Cancer Ever After

7 days prior to our scheduled induction date

In retrospect, I wonder if I somehow knew that something was going to happen. We’d been talking to our birth mother all week and she had definitely reached that point of pregnancy where absolutely everything hurt, sleeping was impossible, and she was begging for the baby to come out. I’m known for letting the battery run dead on my cell phone and I rarely have the ringer turned on because, well, twin toddlers. But this evening, I made a point to plug in the phone and turn the ringer up as high as it would go so that I would be sure to wake up if needed. We were nearing the end, and I read once that most labors start at night because that’s when babies are most active.

The call came at 1:30 a.m.

Our birth mother was in tears and said, “The pains are bad and I need to go to the hospital NOW–I think the baby is coming.”

I shot out of bed immediately and woke Tim up (quite possibly with an elbow to the kidney–oops!). I tried to stay calm and talk her through our plan of action.

“Do you have a bag packed?”

“How far apart are the contractions?”

”How long are they lasting?”

“Do you think you could eat something before you go to the hospital, because they won’t allow you any food after that.”

I promised to make sure her ride was there shortly and we hung up.

Of course it would be now. My mother had been coordinating all of the travel for our birth mother since she lives closer, but Mom was on a humanitarian aid trip to Panama–the first she’d ever been on. And now this.

We had a plan A, B and C for a ride in case this happened. Luckily, Plan A answered her phone immediately and said she could be there in 10 minutes. I called our birth mother back to let her know.

HOLY COW! We’re going to have a baby! I started to get super-excited! You’ve probably realized by now that I’m an over-organizer. All week, Tim and I had been packing “go-bags.” We had our master packing list for the girls that we lived by after our disastrous “no pack-n-play” trip and had packed their suitcases the night before. We had packed Baby H’s bag earlier in the week. We just hadn’t got around to packing ours. That was on the agenda for tomorrow.

My adrenaline was pumping. We frantically packed our bag and began calling people to see who could come over to stay with the girls. Since we were planning on an induction, most of our conversations with my husband’s family had involved them coming over to get them. Apparently, we failed to stress that a late-night phone call was a possibility. We called six cell phones and two home phones with no luck.

At this point it was 2 a.m. Our options were limited. Try to put the girls in their car seats and figure out childcare when we got there? Try to find someone else? Luckily, a friend had volunteered to be our late night call just one week before and I cockily stated, “My in-laws will take care of that.” But my friend had young children, so she was used to waking up in the middle of the night. I called her cell phone–no answer. I called her husband’s cell phone–pay dirt!

It’s the sign of a really good friend that she was there in fifteen minutes. We finished packing, grabbed the dog, and headed out the door. It’s a four hour drive to the hospital where she was going to give birth. Let’s just say we made it a little faster than that. Throughout the drive, we received text updates.

“Contractions are two minutes apart…”

“Now they are three minutes apart.”

We stopped at my mom’s house to drop off the dog and pick up the car seat for Baby H. In our rush, we forgot to call my stepdad and let him know we were stopping by. As it turned out, neither of us had his cell number (he and Mom don’t have a home number anymore). So we killed the headlights, crept slowly up the drive, and Tim quietly went into the house to retrieve the car seat after letting the dog out in the yard. After a few minutes, he was back with the car seat, and a little shaken up. We weren’t as stealthy as we thought, and Tim was met at the front door by my stepdad and his pistol. We now both have his number programmed into our phones!

Tim threw the car seat into the car and we were off to the hospital. Just as we pulled out of my mom’s driveway, we received a text saying: “Dilated to a four, but contractions are not progressing. They are sending her home.” Our driver for our birth mother was understandably freaked about driving 30 miles with her back to her house, but did it anyway.

We looked at each other, turned around, and crawled into bed at my mom’s house. We’d figure out things in the morning.