Of Catheters and Things

In the spring of 1992, forty-two weeks pregnant, I had grown weary of my condition. I was certain that an alien creature had taken up residence in my belly, with no intention of bursting out of its warm cocoon.

One soft, May evening I had an irresistible urge to pack every suitcase I owned. I couldn't come up with any logical reason not to, as I had grown bored with obsessive housecleaning several weeks earlier. I figured it would bide the time until my husband, Jay, returned home from his golfing expedition.

I filled three suitcases to bursting and was waddling towards the nearest chair when the world exploded, upending me. I lay halfway on the couch where I had landed, the ceiling swooping in wild arcs above my eyes. After a time I realized that, as if being violently assaulted by unseen forces wasn't enough, I was also on the verge of drowning. Water was gushing out of me in huge, sloshy spurts as if I were a great, misshapen bathtub and someone had pulled the plug. "Ah, well," I thought vaguely, "I've always hated this sofa anyway."

It is hard to walk with the contents of your linen closet stuffed between your knees, but somehow I managed to get to the phone. I called the Little Falls Country Club, some thirty miles away, and informed the moron who answered that I needed to speak to my husband. That Jay was outside seemed to raise insurmountable obstacles for this young man, and with as much patience as I could muster I explained that I had gone into labor, and suggested that under these unique circumstances maybe he could WALK OUTSIDE AND GET HIM.

"Okay," said the unimaginative twit, and hung up.

I waited in a flurry of inactivity for fifteen minutes before I hit 'redial'. "Is he coming?" I asked mustering slightly less patience than before. "Oh, stuttered this spawn of the devil incarnate. "I haven't gone out yet," and he hung up again, no doubt shaking his head over the demanding nature of women.

After Jay had a couple of congratulatory beers with the boys at the club, he obediently drove the thirty miles home and decided to take a shower. ("It's going to be a long night, you know. Could you pack my suitcase and make a pot of coffee?") While he showered and shaved, I cleaned up the counter-full of coffee I had brewed without having inserted the carafe, repeated the procedure with all the parts properly in place, and packed and loaded the Isuzu.

Once at the hospital, I learned that the mighty upheaval which had knocked me off my feet had also thrown the baby into breach position. It was a quick overview of C-section 101 for me...

I was misled by the benign look on the face of my nurse as she wheeled me into my room. "Now, all we have to do is slip this catheter in, and you'll be all set," she announced with a conspiratorial smile.

Oh, agony and betrayal! Could such a simple procedure truly cause such searing pain, or had something gone terribly wrong?

"Has something gone terribly wrong?" I asked my friend, the nurse.

She assured me that all was as it should be. We repeated this exchange several times, the level of my mounting anxiety matched point for point by the level of her mounting irritation. When I refused to be coddled into believing that this was the way catheters are supposed to feel, she pulled the offending tube out with a slightly less motherly smile.

If her intent was to make me regret the inconvenience of re-threading me, she achieved her goal. I've seen Roto-Rooter operators perform their jobs with more tenderness than Nurse Ratched as she jammed the drainage pipe back into place.

I think the half-inch or so of the tube that popped out of my left nostril was the deciding factor in her choice to remove the whole apparatus once again, albeit not quite as gently as the first time. The pain of the third insertion was excruciating, and as I lay there whimpering I released the contents of my bladder.

Though I had never been equipped with one of these devices before this, some primeval intuition told me that the purpose of catheters is to keep things like this from happening. Humbled, I called the surly nurse's attention to the mishap: my deep shame validated by the look of outraged disgust on her face. With a tremendous tug which decisively ended my ability to protest, she tore the catheter out once again. Then she cleaned up the sodden mess, finished her diabolical work, and stomped out of the room.

I soon found myself in the operating room, surrounded by sharp-looking men and women. They had covered their lower faces with paper masks to hide their true identities as they discussed my convulsing stomach with a clinical detachment that made my blood run cold.

I was propped up on the edge of my gurney, with abdominal muscles constricting my insides like some demented bag-piper, when my doctor called in the hospital's resident sadist, alias 'the anesthesiologist'.

"Relax," he murmured and began to randomly poke long, glittering needles into my spine. "Oops, missed again!" became his mantra.

At some point, out of this hellish miasma, I discerned the sour face of the surgeon as he staked around my personal Iron Maiden. He had a 6:00 flight to Cancun to catch, and his plans had not included performing an emergency cesarean. The zeal with which he sliced me from hip to hip convinced me that the satisfaction he took in disemboweling me more than made up for his lack of sleep.

My bouncing, baby boy made his appearance at 12:07 a.m., May 8th, violently torn from my womb by to determined nurses and a sorely vexed surgeon. I made the mistake of looking up into the overhead mirror: glimpsing the blood-bath that engulfed my lower half, I promptly hyperventilated.

The hospital stay following the butchery soothed me. Demerol is nice. I can look back fondly on lucid moments. On the third evening, Jay and I were laughing hilariously over a game of Scrabble when I felt a tearing somewhere down below. Gingerly I lifted my gown and saw a gap in my neatly stapled abdomen. A staple had popped out to expose my intestines. We eyed the rent thoughtfully for a moment before the absurdity of the situation reduced us to hysterical giggles. Then we summoned a nurse to clamp me back together, secure in the knowledge that I was the only person we knew who had literally spit a gut laughing.

On the final day of our stay, a purposeful-looking nun strode in and tersely informed us that we were not leaving the hospital until we had named our child. It had taken us six months and five days to agree on so much as a first name; neither of us was inclined to rehash every name in the baby book for a middle, so at the end of the day we left the hospital proudly carrying little Miles E. (E for effort.)

We had made it through one of the greatest and most traumatic experience life has to offer, and I simply couldn't wait to walk into my own home to call the Lakes Area Chem-Dry Upholstry Cleaners to deal with the sofa.