‘Not old, just old to have your first one,’ soothed the midwife. ‘Once you’re thirty-five or older, they call you elderly.’
‘I’m forty today,’ Sam said, tearfully. ‘That’s not elderly. Life begins at forty: everyone says it.’
‘Happy birthday!’ said the midwife, who was thirty-nine, and hoped so too.
Four hours later, two more centimetres dilated and a lot of screaming at Ted, interspersed with sobbing and saying sorry because she loved him, Sam thought she might just be going mad with pain. Nobody told her it would be like this or that it would take this long.
When people said ‘I was in labour for sixteen hours’, she’d thought it was exaggeration, not reality. Like saying ‘I didn’t sleep a wink last night’, or ‘I lost all that weight without doing anything’.
A whopping big baby-birthing fib.
But in this case, it seemed as if it was true.
Doing his best to be helpful, Ted extracted Sam’s birth plan from the hospital bag.
The birth plan was full of ideas for the perfect birth and involved soft music – they’d done a track list and it was on both of their phones – no drugs in case they affected the baby and, if possible, Ted to cut the cord.
The birth plan was a paean to glorious natural childbirth.
The woman in the prenatal class had praised their approach, telling them how it was better for Baby to be shoved, drug-free, into the world.
So Ted innocently handed the sheaf of paper to Sam, who sent it flying as another contraction hit her.
‘Jesus, the pain!’ she roared.
‘Breathe,’ said Ted, watching as the birth plan scattered all over the floor.
‘I can’t,’ gasped Sam as she felt as if her insides were being torn apart. ‘I must have been mad with all that breathing crap. Screw breathing. Where’s the anaesthetist?’
‘The one on call is in theatre with an emergency caesarean,’ said the midwife.
Sam stopped grabbing the bed bars long enough to grab Ted.
‘Find him,’ she hissed, in a voice uncannily like that of the little girl fromThe Exorcist, ‘and bring him to me.’
‘I can’t,’ said Ted, shocked at seeing his wife behaving like someone possessed.
‘Dr Lennox will be along soon.’
‘I need him now.’
‘Dr Lennox is a she.’
‘Does she have kids?’ growled Sam.
‘Yes.’
‘Then beg her, she knows what this is like.’
‘She had twins first time.’
‘I don’t care if she gave birth to two fully grown hippos without medical intervention, I need her and her bag of drugs. Please.’
‘But your birth plan,’ went on Ted, thinking that perhaps it was his job to make Sam stick with the plan she’d wanted for so long. ‘You know we don’t want drugs for this delivery and I have your music ready to go—’
He ignored the warning looks on the midwife’s and nurses’ faces who had seen all of this played out many times before.
‘Babies don’t read the birth plan,’ began the younger nurse, who was used to shattered husbands, men who came in all gung-ho and went home, bruised and traumatised wrecks. ‘You never really know how a delivery is going to progress.’
