Chapter 207: Tim and Abby
Being a pregnant father is very different than being a
pregnant mother.
And not just on the obvious levels of your body doesn't
change and you aren't swamped with hormones that make you insane.
For example: if you are a pregnant dad, other dads, upon
finding this out, will occasionally tell you horror stories. These horror
stories usually involve things like your wife going absolutely insane in a
Jekyll/Hyde sort of way, being forced to rearrange every piece of furniture in
the house at 2:00 in the morning as a result of this insane, and how you never,
ever get to have sex again.
They very rarely involve stories of how the baby goes from
being inside your wife to getting out. (Or that there may, just possibly, be a
causal relationship between how this happens and the whole no sex thing.)
This might have something to do with the fact that most
guys, especially with casual acquaintances, would rather cut their own tongues
out with a pair of chop sticks than admit to being really scared about
something.
However, veteran moms seem to have absolutely no issues at
all with telling perfect strangers exceptionally gory stories of how they went
into labor, dealt with twenty hours of excruciating contractions, had the baby
go into distress at nine centimeters dilated, and then had a terrifying emergency
c-section that took months to heal up from. But they don't tell those stories
when there are men around. So, Tim hasn't heard them. Sure, labor forever, lots
of pushing, hurts, yep, he's heard that. Vaginal prolapse, fourth degree
tearing, pushing so hard the blood vessels in your eyeballs burst, emergency
c-sections where you almost bleed to death, not all of the placenta being
delivered and massive infections, nope, those stories don't get mentioned when
he's around.
Likewise, there is no 'Labor Olympics' for dads. Dads don't
compete with each other over who had the 'best' labor. They don't tell stories
of how they didn't need any pain meds and had an all-natural, organic homebirth
awash in love and joy and nesting complete with soft focus, glow-y, happy stuff
all over the place. (Or if there are guys that do that, none of them are in
Tim's social circle.)
 |
| Perfect, natural, soft-focus, love-fest home birth. |
Now, it is true, that the birth she knows most about,
Molly's, was an uncomplicated hospital birth, where nothing went wrong, no one
was treated like an animal about to be slaughtered, followed by a fairly
standard healing up time, and Breena has been telling Abby for months now to
ignore those cows who get off on scaring pregnant moms, but, it's hard to shut
those stories out. Especially when more and more of the keep piling on.
It's also true, that while Tim's been reading The Expectant
Dad Guide, What To Expect When You're Expecting, and things like that, Abby's
been reading/watching The Business of Being Born, Gentle Birth, Gentle
Mothering, and lots of other things that flat out say that if you go to a
hospital they'll cut you open at the first hiccough whether you need it or not
because the profits are better.
And lastly, while they are both aware of the fact they
aren't reading the same things, they are also not aware of how radically
different the content of the things they're reading is.
All of this is relevant because, having gotten home from
being told by their OB that Abby has what's called a near previa, and googling
the ever living snot out of it, they are both coming to some very different
conclusions.
For example, Tim's thinking that more or less bubble
wrapping Abby from head to toe and keeping her in bed from now until a
scheduled c-section at 37 weeks is a brilliant idea. In that he does not have
to personally do it, five weeks of bed rest doesn't strike him as a problem.
And sure, Dr. Draz, who he is currently thinking is being
insanely reckless with the health of the two most important people in the
entire history of the Earth, says they don't need to do that, but the stuff
he's reading seems to be indicating placentas are made of tissue paper and can
rip at a second's notice if you even look at them wrong, and there's no such
thing as a safe previa, and really the only way to deal with this is to keep
Abby as still as possible from now until the minute Kelly's lungs are developed
enough for her to be on the outside. And just to be on the safe side, they
should start doses of steroids at 34 weeks to get her lungs developed that much
faster.
Abby, meanwhile, is dealing with having been DQed from the
Labor Olympics. (She has not internalized any sort of idea that this might kill
her, in this respect she's doing better than Tim at rationally assessing the
risks, in other respects, not so much.) She had had an idea of the kind of
labor she wanted, and sure, at home was a long-shot, but she'd been taking such
good care of herself, and being really careful, trying to get to a
low-intervention, no drugs, hands off, doing this naturally, the way her body
was designed to, at her own pace sort of birth, and that just got shot to hell
and gone.
She likes Dr. Draz, but having her hover around the whole
time isn't what she wanted.
And a c-section… from what she's been reading, they're
almost never really necessary and have so many bad side effects, everything
from massive infections and death, to punctured bladders and permanent
incontinence, to babies with weaker lungs and missing out on the all the useful
bacteria of the vaginal canal, and it's just a huge mess. (This would be where
Tim is doing a more rational job of assessing risk, and Abby's freaking out
unnecessarily.)
Of course, a lot of the stories she's been hearing, and
things she's been reading, indicate you sure as hell don't want to try a
vaginal delivery in a hospital, either. They'll pump you full of Pitocin which
means ultra-painful contractions, more or less forcing you to take pain meds,
leaving you way too woozy to properly bond with your new baby, and possibly
drugging the child, harming her ability to bond with you, followed by an episiotomy
(whether you want it or not, because it makes things easier for the docs) and
of course that makes the tearing worse and the healing up more painful.
And don't get her started on MRSA and all the superbugs that
live in hospitals.
So, Tim is terrified. Abby is sad and feeling hopeless, like
all the good options just got yanked away from her. And both of them are
thinking the other one is completely bonkers because they're both dealing with
this with a radically different set of assumptions about what is going to
happen.
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