Chapter 1: Birth
By Stephania Silveira Hines and Michael Hines
Twentieth of March two thousand and eighteen: the worst and the best day of my life.
The best because at 7.47am my daughter was born.
The worst because at 7.48am, she stopped breathing.
For 6 minutes.
6 whole minutes.
Before that, I had no idea what ‘long-lasting’ meant.
I thought it meant waiting for a night bus on a cold day in London. Or enduring an hour-long mass when, as a child, my parents forced me to go to church.
As I was lying behind the green curtain in the emergency C-section theatre at the Whittington Hospital and I watched the cardiac arrest team storm into the room, time got stuck.
Until that day, my pregnancy had been uneventful. Except for the tiredness and sickness of the first trimester, I felt good most of the time. Plus, all the scary morphological scans indicated everything was normal with my child.
I was confident my birth was going to be something out of a hippie doula video — the baby coming out with less effort than a little trapped fart after eating brussel sprouts or cauliflower.
So when I wrote my birth plan, I decided to have my child in the birth pool. No major drugs. I downloaded a few hypnobirthing guided meditations and listened to them in the bath, visualising the moment my baby would come out in the water and I would have him or her (I didn’t find out the gender beforehand) skin-to-skin on my chest.
Most pregnancies, however, rarely go smoothly until the end. When I went to see the midwife for my 39 weeks check up, she noticed my bump was measuring smaller than before.
Two days later, after a scan, I found out that my amniotic liquid was slightly reduced. The doctors told me I had to be induced immediately.
At around 4pm, the midwife inserted the tiny tampon that was going to stimulate my uterus to start contracting.
And so it started, with a mild pain similar to my first day of period.
I was calm, WhatsApping my family and friends, asking them to distract me with any gossip — the over-the-top Brazilian wedding of the week, the next blogger to get divorced, the last stupid thing that Morrissey said in an interview — anything that would take my mind off the pain.
As the night rolled on, the contractions became more and more painful. At 2am, I was totally in control, practicing the hypnobirthing exercises: breath in for 4 seconds, breath out for 8 seconds.
I put on some of my favourite music and started dancing. And as a good track always helped me run that extra 5k, it helped me to endure labour.
But then the contractions were becoming more and more frequent. They were beyond the 3 per 10 minutes mark. There wasn’t much time to rest before another one started.
At 3.30am, I was lying on the swiss ball, groaning and swearing like a motherfucker.
Michael called the midwife and I asked for some pain relief. She came in with a can of gas and air.
Inhaling that thing took me back to university, when I used to snort a drug called Lança-Perfume — an ambient deodorant very popular in Brazil, that has been applied as anesthetic a long time ago and became famous for supercharging people during carnival. Now that I was about to be a mother, was this the last time I was going to be high in my life?
And then — boom — my water broke. Tears rolled down my cheeks when I saw my pair of Adidas leggings completely soaked in amniotic liquid. My baby! My baby was coming!
The nurse came in with the monitor to check baby’s heartbeat.
Silence.
Every time I had a contraction, the baby’s heart rate was going down. She called the senior midwife, who saw it and immediately told us:
“You two are going down. To the labour ward.”
Screaming in pain, I jumped on a wheelchair holding my can of Gas and Air like an alcoholic holds a can of beer. I was so high I didn’t register how alarmed the midwives were.
Down at the labour ward, they gave me an injection to slow down the contractions. And it worked. The baby’s heart rate went back to normal. But the midwife told me I was only 2cm dilated, after more than 10 hours of labour.
Fuck this shit, I needed an epidural.
The anesthetic doctor came in the room. I checked his credentials. His name was Tom Petty. I riffed a few verses of American Girl, but thank God I was sober enough to remember I have a terrible voice.
The epidural was starting to work, but I could still feel the contractions getting stronger and stronger.
And as I was preparing to settle down and finally stop feeling pain after 14 hours of induced labour, something happened. Something that I’ll never forget until the very last day of my life. A moment that will haunt me forever, like one of those banners that keeps popping up after you search for electronics or cosmetics online.
I wish I could describe what happened more thoroughly. The truth is, I can’t remember anything more than the way I was feeling: scared, exhausted and constantly asking myself: “Is this real?”
Some flashbacks, however, still come back in my nightmares:
A red button.
A siren.
My baby’s heart rate dropping on the bedside monitor.
A nurse beside my bed explaining the risks of an emergency C-Section and asking me to sign a piece of paper.
The doctor with a strong Asian accent dabbing his fingers on my pelvis and asking if I could feel his touch.
Michael by my side wearing surgical scrubs.
In what felt like less than 10 minutes, my baby was out.
I didn’t hear her crying.
I’ll never forgive the fact that I don’t have the photo where I hold my baby with tears in my eyes and Michael looks at me like he’s never been so in love. That photo that would have a thousand likes on my social media profile didn’t happen.
The big surprise “is it a boy or a girl?” was replaced by “is it dead or alive?
A group of 4 or 5 doctors stormed into the room and Michael went away to try to find out what was happening.
I was left screaming on the surgical table as if I was a character in a Brazilian soap opera: “Will my baby be OK? Can someone tell me what’s going on? Whhhhheeeere’s my baby?”
And unlike Brazilian nurses, who’d probably hold my hand and tell me to have faith in God and that He would take care of everything, one Eastern-European woman approached me and said: We don’t know if your baby is OK yet. We’re doing everything we can.
The British health system is definitely not for beginners.
I was moved to a recovery room while Michael went to the neonatal CTI to find out what was going on.
And while I sat there, with no baby in my hands, that was when I became a mother.
When I realized that our little ones choose their own paths into this world.
Accepting that they’ll come and fuck with our birth plan, life plan, holiday plan — that’s motherhood. More than holding babies skin-to-skin or enduring the pain of breastfeeding, there’s nothing more maternal than letting go. And abandoning the urge to control every step of our children.
No one tells you this in books about child psychology or how the French, the Danish or the Aliens raise their kids.
So as I waited for Michael to come back with some news, I asked the midwife for some morphine. I said a little prayer and handed my daughter’s life over to the universe. I slept for 4 hours straight, until Michael came back saying she was finally able to breath without the help of machines.
Emergency C-Sections might be essential for the continued survival of the human race, but they’re an awful spectator sport.
It goes like this: you make a birth plan, and then life has other plans, ‘everyone’s got a plan until they’re punched in the face,’ etc. It is some time after midnight and life had already yanked our detailed birth plan off the rails and onto the sidings — due to some issues with the amniotic fluid & the placenta, my wife is in the middle of an induced birth.
Now, after several hours of Entonox, Propess to induce the labour, some other drug meant to slow down the accelerated contractions induced by the Propess, and an Epidural, she is as high as I’ve ever seen her — which, for the record, was at a Tame Impala gig in the Hollywood Forever Cemetery in 2015.
She has started talking to one of the midwives in French, and upon finding out that the anaesthetist administering the epidural is called Tom Petty, proceeds to slur a series of mis-remembered lyrics to Heartbreakers songs at him.
Her waters have broken but something odd is happening with the contractions, and we are moving wards.
There is one other occupant on the labour ward, and judging from the screams down the corridor, it’s quite clear to me that they aren’t in labour at all, but are the unfortunate victim of some clandestine MI6 interrogation and torture programme that is using NHS hospitals as cover.
I make a note to report this waste of taxpayers’ money to Amnesty International and The Daily Mail afterwards, but I am too busy for such things now: the birthing books have stated that my role in proceedings, due to my lack of a womb, vagina or any other vital birthing organs, is as the guardian of oxytocin, the good-vibes generator, pillar of masculine support and giver of food. This is a lot of jobs for someone who cannot walk and chew gum at the same time, but I am dedicated to fulfilling my sacred masculine office with distinction.
Something in the manner of the midwives, the way that they are checking the equipment and how it is fitted to my wife, the intensity with which they are looking at the charts, suggests that the routine checks of the baby’s heartbeat have become less-than-routine.
Steph has started, as the drugs begin to wear away at the edges of her consciousness, to focus on this, asking every few minutes how the child’s heartbeat is doing. I add to my list of roles The ECG Reader, forced to continually scrutinize the readout as if I know what I’m doing and make banal observations about the heartrate dropping and then returning to normal.
This lasts up until the point when a consultant comes in, looks at it, says the word ‘deceleration’, and then reaches over and slaps an ominous red button, the sort that in films and movies are generally used to indicate that very bad things are about to happen, or that some state of higher alert is necessary.
An alarm goes off, and a large enough quantity of people to scare the shit out of me enter the ward. I am told an emergency C-section is about to occur, sign a form, and then Steph bursts into tears as they wheel her away.
After she has gone out of my sight and almost everyone has vacated the labour ward, a straggler hands me a set of scrubs as an apologetic afterthought, as if to underline some larger punchline about my pointlessness in the scheme of things.
When I enter surgery, they are giving Steph more fucking drugs — people pay a lot of money at music festivals to get this off their face — pushing her further into the zone of uncomprehension.
I am pointless, peripheral and exhausted, but I will be the one that bears witness to whatever happens next, who will be asked to explain why and when and where things went wrong at the inquest.
I come in and take up residence on a stool next to her, above the green sheet that they have hung up to hide them gutting my wife like a fish.
Steph is asking about the baby’s heartbeat.
Because I cannot bring myself to lie and say that everything is going to be fine, I am reduced to holding her hand, kissing her on the forehead, and telling her that I am there, repeating the fact of my own existence as a mantra as if to reassure both of us that I am somehow less pathetic for it.
I continue pretending that I know what is going on, when in truth this childbirth is nothing but a brutal scattering to the four winds of any illusions that I might have had about being in control of my life and fate, let alone those of my wife or the child we are meant to be delivering.
Steph is asking about the baby’s heartbeat.
The doctors go to work. My sense of time has been bent out of shape by lack of sleep, but it seems fast — too fast — the speed that they remove the baby from my wife’s womb. I hear the doctors, in tones light and forced enough to confirm that this a performance for the people on the other side of the sheet, welcome my child into the world.
Steph is asking about the baby’s heartbeat.
In the period — it might have been a few minutes, or even ten — when I am huddled behind a sheet, holding my wife’s hand, waiting to hear if the child that they have just torn from her womb will cry, I learn that I have never known what fear really feels like.
The doctors and nurses say something about it being a girl, but they are dwelling on the wrong issue by not telling me if it — if she, it is a girl, I am required to treat it as a person and not an abstract object now — is alive or not.
Steph is asking about the baby’s heartbeat.
If the child is dead, I decide, I would prefer that they do not give it a face, a sex, or an identity.
I then watch as they carry my child — my child’s body — over to a trolley, and one of the doctors, in a tone of gradual escalating urgency, rubs her with a towel and entreats her to breath.
I am such a coward that I don’t look over my shoulder, because I don’t want to discover that my daughter is dead.
Steph, despite the drugs and what she has been through, is somehow still asking about the baby’s heartbeat.
Repeatedly, I beg for someone to tell me what is going on. I am parried with the explanation that someone will come and tell me everything soon, a misdirection performed with the practised ease of people used to delaying the giving of bad news until they know precisely how bad it is.
We agreed that if it was a girl, her name would be Margot.
Eventually, I am brought over, and watch as someone extracts a milky-white fluid from Margot’s lungs with a syringe, and she undergoes assisted respiration through a mask. Her chest is fluttering up and down, in a way that indicates that she is having problems breathing.
I stick my finger out in the hope that she will grab it. This is what parents are meant to do with newborns — the books and films have told me so.
Steph is asking about the baby’s heartbeat.
Whilst this is going on, she is being stitched up on the operating table, and I am trying to make reassuring gestures and noises to her because I can’t bear her to think about the possibility that after everything she has just endured, our child is about to die.
Steph is wailing about ‘my baby’.
None of the nightmares I had about this have been quite vivid enough.
In what feels like the first of many impossible decisions and compromises that I will have to make if I ever get to be a father, I’m asked to choose between staying with my exhausted, drugged, panicking wife or accompanying my barely-alive, not breathing, newborn daughter.
I pick the baby — it would be a shame to waste what might be all the minutes I ever get with her.
When I eventually see my daughter, she is in an incubator, a rare and precious plant kept in a miniature glass box. My first contact with her is not the ‘vital’ skin-to-skin time, but touching her through two holes in glass, in the manner of a biologist handling toxic waste.
She is asleep, but she is breathing.
I ask about the baby’s heartbeat, and am told that it is perfectly regular.
When I return to see Steph, she is awake, abandoned, refusing to believe that Margot is alright and improving, will not take any positive report or news from me or anyone else until she has seen and touched the child with her own hands & eyes.
Someone explains to us that what happened is that the umbilical cord, priceless lifeline from mother to daughter, had formed a noose around Margot’s neck, and with every contraction, got a bit tighter. I resolve to keep jokes about this being the first of many times that we would want to throttle our daughter until a little later on.
Within 48 hours, our daughter graduates from neo-natal CTI to the maternity ward, and we are together again.
Over the next week, I see many other parents moaning about sleeplessness, breastfeeding, the size of their ward, but none of these seem that important as long as my daughter is breathing.
It is six months later, and I still find myself going into her room in the middle of the night to watch her little chest go up and down.
Every time I hear her cry, I think about those minutes of silence, and the much longer silence that might have followed them.
