There’s always someone. The first love, the one who took him away, the idiot who tells you everything will be fine, and then whispers behind your back about how you will never recover, and how he or she doesn’t understand what you saw in him in the first place, because he likes to drink Pepsi and grabs things with his toes, or some such blather. Whatever…that’s emotional pain. I tend to deal with that by quietly going through the five stages and then eating cake. Simple, huh? But physical pain??? Oh, I remember that stuff like Bruce Willis’ vital statistics. So, here is my letter to One Who Should Be Censured By Fire:
Mr. OB Resident,
You were a second-year resident the day I was giving birth to my son. You were a cocky individual, not only because you were in Obstetrics, but because you were going to deliver your first “officer baby”. Like that should be a feather in your cap, or something. But I gave you the benefit of the doubt, because everyone has to start somewhere. You came in and asked me if I had an aversion to needles. Answering in the negative, you proceeded to fill a syringe the size of a #2 pencil with some fluid, and when I asked what it was, you replied it was an epidural.
I told you in no uncertain terms I did not want an epidural.
You told me I did.
I told you five times I did NOT.
But in your mind, I was delirious with pain, and didn’t know what I was saying. So, you had the nurse bend me in half while carrying the equivalent of a fully mature watermelon in my midsection, while you prepared to inject me with the epidural. Not once, not twice, but four times.
Because you wouldn’t listen when I told you my lumbar are fused together like a lump of twisted bone.
To add insult to actual injury, you turned to the nurse and told her to call you when I was “under”. You just LEFT with no words to me or my husband as to what you were waiting on or doing. Thankfully, Hubby had had more than enough experience delivering babies to compensate for your lack. As I lay there, my back on fire from the jabbing, my abdomen contracting, I began to feel a numbness in my legs. My legs?? My confusion spread when you came back and without ceremony you told me to begin pushing, which I did. As the baby crowned, you then told me to stop, and to close my legs to prevent birth UNTIL YOU HAD THE LABOR ROOM READY. You left to oversee your minions, while Hubby and a sympathetic nurse tended to me.
Without warning, I told Hubby the baby was coming. Hubby replied that he knew. I wailed that I meant NOW. And as my final stick-it-to-the-man move, I delivered my son into his father’s arms. And that galled you. You had the nerve to lecture me in the delivery room about not following instructions. I laid there, trying to recover, and you went about your business talking to your friend. And to make matters worse, the epidural paralyzed me for hours, leaving me in fear that something had gone terribly wrong.
So, in short, I hope you have learned the value of having a good bedside manner. If not, I hope you were baptized by napalm.
Sincerely,
Mom Who Wields Machetes
