A glutton for punishment

(Liam was fascinated by the animated Santa at Canadian Tire last night, where we went to buy Girl Guide cookies from Evelyn's Sparks troup. Photo credit goes to Megan MacKay-Barr, from whose blog I lifted this. What can I say... I am short on photos these days!)

To continue from where I left off yesterday... regardless of these epidurals being available or not where I live, I had already decided early on that I didn't want one for #2, so a couple of months ago I finally got around to calling Lisa, the doula we used when Liam was born. The first time we hired her, I figured that if the epidural I so badly wanted wasn't available, I was going to arm myself with every other trick in the book to make it through labour as unscathed as possible. When I went into labour, we checked into the hospital around 6 p.m. and she showed up around 9 p.m. We probably had passed on Dr. Bailey's famous last words to her, that she expected Liam to be born before midnight. Poor Lisa didn't get to go home until 6 a.m. the following morning, since Liam's entry to the world was not so speedy after all, and she spent all that time running heating packs up and down the hall to the microwave and holding buckets for me to barf into. She certainly earned her fee.

When I called her I got her machine, and I left a message saying I hoped she remembered us and we enjoyed working with her (ha!) and wondered if she would want to hook up again in Spring 2007 to do it all over again. Then I sat back and waited... and waited... and waited... and no call came. I remembered how bedraggled she was by the time she went home on Liam's birth day, and how bad I felt for keeping her so long. The lack of a return call made me think she wanted nothing more to do with me and my extremely slow uterus, and I really couldn't blame her; when you calculated what she earned from us on an hourly basis, it didn't turn out to be all that much. I thought maybe we were stuck in her mind as a client horror story that she had taken to sharing at parties with all her doula friends.

Finally one day I got a message back from her. She did remember us, and she was happy to hear that we were expecting #2, and she was honoured that we would ask her to come back again. She sounded totally upbeat, and part of me wondered if the long night had been completely wiped from her memory. Then there was a pause on the line, and I could tell that she was trying to word something as delicately as possible. Finally she said, "And try not to worry about it too much, Carrie... it will almost definitely be shorter this time around." Yeah, I guess she remembers, too.