Difficult conversations with my cervix
By: Lisa Key
Tags: Baby, Humour, Nhs, Hospital, Pregnancy

Photo by Micaela Parente on Unsplash

The one thing you don’t want to see is blood. That’s universal. There’s no-one that says “a little bit of bleeding just before your third trimester is lucky! Your child will have great wealth and happiness!” Blood is bad. Blood is go straight to the hospital. Do not pass Go. Do not stop to Google it.

So last Saturday I started bleeding. We were at home. Baby Daddy, as luck would have it, was on the sofa recovering from an operation: a strange greyish colour, his knee, which was operated on, roughly the size and shape of an American football. If he was to pick a time in his life where quick, decisive action, and some leaping to the feet and taking charge of the situation was required, he probably wouldn’t have gone for this one. Looking back later, we’ll reflect that this was our first taste of parental stress — the beginning of a long road of falling off swings, crashing bikes, standing on sea urchins, colds, flus, poxes, puking and temperatures, and then later, bad school reports, bad crowds, breaking curfews, underage drinking and lord knows what else. In our first roll of the dice, we did not do well. I’m afraid to say we flapped. I took a few turns around the flat for no particular reason. Baby Daddy went from greyish to white as a sheet. At some point, we found ourselves in an Uber to A&E, while the poor driver wondered which of us was going to pass out or puke in the back of his brand new Mercedes first.

The baby was fine, that much we established almost immediately. It’s only later that I’ll realise how incredibly fast everything went. If you’ve ever waited in a London casualty department on a Saturday night with anything less serious than the bubonic plague, you’ll know that going from the car park to the examination table in 15 minutes is something of a miracle. Are pregnant women more important because we’re actually two people in one? Or is the small, wrinkly, sinless creature currently sharing my oxygenated blood and glucose more important on its own than any ex-womb being? If it stops me having to sit in A&E for two hours contemplating how many ways there are for the human body to break down, frankly, I don’t care.

At maternity night triage the midwife calmly, but very quickly, found the baby’s heartbeat using a doppler — the little handheld device that I like to think of as the midwife answer to Batman’s grappling hook: always on the utility belt, used in almost every episode. We’ve heard the Little Bundle’s heartbeat before and this time it sounded no different. Also, she was doing her usual evening gymnastics display inside my belly. Even I know that there can’t be too much wrong with a wriggly baby whose heartbeat is as loud, clear and regular as a techno kick drum. The midwife seemed to agree because, as fast as she’d arrived, she was gone, presumably to go and casually deliver a couple of new humans into the world down the hall, while Baby Daddy and I sat alone in our cubicle for a bit and went “well, that was bloody stressful” at each other over and over, and he turned different shades of grey and green and clutched his knee in agony.

Next, a cheery lady in blue scrubs entered stage right, brandishing what looked like a small transparent traffic cone and trailing a shy looking male nurse. It started to feel a little crowded in the cubicle.

“We need to inspect your cervix,” said the doctor, in the voice you would use to tell a child we need to stop at Disneyland for jelly and ice-cream, and handed me a sheet while the nurse squeezed clear gel onto the traffic cone and fetched a bright light from another room. I slowly connected these dots in my addled mind: the cone, the lube, the sheet, the searchlight pointing at my groin like it had escaped from its cell and was trying to shimmy over the prison walls. Everyone waited patiently while I got my cervix out if its jeans and explained to it what was happening. “At some point,” I told it, telepathically. “The nice male nurse and Baby Daddy will be asked to leave, and it will just be me, you and this friendly lady having a quick chat. Ok?” Well, that was a lie.

“He’s staying is he?” I asked weakly, as the doctor, the traffic cone, the nurse and the searchlight all shuffled to the end of the examination table. He was. What happens at maternity night triage and all that. One incredibly uncomfortable, if not actually painful, procedure later and doc emerged from my nether parts, bright as a new button, with the good news that my cervix was closed, and not a drop of blood was to be seen near it. Which meant I wasn’t going into labour, and neither had my placenta detached itself and floated to the bottom of my uterus, like one of those alarming climate change videos you see of entire ice-caps breaking away and falling into the sea. Why was I bleeding, then? No-one seemed to know, nor be particularly concerned about it.

“Don’t look for problems,” counselled the midwife, as I coaxed my indignant cervix back into my knickers. If the bleeding started again, she told us, come back. Otherwise go home, order a pizza and file this experience under TRY NOT TO THINK ABOUT THIS EVER AGAIN, along with Baby Daddy’s car crash and the film Saw II. Maybe she only said the first bit. Either way that’s what we did.

So of course on Wednesday evening it starts again. I feel more chill about it this time, but still, blood is blood. Back we go to maternity triage. The same midwife installs me in a cubicle and finds baby’s heartbeat, and while I’m wondering if the poor woman has been home or even stopped for a tea break since Saturday, a new doctor, a new traffic cone and, lo and behold, the same shy male nurse enter the scene for a cervix inspection. “Hello again,” the nurse and I say to each other politely. “Alright mate?!” my cervix calls out to him. She really is quite friendly once you’ve broken the ice. Knowing what’s about to happen doesn’t make me feel any less like a sock being turned inside out during the examination, but all is well with her indoors, which is a relief. Nevertheless they decide to keep me in for 24 hours this time.

“I’ve never stayed in hospital overnight before,” I say to Baby Daddy, who has stayed in hospital overnight more times than he cares to think about, and suddenly feeling like a small child. We’re shown up to the maternity ward and given a roomy cubicle with a bed, a reclining chair and a window that actually opens, which frankly all feels pretty luxurious if you know anything about hospital wards, which we do. An orderly appears with the next day’s menu and asks me to select what I want for lunch and dinner. I start to warm to the idea of being an inpatient. As the midwives hand over from day to night shift, a string of lovely women enter with dopplers, ask me how I’m feeling, and listen to the baby’s heartbeat. Can all this listening be for medical reasons? I wonder. Maybe they just like it. A second string of nurses swing by and take my blood pressure and temperature about 500 times too. It’s all very reassuring.

But then Baby Daddy leaves, the lights go down on the ward and the noises start. This part of the unit is where you go for the first bit of labour, the bit where the biggest muscle contractions anyone will ever feel in their life are getting started on moving the Little Bundle towards the exit, but before baby has packed its bag, kissed goodbye to its watery home and got itself arranged head first in the birth canal, like a kid at the top of a slip-and-slide. If you actually take a second to consider what your body needs to achieve to push roughly 7lb of baby through a channel that’s ordinarily a few centimetres wide, it’s no surprise that it hurts a bit. On TV people scream. In real life, it’s worse than screaming. Through that night and all of the long next day, I hear groans, whimpers, and sounds that can only be described as the expression of complete surprise. Like ‘I knew it was going to hurt but FUCKING HELL’. But no screams. As the only patient not actually in labour, or toting a brand spanking new baby, I become a sort of auditory spectator. By lunchtime I’ve begun commentating to myself. “Come on love,” I sigh wearily, as a lady across the hall who’s just 2cm dilated starts whimpering and begging for more pain relief. “The lass before you had been in there for 36 hours, and I barely heard a peep out of her.”

But the really amazing thing is listening to the midwives. My cubicle is next door to their station, so from behind my curtain I’m treated to a radio play of staff meetings, shift handovers, decision making, discussions with the doctors — who appear twice a day, always in a rush somewhere else — and phone calls to other departments. If you think midwives just look after pregnant women and deliver babies, you’re disregarding the incredible amount of project managing, bed juggling, cajoling, advocating, and eking out of stretched resources that is woven into each shift. Everyone is too busy. Every ward is almost at capacity. My doctor wants me to have a scan, but the imaging department phones back saying they don’t have a spare minute. They’re fuller than the last lifeboat from the Titanic. There’s no hope today, not a chance. And yet, and yet… 30 minutes later my triumphant midwife pops her head around the curtain like someone who’s just blagged backstage passes for Glastonbury. She’s managed to get me in. I guess I assumed a lot of this stuff was run by computers, but it’s not. It’s a daily, herculean, effort that means a bed is found even when every bed is taken, that an extra scan is squeezed in, that a doctor is plucked from the tail end of an emergency on another ward and persuaded to come here, to another patient, a new priority. As it happens, the company my brother works for are trying to write software that will automate this kind of decision making in hospitals, and hand the staff back their time for the actual medical care they’re trained in. I would say my bro has his work cut out.

At the imaging department we see the Little Seed for the third time. She really does look like a person now, albeit an upside down, see-through one. The sonographer confirms everything is well and takes some measurements to draw on our growth chart. The chart shows two gently curving lines, one representing the smallest baby should be at any given time, and one the biggest. Our darling little girl, the sonographer explains, is tracking above the upper line. She’s “off the chart”. A biggun. A bruiser. This is sold to me as a positive: big babies are stronger, fair better during labour and face fewer risks once they reach the big bad world. Baby Daddy, who is 6'3" and is surely to blame for this monster child preparing to enter the world via my most intimate parts, beams with pride at the news. All I can think is that I’m going to have a nightmare explaining this to my cervix.

With the scan confirming everything is as it should be, and the pressure for beds on Murray Ward not getting any lighter, I feel sure I’ll be sent home. But then on the way back to the ward, I stop for wee and there they on the standard issue sanitary towel the hospital have given me to wear — two tiny, undeniable drops of blood. FFS. There’s clearly some sector of my lady parts that’s enjoying all this attention and doesn’t want it to end. For few moments, alone in the toilet stall, I think bollocks to it, I’m not going to tell anyone. I can’t face another night listening to the Whittington Hospital women-in-labour choir. And I’m starting to fret about work and emails and meetings, picturing my unmet responsibilities stacking up in the hallway at home, like when you go on holiday and forget to cancel the newspaper delivery. But I can’t do it. I tell the midwife, and she asks to see the towel, and there’s a strange moment when she, Baby Daddy and are sat around a table, contemplating my used sanitary product in silence as though it’s a work of conceptual art. “It really is a tiny amount of blood,” I say pleadingly. Even so, the midwife explains, really they would want to keep me under observation until I’ve been bleed free for 24 hours. The cubicle, which last night felt roomy and luxurious by hospital standards, suddenly looks like a prison as I stare down the barrel of another night in it. Like a kid, I consider a bit of tactical crying to help my cause. I could definitely summon a few tears right now, I think.

But in the end there’s no need. A tired looking young doctor, who’s on the ward to see another patient, is lasso’d by my midwife in the hallway and made to look at the towel. She’s just come from an emergency elsewhere, and is now hurrying back to it, and she’s unimpressed by the tiny drops. Me, my attention seeking vagina and my outsized baby are free to go. As we’re leaving, my shy male nurse is arriving onto the ward to start his shift. We smile at each other awkwardly. “Laters pal!” shouts my cervix. “Let’s go for that pint soon ok?”