What typically goes through your mind when you’re told that you will be having an emergency C-section? For Lou, it was all about whipping her bikini line into shape.
The crux of it was – I had to stay in the hospital. I had pre-eclampsia.
Hubby would go home to get my hospital bag (LOL, what hospital bag? Do you mean the knickers and deodorant in a plastic bag behind the bathroom door?) and the little-big-head-guy would be coming in the morning via emergency C-section.
Bizarrely, my first thought once this had been explained to me using flash cards and short words that my pea brain could understand, was vindication. I knew I had felt sick! I knew I wasn’t just being (typically) whingey! I knew human beings weren’t supposed to resemble Zorb balls!
We were shown to my room and then kind of just left to our own devices. After I looked in every possible drawer and cupboard in the place and read every file, because I am the nosiest spy in the world, we sat down and tried to make a list of all the things he would need to get. Clothes, pyjamas, the baby clothes we’d set aside, thongs, my special sippy cup because I am a giant baby, toiletries.
That’s when it hit me. Toiletries.
My bikini line.
Oh my god, my bikini line.
I was about to be naked, stretched on a table, in a room full of people. Nurses, midwives, doctors, orderlies, paediatricians and a partridge in a fucking pear tree. My downstairs situation resembled a hairy pair of bike pants. I hadn’t seen the business section of it for months and suddenly it was about to be a bloody show on the operating table!
My husband eventually figured out what my panicked fast-talk meant and left to get not only the things that I’d listed but about four litres of depilatory cream, ten razors and a gas mask. This was an all hands on deck situation and he assured me that he could cope under pressure. Given this was a man who screams and farts at the same time whenever I sneak up on him I had my doubts but, ok, this is what I was working with.
Ten million years later he returned with everything I needed and more. He did a really, really thorough job and while he’d been gone he’d arranged for a house sitter to look after our dogs for a few days. He’d also snuck in some delicious food because I had missed dinner service.
We ate and then we got down to business. My hairy bike pants got the first dose of Veet and he set to work shaving my legs because I couldn’t even see them any more let alone reach them. I wouldn’t quite say that we whistled while we worked (at the risk of inhaling pubes) but we certainly worked as a team and it made our soon-to-be parent status seem all the more manageable. Yes, I can deal with a crying baby, I have removed 20 kilograms of hair from my wife’s upper thighs. I’ve got this shit!
Within no time at all (actually, probably like 45 minutes all up) I was as inappropriately smooth as a baby’s bottom. There are probably some of you pishing and poshing about the idea that I felt that I needed to get hair removal done before giving birth – good for you, mate! No one’s stopping you from poking the orderlies in the eye with your freak stray pubes when it’s your turn but this is what made me feel better and more in control of a situation I had no control over. If focusing on my bikini line meant I didn’t have a panic attack about the huge surgery I was having tomorrow, and the impact it would have on my little potato, then I should have your blessing to wax strip my little heart out.
Sleep was impossible so I spent the night resting and occasionally looking out at the city lights. I wondered about the kind of life that was waiting for me, and us, and was really excited and really scared at the same time.
