Sleep Deparvayshun…

…seems to affect your spelling abilities. The funny part is my mother had to tell me I’d misspelled Miracle – I didn’t even notice it. (Previous post title – since corrected.)

A friend and co-worker had been telling me for some time that the secret to inducing labor was Chinese food. I told Mrs. Clancy about this advice and it’s been a running joke between us. Finally, last Friday we got up the courage to order some Chinese take-out. She ordered Hunan Chicken, extra spicy. Ten minutes after finishing her dinner, Mrs. Clancy’s water broke. Our little joke suddenly became very real. Mrs. Clancy has been preparing for this moment for months. Despite that, we still had things to get in order and it took us longer than expected to get out of the house. But we finally did get out and only had to turn around once because *I* forgot my Palm and without that wouldn’t have all the phone numbers I would be needing soon. We got to the hospital around 8:30 PM. They shuffled us off to Triage and when the nurse came to collect us, Mrs. Clancy stood up and retrieved the towel she had been sitting on. The nurse noticed the towel and asked, “Did you bring that with you?” “Yes”, we responded and she went on to explain that the towel is what they refer to as a “positive towel sign” and that it was usually an immediate ticket upstairs (to labor & delivery). Despite our “positive towel sign”, we still lingered in triage for a while before they shipped us up to our delivery room. Contractions started around 10:00 PM and quickly grew in strength. Mrs. Clancy had decided that she wanted to attempt this venture naturally and declined the first and all subsequent offers of an epidural. Our baby Yoda was being obstinate (just like mommy and daddy) and was constantly moving away from the fetal heart rate monitor. We were also having problems with the contraction monitor moving as well, so it wasn’t too long before the doc and nursing staff had her wired. By 3:00 AM, the contractions had intensified and labor wasn’t progressing quite as fast as we’d hoped. Mrs. Clancy finally relented and called for the epidural. As she would later confess, she was more worried about that needle than the she was the labor pains. She held onto my hands as the Doc fixed her up and I regained feelings in my fingers about the same time the epidural kicked in. After that, we turned down the lights and tried to get some rest. That didn’t last long. At 8:30 a new doctor came on shift and she said that we probably should wait a few more hours, but she was fairly confident that in a few hours we’d probably still be in the same position as we were now – having to decided whether or not to call the “c.” After a few moments of deliberation, Mrs. Clancy decided that we should just go for it. We hadn’t had any progress for 4-5 hours and it didn’t seem likely that we would. The time had arrived.

For reasons I’ll never be able to explain, I stood by my dearest wife’s side, held her hand, and watched most of the procedure. Wow. All I can say is that I’m glad that they had a sheet up so she couldn’t see it. After what felt like forever, the doctor withdrew a bloody baby. Someone said “it’s a boy” – I was looking, and from my angle I thought I was seeing boy parts (the sex organs are extremely engorged at birth). Then someone said “It’s a girl” and I looked again and saw that it was in fact a girl. I looked down at my wife and repeated – “it’s a girl” and she just burst into tears of joy. As long as I live, I will never forget that moment.

After being cleaned, tested, poked and prodded, a nurse finally handed the most beautiful little girl over to me. I held her for at least 20 minutes before the docs finally got Mrs. Clancy stitched & stapled back together again and I was able to pass her to her mom.

The last 6 days have been a blur - and I’ve been able to string more than 2 hours of sleep together! As for Mrs. Clancy… well, that’s another story entirely.

As for the secret of Chinese food – I’ve thought about it and concluded that its not really a secret – I mean, how can 2 billion Chinese be wrong!