But at the same time—it was one month early! I couldn’t be about to have a baby. I had a month to go. I wasn’t ready yet. This had to be a false alarm, and I was just wrong.

For about thirty minutes I waited and worried and wondered how I would know if it was my water breaking or a really embarrassing lack of muscle tone when I thought, “Oooh, these gas pains are bad. What could I have eaten?” I looked at the clock. “It’s a little odd for them to be coming so regularly, isn’t it?”

That was when I really started to get scared. I started timing the ‘gas pains’ and, sure enough, they were about seven minutes apart. “I should try to get some sleep,” I thought. “If I’m going to have a baby tomorrow I’m going to need more than two hours of sleep.”

I tried, but the contractions—because that’s what they were, and you clever folks have figured that out by now, I know—were getting worse and I couldn’t relax from pain, and worry, and fear. They came closer and closer together. Soon they were under five minutes apart. It was not yet 1:30 am.

So I got up and started to pack my hospital bag. It was better to be on the safe side, right? Even though at this point I knew they were contractions and knew that my water had broken, I still believed that if we went to the hospital they would only laugh and send us home again. So I got out my pregnancy planner and packed a hospital bag, not really believing I would need it.

The contractions were getting bad, but I was getting through them ok—grabbing the rails on the bed, and bending over, swaying my hips, trying to breathe—but I couldn’t pretend that this was an obvious false alarm anymore. Of course, it had to be. I was one month early. Therefore it had to be a false alarm. But I woke Erik up at 3:30 anyway, and said, “I need you to time my contractions.”

They were three minutes apart and lasted for about 45 seconds.

I called the hospital. “Hi, I’m registered to give birth here in January,” I said. “But I think I might be in labour.”

“Are you having contractions?”

“Yes. They’re three minutes apart.”

“When are you due again?”

“January 22.”

The woman on the other end of the line sighed. “You’d better come in, then.”

The hospital was only five minutes away, but it was five agonizing minutes—contractions sitting down are nothing like contractions up and moving. By the way, am I alone when I say that I’d like to go back in time and strangle whatever male doctor first decided to call these head-to-toe previews-of-purgatory “contractions”? We got to the hospital and I tried to stand in the emergency room (the after-hours entrance for L&D) while Erik got us registered.

“Go! Go!” The nurse in attendance said, shooing me towards the elevator. “You don’t need to wait for this. Your husband can catch up with you in a minute.”

I got to the check in desk and probably said something brilliant like, “I think I might be in labour?” At this point things become a bit of a blur. They got me to lie down flat on my back (!!!) on a hospital bed and strapped into an electronic fetal monitor (!!!) which, by the way, can be accurately renamed Maternal Torture Device, and checked to see if I was dilated. Yep, three centimetres. Maybe a touch over. And those were contractions, all right.

The doctor—an OB I hadn’t liked much when I dealt with him in the high risk clinic—turned to me and said, “You’re having a baby.”

I might have mumbled something about if they couldn’t stop it or keep me on bedrest or something—but no no no.

By the way, the OB who was attending me will be forever famous for something he told me at an appointment I had with him before the Ultrasound From Hell experience: I was asking him what the point of all these tests were, and why all these procedures geared to women with poorly controlled diabetes were being targeted at women with well-controlled diabetes, and what if I didn’t want all this monitoring? He said, “You’d be glad of this if we found something wrong.”

“Why?”

“Well, we might be able to fix it.”

“How?”

“We could give the baby steroids.”

And then, of course, they did find something “wrong” and it was something they couldn’t fix or even diagnose and it just made the rest of the pregnancy stressful and frightening, and I ended up seeing him for the results of some of those ultrasounds. When I sat there talking with him about short femurs and hypochondroplasia and genetics appointments I often wondered if he remembered once saying to me, “You’d be glad of this if we found something wrong.” I doubt it. Bedside manner was not their strong suit.

Anyway, there he was, delivering my baby. And there I was, strapped on my back hooked up to an EFM, not even able to sit because of all the crap they stuck into me, exactly what I didn’t want. And the contractions were getting worse, I was scared—not only of childbirth but of early childbirth and not having any idea whether the child I was giving birth to was healthy or not, thanks to the Ultrasounds From Hell—and not coping very well. I remembered being told in the childbirth class I took that you should breathe quickly when the contractions were peaking, to help you crest them. But then when I did the nurses would yell at me—“Slowly! Breathe SLOWLY! You’re too tense, you’re going to hyperventilate. Are you sure you don’t want an epidural?” And I would fix wild eyes on the face closest to me and try to breathe SLOWLY.

I begged them to take the EFM off, just for a few minutes so I could sit up, walk a bit, change position, but they wouldn’t. If this happened again I would take it off myself, I think. “You’re preterm,” they said. “We can’t take this off when you’re preterm.”

Well, maybe they were right. What did I know about preterm delivery? I knew about diabetic pregnancies. I knew about achondroplasia and hypochondroplasia and down syndrome and turner syndrome and inductions and c-sections and macrosomia and shoulder dystocia and all kinds of things for which I was marginally prepared. But preterm delivery? Nope.

At 6:00 am they offered the epidural again. I asked if they could see how much I was dilated before I made up my mind. Just over 4 cm.

I thought—“I could do this, but why should I?”—and got the epi. It made a huge difference. I couldn’t feel the contractions at all at that point. I could relax and even joke with the nurses. When they checked me 45 minutes later, I was 10 cm, and an hour after that, they told me I could push. I still couldn’t feel the contractions so I had to rely on them to tell me when and how. Now the doctor came back—I was pushing, but the baby wasn’t moving as much as they wanted and that hideous, tortuous EFM was making little noises they didn’t like, so the doctor—what a swell guy!—got out the vacuum extractor and sucked my little girl out at 9:51 am, December 22, 2003.

“You have a baby!” the nurses and doctors said.

“She’s here!” said Erik. “Look, Andrea.”

And I looked. A small girl, red, covered with white smeary vernix. Long, dark hair plastered to her head. Limbs clenched in tight against her torso. No frontal bossing, trident hands, epicanthal folds, or any of the secondary signs of the syndromes I was told she might have. Two huge, dark, staring eyes, wide in shock.

The doctor then reached in and pulled the placenta out. Even with the epidural, that hurt. I still don’t get it. That would have come out on it’s own within thirty minutes; why rip it out?

They cleaned Frances up, wrapped her in a pink blanket, and laid her on my chest. I held her and thought—“Wow, I’m a mom.” And there she was, my little girl, my Frances. As adorable and perfect as I’d wanted. But making slight noises, little wheezy breaths. “That’s not crying,” one of the nurses said. “She’s having trouble breathing. We have to take her now.”

And they did.

They set me up in my room. Erik called my parents and they came with a big basket of flowers and a little pink teddybear wearing a t-shirt that said “I was born at Large Suburban Hospital.” The teddybear was bigger than Frances. I cried a lot. Here I was a mom, but my baby was somewhere else, and gods only knew what was happening to her. I couldn’t hold her, I couldn’t care for her, I couldn’t bring her home. It was not the way birth was supposed to be. Not the way I’d wanted it, certainly. Because of my medical history, I’d imagined something wholly different—a large baby who was born late, by induction.

It was a few hours before Erik and I could go see her. When we did, she was covered in wires. She had an oxygen sensor strapped to her foot, an iv, a feeding tube through her nose taped to her face, a little anonymous hospital cap, and a blanket. She was lying on her tummy in an incubator, a large plastic bin with two flaps in the front where I had to put my hands through if I wanted to touch her. They were feeding her formula down the nose tube because my milk had not come in yet—obviously—and it was their policy to start feeding preterm infants immediately. All I wanted to know was when I could bring her home.

I went home on Christmas Eve, but it wasn’t exactly festive. We didn’t even hang our stockings—just handed them stuffed to each other Christmas morning before heading off to the hospital to see Frances. Not that she knew what it was all about, I know, though my family joked that she was born early so as not to miss Santa’s visit.

All I wanted to know was when I could bring her home.

First the oxygen sensor went. Then she started maintaining her own body temperature and was moved from the incubator to the bassinette. She went from 5 lbs 1 oz at birth to just under 5 lbs, and I was told that she would need to first start being able to accept her feedings through the nose tube so that they could remove the IV. She did. Then I was told she’d have to start accepting all of her feedings by mouth, either by nursing or bottle-feeding. I’d told the nurses I didn’t want her bottle feeding, when they asked, but they did it anyway and I was so desperate to just get her out of there that I didn’t complain. She did that, and then I was told that she’d have to stop losing weight.

It seemed like we’d jump through one hoop just to find another one.

I poured over her charts at every visit—how much she’d eaten, how, when, how much she weighed, what her diapers were like. I planned my days around being there for her baths and feedings, and seethed with anger when they changed the schedule without telling me. Every time I had to leave, we’d both cry. I hated to leave her behind in the care of people who just could not care for her as much as I did. Every time her weight showed no change or a slight dip, I’d cry, afraid that they would never let me take her home.

On December 29, I managed to track her doctor down. A nice man, he’d been the only one to reassure us when she was born, coming to my room and mentioning the tests that had been performed due to the ultrasounds during my pregnancy, then saying, “She looks fine to me.”

“When can I take her home?” I asked. I must have looked like a crazy woman, hair probably unwashed, tired puffy eyes, blotchy skin still covered with pregnancy acne.

“Well,” he said, “She needs to be taking all of her feedings by mouth and we want to see her weight stabilized.”

“It’s been stable for three days,” I said.

He looked surprised. “Then I think we can discharge her tomorrow.”

December 30 we brought her infant car seat and a little outfit and jacket and blanket to snuggle her in. I was so happy. Finally! Finally we were bringing her home, to her family, where she belonged. We took down the little hospital stocking the nurses hung by her bassinette, the little sign they made for her stand, her leftover packages of bottles and lids for the pump, the clothes and blankets and toys we’d left there with her, and got her dressed, and snugged in.

“After all,” as one nurse said, “If she loses weight again we can always readmit her.”

I pretended I didn’t hear her. Did these nurses see it as their job to discourage and frighten vulnerable new preemie moms?

We took her home, and tucked her snugged in a blanket into the little bedside bassinette we’d had ready for her for a week, and took a picture. We celebrated New Year’s that year the way new parents are supposed to celebrate it—at home, exhausted, asleep well before midnight, wondering what they had gotten themselves into. I finally had my happy ending.

Slightly obscured by slow growth and reflux, but happy nonetheless.

Why this sad/happy story, of all possible sad/happy stories, for the Tuesday Tearjerker this week?

Last week, one of my colleagues began experiencing third trimester bleeding. Which is scary, but not always bad. Except that this past weekend, she delivered her baby—a little girl.

The baby was due in November. She was not quite 29 weeks pregnant.

Frances was in the hospital only 8 days, which seemed endless and terrible at the time—but this little one has a much longer road ahead of her to rejoin her family at home. And thinking of it brings back all the fear and grief and anger of Frances’s birth, mixed in with the joy, and knowing how much harder and more frightening it must be for their little one to be born so early—

Most of the time, I don’t really think of her preemieness. It has since been overwhelmed by the growth and reflux and genetics issues we’ve dealt with on an ongoing basis, and besides being perhaps a little bit smaller than she otherwise would have been, Frances shows no signs of having been a preemie, except for a small Rubbermaid bin filled with unimaginably small clothing in the basement and a collection of photos showing a little baby who once fit on my forearm, head in my elbow, feet in my hands.

But this brings it back, and overshadows it again with another family’s much greater difficulty.

I don’t have the reach of one of the Big Bloggers, but please remember to send kind and healthy thoughts to this little girl and her parents as you go about your days.