Kiss Mommy Goodbye by Joy Fielding Page B

end of twenty hours she was becoming increasingly belligerent. “This is ridiculous,” she moaned, looking around the small labor room. “Why don’t they put a television in here?” The room itself was very pleasant, one wall freshly papered in green and white, bright-colored closets and a Kandinsky print directly across from her bed. “Do I really need all this stuff around me?”
    “It’s monitoring the baby’s heartbeat,” Victor said of the large gray computer they had hooked up to her body by means of a special belt that went around her stomach. It traced the heartbeat and seemed, to those who knew nothing of computers, to work along much the same lines as a lie detector. It also monitored and took note of her contractions.
    “Oh, you’re having another contraction,” Victor stated, obviously startled at its coming so soon after the previous one.
    “Thanks for telling me,” she gasped.
    “A big one. Look at it, honey.”
    “I don’t have to look at it! I can feel it! What do you think I’m doing here?”
    “It’s very exciting.”
    “Good—then
you
have the contractions and I’ll watch the bloody machine. That’s it, I’ve had enough.”
    “You must be in transition,” he said happily. “Trish said you’d get very irritable during transition.”
    “Where is she? I’ll kill her.”
    Victor was behind her again rubbing her back. “You should be happy,” he said. “Transition means it’s almost over. Just another couple of hours.”
    Only a man could say something like that, she thought.
    A woman in one of the other labor rooms let out a piercing, agonizing cry, followed by an enviable string of four-letter words. “My sentiments exactly,” Donna said. “Look, I’ve given it my best shot, but I’ve had enough. It’s your turn. I’m going home.” Donna tried to pull herself off the bed.
    “Donna, for God’s sake—”
    “Call me when it’s over,” she said, disconnecting the machine.
    “Donna, please—” Victor urged helplessly.
    “Call me a taxi, Victor.”
    Victor called the nurses.
    “Spoilsport,” she said.
    Two hours later she was delirious.
    “Twentieth-Century Fox!” she exclaimed.
    “I beg your pardon?” Victor said.
    “Dr. Harris asked me a question,” Donna said impatiently. Dr. Harris had by this time joined them and was sitting at the foot of her bed. “He asked me what movie studio made
The Seven Year Itch
and I told him.”
    “Jesus.”
    “That’s my line.” Suddenly she was crying. “Victor, please, could they give me a shot of something?” She knew he had hoped she could do without any drugs.
    “Sure,” he responded immediately. “Dr. Harris?”
    Dr. Harris administered a shot of demerol, which Donna was disappointed to discover did nothing to ease the ever intensifying pain of the contractions. It only made her groggy.
    “I don’t think the baby’s going to drop anymore,” she heard Dr. Harris say from afar. “We better operate. We’ve waited long enough.”
    After that everything happened very quickly. She was wheeled into the operating room and placed on the table. The I.V. unit to which she had been hooked up since she entered the hospital stayed right with her, as did Victor, two lifelines of support. They told her to lie on her side in a fetal position and not to move—not an easy request when one is into hard labor, she realized—and she was given two more shots, the first one a local anesthetic to relieve the subsequent pain of the second one, the epidural, which was to then take away any feeling altogether. She grimaced and gasped loudly as she felt the fluid from the epidural shooting through her spine. It felt as if she were being pounded all along her back with a hammer. Trish, their darling prenatal instructor, had neglected to mention the pain that accompanied an epidural. She had spoken only of the glorifying numbness. The nurse put an oxygen mask over Donna’s nose and she felt herself being strapped down and a