My due date was Friday, October 13th 2006. This was enough to make me wanna fly out the window and I’m not even superstitious. The last week of my pregnancy I was literally the size of a hippo and having survived the long hot summer, I was gonna give birth in the middle of the street if I had to. My doctor suggested that if I wanted to “speed things up” there are 2 things I could try: Sex and spicy food. The first was literally and physically impossible, since my husband needed to be a magician to try and move me around or climb on top of me. So we opted for the spicy food and for the whole bloody week I ate curry for dinner.
Funny enough, my water broke around 2 pm on my due date in a Mexican restaurant while my husband, my mom, who was visiting from Italy, and I, were having lunch. I’m not kidding! It was like a scene out of a movie. After paying the bill, we were ready to go and the moment I lifted my big fat pregnant ass off the chair, I felt the Hudson River in between my legs. I quietly whispered into my husband’s ear to keep going since I didn’t want to attract any more attention then I already did. He didn’t quite understand what was going on and kept asking: “What? What?” when I finally screamed:” This is what!” pointing down to my soaked cargo pants.
For some reason I was surprisingly calm. We were just a couple of blocks away from home but we hailed a taxi because I really didn’t feel like walking with my legs wide open and scare everybody on the street. They probably thought I was this poor crazy pregnant lady who escaped a mental institute and was riding her way to the hospital on an imaginary horse. I also would like to take a moment to thank and apologize to the yellow taxi driver for leaving some amniotic fluid on the back of the seat and on the carpet of his taxi…sorry sir, I swear I didn’t do it on purpose!
When we got home, my husband and my mom were running around in circle like show dogs while I was calmly on the phone with my colleagues.
A couple of hours later we left for the hospital and the moment I entered the Triage Room it finally hit me that somehow I was going to have a BABY! This is the first room you stop when you get to the hospital where they kinda of wanna see if you’re really in labor…(yeah like you gonna fake something like that!). It’s very common during pregnancy to get Braxton Hicks contractions (fake ones!) and sometimes are really painful to make you believe that you are in labor. After I filled in all the check-in papers and I was quietly sitting around, I heard the loudest screams and moans of a laboring woman. I looked at my husband and my mom and then stood up getting ready to leave! It sounded like she was being tortured by some crazy doctor who was trying to cut off her arms and legs…without anesthesia. Well that, ladies and gentlemen was LABOR and I just wanted to poop in my pants (actually more of the pooping part later!).
A few minutes later a nurse came to get me and escorted me to a big room with about 10 different beds. There they asked me to pee in a cup and bombarded me with a thousand questions like….Why was I there? - Huh?! Are you fucking kidding me? - And what made me think that I was in labor? Was I abused or subjected to domestic violence?
I didn’t have strong contractions yet, so for them I could have been another big fat liar or just another silly pregnant woman.
Once they realized that I was indeed in labor, they stuck an IV in my arm and wheeled me into a private room.
Around 6pm the real shit (I mean…the painful contractions) begun…
To be continued…
DCP: When you get ready to go to the hospital, make sure you wear something cool (of course) and comfortable. You really don’t know how many hours you can be stuck there (that’s the comfortable part) and also you will meet a lot of different people in the waiting room, so you definitely want to look presentable. I wore my cute black Adidas pants with hot pink stripes, a black top and my beloved Puma sneakers in case they sent me out for a walk. Remember, no matter what life throws at you, you always want to be properly dressed!
