So, this is the fuller picture version of what has happened today.

As I sit here with a blank screen ahead of me, I haven’t pre-planned what I’m going to type, but before we start, if you’d rather not know anything too detailed, read the first part of this blog effort, which is Baby Oliver. (Actually, that blog post sets a lot of the scene anyway, so is worth reading first).

So, here’s what I want to remember for the future, which doubles up as a blog post for you strange people reading this waffle.

05:50 Claire’s alarm goes off and she gets straight into the shower to get ready. Not allowed the usual “breakfast of champions” that she’s had for the past x number of months, which is that of a bacon sandwich; today, Claire has to starve, as fasting is an important element of having the c-section.

07:15 We (Claire and I) leave the house. Jack is already at his Grandparents house (my in-laws) overnight, as we’d never make it out the door on-time! (Sorry Jack – you just don’t understand ‘urgency’ as yet).

07:50 We arrive at the hospital, check in at reception, and are promptly shown to the 2-bed/bay room in the Labour Ward, which is, rather nicely, empty. (All quiet, still very early in the day for the 13-year old mums to want to get out of bed to deliver their babies, waiting for Jeremy Kyle to finish, no doubt.)

08:15 Midwife Alison introduces herself – turns out, it’s the SAME midwife that was with us all day for Jack, nearly three years ago. Spooky, but not really, considering it’s the same hospital and all that.  Alison checks Claire over and does all the routine stuff that is needed before the operation, such as blood pressure, temperature, blood/sugar tests, etc etc etc. All fine, normal and so on. She tells us that we needed to wait for the doctor to come around to visit us to let us know what time of the day to expect to be done. All good.

08:20 Other couple arrive to occupy the other bay in the small and so far, private, ward.

08:40 Senior consultant appears. Don’t know why, didn’t want to be involved, other than to say he was in charge of the others that would be doing the work.

08:45 Doctor appears a little earlier than expected, visits other to-be mum first, comes to us, and tells us that because Claire had gestational diabetes, this put us (read: her) at the top of their priority list. So, finally, Claire having the headache of having to test her blood 4 times a day for the past several months has materialised into something useful!  The doctor is a big… no, massive bloke, Polish maybe; either way, he was very nice indeed. He spoke very good English and despite this, he didn’t mince his words, but instead described the day’s efforts as ‘I will be doing your … ‘ whilst simultaneously moving the flat of his hand from left to right, indicating a cutting motion that is to chop my bride in half. “I like him already”, Claire says, because “he didn’t mess around saying what he needed to say.” Fair point. Scores are good for him so far. Doc goes away happy.

08:47 The Anaesthetist appeared, asked many of the same questions that the previous chap did and went away happy too. All are now agreed that Claire is first-up because of this pesky diabetes thing, which is pregnancy-related in the first place.

09:00 Claire is promptly changed into her rather fetching surgery gown (the one with the join right up the back) and I’m changed into the blue set of scrub-clothes that I’ve been given, along with a pair of over-shoe covers (that, incidentally, no-one else wore!) and a sappy-looking yellow felt hat to top it. Meh, whatever; it’s not a fashion parade, and me in my XXXXXXXXL baggy trousers wouldn’t do well at either.

As an aside – these bloomin’ scrubs were ABSOLUTELY MASSIVE, I kid you not. The top was ok, but I could have fitted into the trousers and them asked Claire to get into them too, even with her oversized [pregnant] belly AND then still been able to tie the knot on the trousers! Who are they expecting to wear these things?? Giant Haystacks? (a WWF Wrestler)

09:20 And so, we’re off! Claire’s on-board the rolling trolley that Alison (the midwife) and another random nurse are pushing into the operating theatre for today’s cut ‘n shut operation.

Me? I am simply following behind. Can’t help to open doors or anything, as

1. I don’t know where we’re going

2. Some are locked anyway. So, I can’t get in without clearance.

Follow on, it is.

Straight into this operating theatre.

This… cold… huge room, with those funny spot-lights hanging from the ceiling, like you see on Casualty on BBC1.

A single, solitary bed (that looked so funky it’s as though it was intended to be sent to the MIR Space Station) in the middle of the room, surrounded by drip-stands, already hanging with bags of water-looking substances (hey, I’m not med-student – I’m a geek remember!).

A workbench along the far side of the room has a computer on top (albeit running Windows XP… pah!).

Random-looking trolleys are seemingly abandoned in the middle of the walking area in the room, later to be uncovered for our needs.

Oh, and about 7 people lurking around waiting, all in blue scrubs, but none that had the same-style baggy trousers as me. Hmm, interesting.

Add to this, Claire, Alison, the other trolley-pushing random-nurse and myself. Now this room is starting to fill up. 

Claire is sat on the bed in the middle of the room, and I’m given the only chair in the room, which is a red waiting-room-style chair cunningly hidden out of sight, behind this space-aged looking bed.

People are walking around going about their normal business, having a laugh and a joke with each other too, which all helped to take our minds away from the fact that someone that we’ve only just met is going to see something that a handful of people (including myself, I might add) have seen before. Namely, the blood and gut innards of my wife.

Being in this rather daunting room, really helps to remind me (for sure) that this is big bad-ass surgery going on here. As I said in the Baby Oliver post, the notion of c-section delivery method for babies is a commonly known process. A household name, if you like. But when you are actually in a room with what soon totals 10 working people, who each have their own specific job as a well-oiled cog in the machine that is to soon deliver a baby, it makes you feel a little worried. Seriously worried. This is cutting a whacking great hole into a perfectly fit and healthy individual to surgically extract a baby.  A BABY! One of THE MOST delicate and fragile objects that a person can ever hold, and this baby’s safe haven is going to be attacked and sliced open by the myriad of stainless steel objects that are uncovered from those random-looking tables parked strategically in the main flow of the room.  Yes, we’re talking scalpels. Scissors? Yes. Separators, tongs, levers, in their tens, piled high. Add to this, the still-packaged needles, bottles of fluids, bags of saline, blood on stand-by.  Oh my word, did I feel a little out of place.

09:25 The anaesthetist begins his magic and so fantastically crucial work of paralysing my wife from her boobs downwards, otherwise known as the Epidural.

Again. This needs a little more attention than an eight letter word to describe it.

Basically, a six inch needle is used and is inserted into the gaps in the spinal chord to apply drugs directly onto the nerve endings that connect and talk directly to the brain, causing the brain to no longer maintain control of anything that those nerve endings connect. 

Again, deliberately, and methodically PARALYSING someone is not a small task. This needed a local anaesthetic to mask the pain that this process itself caused!  When people have accidents and break their back or neck, it’s the spine that is the critical element, because of those ever-so-important nerves. And we’re going to temporarily recreate that process as pain relief?? Give me strength. To add to this, we was told that there’s so many independent factors to take into consideration here when squirting drugs at a bit of spine to numb the pain; too much drugs could seriously knacker the nerve bits and too little would mean that part-way through the show, the feeling could come back and leave Claire in absolutely excruciating pain when her brain re-connects those processes and realises that there’s a bloody great hole in the lower part of the torso. 

Anyway, we digress.

09:32 We get started. How do I know precisely? Because when I asked the time, the ladies behind me that were using the Windows XP computer (that was being used to log absolutely everything that went on) declared the time, the 12ft tall Polish surgeon announced that we’re to start. But not until the adjusted the Casualty-style lighting rig into exactly the right position and angle.

“Then, we begin.” He declares, as though it’s a safari or a trip through the wilderness. Made me smile.

And we were indeed off.

Claire is awake, but but this point totally numb from the boobies downwards. They checked this by spraying super-cold spray onto her arms (not under epidural) which she can feel and normally react to as being…. well, rather cold.  Then, they spray other areas, such as the legs, body, lower back and so on, looking for reaction from Claire.

None. Good answer.

Blue medical surface-draping is applied all around the new Ground Zero that is Claire’s massive belly sticking out perpendicular from her, as she is by now-laying down her super numb body on the space-bed. 

Not able to see anything at all, Claire only has me to look at (poor bugger, I know!) and the midwife who is constantly checking how Claire is feeling and trying to calm any undue nerves.

Me? Well, being the odd/interested fellow that I am, I kept peering over the deliberate drape-wall that they’ve made to shield Claire from what they’re doing.  I’m guessing that seeing your lower half cut, sawn, snipped, scrapped and sucked would probably mess your head up a little for a few nights in future. 

Of course, I can’t tell Claire exactly what I’m seeing, as they very much are cutting, sawing and scrapping parts of the anatomy. So, I simplify and summarise into the words that I can in the heat of the moment and end up with “No baby yet.”, to which she smiles and without saying it, shouts “no s**t, Sherlock” loud and clear.

Claire’s doing really well. Again, she’s voluntarily laid down in this clinical room with barbaric looking torture devices on the deck. Brave girl. Brave to beyond my means of describing.

I look up again moments after, a scalpel is used, put down and replaced in the surgeon’s hands with a pair of surgical-looking scissors, and he almost looks like he’s hacking away at his teenage son’s new hair-do or something. The look of focus and attention on his face puts me at ease and at worry at the same time, but I take solace in the fact that he certainly looks like he’s been in this situation before.

More brownie points to the doc at this point, as he’s already knee deep in blood that has very obviously come from Claire’s innards.

Claire’s eyes flinch, reacting to the tugging and pulling that they’re doing over there, as although she’s numb, she’s still able to feel someone apply enough force to a part of her body that causes other parts to move too.  I have no idea what he was pulling or pushing on, but this big bloke is putting some serious weight behind it and her whole body moves under the momentum caused.  She looks at me for reassurance, so I do my husbandly bit again, and look at what the bloke and his other surgeon-friend are doing. Again, I give the only response that I can, and that she can handle, which is “No baby yet”.  Claire’s not daft, and already she’s starting to see a pattern emerging here.

Hoses are sucking out fluid, whilst 3 of the other people in the room are monitoring the amounts to quite accurate detail. When I looked, the fluid in the transparent piping on the body-hoover looked clear with an ever-so-slight pinkish/reddish tint to it.  Claire asks if it’s her waters, to which I nodded, not being able to think of anything else it could be.

Grunting, heaving, and more snipping with the razor sharp scissors. If it is indeed a new hair-do, it wants to look fantastic for the amount of cutting going on.

I have absolutely no idea of the time, but at this point, it genuinely felt like we’ve been in there hours, whilst this mountain of a man is butchering someone I know and love, and occasionally demanding that the lights are repositioned between moments of swabbing blood out of from Ground Zero.  Incidentally, each time, I noticed, that he used a new swap, tool, or whatever, there was about three different people, independently watching, counting and returning that implement to the torture-device pile. Another person in blue scrubs records all and sundry on the very low-tech whiteboard in the wall, whilst the two ladies around the XP machine continued to type and talk about stuff.

Suddenly, I look up and see something being held aloft… it’s a spherical looking thing, skin coloured, but heavily dowsed in blood and gunk.

“Chord is around neck. Once.” The man-mountain exclaims and continues to do something which means the spherical looking thing that I’ve assume was my boy’s head, is then lowered back in momentarily, followed by the sighting of a small purple-coloured foot.  I recognised the foot, as I’ve got one myself. But not that small and not that colour. 2 + 2 = That’s my babies’ foot.

I tell Claire… “Now… there’s a baby!”, and with that, the man-mountain-doctor lifts a now-screaming child from the void that now fills Claire’s lower torso area.  A giant look of relief sweeps across Claire’s face, as though to say that knowing that the baby was out AND hearing it cry are two very good resulting points from this jolly activity.  I can see him being carried by the midwife to quickly check all is well with him, and actually go into detail with Claire about this, as again, she’s not able to see very much at all.

I am asked to leave the relative safety of the reception chair and come over to the side workbench and see the blood-stained, purple-coloured baby that has been lifted out and is wailing away to himself, and see for myself that he’s all ok. 

He’s dried off ever so slightly as to not harm his delicate skin, and the 12-18” long section of umbilical cord that the surgeons had removed from Claire, is still attached to the baby’s belly button. Alison clamps it and trimmed it down and announces that she’s going to weigh him, after counting toes, fingers, eyes and ears. “Nine pounds and… THIRTEEN ounces … AND A HALF! Wow, he really is a big boy!”, she says loudly for all to hear.

Everyone is pleased that he’s well and happily surprised of his size and weight, starting more mid-work conversations amongst the almost dozen people in the room.

I went back over to Claire to return to my seat to continue my job of reassurance to her that all is well. She replied with something along the lines of “That’s ok, as long as he’s ok, I’m happy.” To which I had to ask what she thought about being opened up and still laying on the table, and if that was an important job to repair. Daft question in the moment, I guess.

Alison the midwife asks about the name to write on the wristbands, and almost announces to everyone that Oliver is a fit and healthy baby boy, and is wrapped by warm and placed on the non-numb upper section of Claire’s body (i.e. above the boobs but below the chin) for her to start the bonding experience with her new baby boy.

09:45 At this point, I ask one of the ladies the time and they declared the time of birth. 

So, all that work.

All that effort.

The worry.

The bloodshed.

The looks on Claire’s face...

All happened in next to no time at all. What I mean, is that you couldn’t cook a pizza in that time, and yet a man has hacked his way into a human body and pulled out a baby, through various layers of tissues, muscles, guts and gore. Amazing.

Last time, at this point, Jack and I went into the other room, when the the surgeon finished up and put Claire’s inner organs back into place, but this time, we waited with her until the surgeon (who had just scored more points for finding and retrieving the baby) had continued to remove the placenta and begin ‘closing up’. More hose sucking, little more pushing and pulling but it was soon done.

10:00 It was around this time that the Polish mountain-man downed tools and declared the mission a success. The midwife complimented him on the very neat residual marking on Claire lower stomach, namely the wound that will form the scar from the operation.  Anything the vaguely saw the light of day in the operating theatre was meticulously counted and recounted again, by at least two people at any given moment.  Luckily, all seemed to be accounted for, which was… nice.

Claire is slid off of the space-age-looking table that she’s just instantly lost weight on, and onto the ward-bed that seemed to have appeared from nowhere, and is soon driven back to the Labour Ward for several hours of recovery, before we’re even able to think about doing anything else.

11:30 seemed to be here in a flash – surprisingly, this relatively quiet part of the day disappeared whilst watching Alison show Claire how to get Oliver to begin feeding. Nothing else happened in this time, and I was absolutely mystified with the fact that a baby feeds from his mum.  I had just watched the bloodbath from the front-row seat and that was fine (gruesome in places, but still fine) and then when I saw Claire’s face light-up that our new baby had actually started to breastfeed, I actually started to well up. I didn’t cry or anything like that, but it was almost like a compounded ‘thing’ from thee years ago, about Jack not wanting to feed and now that Oliver was, it was sort of magically in a very odd way.  I’m not saying that Oliver will benefit from breastfeeding and Jack didn’t – to the contrary, Claire had expressed milk for seven months for Jack to have, and we were able to heavily monitor his quantities, almost to the extreme.

So, that’s it, coupled with the Baby Oliver blog post.

What a very, very surreal day it has been.

Absolutely and most positively... mad.

But the best outcome, is that Oliver AND Claire are both amazing and in good health.

Hats off to all of the team that helped to deliver Oliver today. I don’t know what some people did, but they obviously did it when needed, I assume, as nothing was missing, out of place, or not done. A very big “9lb 13 and a half”-sized thanks to you all.