Everything You Never Wanted To Know About Delivery (Srsly, Don't Read This Post)

Okay, let's do this.
It's 6:00 am, I've been up for almost an hour an a half, I'm jazzed up on coffee, and my ta-tas are feeling scrumptious from their recent pumping

(If you thought I was gonna ease you into the disturbing nature of this post, you were wrong. dead wrong. Abandon this blog, oh ye of faint heart and testicles)

So.
The birthing process.
Yeah....not so much miraculous. More like a humiliating disgust-fest the likes of which we haven't seen since Courtney Love slopped her way through MTV.


But where to start?

I could start in the Maternal Fetal Medicine office, where we went in for a routine ultrasound and came out with marching orders to head straight to the hospital to deliver. But there's nothing funny about being told that people are about to open you up and take out babies. ESPECIALLY when you were looking forward to a leisurely Panera breakfast.

So let's start in Obstetrics Triage where, after some routine placement of monitoring devices, a chatty, grandmotherly nurse strolled in with an electric razor and volunteered me for some Hoo-Hah landscaping.
Poor Brian.
It was SO CLOSE to every guy's porn fantasy. So close....and yet...so far. She chatted away about her grandkiddies, expertly grooming my nethers into a trendy surgical coiffe, while Brian looked at the walls...at the ceiling...at the monitors...everywhere but right in front of him, where a potentially hot sex scene had made a hard left turn into Nightmare-ville.

But it was just the first of a series of events that stripped away my femanine allure, piece by piece, until I was reduced to a leaking, sweating, emotional lump of deflated baby belly.
Seriously.
You know why so many teens date, get knocked up, manage to stay together until the baby is born, and then promptly break up?
It's not the responsibility of caring for an infant.
No.
No indeed.
It's actually because the hormone-filled boy stands by and watches helplessly as his once-attractive girlfriend with the skinny jeans and the emo hair hemorrhages and constipates and leaks boob juice and suffers through the awkward disturbance of every bodily process known to man.

You want to know what they don't tell you?

They don't tell you that it takes about 25 minutes to set up the operating room for a C-section and the entire time, you're laying on this narrow table, arms out crucifix-style, completely exposed from the boobs down, while 10 to 15 people bustle about laying out instruments and scrubbing your belly and what have you.

They don't tell you that, sure, spinal blocks are fantastic, but in return you have to spend the next 24 hours being wheeled around with your pee bag hooked on to your armrest.

They don't tell you that C-sections may spare your vagina the trauma of ripping and tearing, but either way, you'll bleed out your coochie like a motherf*cker for 6 weeks post-partum.

They don't tell you that the combination of abdominal stitches and days of narcotics tie up your bowels so badly that you'll spend an hour on the can with an unmovable lump of lead stuck somewhere between your out-hole and the toilet bowl.

They don't tell you that if you plan on breast feeding but your kids are otherwise occupied in the NICU, you're expected to place these suction cups on your boobs and sit around for about 10-15 minutes, every 3 hours, day and night, while you're essentially milked like a dairy cow.

And they don't tell you that a week or two later, even though your belly is starting look more like a human mid-section and less like a droopy sack of flour, and even though your bleeding level has been reduced from tsunami to babbling brook, and even though your boobs have gotten HUGE (which is a definite plus for us less-well-endowed ladies), you'll be sweating profusely every night that even if your husband wanted to touch you again (which is questionable, considering he witnessed the above insults), he couldn't because his hand would slip right off your slimy, clammy skin.

You guys.

And I thought pregnancy was humiliating??
Dude...that was just a warm-up.

People have done things to my privates that I never want to speak of again.
Brian has played audience to bodily functions that before this experience I swore I would never expose him to (because everyone knows that girls don't poop).
I have leaked more fluids from more parts of the body than I knew existed.

Honestly, the only thing in this world that would be worth the aforementioned physical assault of all things gross and disgusting is my kids.

So let's take a moment to thank God or Allah or whoever schemed up this whole reproduction thing for giving us the greatest reward of all time in exchange for the horribleness of delivery.

Was it worth it in the end?
Absolutely.
But I swear to God, I'll never do it again.

Well...maybe.