Terry’s Birth

I first figured out that I was pregnant as a married graduate student at UPenn. I of course called the insurance folks so that I could be a responsible expectant mother and take my vitamins and follow the fetus’ development.

But guess what: UPenn’s student health didn’t cover maternity care! Because what women between the ages of 18 and 28 get pregnant after all? Not serious students obviously. I paid plenty of money monthly to be covered, but I guess because I didn’t need hair replacement or Viagra they didn’t cover my needs. This was 1986 remember and we have made some progress since than – though not much in the ‘heroic’ field of western medicine I’m afraid. I understand that Birth control is still not covered by many insurance companies.

But I was 24 and healthy so I decided to look into just having a midwife supervise my pregnancy and delivery. No such luck! The midwives in Philadelphia at that time were on strike because their malpractice insurance costs were too high. They were being lumped in with obstetricians and thus had outrageous malpractice insurance costs. Obstetricians got lots of lawsuits against them. I was assured that nobody sued their midwife like that, but the insurance companies wanted to charge her the same rate as the doctors who pretended to be god an so got sued. I don’t know how that stand-off ever ended, as I moved on.

While I was stressing about how I was going to call in my grandmother come deliver my baby in our bathtub, Lew (my then husband) was told of a possibility to go to Paris – or actually a close suburb – to take classes at the French Petroleum Institute as an exchange program with UPenn, where he was working on his doctorate.

It occurred to me that due to an accident of birth, I was born in the UK and was thus part of the EU. This stroke of luck meant that I could have my baby in Europe for next to nothing if I could just get myself ‘properly settled’ in time. That would involve getting a ‘carte de sejour’ which is like a long-term visa by which I would be legal (to have a baby) in Europe. If my husband had a steady – even tiny, income – and a reason to be in France, we would be golden. But first he had to spend the summer in Washington, DC for an internship. While in Philadelphia I managed to suffer from serious – as in potentially life threatening – morning sickness that lasted 24/7 for 12 weeks. I threw up many times a day, but it never brought any relief to the nausea. My maximum was 9 times in one day and I took to drinking seltzer water because it tasted as good coming up as going down. Dry heaves were the worst. I threw up for the last time as I walked home from my last exam (at Wharton in Finance, and I did just fine on it thanks very much).

In DC we sublet a lovely place near the reservoir that had air-conditioning in the bedroom only, and Lew took a bus to the DOE every morning for six weeks or two months. I did nothing at all because I couldn’t leave the bedroom. I had lost so much weight while we were both students in Philly, that I had taken a leave of absence from my own Masters’ program. So in DC I just rested and ate. There was a Safeway supermarket across the street from our apartment, and I went over every day to buy myself a quart of eggnog. Since I had been dangerously skinny at 5 months pregnant (still weighing twenty pounds less than I had weighed when I got pregnant) this was a wise move on my part – but mostly I was just hungry. Blessedly, I gained enough weight to ‘be normal’ by the time we moved to France when I was 7 months pregnant.

As we were taking our stuff to a friend’s house before our flight to France and schlepping our big bags up the sidewalk from the bus stop, when a scene unrolled that is frozen in my brain forever: It was a bit rainy (the usual 5 pm DC thunderstorms had just passed I believe); certainly it was steamy.  Lew and I each pulled huge suitcases because I had packed everything I could think of for an imminent birth in a foreign land. Maybe he carried and I pulled. This was before most suitcases had rollers remember, so I just dragged them on the ground, they didn’t have to last long…just to get us to France. My belly was big and my ponytail was long as we two bravely schlepped – and some man – in an airconditioned car – rolled down his window to shout “get a car” at us! I was too stunned to rejoinder “I’ll take yours” as I should have, so we just laughed to each other as we schlepped pathetically along. But we made our flight later that evening!

We arrived at Charles de Gaule airport with no place to live but at least Paris was cool enough that we no longer needed air-conditioning. So that was good. My first order of business was to find an obstetrician. Lew’s was to go to class, I believe August classes were meant to brush up his French and he met a classmate while they both recovered from jet lag as well. Ivan and his wife Karen became real road buddies that year as we all surfed over life’s challenges: I distinctly remember their tiny flat with a shower in the kitchen that they felt very lucky to have found.

I signed up at a private maternity clinic out in the suburbs near Lew’s campus because we didn’t know where we would be living in the long term (you know three months). At first we were actually given a lovely hotel room which was an easy walk from his school, on what I believe is now called ‘the island of impressionists’ in Reuil Malmaison. At the time it housed a Shell Oil retreat center. I remember looking up the Seine from our bedroom window and remarking (unbidden) how extremely like an impressionist painting it looked. I saw that tourist attraction coming before ‘the smart money’ I guess.

After a week though, they had to kick us out because dignitaries were coming or something. Now, we were truly into August in Paris in 1986, and so you may be able to guess that EVERYthing was closed, even hotels. Remember dear reader, that we were decades before AirBnB so we simply did a lot of moving around from cheap hotel to cheap hotel – even at the time I felt like the Virgin Mary on her donkey – only we were traveling on the metros.

Come September, we found an agency who placed us with a young couple – about our own age actually – who housed us for some time in their bedroom, while they slept in the living room. This was very nice indeed, mostly for the French comradery, except for the tiny detail that their bed was a double up on stilts with a desk underneath. I was scared to death of falling out of bed in my sleep so instead I crawled over Lew three or four times every night and crawled down the ladder to the toilet and back up again. Frankly, I have been waking up several times a night ever since then to pee though that was nearly 40 years ago. Still I don’t think I can blame the nice couple Michelle and Dominique….or perhaps Dominique and Michel.  When we 2 couples finally talked about how much we paid and how much they were paid we realized that he agency had made off like a bandit, as have all the hotel and housing middle-men since then. We couldn’t afford to stay and they didn’t make enough money to make it worth their while to give up their bedroom. So we left for Oct.

I spent a lot of time that Sept. going from their house to the prefecture (all the way downtown on the Ile de la Cité) to get my Carte de Sejour properly ‘toute reglée’. It amounted to a couple of hours every day standing in line with lots and lots of black immigrants from Africa as the staff spent a long time on each client. I waited my turn, and they never got to me. I was just like everyone else….but my belly was expanding unbelievably by now. Finally, one day a woman came out from behind the window and walked up to me halfway back in the line and said: “Madame you need your carte de sejour urgently” and I agreed. She kindly took me into her office and let me sit down while she went to see what the problem was. Here is as simple an explanation as I could understand: the Africans had just had their visa requirements tightened so they each took a lot of manpower to process, while I personally had an old carte de sejour that needed to be verified before they could give me a knew one. Nothing was yet computerized, so the lady had to go down to the storage rooms in the basement and find my old paper forms and confirm that I was still me. Happily, I was still me and that day my paperwork came through.

Another day that I remember much less fondly than the day I got my papers was the day that I walked Lew down to the metro station to go to his school out in the suburbs via the big metro station at La Defense. I walked back home and was probably getting more food for myself when I got a call from Michelle all glad that I was at home safely, because there had been a terrorist attack at La Defense. She was grateful that I was safe, but I was properly terrorized. I called the school in tears asking about Lew. They knew nothing for what seemed like hours as I waited by the landline for them to call me back. Finally, he called me perfectly fine, if a bit bemused that I was so worried. I had been weeping unconsolably for a long time, just as the terrorists hoped.

By Oct. Lew and I had finally found ourselves our own little apartment in the 15^th arrondisement. It was closer to my clinic out in Reuil Malmaison so I could even take the metro when I started labor. People talked about how we should take a taxi, but we couldn’t find anything affordable to book in advance. With the confidence of youth we decided it would be okay.

The bathroom was the biggest room in our studio apartment in the 15^th but we were thrilled when our old (bilingual) friend Alison showed up to help with the labor if need be. I was afraid that when the chips were down I would loose my French, even though I had been taking Lamaze courses and learning all the appropriate jargon of childbirth. Alison was in Europe, had two doctors for parents, and was willing to stay by my side. She slept on the kitchen floor as Lew and I slept on the murphy bed which came down at night.

On Oct. 29^th, 1986, at about 5 am I woke up to pee and found a very large puddle on the bathroom floor. My ‘water had broken’. I thought this was a perfect time actually, because the metros only opened at 5:30 and they would be really empty…..so why bother with a cab? There was a metro stop just outside our apartment actually, and then we just had to make a change at CDG-Etoile (right under the Arch de Triumph) to get on the awesome RER A to take us out the Reuil where we had a 7-minute walk to the clinic. All systems go.

My contractions were coming pretty regularly and they did hurt but I was fine between contractions. Off we three went. We took the escalator up to the metro and our car was almost completely empty; except I remember one homeless looking man sleeping all off by himself. I was wearing one of Terry’s cloth diapers inside my underwear, because I didn’t know how this ‘water breaking’ would pan out. We got to CDG-Etoile and, just like to this day, the doors opened on the left side first so that us ‘terminal’ passengers could get out before the incoming passengers got on. But I was in the grips of the hardest contraction I had had yet and couldn’t move. …..so we three just sat there and watched the doors close again. Luckily, the doors then opened on the right for the new people to get on. I don’t remember anybody getting on as we snuck out the entrance. But that homeless man was paying attention by this time – I bet he would have been willing to help if the need had arisen.

Okay, so far so good, except that now we found ourselves on the wrong side of the ticket control system for the RER trains, which are more expensive because they go farther. We had only bought a normal metro ticket and though I assure you we were willing to pay more, there was no system in place for us to do so. Instead, I had to jump turnstiles in order to get to the outbound train. I bravely did just that between contractions. Lew and Alison helped but the turnstile was at an awkward height even then: just crotch height in my memory.

By the time we got to Reuil the contractions were coming pretty much every two minutes and that 7-minute walk took far longer than 7 minutes. We walked into the front door of the clinic and they took one look at my diaper to find that Terry (we had named the baby for either boy or girl) was under extreme duress because the cloth was full of blood and fouled amniotic fluid. They strapped me up and tied my down and my contractions kept coming but did nothing to my cervical dilation.

I asked the doctor “Est-ce-qu’il faut un episiotome” and he replied “C’est deja fait madame”. But though my contractions were off the top of the chart pain wise, no progress was being made. Finally, I begged them for an epidural, I believe I had to literally sign a form with which I promised to pay the 50 bucks extra that it would cost. I was trembling all over much of the time by now, and as they stuck the needle in my spine they said ‘whatever you do don’t move’…..but I stubbornly trembling. Immediately after the calming epidural was given I kicked back into dialating and Terry came shortly after. Lew got weak in the knees at some point and they told him to go away so Alison was the only one by my side when Terry came out. But Lew came right back in and he and I both were convinced that the baby was dead, he was all covered in a nasty cheesy substance and didn’t make a sound until the doctor hit him hard on the bottom. Then he ‘cried lustily’ I think is the expression and everybody declared him very healthy.

Terry’s first word was RER (said with a perfect little French accent) And we haven’t had any trouble with him since. He’s about to turn 39!