The Only Girl to Make Me Cry

The waiting was over; after seeing many couples go into the delivery ward and emerge as a family, it was finally our turn.

I wanted to be the ideal husband. Holding onto my wife's hand and mopping her fevered brow as she went through the pain. Unfortunately the i.v. drip used to induce her wasn't put in properly and my wife's fingers swelled up like sausages. The drip was swapped from her left to her right hand leaving her unable to use either. It became my job to hold the gas and air mask and to judge when pain relief was required.

Throughout her stay in hospital my wife was frequently wired up to a machine that monitored our baby's heart rate and the ward would often echo to the sound of babies' pulses. At one point the mid-wife complained that she couldn't hear our baby's pulse over the noise of the second heart rate (from another machine in the room) momentarily convincing me that we were suddenly expecting twins. In the delivery room I noticed that our baby's pulse had got progressively slower before levelling out at about the rate of an adult's, the machine was now monitoring my wife's pulse. The mid-wife was sufficiently alarmed to press the emergency button and within a few seconds the room was full of people all talking in a medical language that I couldn't understand. A young consultant burst into the room only to look at us sheepishly and then back into a corner as moments later an older consultant swept into the room and took charge. The mid-wife was instructed to attach a scalp monitor to the baby's head. I guess I should have realised that her scalp attaching technique was no better than her ability her to attach an i.v. correctly, but when she said "that's the best I can do" and there was still no pulse on the machine I thought the worst.

I should mention that my wife was completely stoned on gas and air and she started to engage the consultant in a conversation about his tie. It was at this point I noticed that the baby's pulse had come back on the monitor and I interrupted the consultant's story about his holiday to Kamloops to tell my wife that our baby was still alive. The consultant assured me that everything was and always had been fine and the entire entourage left the room as suddenly as they had arrived.

In the last stages of labour I could see the top of the baby's head, which would emerge with each contraction, only to agonisingly disappear again. My wife was clearly in pain and I took it on myself to whisper the names of people she didn't like to get her through it. Later she told me the she thought I was saying the baby looked like these people. I guess it seemed like a good idea at the time.

The mid-wife instructed me to withhold the gas and then barked at my wife to give harder pushes, to get the head out. None of the four to five people in the room were expecting what happened next. After the head was clear the rest of the body immediately followed and I saw my first child fly into the world with a neat little somersault onto the foot of the bed, with her surprised eyes looking up into mine. The mid-wife, who had been too slow to catch her, now jumped into action like a slip fielder trying to retrieve a catch that has already gone to ground.

A tremendous feeling of relief washed over me; our child had been safely delivered. I managed to tell my wife how proud I was of her before breaking down in tears.