Graham's Birth Story, Part Three: In Which I Nearly Die But Not Really At All

Part One: In Which I Discuss the General Suckiness of Being 41 and then 42 Weeks Pregnant
Part Two: In Which I Birth a Human Child

So Graham was here, a perfect specimen, minus a weird bulge on his head, a battle wound from labor that went away before we even got a chance to take his first picture. I got into bed with him, still snuggling him against my chest and he let loose two enormous frat-boy burps, his first official act on this Earth. We were so proud. I made awkward attempts at nursing him while Cindy stitched up a bit of tearing and within the hour we were alone in the room, my two boys and I.

While David and I inspected him, poked and kissed him, I began to feel like something was wrong. I was having intense pressure in my spine and tailbone, enough that I was having a hard time sitting, and felt a lot of blood coming out of me. I asked David to go find the nurse so she could check if the amount of bleeding was normal. She came back in and checked, got wide-eyed and said, "No. No, that is not normal," and then she pushed down on my uterus and I felt something enormous come out of my body and then the nurse cursed and ran to find a doctor. It was very dramatic. She was a very dramatic nurse.

The enormous thing turned out to have been a clot nearly the size of Graham, made up of somewhere in the region of one liter of blood, blood that was pouring out of my body through my now inactive, non-contracting, completely lazy uterus. On the plus side, the clot getting pushed out made my back pain go away. On the down side, I had already lost about a liter of blood before the nurse checked me, in addition to the amount I'd lost during labor, in addition to what was continuing to come out, which was apparently not insignificant, which I realized when the nurse brought back four doctors, an ultrasound tech, and another nurse, plus an intern just to hold my hand while they dealt with what they were referring to as a "severe hemorrhage". This was the part where they whisked David and Graham away to the nursery and I didn't get to see Graham again until midnight, six hours later, and David was convinced I was dying and he was going to have to raise the boy on his own.

Meanwhile, I was getting poked by many needles and having many instruments shoved into many places and causing my original nurse to just absolutely panic, enough that I asked her if I was frustrating her before she went on a tirade about people not answering the "send help" button (not its official name). This was the same nurse who, apparently prompted by the getting-to-know-you Q&A I was engaged in with the hand-holding intern, exclaimed "Why aren't you unconscious?!"—either an expression of disbelief or the verbalization of a desire (I suspect the latter).

But apparently I really should have been unconscious, a third of my total blood volume then existing outside of my body, and I very nearly became unconscious a few times, and each time that happened they would yell, "We're losing her! We're losing her!" which reminded me of every episode of Grey's Anatomy and made it all feel very familiar and safe.

The end game of all this was a blood transfusion, a longer-than-we-were-hoping-for stay in the hospital, and several weeks of bed rest, which I am just now emerging from, to my absolute delight. The recovery has been decidedly less than fun, but I'm relieved that the whole thing didn't end in a hysterectomy, which the doctor had warned me was a likely scenario, or death, which really probably wasn't a likely scenario, considering that I was in a hospital and all, but could have been, you know, for the sake of the story.

Instead my uterus and I will live to see more babies, I hope, and I also hope they are even an iota as good as Graham, who is cuter than all other things and turning out to be a real champion of a baby, even though he has a terribly hard time with eating, sleeping, pooping and burping, all the things babies are supposed to be good at (although he is terrific at crying.)

I was really thankful for a lot of things about this labor, but especially that we were able to do it naturally. I don't think there's anything less admirable about medicated birth at all, but in our case, any interventions in Graham's birth would have meant a higher risk of postpartum bleeding and could have made the difference between the way things turned out and a much worse scenario.

So that is my (much longer than I thought) birth story. And now, pictures.