Sisters Sarita was planning a home birth with her second child…but then major repairs needed to be done on the house, and as her due date approached, it was clear to everyone that a home birth was no longer an option. Painters were using the stacks of clean cloth diapers as paint rags. To quote Gertrude Stein, Theres no there, there. So when labor was underway, off to Kaiser Oakland we headed. They weren’t as ‘visitor friendly’ then as they are now, and the labor rooms were miniscule w some decidedly ODD features, such as a metal toilet seat that folded up beneath the sink, so there was actually no bathroom, and certainly not a shower. The room was wide enough for a single hospital bed with maybe 4 feet of space beside it. Not even a chair. Therefore, because of the limited size and also just because hospitals love to make arbitrary rules, they were pretty rigid about enforcing their Only One Visitor At A Time rule. Sarita’s husband and I took turns for a while, but then I just…stayed, and one or the other of us would sort of hide in the back corner or briefly step outside the room when the nurse or doctor appeared. Sarita was in heavy labor, and then she got kind of stuck. She was 8-9 cm, but the baby was high and she hadn’t progressed in more than an hour. The residents and doctors began to mutter about a Cesarean. “Okay, girlfriend, you’ve got to get out of that bed and on your feet. Squat, swing from the doorknobs, do hip hop dancing, whatever. Just do NOT stay on your back in that bed one minute longer.” Groaning in protest, she hauled herself out of the bed and walked back and forth the perhaps ten-foot length of the room (really, folks, these rooms were TINY), and with each contraction she grabbed onto either her husband or me, swung her butt from side to side, and moaned loudly. Something was definitely happening. Then she squatted and gave a pretty convincing push, ending with a long howl that brought the nurse in at a trot. She looked at the husband. She looked at Sarita, hair stuck to her sweaty face, crouching on the floor...and then there I was, crouching beside her with my hand between Sarita’s legs. I could feel the baby’s head begin to push against my palm. “What?? What are you doing??? Who ARE you? Are you two sisters?????” Sarita and I looked at each other. Fair haired, fair skinned, close to the same age, blue eyes…and in unison, we put our arms around each other’s shoulders and shouted, “YES.” “Well, Sister or Girlfriend, or Whatever You Are, get her the hell off the floor and into that bed while I find the doctor,” and she fled. I delivered the baby on the floor, but before the nurse returned with a doctor, we managed to get Sarita back into the bed, clutching the wet and screaming baby to her chest. I threw a spare flannel sheet on the floor to cover the water and blood. “Well,” said the doctor, “at least she didn’t have the baby on the floor,” and he delivered the afterbirth. As the doctor was messing with some charting, Sarita’s husband turned to me and half-whispered, “Loose lips sink ships.” “What?” said the doctor, turning around. “Nothing. Just a private joke.”
Posted on: Sun, 14 Sep 2014 00:54:04 +0000
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