The First Day by Agnes

We arrived at Labor and Delivery at 10:30 AM for a 12:30 PM scheduled C-section. It felt kind of odd to show up at the nurses station with our duffel bag saying, “Hi. We’re here to have our babies today.” I would imagine most people show up with their hands clutching their abdomens, saying, “The contractions are two minutes apart.”

Everything went very smoothly in terms of getting me ready for the operating room. The only glitch was that just before I was about to walk over to the C-section room, I had the most painful contraction that I had ever experienced, so I was lightheaded, short-of-breath, nauseous, and in pain walking over. Then, when I got onto the table to have my spinal catheter inserted I couldn’t position myself correctly and it took the anesthesiologist three tries to get the needle into the spinal canal. Anyway, by the time the needle was in and the anesthesia was infusing into my spine, I was dizzy and already disoriented.

A word about spinal anesthesia. This was the most bizarre sensation that I have ever experienced. It starts with warmth in the feet, which spreads upwards; then you get tingling up to the mid-chest level, then you realize you can’t move your legs anymore. In my case, I also got tingling in my arms and hands, which was a little scary, because last year, I was involved in an obstetrics case where the epidural went into the high spinal canal, and the woman lost all her brainstem reflexes, which means she stopped breathing and they had to intubate her. A spinal is really only supposed to go to mid-chest and not the arms, so I was frantically moving my arms and hands to make sure that the paralysis didn’t continue upwards. This wasn’t really necessary though because the anesthesiologist kept telling me that it’s not too uncommon for the sensory loss to spread into the arms.

Anyway, by this point, my obstetrician was asking me, “Agnes, can you feel this?” while poking me with the scalpel, and I really felt nothing, which is also bizarre, because you can imagine being sliced open but it’s really strange to not feel anything. Actually, it’s probably a good thing that there was a big sterile drape in front of my face so that my mind couldn’t make myself feel all the horrible things they were doing to my abdomen. The next thing I knew they were pulling the first baby out, and everyone was saying things like, “It’s a beautiful little girl! Wow, she’s big for a twin!” and then, I heard her cry which pretty much made me want to cry. And then it happened all over again a minute later for the second baby.

Bernard went over to the warmers to take pictures of the babies, and, as I later found out, put the umbilical clips on and cut the cords (which is cool that they let him do that). Then, they brought the babies over to me. I had imagined this moment the night before, and I thought I was going to say all sorts of things to the babies, but when they put the babies on my chest, I couldn’t say anything. Bernard took a picture of us, and I’m glad that I at least managed to smile because I was really overwhelmed.