Naissance

My wife’s water broke after we were already at the hospital, but she had not yet dilated. As soon as her water broke, they moved her into a proper room and put her on antibiotics. The doctor on call put her on pitocin to start labor, but definitely gave her too much as my wife suddenly had immense contractions coming thirty seconds apart.

I felt so impotent. I knew she was in pain, but there was nothing I could do to help. It’s funny that I spent hours putting together the music mix onto my computer and designing visual effects to go with it that I set up in the hospital room. I realized when she grabbed me in agony, that the music couldn’t help her now. She would grab me when the contraction came, not say anything, but held me in a vice grip. When she released, she’d beg me to go get the nurse and before I could get up, she’d grab me again. We were alone and I knew something was wrong, it was awful.

Our doctor finally came in, ordered the pitocin levels cut off and then ordered an epidural. He didn’t give my wife an option, even though he knew she was trying to labor without one. Since she was only one centimeter dilated, but had contractions coming every thirty seconds as is she was going into labor, he insisted she have one to relax her.

After the epidural, we were able to relax and we both took a nap in the labor room. Afterwards I was actually able to go around the corner for a bagel. Obviously, I’m a big fan of the epidural.

About four hours later, she went from one centimeter to eight centimeters dilated and soon thereafter she was in labor. All I can really remember is holding up her legs, patting her forehead and trying to help her with her breathing, which I suspect she wasn’t listening to.

I do recall that we had an amazing thunderstorm that night—which is rare for Santa Monica, even rarer in November. We had thunder and lightening—a full-on storm as she was giving birth to our son. From our hospital room windows we could see palm tree tops swaying wildly in the wind. It seemed our universe was in the same amount of pain that she was in at that moment.

It was the most amazing experience of my life when I saw our beautiful son born. I’ll never forget it.