Asher's Birth Story
Asher's Birth Story
(On the six month anniversary of his birth)
By his mother
(Super lengthy for posterity and also I am chronically verbose: sorry.)
My pregnancy with Asher, like conception, was smooth and easy. I had no nausea at all, no fatigue, no food nor smell aversions, and cravings for mostly healthy food (salads, cherry tomatoes, cucumbers, and fruits of all kinds -- I ate two oranges a day in the second trimester and a pear a day in the third).
I loved my bump and how it looked (for the most part -- except for certain teary moments in the third trimester when I cried to Alman about being bloated and unattractive, and how none of my clothes fit me anymore. I blame the hormones).
I did have to give up doing yoga in my fourth month of pregnancy, because I had started feeling breathless (baby was pushing up on my diaphragm) and I didn't want to exert myself. And I had swelling in my feet towards the end of my third trimester (on one occasion, after a long day at work, I looked down at my feet and found my ankles had totally disappeared, and I just had cankles. No legs, no ankles: just ALL CANKLES). One memorable night, I was woken up by leg cramps in BOTH my legs at the SAME time, which was a special kind of torture I wouldn't wish on my worst enemies. (Leg cramps are a surprising but common side effect of pregnancy.)
But other than those moments, which were sparse and far between, I had a unicorn pregnancy, for which I am very grateful. I even travelled extensively throughout my pregnancy. Coachella, New York and Boston in the second trimester? No problem. Brunei and Bali in the third? Piece of cake. Generally, I lived life as I normally do but with pregnancy perks: people being kinder and more considerate as I got bigger and heavier.
Things were fairly uneventful until I reached my 38th week. I noticed I some clear liquid discharge in my underwear on a Thursday night, right after we watched Blade Runner 2049 (which now has the honour of being the very last movie I watched pre-Asher), and though it didn't seem like a continuous leakage, I was worried it was my water leaking. I dropped by the Accident & Emergency department at my hospital on a Friday morning before work to get it checked out, fully expecting to hear a yes or no from the nurses: either a 'yes, your water has broken and you have to stay here at the hospital', or a 'no, it's not your water, stop jumping the gun and come back when something is happening'.
Instead, the doctor on call told me that while the leakage wasn't amniotic fluid (it was likely just vaginal discharge - sorry, TMI), I was having regular contractions and he expected me to go into labour in the next day or so. I was surprised: I'd been having strong Braxton Hicks contractions (also known as false labour contractions) since week 16, so I thought the contractions I was feeling were more of the same. I ended up staying in the hospital over the weekend on the doctor's advice, but my contractions weren't getting more painful or closer together, so I asked to be discharged. If I was going to wait around for labour to start, I'd rather do it in the comfort of my own home, while hanging out with Pablo. I was also bored stiff in the hospital.
I had my weekly checkup with my regular doctor the following Tuesday, and found out I was 3cm dilated. Dr Shilpa (who I chose as my doctor because she was fairly young, seemed pretty chill about pregnancy, and always made me feel as though she had all the time in the world to listen to me chat about how I was feeling) did a membrane sweep (painful AF) to see if that would move anything along. (A membrane sweep, for the blissfully uninitiated, is when your doctor sticks their finger into your cervix and does a sweep around the amniotic sac. If it sounds unpleasant... it's because it is.) My contractions continued all this while, but they went from regular to irregular to regular, and they didn't hurt. They'd get more uncomfortable and regular at night, but I figured that if I could sleep through them, they weren't that serious.
On Wednesday night/Thursday early morning at 1am, I was awakened from my sleep by my water breaking -- and there was definitely no doubt about it this time. I simultaneously heard and felt a pop, and suddenly felt a huge gush of warm water on my legs. (Alman says that I screamed when this happened, but I think I just cried out in shock.) My side of the bed was soaked, and I ran to stand in the shower, where I continued to leak water. Alman woke up, we woke up Umi and Zahirah, and we all headed over to the hospital with a towel between my legs and with my labour suitcase all packed. We even called Naz on the way to the hospital! #stillchill The contractions were still not painful at this point, but getting more and more uncomfortable.
At the hospital I was brought up to the Labour & Delivery ward, where they found I was 4cm dilated. The contractions were starting to hurt at this point, and I asked for an epidural at 2am. While I waited for the anesthesiologist to administer the epidural (which felt like FOREVER), I had to breathe through my contractions, which suddenly ramped up. My natural instinct was to hold my breath and wait for the pain of each contraction to subside (which isn't what you're supposed to do) but Alman was amazing: he asked me to follow his breathing pattern, and his face and breath became my focus point throughout the contractions. I feel like I would have forgotten to breathe if he wasn't there. Once the epidural was in (and gave me sweet relief: yay for drugs), the midwife told both me and Alman to rest and sleep, while we waited for me to dilate more, and before the pushing could begin.
At 6am though, I started to feel the pain of the contractions again -- only much, much more painful than before the epidural. The nurses kept upping my epidural dosage, but soon I was in tears from the pain - and I know I have a high pain threshold. (Later on I found out that I was given Pitocin, a drug, to speed up the labour process, and Pitocin is associated with intense, painful contractions.) Even now I find it difficult to describe what my contractions felt like, but if I were to try: it felt like an intense cramping in my stomach, and like my entire vaginal area was being squeezed and put through a ringer. I had a catheter in (so you don't pee on yourself during labour) and with each contraction, could actually feel the catheter in my urethra and feel all my inner passages ache.
At around 7am the nurses started coming in more frequently because both my blood pressure and the baby's heartbeat were both dropping. I was given laughing gas at around 8am because the epidural was having no longer having any effect, and I was officially crying from the pain. It did NOT help: my verdict is that laughing gas = most unpleasant drug ever. I felt loopy and completely out of it, and not in a pleasant yay I'm high way, but in a oh god what is going on and why is the world fuzzy and why can't I concentrate on anything way.
Right after the laughing gas kicked in, I realized that there were several nurses around my bed with tense expressions on their faces. They couldn't locate the baby's heartbeat anymore. I remember trying to concentrate with all my might, through the haze of the laughing gas, on the conversations they were having around my bed.
I kept asking Alman (who seemed at this point to be more preoccupied with how poorly I was handling the pain) if the baby was ok but I couldn't even focus on his response (I actually have no recollection of what he said to me). I knew things were not going well when I saw Dr Shilpa come running into the room, in her skirt and high heels (whenever you see a woman run in heels, assume shit's getting real). Baby's heartbeat had stopped. I was 7cm dilated but my cervix hadn't thinned enough. I was asked to lie on my side, where thankfully a faint heartbeat was picked up, and was told to stay on my side. The baby couldn't handle any more contractions, which were cutting off his oxygen supply, I had lost too much water when the amniotic sac had burst, and the baby's heartbeat was still weak and they didn't know how long he would last.
Dr Shilpa asked/told me they needed to get the baby out as soon as possible, which meant emergency cesarean. I remember wanting to offer up all my limbs in any sort of surgery necessary if that meant we could get the baby out safely.
Things were a blur after that. I signed the consent form for the c-section while I was being rushed down to the surgery rooms. Alman wasn't allowed into the OT because Dr Shilpa wanted to focus on the baby and me, and I remember feeling frightened and utterly helpless as I was wheeled away from Alman into the OT, watching him get smaller and smaller in the corridor. I asked Alman if things would be ok, wanting some kind of reassurance and trying to read his expression, even though I knew that there was nothing he nor I could do at this point, and that no one could give any kind of reassurance. (It was a huge comfort to me that he was not outwardly freaking the fuck out though, because if he had been, I would have totally started to panic as well.) The possibility occurred to me at that moment, for the first time since I found out I was pregnant, that we could actually lose this being I had carried in me for nine months; that I might actually be one of those unlucky mothers who goes to the hospital pregnant, but leaves the hospital without a baby. It was a terrible, terrifying feeling.
Asher was pulled out of me at 8.46am, after what felt like only 15 minutes after my doctor decided we needed an emergency c-section. I have never been more relieved to hear any sound as when I first heard his very loud cries. My doctor leaned over the sheet and told me that he was ok, and I felt as though I could finally breathe again. The paediatrician put this tiny blackhaired baby next to my cheek for a few seconds before whisking him away to run tests and clean him up. I don't remember much else from that moment. I remember how the mood in the OT was tense and brisk, with Dr Shilpa barking orders and telling her nurses we were going to do this quickly, before we heard Asher's cries. I remember feeling the weight of the baby leave my body, as he was pulled out. I remember feeling my body pulled and tugged as Dr Shilpa cleaned out my uterus and stitched up my wound. I remember the radio was playing in the background of the OT - a love song or pop ballad. I remember the room was bright and the sun was coming in through the windows, and feeling happy that Asher was born on such a beautiful morning. I remember the anaesthesiologist wishing me congratulations, and wondering for a split second why he was congratulating me. It definitely felt like I had gone through surgery, but I had almost forgotten that the surgery was to birth my child, which was something to celebrate.
After the surgery I was wheeled into the recovery room, where they put heated blankets on me. It felt like I was there forever (it might have been an hour) because I was too wired to sleep and too anxious to see Alman and Asher.
In retrospect, I think it took me weeks to get over the shock and trauma of how scary the delivery was: how my carefree, uncomplicated pregnancy became an emergency c-section. I feel almost selfish and ungrateful admitting that, because all was well in the end -- but I didn't know that all would be well when I was going through it. People don't really talk about their traumatic deliveries, but I don't think I can ever forget that terrible, terrifying feeling of possibly losing my child. That feeling didn't disappear and become forgotten as soon as I held Asher, and I think it's important that I acknowledge it. It was scary. It was a traumatic experience. It wasn't what I expected or prepared for -- I remember even skipping over all the c-section chapters in the many many pregnancy books that I read, because I (very naively) thought it wouldn't apply to me. I didn't get to have the "natural' (I try not to use this word now to describe vaginal deliveries, because it implies anything else is unnatural) delivery I was expecting. I felt like a failure, and that my body had failed me, because it didn't do what it was supposed to do. I know this all sounds silly when you consider that I was lucky enough to have safely delivered a healthy baby, but in the flood of post-partum hormones and adrenaline and post-surgery pain, it didn't feel trivial.
But of course, it was all more than worth it. Asher was a tiny, fragile little thing: tiny legs, tiny fingernails and the tiniest little rosebud mouth. It only stopped feeling surreal after a few weeks, but impossibly, it started feeling normal and natural almost immediately: like yes, of COURSE THIS baby is our son. Of course this is what Asher looks like: he couldn't have looked any other way. Of course this is when Asher was born: he couldn't have come at any other time in our lives. Of course this is what Asher is like: he couldn't have been any other way. It was reassuring how natural it felt, because all throughout my pregnancy, the concept of a baby (our baby?!) felt abstract and unreal. But when I met him -- it clicked. Everything about Asher felt completely right to me. The way he fit into my arms, like he was made to be there, was how he fit into my life. We had to adjust, certain things a little and certain things a lot, but it felt (and feels!) like he was meant to be with us even from the very start.
Happy six months, little AshBash!
(On the six month anniversary of his birth)
By his mother
(Super lengthy for posterity and also I am chronically verbose: sorry.)
My pregnancy with Asher, like conception, was smooth and easy. I had no nausea at all, no fatigue, no food nor smell aversions, and cravings for mostly healthy food (salads, cherry tomatoes, cucumbers, and fruits of all kinds -- I ate two oranges a day in the second trimester and a pear a day in the third).
I loved my bump and how it looked (for the most part -- except for certain teary moments in the third trimester when I cried to Alman about being bloated and unattractive, and how none of my clothes fit me anymore. I blame the hormones).
I did have to give up doing yoga in my fourth month of pregnancy, because I had started feeling breathless (baby was pushing up on my diaphragm) and I didn't want to exert myself. And I had swelling in my feet towards the end of my third trimester (on one occasion, after a long day at work, I looked down at my feet and found my ankles had totally disappeared, and I just had cankles. No legs, no ankles: just ALL CANKLES). One memorable night, I was woken up by leg cramps in BOTH my legs at the SAME time, which was a special kind of torture I wouldn't wish on my worst enemies. (Leg cramps are a surprising but common side effect of pregnancy.)
But other than those moments, which were sparse and far between, I had a unicorn pregnancy, for which I am very grateful. I even travelled extensively throughout my pregnancy. Coachella, New York and Boston in the second trimester? No problem. Brunei and Bali in the third? Piece of cake. Generally, I lived life as I normally do but with pregnancy perks: people being kinder and more considerate as I got bigger and heavier.
Things were fairly uneventful until I reached my 38th week. I noticed I some clear liquid discharge in my underwear on a Thursday night, right after we watched Blade Runner 2049 (which now has the honour of being the very last movie I watched pre-Asher), and though it didn't seem like a continuous leakage, I was worried it was my water leaking. I dropped by the Accident & Emergency department at my hospital on a Friday morning before work to get it checked out, fully expecting to hear a yes or no from the nurses: either a 'yes, your water has broken and you have to stay here at the hospital', or a 'no, it's not your water, stop jumping the gun and come back when something is happening'.
Instead, the doctor on call told me that while the leakage wasn't amniotic fluid (it was likely just vaginal discharge - sorry, TMI), I was having regular contractions and he expected me to go into labour in the next day or so. I was surprised: I'd been having strong Braxton Hicks contractions (also known as false labour contractions) since week 16, so I thought the contractions I was feeling were more of the same. I ended up staying in the hospital over the weekend on the doctor's advice, but my contractions weren't getting more painful or closer together, so I asked to be discharged. If I was going to wait around for labour to start, I'd rather do it in the comfort of my own home, while hanging out with Pablo. I was also bored stiff in the hospital.
I had my weekly checkup with my regular doctor the following Tuesday, and found out I was 3cm dilated. Dr Shilpa (who I chose as my doctor because she was fairly young, seemed pretty chill about pregnancy, and always made me feel as though she had all the time in the world to listen to me chat about how I was feeling) did a membrane sweep (painful AF) to see if that would move anything along. (A membrane sweep, for the blissfully uninitiated, is when your doctor sticks their finger into your cervix and does a sweep around the amniotic sac. If it sounds unpleasant... it's because it is.) My contractions continued all this while, but they went from regular to irregular to regular, and they didn't hurt. They'd get more uncomfortable and regular at night, but I figured that if I could sleep through them, they weren't that serious.
On Wednesday night/Thursday early morning at 1am, I was awakened from my sleep by my water breaking -- and there was definitely no doubt about it this time. I simultaneously heard and felt a pop, and suddenly felt a huge gush of warm water on my legs. (Alman says that I screamed when this happened, but I think I just cried out in shock.) My side of the bed was soaked, and I ran to stand in the shower, where I continued to leak water. Alman woke up, we woke up Umi and Zahirah, and we all headed over to the hospital with a towel between my legs and with my labour suitcase all packed. We even called Naz on the way to the hospital! #stillchill The contractions were still not painful at this point, but getting more and more uncomfortable.
At the hospital I was brought up to the Labour & Delivery ward, where they found I was 4cm dilated. The contractions were starting to hurt at this point, and I asked for an epidural at 2am. While I waited for the anesthesiologist to administer the epidural (which felt like FOREVER), I had to breathe through my contractions, which suddenly ramped up. My natural instinct was to hold my breath and wait for the pain of each contraction to subside (which isn't what you're supposed to do) but Alman was amazing: he asked me to follow his breathing pattern, and his face and breath became my focus point throughout the contractions. I feel like I would have forgotten to breathe if he wasn't there. Once the epidural was in (and gave me sweet relief: yay for drugs), the midwife told both me and Alman to rest and sleep, while we waited for me to dilate more, and before the pushing could begin.
At 6am though, I started to feel the pain of the contractions again -- only much, much more painful than before the epidural. The nurses kept upping my epidural dosage, but soon I was in tears from the pain - and I know I have a high pain threshold. (Later on I found out that I was given Pitocin, a drug, to speed up the labour process, and Pitocin is associated with intense, painful contractions.) Even now I find it difficult to describe what my contractions felt like, but if I were to try: it felt like an intense cramping in my stomach, and like my entire vaginal area was being squeezed and put through a ringer. I had a catheter in (so you don't pee on yourself during labour) and with each contraction, could actually feel the catheter in my urethra and feel all my inner passages ache.
At around 7am the nurses started coming in more frequently because both my blood pressure and the baby's heartbeat were both dropping. I was given laughing gas at around 8am because the epidural was having no longer having any effect, and I was officially crying from the pain. It did NOT help: my verdict is that laughing gas = most unpleasant drug ever. I felt loopy and completely out of it, and not in a pleasant yay I'm high way, but in a oh god what is going on and why is the world fuzzy and why can't I concentrate on anything way.
Right after the laughing gas kicked in, I realized that there were several nurses around my bed with tense expressions on their faces. They couldn't locate the baby's heartbeat anymore. I remember trying to concentrate with all my might, through the haze of the laughing gas, on the conversations they were having around my bed.
I kept asking Alman (who seemed at this point to be more preoccupied with how poorly I was handling the pain) if the baby was ok but I couldn't even focus on his response (I actually have no recollection of what he said to me). I knew things were not going well when I saw Dr Shilpa come running into the room, in her skirt and high heels (whenever you see a woman run in heels, assume shit's getting real). Baby's heartbeat had stopped. I was 7cm dilated but my cervix hadn't thinned enough. I was asked to lie on my side, where thankfully a faint heartbeat was picked up, and was told to stay on my side. The baby couldn't handle any more contractions, which were cutting off his oxygen supply, I had lost too much water when the amniotic sac had burst, and the baby's heartbeat was still weak and they didn't know how long he would last.
Dr Shilpa asked/told me they needed to get the baby out as soon as possible, which meant emergency cesarean. I remember wanting to offer up all my limbs in any sort of surgery necessary if that meant we could get the baby out safely.
Things were a blur after that. I signed the consent form for the c-section while I was being rushed down to the surgery rooms. Alman wasn't allowed into the OT because Dr Shilpa wanted to focus on the baby and me, and I remember feeling frightened and utterly helpless as I was wheeled away from Alman into the OT, watching him get smaller and smaller in the corridor. I asked Alman if things would be ok, wanting some kind of reassurance and trying to read his expression, even though I knew that there was nothing he nor I could do at this point, and that no one could give any kind of reassurance. (It was a huge comfort to me that he was not outwardly freaking the fuck out though, because if he had been, I would have totally started to panic as well.) The possibility occurred to me at that moment, for the first time since I found out I was pregnant, that we could actually lose this being I had carried in me for nine months; that I might actually be one of those unlucky mothers who goes to the hospital pregnant, but leaves the hospital without a baby. It was a terrible, terrifying feeling.
Asher was pulled out of me at 8.46am, after what felt like only 15 minutes after my doctor decided we needed an emergency c-section. I have never been more relieved to hear any sound as when I first heard his very loud cries. My doctor leaned over the sheet and told me that he was ok, and I felt as though I could finally breathe again. The paediatrician put this tiny blackhaired baby next to my cheek for a few seconds before whisking him away to run tests and clean him up. I don't remember much else from that moment. I remember how the mood in the OT was tense and brisk, with Dr Shilpa barking orders and telling her nurses we were going to do this quickly, before we heard Asher's cries. I remember feeling the weight of the baby leave my body, as he was pulled out. I remember feeling my body pulled and tugged as Dr Shilpa cleaned out my uterus and stitched up my wound. I remember the radio was playing in the background of the OT - a love song or pop ballad. I remember the room was bright and the sun was coming in through the windows, and feeling happy that Asher was born on such a beautiful morning. I remember the anaesthesiologist wishing me congratulations, and wondering for a split second why he was congratulating me. It definitely felt like I had gone through surgery, but I had almost forgotten that the surgery was to birth my child, which was something to celebrate.
After the surgery I was wheeled into the recovery room, where they put heated blankets on me. It felt like I was there forever (it might have been an hour) because I was too wired to sleep and too anxious to see Alman and Asher.
In retrospect, I think it took me weeks to get over the shock and trauma of how scary the delivery was: how my carefree, uncomplicated pregnancy became an emergency c-section. I feel almost selfish and ungrateful admitting that, because all was well in the end -- but I didn't know that all would be well when I was going through it. People don't really talk about their traumatic deliveries, but I don't think I can ever forget that terrible, terrifying feeling of possibly losing my child. That feeling didn't disappear and become forgotten as soon as I held Asher, and I think it's important that I acknowledge it. It was scary. It was a traumatic experience. It wasn't what I expected or prepared for -- I remember even skipping over all the c-section chapters in the many many pregnancy books that I read, because I (very naively) thought it wouldn't apply to me. I didn't get to have the "natural' (I try not to use this word now to describe vaginal deliveries, because it implies anything else is unnatural) delivery I was expecting. I felt like a failure, and that my body had failed me, because it didn't do what it was supposed to do. I know this all sounds silly when you consider that I was lucky enough to have safely delivered a healthy baby, but in the flood of post-partum hormones and adrenaline and post-surgery pain, it didn't feel trivial.
But of course, it was all more than worth it. Asher was a tiny, fragile little thing: tiny legs, tiny fingernails and the tiniest little rosebud mouth. It only stopped feeling surreal after a few weeks, but impossibly, it started feeling normal and natural almost immediately: like yes, of COURSE THIS baby is our son. Of course this is what Asher looks like: he couldn't have looked any other way. Of course this is when Asher was born: he couldn't have come at any other time in our lives. Of course this is what Asher is like: he couldn't have been any other way. It was reassuring how natural it felt, because all throughout my pregnancy, the concept of a baby (our baby?!) felt abstract and unreal. But when I met him -- it clicked. Everything about Asher felt completely right to me. The way he fit into my arms, like he was made to be there, was how he fit into my life. We had to adjust, certain things a little and certain things a lot, but it felt (and feels!) like he was meant to be with us even from the very start.
Happy six months, little AshBash!
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