Diary: The Labour – A Review

(Diary 9th June 2007) Wake up to carnage in the bathroom. Just before we left for the hospital, Karen’s waters broke and brought with them an explosion of blood. Our smallest room looks like a scene from the play Marat Sade. Or a particularly imaginative Quentin Tarantino set piece.

I review the labour. For a man prone to squeamishness, a squeamishness that can often manifest itself in an effeminacy surpassing the outlandish, I feel I have coped admirably well. I begin to make a mental note to ask Karen for congratulations on my performance when I remember: she has just undergone 26 hours of labour with no pain relief save a tens machine and a boxset of Waltons DVDs.

The tens machine – a battery pack with electrodes that attach to the lower back – is as effective a pain reliever as having someone you don’t really like standing nearby and shooting you withering looks while barking from time to time “Try not to think about it, ducky” and “Focus on something other than the pain, you big wimp”. The Waltons, on the other hand, was invented to sedate 250,000,000 Americans at the height of the Vietnam War into believing that the world really was a lovely, folksy, apple-pie place. And, according to Karen, it worked a treat for her, too.

After cleaning up the bathroom, I head for the hospital where I find Karen and Isobella dumped in a room partitioned by a makeshift curtain. Joy at our little bundle (with the big feet) tides us over for the first eight hours of being ignored. When, as we head for nine hours in purdah, I ask when the paediatrician will see us, I am met with a filthy look from the young Irish midwife on duty, who seems to be mimicking some demonic matriarch from a Victorian penny dreadful. The look says: “How dare you question my authority you big-mouthed NCT ponce.” The tone, when she finally barks, backs it up.

Our own midwife – the midwife who brought Isobella into the world – has gone off duty long ago. And with her she seems to have taken 99 percent of the ward’s sunshine and compassion. Her performance was particularly impressive given that she only seemed to be marginally older than Isobella herself. Only one complaint: when I asked if we could try the gas and air – Karen hadn’t used it during her frantic labour – she, the midwife, just laughed. Her tinkling laughter was utterly charming and only doubled when I insisted, “No really. I’m not kidding.”

Home by eight p.m. to ignore the phone and doorbell and just gaze at our new daughter. Karen had noticed the feet thing. I felt a little less of a bad parent.