matthearn.com

Wanna see something really gross? This is REALLY GROSS.

It’s amazing that I managed to survive to my current advanced age with all of my limbs intact. In fact, the number of injuries I’ve suffered over the years has been relatively minimal, although when I’ve hurt myself, it’s been via doing something really stupid. This trend continued this weekend, when Brian came over to help me demolish my back patio so that it might be replaced with pretty bricks.

I got up Saturday morning and drove to Home Depot so that I might rent a jackhammer (note: we later realized this was a stupid thing to do). It weighed something close to 100 pounds, I think, so getting it into the car was a challenge, but I managed it. Brian wasn’t going to arrive until noonish, so I went around back and got started, breaking the ugly concrete up into small chunks. (Note: we quickly realized that this, also, was a stupid thing to do).

Brian arrived around noon, and pointed out that it might be best to break the concrete up into large chunks that could just be lifted out, instead of several thousand small chunks that needed to be shoveled. The wisdom of this was confirmed when we attempted to shovel the small chunks and discovered they were all held together by some kind of wire mesh within the concrete that prevented it from cracking and spreading. We discovered this after I had chopped up something like 2/3 of the patio into very small pieces. (We also realized later that if I had bought a 14″ concrete saw, we could have cut the whole patio, including the wire mesh, into neat squares and hoisted it out in probably 2 hours. The lesson learned: I am an idiot.)

Then I dropped the jackhammer on my foot. I’m not gonna say it hurt worse than childbirth, but I didn’t have the benefit of half my body being numb when it happened. As of Monday morning, the toe is black and blue and still oozing a small amount of blood. I’m pretty sure I’m going to lose the toenail. It might be broken, but if it is, it’s the outermost bone, and there’s not much doctors can do for that. Ow.

After taping my foot and chewing half a bottle of extra-strength Tylenol^TM, Brian and I got back to work. We broke up the remaining third of the patio into big chunks and removed them one by one, which resulted in 1) bending the hell out of my wheelbarrow by putting too much weight in it, and 2) stabbing me in the left forearm with a small piece of rusty wire. That wasn’t too painful, but it sure bled a lot. And now it’s making me apprehensive because the surrounding skin is just a LITTLE too red, so I’m fearing tetanus and god knows what.

In the end, we got the entire patio broken, but only 1/3 of it removed, because of the stupid mesh. I’m hoping to start cutting the wire up with small bolt-cutters and prying the concrete out, but it may take a while. Basically I turned what would have been a 4-hour job for two guys with a concrete saw and a prybar into 9 hours of frustration and injuries, followed by weeks of back-breaking labor.

This is why normal people hire professionals.

Every couple of years, I feel the need to assert my manliness. Not via bullfighting or boxing or modern dance or impregnating my wife, but by going against my non-hirsute nature, disobeying all laws of science, and growing facial hair in some form. In the past, it has always ended in horrible tragedy, but this time, man, THIS time it’s gonna come up aces for me.

After Charles arrived, I took two weeks off from work so that we could try and figure out how to keep him alive (apparently you can’t give them hunks of pork! Who knew?). The second week, after he came home, we were so busy that I barely had time to shower, let alone shave. So, after 5 or 6 days I found that my chin and cheeks and ever-quivering upper lip were coated with a fine downy fluff that my wife refused to kiss, but which was completely invisible to anyone more than 5 paces away. So I went upstairs and shaved off anything that wasn’t part of a goatee and sideburns. Then I realized that my sideburns STILL don’t connect to my hair, so I shaved them off as well. I was left with a festive little beard, which makes me look:

Dashing
Villainous
Quite The Cad
All Of The Above

Sarah, of course, hates it, because when she kisses me I abrade her lips. You judge for yourself.

It is flat-out retardulous that there isn’t a Target near my house. The nearest one is in what is basically the least accessible part of New Castle County for me. Getting to that North Wilmington location involves only 10 or so minutes on an interstate, but then upwards of 15 on stoplight-ridden thoroughfares to get to the Target contained in the Brandywine Town Center. It’d be faster to get to one in Middletown, which is a slightly further distance but is a straight shot down Route 1.

Well, unless you want to get to the other side of Middletown, which is where they’d probably build it, and which is a 15 minute drive on a 2 lane main drag through down. So nevermind. Just build one right by my house, please.

I was hoping they might, because one has long been rumored to go into the shopping center (I forget the name, and what does it really matter?) across from University Plaza, which is right at the junction of 273 and 95 in Newark, but that doesn’t seem to really be happening. Which is a pity, because that shopping center already has an Old Navy, DFW, Staples, JoAnn’s Fabrics, and Linens and Things, all stores that make me happy in my pants. It also has the worst Boscov’s in history, and if you’re familiar with Boscov’s, that’s saying something. A Target in that location would probably cause me to set up a tent on the grounds. (Probably one I bought at Target.)

Now I see they’re ripping up a huge chunk of the parking lot in University Plaza itself, which makes me almost quiver in anticipation, but a quick check of Target’s New Stores list makes no mention of a new Delaware location. Also, the site they’ve torn up doesn’t seem quite large enough for a Target, and I’m not sure there’s enough parking left to support one anyway. ARGH. Target, why do you tease me so?

I’m sure they’ll build one down here roughly 2 weeks before we move to North Wilmington (better schools up there), which is tentatively scheduled for 2009, assuming I get a massive payraise so I can afford the mortgage payments. Or I sell a kidney or two.

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.”

Okay, I don’t have enough time for a major league update (I’m still working on my little play-by-play of Tuesday’s action), but I did have enough time to upload a bunch more pictures of Charles: click here, y’all.

Uploading is painful from the hospital because I’m on 56K dialup; getting 4MB of photos online took like half an hour. It hurts my soul. The lappy detects a wireless network, but I lack the passcode. ARGH.

More later.

Baby is out! May I introduce: Charles Matthew Hearn.

I’ll have more details tomorrow, including a lengthy description of the process, which started out Nicely, moved into Painful, spent a lot of time in Surreal, and finished in Exhausted but Happy, for all parties. Right now it’s 3 in the damned morning and I just got finished uploading all the pictures on Charles’ site, so I’m going the hell to bed.

And before you ask: Yes, it feels really weird to be a father, in the awesomest way possible.

Baby’s still in there, and really, really, REALLY does not want to come out:

We had one more ultrasound, and then our doctor tried to lose his watch inside my wife, and has informed us that we will be getting induced on Tuesday, if the baby hasn’t try to wiggle out sooner. She was dilated all of 1cm, so I’m thinking Tuesday is GO DAY, people. The bag is packed, the iPod loaded with good delivery room jams, the camera has fresh batteries. I would not expect to see anything here before Wednesday, at which time there will be Much To Discuss.

The kid continues to be irritating, what with its steadfast refusal to enter the cold, angry world, breathe deep the sour medicinal air, and submit itself to the incompetent care that only I can provide it. So I took the opportunity to buy some consumer electronics.

The Radio Shack near us, in University Plaza, is going out of business (aside: Radio Shack basically screwed itself by moving away from the electronic hobbyist business towards the consumer electronics business, particularly the cell phone concentration. As soon as the major cell phone providers opened their own local stores, Radio Shack was screwed. If you want a Verizon phone, would you go to Radio Shack, or would you just go to Verizon? Plus their selection of stereos, TVs, etc. is never EVER going to rival that of Best Buy, and the fatal decision to carry videogame components [controllers, video adapters, and the like] but not actually carry the consoles or games was flat-out stutarded. Aside over), with the attendant 20-50% off everything in the store!!!! sale. I’d been planning to try and keep track of the goings on during labor (“We’ve entered our 14th hour, and Sarah is demanding to be killed. She has ripped off my right arm and has beaten a nurse to death with it. The doctors plan to increase her epidural dose”), and I realized that typing on a keyboard while Sarah is attempting to push out our progeny might be suicidal. And if I wrote it on a notebook it would be illegible. So I decided to buy a small hand-held voice recorder to use for the purpose.

Radio Shack had ’em, and on sale, so I bought this beauty:

I am pleased to report that it is heck of rad. It has enough flash storage to hold 6 HOURS of data at the highest quality, and something like 19 hours at the lowest. So far I’ve been able to use it for work to record some information at the data center, and used it to remember Sarah’s dinner order yesterday (although I still managed to screw it up), along with recording songs in the car to play back for Sarah later to make her giggle.

Hopefully in a couple days I’ll be able to released the uncut, monosonic recording of Sarah screaming “GET THIS [censored] THING OUT OF ME BEFORE I CUT OFF YOUR [censored] AND [censored] YOU IN THE [censored] WITH IT YOU [censored] [censored].” It’s gonna be AWESOME. Particularly after I produce the remixes.

Okay, this baby is just f&%#ing with us now.

Last night we went out to dinner, and when we got home, Sarah started having what she described as “something.” So we waited to see if it would turn into actual contractions, but eventually it stopped, whatever it was. So we went to sleep.

Of course, as a result, I dreamt about the baby all night long. I was feeding it, and checking its diaper, and all that stuff. At some point in the dream, it turned into a cat. It was a weird dream. Then the dream switched to a Walmart or something and I’m carrying the baby around and I notice that Chase Utley (2nd baseman for the Phils) has apparently changed his uniform number, so the nice new jersey that Sarah got me for Father’s Day is obsolete. Of course, in reality, he has not changed his number. Although Sarah did get me his jersey, and it is frickin’ AWESOME.

By morning, we decided that the baby must have dropped down into the pelvis a little bit, because the top of the basketball was squishier, and the bottom was firmer. (We’re very scientific over at Hearndom II.) So that’s somewhat thrilling, and hopefully an indicator that something might happen in the next day or two. I’ll keep y’all updated as best I can.