‘Yeuch.’ Shazz took a step back, thinking about it. ‘That’s going to mess it all up down there, right? In the lady garden palace.’ She shuddered.
For a brief moment, Sam thought about her own lady garden palace and getting the baby out of it. She’d watched lots of Discovery TV birthing shows and right now, she was scared.
Ted got into the car.
‘Hospital bag!’ Sam reminded him.
He got the bag.
Looking right and left like a racing driver, Ted whizzed through every red light on the way to the maternity hospital. Beside him, Sam panted and screeched with a combination of nerves and pain.
Another wave hit her. This was not what she’d anticipated, not this searing pain that felt as if it would rip her in two. Plus, she might kill Ted before they got to the hospital. He kept going over speed bumps too fast.
That was the problem, she decided grimly as the pain receded. She was having a baby with an idiot. An idiot who loved his computer, thought the sun shone out of the Tipperary hurling team’s collective backsides and had no idea what women had to go through in life. Any of it.
Women understood pain. Or women were pain . . .? Something like that. She’d read it on Pinterest.
Another pain bloomed inside her.
‘Drive faster!’ she hissed.
Ted broke all the speed limits and, at last, they slid to a halt in front of the Rotunda Hospital in the ambulance bay.
As she was put into a wheelchair at the hospital door, she was half sobbing. ‘My waters broke an hour ago and the baby’s coming,’ she said.
A nurse shooed Ted off to park properly because he wasn’t allowed to abandon the car in the ambulance bay.
‘I am going to have this baby here and now!’ went on Sam, watching with dismay as her husband left. She loved him. She’d been so horrible to him . . . he couldn’t go—
‘You probably won’t give birth this quickly on your first,’ soothed the nurse. ‘Let’s see how you’re doing.’
‘No, it’s a week overdue, it’s coming very soon, I can feel it,’ said Sam, who was not feeling remotely soothed.
‘Everyone thinks that, but it’s a first baby and they take time.’
‘No, I do know,’ said Sam wildly. ‘I’m giving birth now, here and now! Get me into the delivery room!’
‘All right, pet, let’s check out how dilated you are.’
Somehow, assisted by two nurses, and a midwife with an even more soothing voice, Sam got onto a bed.
‘It’s coming!’ she shrieked as another pain hit her.
‘It’s not,’ said the midwife calmly as she emerged from between Sam’s legs. ‘You’re only three centimetres dilated.’
‘Three!’
Three centimetres would not let a Barbie doll emerge. Barbie’s insanely perky bosoms would get stuck.
‘Yes, only three, I’m sorry, Sam,’ said the midwife with the awareness of a professional who’d delivered enough babies to know that smugness in delivery rooms did not help anyone.
Three was nothing, Sam knew. Nothing. How could she be in this pain with no sign of a child appearing? What was next? Red-hot pokers of pain?
Ted came back from parking the car as another contraction ripped through Sam.
‘Darling,’ he said, taking her hand.
‘Don’t darling me!’ she yelled, fear coming out as rage. ‘If you ever think you are coming near me again with that . . . that thing, you have another thing coming!’
‘But . . . but . . . we want this baby,’ muttered Ted, who had read all the baby books with mentions of fury bouncing off the walls in the delivery suite. But not his Sam, surely?
After this long journey of IVF, he was going to help, hold Sam’s hand, man the phone.
Not get screamed at.
‘Relax, dear,’ whispered the midwife to Ted. ‘They all say things like that. In fact, that’s mild. No sex forever or having their bits chopped off is what some partners hear in these rooms, but afterwards, it’s OK, you wait and see.’
‘It’s her birthday,’ Ted said, desperately trying to shift the conversation on from parts of his anatomy he did not want to discuss with strange women. ‘She’s forty.’
‘We know, she’s an elderly primigravida.’
‘I am not elderly!’ said Sam, who had nothing wrong with her hearing even if it felt as if a giant wriggling emu with a bowling ball for a head was trying to emerge from her body, sideways. This could not be normal. There must be something wrong.
‘Not old, just old to have your first one,’ soothed the midwife. ‘Once you’re thirty-five or older, they call you elderly.’
‘I’m forty today,’ Sam said, tearfully. ‘That’s not elderly. Life begins at forty: everyone says it.’
‘Happy birthday!’ said the midwife, who was thirty-nine, and hoped so too.
Four hours later, two more centimetres dilated and a lot of screaming at Ted, interspersed with sobbing and saying sorry because she loved him, Sam thought she might just be going mad with pain. Nobody told her it would be like this or that it would take this long.
When people said ‘I was in labour for sixteen hours’, she’d thought it was exaggeration, not reality. Like saying ‘I didn’t sleep a wink last night’, or ‘I lost all that weight without doing anything’.
A whopping big baby-birthing fib.
But in this case, it seemed as if it was true.
Doing his best to be helpful, Ted extracted Sam’s birth plan from the hospital bag.
The birth plan was full of ideas for the perfect birth and involved soft music – they’d done a track list and it was on both of their phones – no drugs in case they affected the baby and, if possible, Ted to cut the cord.
The birth plan was a paean to glorious natural childbirth.
The woman in the prenatal class had praised their approach, telling them how it was better for Baby to be shoved, drug-free, into the world.
So Ted innocently handed the sheaf of paper to Sam, who sent it flying as another contraction hit her.
‘Jesus, the pain!’ she roared.
‘Breathe,’ said Ted, watching as the birth plan scattered all over the floor.
‘I can’t,’ gasped Sam as she felt as if her insides were being torn apart. ‘I must have been mad with all that breathing crap. Screw breathing. Where’s the anaesthetist?’