Luke, Chapter 1 at 11:05 PM

This story will be broken up into a series of posts. I don't know how many yet, because I haven't even finished writing in longhand. But we'll see.

Also, before I start, a shout out goes to Joel for getting "O Brother Where Art Thou?" as the answer to the question in my last post. Good job, Joel. On to the story of how my son came into the world (minus graphic details, of course). This is--for the most part--what I wrote while sitting in the hospital after the birth:

At about 3:00 AM Friday (12/31), Jessica started having contractions. I woke up at about 6:00 and started writing down the times when she had them so that we could see the intervals. By the time I had to go to work at about 11:00, they were about 10 minutes apart. I should mention that we were scheduled to be induced this Friday (1/7) if it didn't happen on its own first. The doctor was pretty sure it wasn't going to happen on its own, so Jessica was resigned to waiting another week, much to her chagrin. So I wasn't really thinking that this was going to happen any time soon, regardless of any 10 minute intervals or what have you. Anyway, to make a long and unimportant story short, work was awful. I was supposed to be off at about 5:00, with it being New Year's Eve and all. At about 4:45, I was nowhere near ready to go, and Jessica called saying that the doctor had told her to come in to the hospital. Needless to say, I was out of there like one of those cartoon characters that leaves the phone hanging in the air with a cloud of dust behind. Luckily I remembered to call someone to cover for me.

Jessica told me when I got home that the doctor didn't sound exceedingly hopeful that we were going to actually have the baby right now, so we didn't really hurry to the hospital. So by the time we got there and to our room in the birthing center, it was about 6:00. If you've ever seen the beds on which women give birth, you know that they're not the most comfortable things in the world. At least if you've seen the same ones they use here. Of course, add in the contractions, which get progressively worse, and it's not exactly the kind of situation you want to be in for fun. Well, we were there for a few hours, with the nurses coming in ever 45 minutes or so to check on how things were "progressing". If you or someone you're close to have had a baby, you know what I mean by that. If not, you'll find out. I'm not going to use hospital/gynecological terms here. In fact, it's taking me a while to decide if I even want to use the word "gynecological". Anyway, the nurse told us at about 9:30 that if things didn't start moving along, they were going to send us home. This was not the news my wife wanted to hear. Luckily at about 10:00, they told us that we were going to have the baby, and there was much rejoicing.

Remember, at this point, my poor wife hadn't slept since Wednesday night (it was now Friday night), because the contractions had kept her awake on Thursday night even before she started having them regularly at 3:00 Friday morning. So once they decided that the baby was coming, they hooked her up to an IV, to which they added some painkillers. If I had all the space in the world, it would not be enough to extol the wonders of painkillers. Seriously. Not only did it allow Jessica to get some blessed sleep, but it also gave me rest from hearing her in pain for the last however long it had been. That's a tough thing, not being able to help. So she got some sleep, even though the nurses continued to come in every 45-60 minutes or so to "check progress". After a few hours of this, and a few installments of VH1's "100 Greatest One-Hit Wonders" (and both of us sleeping through the arrival of 2005 in the meantime), our present nurse announced that it was time to call the anesthesiologist for the epidural. This set into motion a new series of unfortunate events, which will be detailed in chapter 2.