got out of bed and headed for the bathroom, as usual.

Claire: "Ow."
John (sitting up, blinking): "What."
Claire: "I think that was a contraction."

So we were off and running. We sort of expected this, since we had gone to the OB the day before, and the Dr. had "aggressively" stripped her membranes because we were 6 days past due. She was 3.5 cm, as she had been for 2 weeks. After all of the reading we had done about labor, we expected that the first contractions would be small and irregular and far apart. Early labor was a casual and boring time, and you could casually pack and head to the hospital some several or many hours later. You could nap, take a bath, or, as one book put it, go to the mall and walk around.

5 minutes later:

Claire: "There it is again."
John (still in bed): "Another contraction?" He looks at the clock; "That was fast".
Claire: "Mmm hmmm".

And they were never more than five minutes apart, from the start. They started out pretty short (15 seconds or so), but progressively got longer and longer as the morning went on. By 10:30 a.m., Claire's contractions were already hitting the critical 5:1:1 hat trick (5 minutes apart, a minute long, for an hour). And they were getting stronger.

John: "Is that another contraction coming."
Claire: "Aaaaaaaaaaaa."
John: "Ok. There there."
Claire: AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAaaa."

I made Claire a couple of English muffins. We had packed most of our stuff for the hospital weeks before, but I had to get it out to the truck between contractions. I'd head out the door with a handful of bags and Claire would start another contraction, so I'd drop the bags and run back in the house to give her a hug and hold her hand until it passed.

Claire" AAAAAAAAAAAAAaaaaaaaaa."

At 11 a.m., we called our doula, Alex. It was time to go. The boring, slow, casual early labor was a myth. We had sudden onset immediate full bigtime holy shit labor instead. We headed out the door and left for the hospital soon after Alex arrived. Claire had two contractions between the house and the truck. She had about 5 contractions during the 10-minute drive on the way to the hospital. I wondered if people in other cars could see the nice woman in the red truck yelling at the top of her lungs. I pulled up to the hospital entrance and helped Claire out.

Another contraction. Claire: "AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAaaaaaaAAAAAaa."
Hospital admitting lady, coming out the front door: "What's going on?"
Claire: (thinking: DUH..I'm hugely pregnant and yelling. What do you think???)

So my first primary goal was accomplished: we did not have the baby in the truck.

Tomorrow: MORE Labor.