History of the J Man

So as you’ll recall, we’ve just arrived at the hospital and the ABC is unavailable… 

Julie: When we got to the room and they got my monitor hooked up, we took a few showers to try and get comfortable and relax.  We did a few laps around the ward too, but the contractions weren’t getting any closer or more steady.  My water hadn’t broken.  So I opted to let them break my water to see if that would get things going.  But once they did, that there was meconium in the discharge so then they had to hook me up to the amnio infusion to try to flush the meconium from the womb so the baby wouldn’t ingest it.  Picture sitting on a hose.  So that was going on, the baby monitor was hooked on and I couldn’t really move at all anymore.  At that point they wanted to start a little pitocin so, although I wanted to do this naturally and avoid drugs, nothing was happening and I couldn’t walk around so I agreed.   

That’s when the contractions started and I was so tired at that point that I sort of zoned out between each contraction.  At the rate I was going, I wasn’t going to have any energy to do anything else, much less push.  So at 11 a.m. on Saturday, after about 14 hours of managing the pain myself, I asked for the epidural.  I was hooked up to a million tubes and hoses already and I was drained so I said, “Why not?”  I think I finally got it around noon.  At that point, Chris and I both got to sleep for 3-4 hours and I dilated another 4 cm during that nap.  I think the epidural really helped to relax me and let my body open up.  The baby was positioned a little funny though, so I still had a lot of back pain laying there, even with the epidural.  The anesthesiologist and midwife kept arguing whether giving me more pain meds would help my back or not.  He said it wouldn’t, she said it would.  I think she was right, but it didn’t get rid of it totally.  And I hated lying there so still on my back but, the IV and hose were still in me and I couldn’t move my legs, so I was stuck.

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I want to get this down before I’m 50 years old have no memories left except those of the the Cubs winning the Series back in ‘08.

The Day That Would Become the J Man’s Birthday actually started on The Day Before the Day That Would Become the J Man’s Birthday. I know, because both Julie and I had both come home from a full day’s work that fateful Friday, June 8, 2007. We were sitting around thinking about ordering in, when Julie began to feel some twinges in her general stomach area. This was around 6:30 p.m.

At first, she wondered if it was just indigestion, but it quickly became apparent that the gig was up — the kid was knocking.

For those of you who don’t have kids, you may think that having a baby is similar to what you see in the movies, with people rushing around and a frenzied ambulance ride, but our birth class’s recommendation for when labor pains started was to take a nap. So we tried a few of the methods we had learned in said birth class and things were going OK, but since we had signed up for a doula, we decided to give her a ring. Carrie (the doula) lived (and may still live) in Bolingbrook, Illinois, which you can see is not close. I figured a) it could take a couple of hours for her to arrive and b) I wasn’t sure if I knew precisely what I was doing. Needless to say, we made the call. Continue Reading »