A Mississippi Birth

Warning: The following post is rated R for obscene language. Read at your own risk.

This is a post about childbirth. Don't worry, I'll do my best not to over share, but this wouldn't be a very complete blog about life in Mississippi if we didn't tell you about our most significant interaction with medical professionals down here.

Our birth story starts pretty much like every other one. At some point on Saturday night I realized that my stomach pains were contractions and not a result of combining the taco tailgate, frozen yogurt, sweet potato fries, and a heart breaking Mississippi State loss. A few hours later, around 2am, I woke up Phil. A few hours after that, around 5am, my water broke and I made the executive decision that we were going to the hospital. My contractions weren't doing what the books said they would be doing, but I was in pain and decided to throw my plans for a natural childbirth out the window. While quietly saying "fffuuuuuucccckkkkk" with every contraction was comforting to me, it wasn't going to get me through hours and hours of this. I wanted an epidural.

We arrived at an empty emergency room and quite hospital, I got put in a delivery room around 6am, and was still exhaling "fuck" with every contraction. At which point the following conversation took place:

Nurse A: Oh my, I don’t know if I can do this.
Phil (dumbfound): What?
Nurse A (looking at me): You need to pick another word.
Phil (even more dumbfounded): She’s in labor!
Nurse A: I’m a Christian. I just…just…
Sarah: Are you kidding me?
Nurse B (with a whole lot of attitude): The next shift will be here soon.
Phil: You guys just need to stop talking!

Then they checked me.

Seriously. That really happened. The nurse told me to stop swearing and then said she needed to see what my cervix was doing. Let's just say that was not a pleasant few moments. She did learn that I was complete, the baby's head was down, and I was ready to push. Apparently we did not do a very good job of timing my contractions because we had no idea I was that far along. This meant I would be doing this without any pain meds, despite my moment of weakness. Chaos ensued as they ran around paging the (not very friendly) on-call doctor and setting up the delivery bed. Four contractions later Evelyn Miriam was born...into a room filled with her loving parents and three judging hypocrites. Granted, our knowledge of the New Testament is pretty limited, but we're pretty sure Jesus would be more offended by them passing judgment than by my cuss words.

At some point after the birth Nurse A came in and apologized. This was after she found out we are Jewish. Maybe she figured since our souls were already lost it didn't matter if I swore in her presence?

The rest of our time at Oktibbeh County Hospital was less eventful--although we were constantly amazed at the lack of professionalism and the little information imparted to new parents. For example, every nurse we interacted with kept talking about "tee-tee." What the fuck is "tee-tee?" It's urine. Apparently that's too un-Christian of a word to use in a hospital.

To the delivery nurses at OCH we say:


To all of you, we leave you with some pictures of Evvy's first week (courtesy of my dad):

Evvy--days 3-6