Jason was born in April 1966, and for the first time I had problems giving birth, so both JD and I were glad that I hadn't taken the midwife home-birth option, but had gone to Cook County Hospital again. At first when I went in the doctors thought I was having twins, but it turned out that the baby was what they call a transverse lie; stuck sideways, in this case trying to be born right arm first. I was full of morphine, but it didn't seem to either slow labor down or kill the pain, just make me fuzzy in the head. The doctor reached in to try and turn the baby, but Jason wasn't having any of that, and remained firmly transverse. I remember lying on a gurney in the hall outside surgery with the doctor yelling that "someone better get me an OR now, or we'll have a ruptured uterus and a dead baby!" You can just imagine how confident that made me feel.
The doctor got his OR in good time to deliver me of a healthy baby by Caesarian section. I was just able to achieve consciousness enough to ask what the baby was and to hear someone say "it's a boy," before drifting off again. When I saw Jason for the first time, I was charmed by his full head of dark hair, which sported a white streak; the other two had been pretty much bald at birth, and only developed full heads of hair by six months, in Diana's case and by a year in Mark's.
I had to stay at County for a full week because of the C-section; at first I was in a recovery room with one other woman who had also had a C-section. She was a Native American and a dwarf; her husband was also Native American, but over six feet tall, so all her babies had to be surgically delivered. They made an odd-looking couple when he came to visit. Surgical patients were allowed visitor, so JD came to see me. He said that when he phoned the hospital to find out if the baby had been born, someone had told him that it had died. Cook County Hospital, what can I say... I remember seeing a cockroach crawling across my blanket, and when I told the nurse's aide, she looked at me as if I were crazy and said, "This is Cook County Hospital, what do you expect?"
After the first couple of days I was moved to the ward. One of the new mothers had a radio, and the song that was playing incessantly was Percy Sledge's "When A Man Loves a Woman." My Native friend was down the aisle, and we would wave at each other as we walked up and down the ward for exercise. There were several other women named Walker, and even another Jason Walker among the babies, but there was no fear of my getting the wrong baby, as I was one of the very few white women in the ward. One of the other white women was a six-foot tall teenager who had given birth to the biggest baby anyone had ever seen, a twelve-and-a-half-pound girl who looked just like Rocky Graziano. Our babies were brought to us twice a day for feeding; no question of formula feeding for this group.
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The doctor got his OR in good time to deliver me of a healthy baby by Caesarian section. I was just able to achieve consciousness enough to ask what the baby was and to hear someone say "it's a boy," before drifting off again. When I saw Jason for the first time, I was charmed by his full head of dark hair, which sported a white streak; the other two had been pretty much bald at birth, and only developed full heads of hair by six months, in Diana's case and by a year in Mark's.
I had to stay at County for a full week because of the C-section; at first I was in a recovery room with one other woman who had also had a C-section. She was a Native American and a dwarf; her husband was also Native American, but over six feet tall, so all her babies had to be surgically delivered. They made an odd-looking couple when he came to visit. Surgical patients were allowed visitor, so JD came to see me. He said that when he phoned the hospital to find out if the baby had been born, someone had told him that it had died. Cook County Hospital, what can I say... I remember seeing a cockroach crawling across my blanket, and when I told the nurse's aide, she looked at me as if I were crazy and said, "This is Cook County Hospital, what do you expect?"
After the first couple of days I was moved to the ward. One of the new mothers had a radio, and the song that was playing incessantly was Percy Sledge's "When A Man Loves a Woman." My Native friend was down the aisle, and we would wave at each other as we walked up and down the ward for exercise. There were several other women named Walker, and even another Jason Walker among the babies, but there was no fear of my getting the wrong baby, as I was one of the very few white women in the ward. One of the other white women was a six-foot tall teenager who had given birth to the biggest baby anyone had ever seen, a twelve-and-a-half-pound girl who looked just like Rocky Graziano. Our babies were brought to us twice a day for feeding; no question of formula feeding for this group.