Everybody has a story of their birth: here’s Grey’s.

Sunday, May 3rd, 2009
From 9:00 AM to 7:00 PM, Amy, Athena and I slept in a little after a busy Saturday; I had played soccer in the afternoon and worked on trying to finish my final papers for school while Amy ran some errands and cleaned the house (again). We went out for breakfast, got some work done at home, then took Athena for some frisbee and a walk down Picnic Point. Amy mentioned some contractions but neither of us thought much about them. Why would we? She wasn’t due for another week.

Around 7:00 PM we ate dinner, and I settled into doing work on my paper while Amy went into organization mode, sorting through baby gifts and prepping her lunches for the week. About 9:20, I poured myself a Guinness and a small side of Jameson to help lubricate the paper writing. At 9:24, I update my Facebook status to: Trent writes to help him drink.

At about 9:50, Amy comes upstairs to to sit in bed and read while I work. She asks if I think it’s a good idea to be drinking. Suspicious, I ask why, and Amy tells me (for the first time) that she’s been having contractions on and off for the whole day, but they seem to be getting more regular.

By 10:05 they’re starting to intensify so I start writing them down, but we’re still telling ourselves that these are probably false contractions—Amy’s not due for another week (this is a recurring theme). At 10:37, I’m having trouble calculating the times and, not without sarcastic comment from Amy, I begin tracking the contractions in an Excel spreadsheet that calculates the time between contractions, their duration, and the average for both sets of data. As the numbers come in, we see that they’re fairly regular intervals of 3-5 minutes for contractions and lasting 50 seconds to a minute. I pour the rest of my Guinness down the drain.

Around 11:30 Amy phones the obstetrician on call who isn’t much help—we’re know first-time parents tend to go to the hospital too soon, but the obstetrician only says we should go when we feel ready… whatever that means. The contractions have built to the point where Amy can hardly give me instructions on where to push on her back to help her out.

At 11:54, the stats show contractions coming every four minutes and lasting fifty-two seconds over the last two hours. We decide that, even though these are probably false contractions (Amy’s not due for a week yet) we should pack the car and get to the hospital—just in case.

Monday, May 4th, 2009
From midnight to about 12:30 AM, I started packing the car, checking off the list of all the last-minute things we hadn’t already put in our hospital duffel bags. Amy is fine between contractions, but when they hit, they stop her in her tracks.

We get to the hospital around 1:00 AM. Because Amy is Amy, she prefers to walk rather than take a wheelchair to the fifth floor birthing unit. She has to stop every few minutes when the contractions hit. In triage, the resident informs us that Amy’s dilated about four to five centimeters. When asked whether it’s baby time, he says there’s a slight chance this could reverse itself but his money would be on us having a baby in the near future.

We get settled into the room and start the check-in procedures, meeting the nurse who will be helping us through the labor. The private birthing suite is very nice and Amy starts unpacking, but the contractions are coming quickly and severely enough that she can’t do it. At 1:30 AM, I retreat to the hallway and call both sets of grandparents, telling them we think it’s “go time.”

For the next ninety minutes or so, the contractions decrease in time and increase in intensity, and Amy’s becoming visibly exhausted under the strain. We move her from the bed to the bathtub and try the whirlpool jets which seem to help alleviate some of the pain—for all of ten minutes. She can hardly speak even between contractions now, and she goes through contortions when they do hit. For a husband, this is torture to watch. We had planned for a natural birth with no interventions, but that plan is being shredded by the reality unfolding before us; Amy is dilated about five to six centimeters, only half-way to the full ten centimeters needed. And then there’s the actual pushing. This is back labor, meaning the pain is due to the baby’s head not rotated enough to drop into position so it pushes against the lower back.

A quick conference between the doctor, nurse, Amy, and I, and we decide that she needs an epidural to save her remaining strength. All of us had hoped to avoid it, but things were not good; Amy was a ghost, pale and shaking between contractions and unrecognizable during them. At 3:36 AM, a charmless anesthesiologist came in and inserted the epidural robotically, but he did his job well and after about twenty minutes Amy slowly came back to life. Exhausted, we grab a few hours of rest from 4:00 to 6:00 AM.

At 6:30 AM, the doctor gives news we didn’t want to hear—Amy’s dilation progression stalled out at five to six centimeters due to the epidural. After another brief conference, we decide that Amy’s membranes should be manually ruptured. Although this sounds like she’s going to be stuffed full of TNT and detonated, it’s really much more benign. They slip in a tool that looks like a chopstick with a tiny hook on the end, give a small tug, and cause her water to break. This hopefully drops the baby into a better position and restart the dilation process. Of course if this doesn’t work, it would likely mean more really unwanted interventions—including a drug-induced labor and C-section delivery.

Amy is back to her usual self now, restored by the nap and the epidural relief. She has difficulty feeling her contractions and, to her disappointment, also has difficulty feeling her legs. She can move them from side to side, but can’t lift them. Even though this isn’t the experience we wanted, I don’t think either of us could have handled the alternative. Not for the first time, I shudder to think about what this process must have been like 100 years ago.

At 9:00 another check reveals Amy’s dilated to ten centimeters, but she’s not quite up to pushing yet. She rests for another hour, but we begin with the pushing at ten after 10:00. In days gone by, the expectant father had to pace out in the waiting room far from the action; nowadays, the expectant father holds one of his wife’s legs as she pushes every few minutes. Amy felt most comfortable on her side and, around 11:00 or so after the nurse did some fiddling around with netherparts, I see the top of the baby’s head. The nurse fires up the heater over the baby bassinet to get it warm. Amy asks if we’re that close, and I joke that it took the machine seven hours to warm up. We laugh.

After repeated rounds of pushing, the top of baby’s head is clearly visible by 11:30. Another ten minutes pass and the nurse positions Amy into a sitting position and swings out the stirrups. From this position, the head is fairly bulging out. There’s some commotion in the room and I notice the resident and the attending have both gowned up and wheel in a cart and a spotlight. My breathing picks up as Amy looked at me and says, “Are we really that close?”

The next couple minutes formed one of the most intense experiences of my life. The spotlight went on and I knew that in mere moments we would finally meet the little person that had been squirming around inside Amy for the better part of a year. The top of the head emerged and my chest tightened. They repositioned the baby’s shoulders and urged Amy for one more push, and out the baby came, wet and purple and squealing. And at 11:47 AM, there was a brand new person in the room.

Ten fingers, ten toes, a full head of hair, and parts that marked the child out as definitely a boy. I cut the umbilical cord, and they placed the baby on mom’s chest, where he instantly fell asleep. Greyson Beck Hergenrader came into the world on May 4th, 2009 at 11:47 AM, weighing 7 pounds and 1 ounce, measuring 19.5 inches long.