Chilanga Sprinkles

 

You wake up cold, wet, and with an intense need to pee… some more. You don’t want to move. Movement might alert the boy sleeping next to you, deepening your shame. You’ve only been sharing a bed for three months, and you never imagined that at 19 years of age you would be wetting the bed with your lover in it. You lay a moment longer, hoping for a miraculous solution, one that would get this boy out of bed without noticing the wet sheets. Resigned to be humiliated, you hoist your 42-week pregnant body out of bed, quietly walk to the bathroom, drop the heavy wet garments to the floor with a thud-splash, and sit on the toilet. You sit, berating yourself for ruining a brand-new mattress. Just last week you dragged it up the stairs after the Sears delivery guys tried to charge you extra to take up for you, and now it is soaked with pee. The urine just won’t stop coming, splashing into the toilet. Your shame becomes panic and you cry out, “I can’t stop peeing.” You are on the verge of tears when he jumps out of bed and says the obvious: “Your water broke!” You watch him from the toilet, putting his clothes on over his pajamas, which you imagine are wet. 

Neither of you had given much thought to how you would get to the hospital when the time came. You’d walked the 45 minutes to the resident-run clinic for all your prenatal appointments. You either walked to campus or took the shuttle in from married-student housing to class, and Goyo walked to work. You didn’t even have a license and neither of you thought of a car as a necessity. You had splurged, and spent the $19.00 extra dollars per month for a land-line, and now he was on the phone, unclear if to his mother or yours, asking for a ride to the hospital at 3:00 a.m. 

At the hospital, there was talk of your late gestation. Of broken membranes. Of no contractions. You obediently change into the hospital gown, lay down on the bed, and spread your legs open, so an efficient nurse can dry-shave your bush with a cheap disposable razor. This was not the small village woman’s pilgrimage to the river for birthing that you’d heard your mother describe, and which you aspired to despite all the women in your life having birthed in a controlled medical setting. The nurse gives you an enema and soon you are on the toilet again, with the door open, diarrhea noisily squirting out of your body with your husband as witness. This is not intimacy. You feel violated and exposed. When your bowels will yield no more, you again obediently get on the bed, where monitors are placed on your abdomen, and a tube is inserted in your bladder to drain urine because they are starting pitocin to get your labor started and you will not be allowed out of bed. They explain that with pitocin, your baby must be monitored continuously. Someone recommends an epidural, the first thing that has been recommended since you got there. The first thing you’ve had a choice about. You think of the women in labor who walk many kilometers to the nearest river, where they squat, give birth, wrap their infants in their rebozo, and then walk home. No epidural, you say.

For hours the very competent nurse sits at your bedside reading and occasionally glancing at the monitor next to your bed and reviewing the paper strip that the monitor spits out, at times she has to replace the roll of paper in the machine or readjust the sensors on your belly. You’ve spent the day watching TV. First, Saturday-morning cartoons and Pee Wee’s Playhouse, which you mock yet secretly enjoy. Then old black and white movies. As The Thing ends, you’ve been in pain and stuck in bed for 16 hours. You have not eaten since the evening before. A new, equally efficient and competent nurse has replaced the first and second ones. This one has a glossy fashion magazine and a strawberry milkshake. You listen to the slurping, to the sound of the pages turning under a saliva pre-moistened finger, to your baby’s rhythmic heart on the monitor, to your mother’s knitting needles. In your exhaustion all the sounds are magnified and intolerable. Driven by the pain and hunger, you lash out. This last nurse responds to your anger by convincing you that an epidural will help you rest. You agree, and soon you fall into an unrestful sleep.

When you wake up, the nurse checks your cervix and you are told it is time to push. Your immobile legs are hoisted into stirr-ups and your vulva is painted with betadine to make it worthy of passing a baby through. Your legs become not your own – they are held and moved by others. You are instructed to push, then to push harder. You feel nothing. You assume your muscles are responding to your commands, but the nurse’s instructions tell you otherwise. Eventually the resident checks your cervix and leaves before giving you much information. He returns with an older man. The older man you are told, delivered your husband. He is the father of a girl you went to high school with. This older man checks your cervix, then confers in whispers with the resident. The two men talk of how swollen your cervix is. The older man introduces himself to you and tells you it is necessary to perform a c-section. You ask why. The answer he gives you is “so your baby won’t die.” The nurse brings consent forms. You yell for everyone except the resident to get out. You ask him why the c-section is needed and you get the same answer. Years later you will request your medical records and learn that you pushed for hours before your cervix was fully dilated. But for now, all you know is that the doctors believe your baby will die if you do not have surgery, so you sign the consent forms after being reassured your husband will be allowed in the surgical suite for the delivery. 

They come with a gurney to take you to the operating room. As you are being wheeled down the hall, you begin shaking violently and vomit. You think you must be more frightened than you feel to be shaking so violently and vomiting. They ask you to scoot onto the operating table, but your body won’t obey and they drag you over with a sheet. The table is so narrow that you are sure the tiniest movement will end with your falling to the floor. The nurses and techs busy themselves with securing your arms with straps on either side of shoulders, in a Jesus on cross style, then a drape is hung like a curtain, separating your head from the rest of your body. It all feels like the set up to a magic show. The magician will soon bow and then saw you in half. The business slows down and from beyond the curtain someone is asking you if you feel anything. Instead of answering, you ask your own question, gazing at the anesthesiologist’s face hovering above yours. “Where is my husband?” Your question is ignored, so you try again, with more force, more volume. He ignores you again. Not even looking at you, he lowers a mask over your face. He says something about needing to put you under because you are panicking. Your anger rises. “Where is my husband?” you ask again. Then the older doctor speaks from beyond the drape and says he is almost done and shortly afterward you hear a cry. You can’t see the baby, they have surrounded her with medical personnel on a warmer across the room. She is crying. Someone says the numbers 9 and 9. You see your husband walk in. He comes to your side. Together you catch a glimpse of our daughter’s foot. It is the size of her father’s thumb. 

Your husband is invited to escort the baby to the nursery while your uterus is stitched and deposited back into your pelvis, and your skin is stapled closed. You spend what feels like hours in the recovery area, dozing off between aggressive fundal massages and yet another efficient nurse asking about pain and if you can feel your legs. The resident comes by to check on you. He is chewing spearmint gum and it makes your mouth water and your stomach gurgle with hunger. You chastise him for chewing gum in front of patients who have not eaten in over 24 hours. You tell him you are hungry and thirsty and could really use a Coca-Cola. Embarrassed, he excuses himself only to return a few minutes later, no gum in his mouth, and a red, cold can of Coke, which you greedily sip on while the efficient nurse shakes her head and waits for the ensuing vomit, which she sternly warned the resident about. Even after you vomit, you are thankful for the gesture.

In your assigned room, you finally meet your daughter. You smell her, you snuggle her, you feed her. For three days, visitors come and you grudgingly share her, then hold her, feed her, smell her again. You love the smell of her breath, her neck, her face. You even like the cheesy smell of her yellow breast-milk poo. They take her away overnight, so you can rest, but then they come in to check your blood pressure, they wake you to ask if you are in pain, and then they wake you to ask you if you want to feed your baby or would you rather they give her a bottle in the nursery. On the third day, you manage a bowel movement, despite the pain, and the fear that your abdomen will come undone from the effort. And the tiny log in the toilet bowl, you find out, is your ticket home. You dress your baby in one of the delicate sweaters your mom knitted for her, buckle her in her car seat, and the three of you leave the hospital.