12:42 p.m. - 2006-09-05
Happy Birthday, Son
Monday, September 04, 2006
Currently Reading: Owl Island: A Novel
It was about 3:30 A.M. on a September morning. She had been asleep for a few hours.
She stayed up the night before watching Regis Philbin on his late night program. His special guest was Totie Fields. She always loved Totie because she was so funny and wore such over-the-top outfits. She remembered the program had been especially humorous that night and she had laughed a lot.
*Ms. Fields was a genuinely sharp, witty, caustic comedian, a popular guest on the talk show curcuit, who discovered she had a massive cancer growing in her left leg a couple of years later.
Her leg was amputated in 1976. She returned to performing in Las Vegas and on the Mike Douglas Show in October of 1977 with a prosthetic, incorporating her health problems into her comedy act very effectively.
It was then discovered she had breast cancer; her right breast was removed but still she continued to push on.
Her comeback was a short one; cancer, diabetes and a heart attack won out. Totie Fields died on August 2, 1978.*
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
Back to the regular scheduled blog...
So it must have been about midnight when she arranged her pillows just so and crawled into bed. Some nights it was so difficult to get any sleep. It had been so hot that summer and she didn�t have air conditioning. The windows were high and didn�t let in much air but she had been able to make a little nest of pillows and had fallen asleep.
She wasn�t sure at first what woke her. She rubbed the burn on her stomach but it wasn�t sore any more. She had accidentally burned it when she was ironing her blouse a few
days before. She touched her belly button but it wasn�t hurting either. She had actually run into the bedroom doorknob at least 3 times that week. She was only 5' 2" tall and the door knob and her belly button seemed to be at the same height recently. It had actually turned black and blue from being bruised.
Then she realized what woke her. She felt a pressure and realized she was laying on her stomach. She hadn�t done that in several months. Why in the world was she lying on her stomach? She managed to roll over and push her self up in the bed. Then she felt a strange sensation and thought she was going to be sick. She quickly got up and headed towards the bathroom.....oh no......what happened? What was that wetness?
She turned on the light and felt the pressure again. Was she wetting herself? And why didn�t it feel like it usually did? What was happening? Then she felt a funny little pressure and liquid was coming out.
Now she was fully awake! She rushed to the bathroom and grabbed a towel and starting wiping up the wetness on the floor. She felt the sensation again and sat on the toilet...now she was able to figure this out. She remembered reading about this in a book.
She was 3 weeks overdue and she knew that her water had just broken. She called her doctor. He asked "are you having any labor pains?". She thought for a moment and said, "No." Her doctor said when the labor pains start, head for the hospital when they are 10 minutes apart.
She hung up the phone and went back to bed and felt a pain. "Now wait a minute", she thought. "Just because the dr. asked about having pains, don�t start thinking you are in labor.".
She checked the clock and about 6 minutes later, there was another pain. These were much different than the Braxton Hicks that she had been having for weeks. And even though weeks ago some of those pains lasted for a couple of hours straight, they weren�t as hard as these were now.
Five minutes later, she had another one. She decided to call the police station and have her husband called on his radio. She remembered he had told her his beat had been changed and his car number too. Then she recalled the dispatcher was changed as well.
She called the station, asked for the dispatcher and told him to alert her husband to call his Station H. (That is police talk for CALL YOUR HOME.) The dispatcher didn�t seem to understand. She told him again that her husband had a different beat number and car number, his name, his personnel number and that she was 3 weeks overdue for a baby and she was in labor now! She turned on the police radio and heard the call go out finally.
The next thing she heard was the screeching of tires and she saw headlights in her front window. Her husband and another officer came busting through the kitchen door. She explained she was now having hard contractions about 5 minutes apart. Her husband was so nervous, all he could think of was explaining to the other officer where his gear was, where to put the gear at the station and to lock up the shotgun and so on.
She was now having contractions hard enough that she had to bend over when she went into the contraction. She couldn�t understand why he kept talking to the other officer instead of talking to her. Finally she told him. "I�m having this baby in a few minutes and I need to go to the hospital right now!".
She had her suitcase packed and was dressed and ready to go. Finally, her words got through to her husband and they started for the squad car. He told her he could go "lights and sirens" but she said going quickly with the lights on would be just fine. They pulled into the emergency room parking lot. She had to stop a couple of times on the way to the door
due to the increasingly severe labor pains. When they finally got to the door; there was a sign that the E.R. Door was closed from midnight to 6:00 A.M.
So they walked all the way back to the squad car, stopping for her pains to subside a few times. Her husband drove her around to the front door, they slowly walked towards the door and ran into another officer who asked what was going on. They explained she was finally in labor and went inside.
From there on; it was a fast pace of being taken to a room, given a gown to wear, using the bathroom and fearing she was going to give birth in the toilet and then being put into a bed.
They checked and she was dilated to 4. She had been at 3 the week before at the doctor�s office. They gave her something intravenously and let her husband in the room. He had been busy filling out insurance papers downstairs. She told him what had been going on.
The nurses had told her not to push and that they would be back to check on her later. She asked about her doctor being called and they said it wasn�t time yet. She talked to her husband briefly and then felt a couple of extremely uncomfortable pains. She could feel it start near her spine and work around to the front of her belly, getting harder and harder.
She had the feeling of wanting to push. After the second wave, she told her husband to get the nurse because she had to push.
The nurse whipped off the sheet, said "Oh my God! You have dilated completely!" She pushed a buzzer, another nurse came in and they told her husband that she was going to the delivery room NOW!!
She was whizzing down the corridors and watching the overhead lights go by. The nurses kept saying, "DON�T PUSH, HONEY, DON�T PUSH!!"
She was taken into a room, managed to pull herself over to the delivery bed and they started putting her arms into straps and her legs into leg straps and cleaning her. She asked for her doctor. They said they had just called him and he was on his way and she couldn�t push until he got there!!
She did everything she could think of not to push, she breathed out, she squeezed the hand rails on the bed, she counted and finally told them. "I have to push, I can�t stop it"
A doctor who was on duty came in, washed up and checked her. He told her it was time and when the next contraction started to tell him. She did and he said "Push until I tell you to stop."
One nurse helped her sit up a bit and told her to squeeze her hand if necessary. When the contraction started, she took a deep breath and starting pushing. She felt the pressure and then felt something pop. The doctor said "stop pushing". Then she heard her baby cry. The doctor said "The baby is crying and only the head is out!"
It was then that her own doctor walked into the room. He told the doctor on call to finish the delivery and he would just watch. "When you feel the next contraction, push as hard as you can." The next one came and she delivered her baby. They put the baby on her stomach and she could feel the heat of his body. He was red and crying. It was 4:47 A.M.
JUST BARELY OVER AN HOUR SINCE SHE FIRST WOKE UP THAT MORNING.!!!
The nurses took him to clean him up and get his vitals while the doctor finished with her.
They soon told her that the baby weighed 7 lbs. 5 oz. and appeared to be very healthy.
The doctor suggested if she ever had another child to come directly to the hospital once her labor pains started because they thought she would always be a quick delivery mother.
She was still in the delivery room while they finished up their work and made sure she was doing fine. A nurse came in and said the Police Dept. Had already called and was given the information about the baby.
She asked what her husband said. The nurses said. "Oh, we haven�t told him yet!"
She said "Don�t you think the father would like to know that he has a healthy son before the entire Police Dept. knows?"
When she was being wheeled to her room, her husband was brought by the nursery and they both saw the baby together.
In those days, the husbands were NOT allowed in the delivery room and they didn�t even think to put a mirror up so she could watch the delivery.
That was September 5, 1968....HAPPY BIRTHDAY, SON!!
Virgo personality traits
Virgo personality - The Virgo Zodiac Sign is ruled by Mercury.
Your Sun Zodiac sign may not best describe your personality features, your characteristics and general qualities that you bring to life. For many people, their Ascendant or its planetary ruler is the more obvious characteristic, or sometimes the Moon sign. Your Sun sign, rather, says more about the direction you should be moving in, to make the contribution to humanity you were born to make, and thus achieve a degree of personal fulfilment.
Every sign rules a part of the body, Virgo the intestines. This provides a vital clue as to the function of Virgo within the whole of humanity. Think of what the intestines do. They take in energy in the form of food, and break it down into its constituent parts. Then they analyse the components and see how they can be made to be useful. Perhaps some will be combined with others, some will be stored for later use, and some will be eliminated as being useless. Virgo takes in substance and discriminates between what is useful and what isn't, and works with it so that it may be more useful still, and thus be of service to humanity. That is the key to it all - service.
Traits of a Virgo:
Analyst
Purist
Plays safe
Worrier
Has mood swings
Perfectionist
Easily learns mastery
Demands respect
Fair judgement
Pessimistic
Frequently depressed
Destructive at times
Likes...
Pursuit of 'trueness'
Standards
Proper methodology
Practicality
Neat & tidy
Friendliness
Dislikes...
Chaos
Noise
Assymetry
Change
Risk
Nagging
HAPPY BIRTHDAY, SON.....AND WE HOPE YOUR NEXT YEAR IS THE BEST YET!!!
LOVE MOM AND DAD
