Saturday was brilliant. The nicest day of the year, meteorologically speaking, and a day off for me. A predictably early morning--5:30a, I think. Zoë has learned that getting out of bed, opening her door, and coming upstairs to flail around in bed with her parents guarantees her the attention she wants. We've set a 6:00a alarm for her that plays beach surf sounds. Our agreement is that she can come upstairs when she hears the ocean. I'll have to check for conch shells in her bed, because she seems to be hearing the ocean earlier every day. Could be the 5:15a sunrise...
An early-morning trip to Seward Park for a quick walk around the point became more like an expedition. The parking lots were full of cars belonging to people training with the Leukemia Team in Training, so we found some nearby street parking. I forgot the front wheel of the stroller (a Burley bike trailer with stroller conversion--useful if you remember the parts), so we pushed it for three miles on two wheels. Not as bad as I thought, since neither Zoë nor Elliott would ride in it. Zoë was a very big girl and walked most of the way, first running, then walking, dawdling, and flat out refusing the move. Remember that weak, floppy feeling you got when your mom took you shopping? She had that. Eventually we got her back into the stroller with most of her clothes on backwards and made it around the loop in time to get home for lunch.
Just as we completed our walk my pager went off. I've got three moms-to-be due this month, so I've been anticipating the whenever page. A call to triage confirmed that one of my patients, a 24 year-old Vietnamese woman in her first pregnancy, had ruptured the night before (her water broke) and she was being admitted to labor & delivery. She wasn't particularly active in her contraction pattern and my on-call colleagues can handle anything, so I figured I could count on some more family time.
Home, lunch, book for Zoë, nap (for everyone), then that sleepy indecisiveness about what to do with the afternoon. We'd planned to go to Coleman Pool, the outdoor, heated, salt-water pool in West Seattle's Lincoln Park, but with a laboring patient it seemed like a bad idea to be that deep into an activity. We decided instead to explore the new wading pool on Capitol Hill (I could walk to the hospital if called in). That's where I took the picture of Zoë. It's an amazing place. A pyramid of cascading water feeds into a fast-moving chute, eventually spreading out into a lazy trickle down a cobblestone-studded slab. Adjacent is a huge, warm, wading pool, well-populated with kids and probably full of urine. But whatever, it was beautiful Saturday and every kid deserves to swim in a little pee on such a day. We hung out there for a couple of hours, playing in the pee, watching the capoeira dancers do their thing, the guys tying one another up in preparation for some performance, apparently, the parade of man-kilts, tattoos, piercings, musicians, lost children, and lost adults. Pretty great.
Home, dinner outside on the "patio" (our driveway) Brooke's newest bid for some outside space in our city townhouse. She has created a magical little world where we usually just park our car. I put Elliott to bed and then decided it was time, at about 7p, to head in to the hospital.
My patient had been making great progress all day, contracting and painfully dilating all day while I splashed around with my daughter in the pee-pee pool. By the time I arrived, it was just a waiting game. I worked on some admin stuff while I waited, chatted with the nurses, fellow residents, and Carroll, my attending. Eventually, we focussed on the birth event: ninety minutes of pushing resulted in a charming little baby boy. Some stitches, a lot of documentation and orders, then home. Asleep at about one o'clock.
My only regret is that I didn't get a beer on such a lovely day. I'll fix that today, unless the pager starts going again.
