How to Get Your Partner to the Hospital When She Is About to Give Birth
The bun has been in the oven for nine months and is now golden brown in color. Time to get it!
As the mother-to-be completes another set of pins and changes her birthing playlist, you, the non-pregnant, should be focused on one goal: safely transporting your partner to the delivery facility of her choice.
This will be a kinetic operation. You will serve as an escort, confidant, valet and bodyguard. Your discomfort, embarrassment, hunger, or sleepiness doesn’t matter. Success is a young mother holding a tiny baby to her breast. Bad luck is a Craigslist ad for a used Subaru Forester with a navigation system, tinted windows and a front passenger seat soaked in amniotic fluid. Do not let me down.
Intelligence service
Find out all possible routes to the hospital. Drive them on different days of the week, at different times of the day. And yes, you should drive. Now is not the time for public transport. Some things are meant for privacy in a private car: singing along with Pink, fart, screaming breath during contractions. Does your wife want to go viral on a train by some disgusting teenager? No, she’s not.
The second half of the intelligence concerns the hospital itself. Are you logging in through ER? How many steps are there from curb to labor and delivery? When is the shift change? How is the lighting at night? Know this place well enough that you could do a heist like Ocean’s Eleven if George Clooney asked you politely.
It wasn’t until my wife and I entered the hospital at three in the morning that I realized that the front door was about a hundred yards from the front desk. She could walk a few steps, cry out during a fight, and then walk a little more. According to Guinness, it holds the record for the slowest 40-yard dash of any bipedal mammal. I am to blame for achieving it. Make better.
Convince
Childbirth is painful and difficult, but at home it is a little less awful. The hospitals are cold and brightly lit. They are full of moody people and the snacks are rubbish. The house has a solid Wi-Fi connection, dim lights, fluffy slippers, and implicit permission for weirdness. At home, your partner will feel emotionally free to yell at you, cry, laugh, and eat ice cream half naked. Once labor begins, do not go to the hospital too early, but also do not wait too long.
As a confidant and valet, you must be proactive during this time. Don’t wait for your partner to ask for help or comfort. She will be in pain whenever a contraction comes, and if this is her first contraction, she is likely to feel anxious or fearful. In such a state, it is difficult to formulate your needs!
Find out what the delivery steps look like. Take a course in obstetrics. Read about coping mechanisms. Hire a doula if you’re afraid you will be overwhelmed. But mostly think about the times when you’ve had to convince your partner to do something she doesn’t want. What methods of persuasion work best? Rely on this experience when things get tense.
When we tried to leave the house in the middle of the night, my wife and I stood in the driveway for 20 minutes. The passenger door was open. She gripped the armrest with one hand and the doorframe with the other. No matter what I said, she didn’t get into the car. She was frozen, locked in her own head. Finally, I went back to basics. “If you don’t get in the car, we won’t be able to go to the hospital,” I said. “Oh,” she said and climbed inside.
Transport
When it’s time, be the dude inDrive , notBaby Driver . Both guys get their people where they need to go, but one takes unnecessary chances. You don’t have to rev the engine and do a bunch of turns. Be calm, discreet, confident.
My attorneys don’t want me to tell you this, but they agree with the unconventional seating. These include: lying in the back seat; strapped in, sticking their head out of the window, vomiting; The middle seats have been removed from the minivan, buried in a nest of blankets. My wife knelt in the front seat, facing back, as I raced at a low level through the deserted streets. I reasoned that, since we headed to the hospital, any potential injury from a car accident would be immediately repaired.
Advocate
Childbirth in the United States is much more dangerous than it should be . The chances of complications are increased if your partner’s health history contains circumstances outside the normal range. The second time she gave birth to my wife, elected to VBAC . Most women who try to do this succeed, but the risk of uterine rupture is increased.
My wife and I are ordinary people, so we followed the recommendations. When the contractions were over, we went to the hospital, where the nurse, whom we had never met, did some tests and told us to go home. False labor.
After about seven hours we returned to the hospital. The wife gave birth 10 minutes after arrival. During those seven hours, as she moaned in bed, as her body trembled in the bathtub, as she stared at a thousand yards, I kept thinking, ” False labor is not a joke!”
Later, it became apparent to me the risk that she was going through. We did what we were told. But her doctor was not there that night, and the staff and attendants only knew what the charts and devices told them. So, my wife experienced an active labor and transition period only with my help. And I faint at the sight of blood.
Of all the roles, the bodyguard is the most important. You must be an active advocate. Don’t bow to authority. Question the information being told if it doesn’t match up with what your partner is feeling. Be respectful, but direct and persistent. Ask for more tests or more observation time. Ask another doctor to look around again. People may look askance at you. Do not worry. If something gets dangerous, you will be in the right place. And if all goes well, you will become another strict nursing patient whose worries mean nothing, just another example of the tedious miracle of life.