"Have you been experiencing any contractions at all before you came in?"
I shook my head. "Nothing but a low backache. No tightening that I noticed."
"Sometimes, your cervix is ready and with some women, they don't feel the sensation of pain until the very end. I'd say that's you."
I was anxious that it meant something was wrong. "Is my baby okay?"
"We're going to put you on a monitor, so we can watch how he handles the contractions."
While I adjusted my gown after the exam, she attached a belt around my waist that fed information to a monitor. The monitor gave out a strip that showed my contractions and how the baby's heart rate responded.
"Oh, here comes another one," I said and tried to breathe through it, the way Vanessa showed me.
Luke took my hand. "That was a minute and a half."
When my contraction was over, he wrote down the length of it and the spacing on a receipt from his wallet.
"Keep track on the contractions. Call me if they get to be one minute apart. I'll be right outside at the nursing station. It's a pretty quiet night so we're in luck."
For the next hour, my contractions remained at two minutes apart, and then, everything changed.
Luke went to find Vanessa when they began to be only one minute apart.
She came into the room right away and checked me once more. I grimaced, for even her gentle hands were uncomfortable.
"Okay, we're moving you to the delivery room," she said. "This baby's coming in the next half hour. Tell me if you feel like you have to push."
"Okay," I said.
In a couple of minutes, after another contraction, she and another nurse brought in a wheelchair and took me to my labor and delivery suite, and I was helped up onto the delivery table, which looked like a short bed with the foot removed. There were stirrups, and I felt concerned that my lady parts were soon going to be on display for everyone in the room to see. Luckily, the contractions were coming so close together that I stopped worrying, my focus entirely on breathing through them successfully -- which was a losing cause.
"She can't have an epidural or pain medication?" Luke asked, his hand gripping mine as I groaned through yet another contraction.
"Nope. She's too fast for anything. She's doing great though and baby is doing well, too."
When the contraction was over, Luke wiped my brow, which was starting to sweat profusely.
"How much longer?" I asked but before Vanessa could respond, another contraction started.
&nb
sp; "That was less than a minute," Luke said quietly.
Vanessa pulled her chair between my legs and checked me once more.
"This baby is coming any minute. You're almost in transition."
"Oh, God, I have to push!"
Then, everything was a haze as the nurses moved in and took over, and all I remember is pretty much screaming my face off with each new contraction that felt like they were one right after another with no break in between. Finally, my baby's head emerged, and Vanessa said something, but I didn't hear what she said. Then, he was out and in Vanessa's able hands and the pain stopped miraculously. I tried to see what they were doing to Leif, and watched as they suctioned his nose and mouth, and then attached monitors to him, and took him over to a bassinet where someone -- the pediatrician I presumed -- looked him over and rubbed him off. Finally, we heard a loud cry and he was breathing.
They didn't bring him right up to me first, only because it was so fast, and they wanted to make sure he was stable. Finally, while Vanessa worked on me, dealing with the placenta, they brought Leif over and laid him on my bare chest.
"We can try to latch him on. It's good for baby to start sucking right away."
For the next few moments, we tried to get Leif to latch on, and he was wide eyed, his little body all tightly clenched, and he made a stab at nursing.
Luke held Leif once they were finished, and he looked so happy to be holding his son. My eyes welled up with tears and I cried for a moment, happy that everything had gone well despite being so fast and a few weeks early.