My brother and his wife came over on July 13th in order to celebrate our birthdays. His is on the 9th, mine's on the 14th. He had sent me a text message earlier in the day saying something about wanting a nephew for his gift. Since the due date wasn't for another ten days, I wrote back, "I need another week before that happens. Let's just buy each other six packs instead."
This was also the day before our tee time at 12:30pm in Yountville with my dad. My parents were actually coming at 10am on the 14th for a birthday breakfast that Kelly was planning on making before we boys left for golf. That night, brother and I stayed up til 1:00am, enjoying our birthday six-packs.
At 5:30am, Kelly's water broke.
Since I'm Mr. Disbelief, I jumped up and got on the computer, Google-searching "how do you know when your water has broken?" while asking Kelly questions like, "are you sure, are you really sure?" She called the advice nurse, explained what happened, and was told to get her things together. We were totally going to have to cancel birthday golf.
We got to Vallejo Kaiser (aka Thugs in Scrubs) at 7am and it was confirmed that Kelly's water had definitely broken. She wasn't dialated yet, so we were told to take a walk until a room opened up for us. This was the beginning of what would become the world record for the most text messages in five days. Anyway, we walked for an hour, then got a room which was really nice and spacious; kinda like a hotel suite with hospital technology everywhere. Once we were settled, the family started showing up. My parents brought birthday gifts for me and brother, which was really thoughtful.
Everyone was hoping that Charlie would be born on my birthday, especially after the midwife started talking about pitocin, which induces labor. But Kelly told her that she wanted to go as natural as possible, so they promised to hold off as long as they could. Despite this, bets were made about the time of birthday, the latest being 10:30pm. I think I even guessed 7pm at that point.
At 2pm the contractions really started kicking in. We walked a lot of laps around the courtyard and Emergency (which at times looked like an E-40 video shoot...maybe it was!), stopping every few minutes because a contraction was coming. They didn't start getting bad until 4 or 5. This is when everyone had to be quiet during and shortly after each contraction, and this is when the they were making her cry a little bit. But you could tell they were still fairly tolerable because the contractions would end, and then she'd perk up and say something like, "so are we going to the cafeteria now?"
At 7pm she was 4 centimeters and was told that that would increase 1cm per hour (10cm is full dialation). Do the math; the baby wanted his own birthday. Shortly afterward we were moved to a larger room which is where the pain became unbearable and the exhaustion began. The nurse told Kelly that she wasn't getting enough fluid even though she was downing bottle after bottle of water. They hooked her up to an IV at this point and told her to stay in the room. About 11pm the contractions were so bad that she couldn't talk nor move, except to grab my hand or the side bars of the bed. There was a great deal of heavy breathing and moaning, then silence.
At midnight, she finally demanded pain relief, which the nurse administered through the IV. It was to last for two hours and it kicked in almost immediately. It was a relief for me too because the 4.5 hours of sleep I got the night before was starting to hurt. I dozed off for a couple minutes, then went for a walk. Our families took over the waiting room and I could see that brother was feeling the same way. We went to the cafeteria to get those 5 hour energy drinks, which was a baaaad idea.
To be continued...
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