Raising Blaze Read Free Page A

survive this kind of pain. I wondered if I was going to survive it. Visions of camels passing through the eyes of needles danced through my head. This is too hard, I thought several times, I can’t do it, make it stop. Every time this thought crossed my mind, it was immediately followedby the terrible realization that I had to do it, that there was absolutely nowhere to go and nobody who could make it stop.
    My mother, worry etched into her face, stood at the end of the bed and grabbed hold of my feet, the only part of my body she could really reach, squeezing hard. I looked at her and felt an immediate and deep sense of betrayal. I couldn’t believe that, as my mother, she hadn’t seen fit to tell me about a pain that was—as close as I could equate it—like having my legs tied to two trucks that were driving off in opposite directions.
    “Why,” I panted between contractions, “didn’t you tell me it was going to be like this?”
    “Would you have believed me?” she answered.
     
    After several hours of hard labor, I demanded that Maya kick everybody out of the room. “I need drugs,” I told her. “Now.”
    “But you told me you didn’t want—”
    “Now!” I had thirty seconds before the next contraction was going to overtake me completely and I couldn’t afford to waste time telling her how I’d totally given up on the concept of a drug-free childbirth. I was only four centimeters dilated after ten hours of labor and quite certain that I would never make it without the kind of chemical help that only a day earlier I had sworn I would never take.
    The anesthesiologist who gave me an epidural was easily the most popular person in the hospital. Laboring women who saw him greeted him with the fervency of disciples. It was no different for me. Ten minutes after he painlessly inserted a needle into my lower back, I was completely pain-free and briefly entertained the notion of naming my baby after him . I could feel my entire body relax in the absence of that intense pain and I was prepared to go through many more hours of labor, but within twenty minutes, I had progressed to full dilation.
    That was the moment that things began to go wrong for Blaze. The fetal monitor began showing dips in his heart rate with every contractionand, as the minutes passed, the dips became more sustained. Because I had Blaze at a teaching hospital, I met the doctor who would deliver him only an hour before it happened. This doctor began looking at the monitor’s printout with concern and started talking over my body to the nurse on the other side of the bed.
    “Have her tracings been like this all night?” he asked and the nurse murmured something about the last half-hour.
    Alert now that I was free of pain, I asked him what was going on.
    “He’s probably caught the umbilical cord around his neck,” the doctor told me. “Looks like he came down pretty fast after the epidural.” He went on to assure me that I wouldn’t have to worry, that the baby was on his way out now and that he didn’t think it was severe. He also told me that I should start pushing immediately.
    I pushed on command, totally removed from any physical cues. The doctor, intern, and labor nurse in the room had all become very serious, engaged in the clipped, instructions-only dialogue peculiar to crisis. In a very small unoccupied portion of my brain, I realized that had I not been caught in the middle of the most difficult act I’d ever performed, I would have been completely terrified. I could see nothing over the equipment I was buried under and relied on the reflection in my sister’s eyes to see what was going on in my own body. She was rapt, occasionally prompting, “Come on , I can see the head.”
    I heard the labor nurse say, “Lots of hair on this baby.”
    I felt my ribs stretching and my body tearing.
    I said, “I can’t do this,” and was ignored.
    The doctor said, “There it is, there’s the cord.” I asked if I should push and