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I don’t know how Sarah did it. Childbirth, I mean. For that matter, I don’t know how I did it, what with my propensity to pass out, but then I didn’t have to DO anything. Sarah did all the work, and I just stood there and held her hand, and it was still the hardest thing I’ve ever done.

I’m glad women are designed for this sort of thing, because men would all demand lethal doses of morphine early on in the labor process.

I did end up using my handy dandy recording device for a lot of the labor. Listening to the early tidbits is amusing, for my boundless enthusiasm and desire to record every pointless detail. (BTW: this gets a little gross later. No pictures, but if you’re squeamish about reading gross stuff, it might be time to move on.)

• 5/30, 4:50am: “We have been awakened at 4:15 in the morning for an induction at the hospital . . . it is GO TIME, people!”
• 5:27am: “Arrived at 4:30, admitted to ‘Labor and Delivery Room #1.'”
• 5:54am: “Pitocin started at 5:55.”
• 5:57am: “Looking over the lab forms, we have discovered that Sarah does NOT have chlamydia. We are overjoyed.”
• 6:09am: “The heartrate monitor also shows the fact that Sarah is currently having contractions.”

I’m pretty sure I recorded that because Sarah wasn’t feeling a thing. In fact, later on she had to be told “You are having a contraction right now,” to which she responded, “Oh, THAT’S what that is.”

• 6:11am: “Fairly mild contractions, 3 1/2 minutes apart, lasting . . . well, it’s hard to say, it’s sort of a bell curve. About a minute.”
• 6:18am: “I’m mildly concerned about the accuracy of this graphy thing, ’cause it seems to be indicating Sarah’s having contractions . . . like every 2 minutes . . . which I don’t think would really be the case at this point.”

Later, the doctors apparently thought the same thing, and installed an internal contraction monitor. Ew. The word “internal” has a whole new meaning for me after 5/30.

• 6:39am: “It’s 6:40am, contractions are, oddly enough, 2 minutes apart, but barely strong enough that Sarah feels them. It feels like butterflies, it’s totally bizarre. [Inaudible comment from Sarah] Butterflies and pee.”

The next entry makes no sense at first:

• 7:09am: “Eeyore blood pressure sensor.”

The device that they used to check Sarah’s blood pressure every few minutes would indicate it had completed its task with a couple beeps in a low register that sounded exactly like Eeyore saying “Oh, well.” This amused us greatly.

• 7:21am: “Dr. DeMeo arrived around 7, broke Sarah’s water at about 7:20, not surprisingly there’s meconium in the water which means WE’VE GOT A POOPER. This is, uh, pretty much par for the course with the Hearn gene. That it would poop a lot. Pooping is fun.”

No, I wasn’t drunk, although I sure wished I was a little later. Meconium, by the way, is the baby’s first few poops. If they do one in the womb, it just means they have to clean out his or her breathing apparatus so they don’t have to breathe in their own poop.

• 7:31am: “Uh 7:30, Sarah’s starting a little bit stronger contractions, they’re pretty much consistently 2 minutes apart, and . . . we have requested that she get her epidural, so they’re loadin’ her up with hardcore saline solution. AWESOME. And the Titanic Soundtrack has come on to the iPod, good times.”

For Mother’s Day, I had purchased for Sarah an iPod mini, which I thought might come in handy, and I picked up a small set of speakers at Target so we could all listen to Michael Bolton songs while labor was progressing. It was a lifesaver, according to HW.

• 7:34am: “Guster has come on to the iPod. Jamming has commenced.”
• 7:45am: “Sarah is having what she describes as a Charley Horse in her Urrea.”

Urrea is a word we use that we pretend is the Hisbonic equivalent of “Area,” which indicates the groin.

• 7:46am: “7:49am. I have farted. Sarah has almost peed her pants.”
• 7:47am: “Love cuts deep y’all, Michael Bolton says love cuts deep. If Sarah hadn’t already had her water broken, I’m sure she’d be bursting it at this point. Oh, she’s crying a lil bit, there’s a little bit of pink on the face, I dunno, I think I need to take a picture of her. [Inaudible from Sarah, probably laughter] Oh, GOD! I’ll delete it [the picture], I swear, you just have to look at it once. Oh poor Saree. Oh yeah, you’re uh . . . [laughter, sound of Sarah breathing deeply, attempting to stop laughing. Sarah:] I’ve got to calm down. [Me:] All right, I’m not gonna show you this picture, then. [Sarah: ] No. [Me:] I’ll save that for later. [Sarah starts laughing uncontrollably again. Me:] You poor thing. [Sarah continues laughing, finally calms down. Sarah:] Okay. [Me:] Well, your contraction monitor is totally freaked out. [Sarah starts laughing again.] The nurse is gonna come back in and be like ‘What the hell happened?’ ‘Michael Bolton said love cut deep, y’all.’ [Sarah laughs uncontrollably, someone claps.] I just realized this thing’s been recording for like two straight minutes. [Uncontrollable giggling from all parties.]”

Poor Sarah. That was basically the funniest 2 minutes of my entire life, and I decided to have it while she’s trying to fight off contractions. The lesson: I am a floating turd.

• 8:43am: “Epidural at 8:15. Or thereabouts. Took a while to get it in. Took a long while to get kicked in, it’s about 8:45 now and it seems to be working better.”

Installing the epidural (it’s not just one shot, it’s actually a continuous drip of pain medication delivered into a spot on the spinal cord) was very difficult and painful for Sarah because they had a hard time finding a space between her spine bones. Watching it felt somehow worse, but then I’m just the jerk standing there, not the poor lady getting stabbed in the lower back repeatedly.

• 8:46am: “Sarah’s attempting to operate a bedpan for the first time in her existence.”

And she’ll be thrilled to see it described here on a website.

• 9:41am: “It’s about 9:45, Sarah’s feeling much better and gonna take a lil nap. Bye.”
• 10:44am: “10:45, oxytocin drip up to 12 . . . whatever unit that is.”

It was either milliliters per hour, or milliliters per minute. I don’t remember exactly, but the bag was confusing because it also dealt in “milliunits” per hour, where a unit was equal to some amount of liters of fluid. Also I have a bad memory and am kinda dumb.

• 11:55am: “Noon, getting lunch, ignoring low carb restriction.”

I went in thinking that I’d probably be able to get through the day on meat hunks and peanuts. Ha ha ha ha ha! Wrong. I think I ate french fries with every meal for an entire week.

Sarah’s mom came at some point in the morning and stayed for a few hours, until the contractions got a bit outrageous and Sarah asked her to go so we could concentrate on breathing together.

• 1:34pm: “Round noon, went got lunch, hamburger, fries, totally delicious, two bottles of coke, came back and they had upped her pitocin intake to 16 milliunits per hour, or 16 milliliters per hour; they just now did that to 17, and we are at 6 centimeters dilated, and station at -2, 100% effaced and Sarah’s having a really gross contraction . . . about every two minutes.

The cervix needs to be 100% effaced (thinned out) and 10cm dilated (opened) before they’ll let the mom start pushing. Station indicates where the baby’s head is in relation to, I believe, the pubic bone. Here, baby was 2cm above it. And at this point, recordings pretty much stopped while Sarah did the most difficult thing I’ve ever witnessed.

Starting around 2pm, the contractions became very intense. The pain wasn’t bad, but the pressure was getting enormous, and the urge to push was VERY strong and hard to resist. And it just got worse; the dilation of the cervix was progressing very, very slowly, such that we were at about 9.5cm at 4pm and stayed there for basically 45 minutes. BTW, checking how far the cervix has dilated requires an Internal Examination, which is unpleasant to watch. Sarah and I breathed together, but I don’t know how much good that really did. She was in agony that I can’t even comprehend.

By 5pm, she was as close as she was going to get, so the doctors told her to start pushing. So every 2 minutes, as a contraction hit, the nurse and I helped pull her legs back while Sarah pushed as hard as she humanly could. For 75 minutes. With doctors poking and prodding and doing gross things and even trying to pull the baby out with what amounts to a medical plunger.

In the end, nothing worked, and the doctors informed us that we were going to have to get the baby out via C-section. I busied myself trying to keep Sarah calm, because she was terrified, although I’m sure I did more harm than good because I was so scared I thought I was going to wet my pants. I had to put on big surgical scrubs over my clothes, including a fun hat and mask and mesh things on my shoes.

They wheeled her down the hall and sat me in a chair near the operating room while they prepped her, which gave me plenty of time to think about all the things that could go wrong, and try to pray a while. Then they led me in, where I saw pretty much the thing I least ever wanted to see in my lifetime: my wife, strapped to a gurney, surrounded by people in blue scrubs, getting pumped full of drugs so they could gut her like a trout. For better or worse, she was conscious (but pain-free) the entire time, so I was able to distract her while the doctors did whatever it is they did (they put a sheet up between me and the carnage, which is a very, very good thing).

As we chatted, I half-listened to what the doctors were saying. Mostly instructions to one another, such as “suction” or “clamp this” or “get away from that, you don’t know where it’s been.” Finally, at 7:15pm: “It’s a boy!”

Sarah and I looked at each other. “It’s a BOY?” we said together. We had no preference about gender (I’d been telling everyone it didn’t matter to me, boy or girl, as long as it was left-handed), but in the months leading up we had both just gotten a very strong feeling that it was a girl.

“Wow, it’s a BIG one!” Well, that was hardly surprising. And then I saw him. They didn’t hand him to us right away because they had to suck out the meconium, so I watched as they carried this MASSIVE purple boy (he reminded me of Bugs Bunny for some reason), with all his limbs splayed out in all directions, over to a table where they sucked out and wiped off the goop. And there he was.

I have to admit, my first interest was rather clinical. “Wow, look at that! He’s a big boy, all right. Wonder what he weighs.” They put him on the scale, and he measured an astounding 10 pounds, 5 ounces. Not the heaviest child in history, but above the 97th percentile. Then they measured his length, which was 23 1/2 inches long. To put this into perspective, the average boy born in America is about 19 3/4 inches, and the 97th percentile is about 21 1/2 inches. And the tape measure only went to 24″. All I’m saying is when this kid gets to be 14, and he’s 6’7″, I’m not going to be surprised.

While I was snapping pictures, the nurses took his Apgar score a couple of times (I think his score at 5 minutes was 8 out of 10, which makes him a C student, I guess) (just kidding), and Sarah fell asleep, absolutely wiped out. I went over to make sure she was doing okay, and noticed that her entire face was covered with red dots where she had burst blood vessels while trying to push. Not knowing what else to do, I kissed her on the head.

After everybody was stitched back together and cleaned up, we went to post-op, where Sarah and Charles were tended to by some nurses and I sat and tried not to be TOO aghast at what had just happened. I was finally able to call my mom and let the various family members know that everything went fine, and was allowed to go down and bring them up for a brief visit before we were moved up to the recovery room, where Sarah and Charles finally passed out, and I went home to print a shirt that says “Ask me about my SON! – Charles Matthew – May 30th, 2006 – 10 pounds 5 ounces?!?”, make cigar labels with a similar sentiment, and pass out face first into some french fries.

• 11:05pm: “After a significant delay in proceedings, uh, Charles Matthew Hearn was born at 7:15 pm, 10 pounds 5 ounces, 23 and one half inches long. [Charles, sitting on my lap at the time, cries out.] He had comment to make. [Charles cries some more.] He’s kind of a faker, I’m not gonna lie, but he is a BRUISER. Sarah worked on trying to push him out the natural way for just over 12 hours, and eventually we had to give up and take him out Cesarean Section. And, Sarah was a trouper.”
• 11:27pm: From Charles: “Waa sniff aaaah! Uhhhhhh sniff uhhhh. Sniff sniff.”