DELIVERY

My nails have gone into a shock. This is the unbelievable fact that the doctors have agreed upon. There are some weird looking lines and dents on my nails due to a trauma. And guess what. That trauma was my delivery.

I have such a dramatic, unique delivery experience that I finally decided to write about it. It would be hard to do a full spiel version of it for every single one of my friends over the phone. Plus I figure the story can be entertaining and may be useful for the rest of the world who don't know me!

I don't want to bore you with details of how I, we decided to have a baby. All I can say is that the biggest trigger was after I got sick in a South American country. It was then and there that I felt the power of having someone/people to care for as a family. The other thing that I experienced painfully was the ugliness of selfishness and being egocentric.

Anyhow, after my flight landed in LA in September 2006, the next big call I made after calling my hubby to pick me up from the airport was to call my OBGYNE.

Now, this one was a new OB for me due to the fact that my former OB would not accept any type of insurance anymore! And that would be kind of , sort of expensive especially if planning for a pregnancy.

So, one fine day @ 8: 00 AM I show up in her office in which the daylight pours in and I tell her we have decided to have a baby but not so fast, but in a way that the baby is born before I turn 35 and now I am 34. And being the lovely, logical, American Doctor that she is, she understands that what I need is to start trying right away. Of course, I haven't understood yet that the moment that you decide to have a baby, it does not happen next day or next month. The reason I say this is because many of my friends who will read this think like me. We always think that it is a matter of our decision. And especially for us, immigrant ones that never everything seems to be fitting perfectly to have a baby, we have an extra bunch of reasons/ excuses to deal with. So, summary: Friends, Foes, Folks...getting pregnant might take time, so plan accordingly!

And then " I want to get pregnant" journey begins. And by the term" journey" I mean it. You really have to prepare for it. When the ovulation happens, when you should have an intercourse, when you should test. God, that 's a hell of lot planning at least for me.

The ovulation test sticks were the funniest part. You pay 20 bucks for 2 of these test thingees and you pee on them and boom they are gone! So, I decided to try the 7 day one and sometimes even that sounded such a waste. One pal recommanded buying it from 99 cent stores. I never went for it since I had realized I don't want to waste any time! So, the first time was kind of fun, we were still experimenting. But then when I realised that we have to schedule our busy lives around GOD knows when to have sex, there came the funny part.

That having planned sex in the middle of the week nights...now, if you are married for a couple of years and you come home tired, forcing yourself to have sex is not exactly like watching Lakers game together. Any fun thing when you need to plan for it and do it this way and that way , the fun flies right out of the window.

And even the best part is when one is traveling and you don't want to miss that precious moment that happens once in month. After all, a year has no more than 12 months and so you have no more chances than that ! 1 out of 12 that is pretty a big chunk!

So, we slowly planned our lives around it. Once even my hubby had to drive 200 miles overnight to save the precious moments when the eggs inside me were boiling hot to meet cool, sexy sperms in him. And guess what, the result was that single line in pregnancy kit which means none/not pregnant !

After like three/four months I was like: This is tough! A game that you have to play carefully but you have no idea for how long?! Any game like that gets boring even if it's playing a slot machine in Vegas when you have endless number of coins and each time you play , you know you have a chance of winning that big, juicy, red BMW convertible spinning around!

Anyhow, one fine day in January when experimenting with different brands of these pregnancy kits just for keep it fun sake, I came up with two sticks instead of one! And since I was born an "always double check it before announce it" type of a person, next thing I did was running all the way to Savon to indulge and buy one of those more expensive but dummy proof ones that shows the words pregnant/not pregnant!

So, I have the test, I came back home and with my crime partner we test and guess what it shows the precious words : pregnant! And after the first jumps up and down, I am like what if this is not working right, I have to check with my OB.

And here we have brave me in OB's office telling them what I had seen in test sticks. I have test sticks neatly wrapped in tissues in my bag just in case. After all in such cases you need OB/nurse to still believe that you are not hallucinating.

And the big news is confirmed! I am a prego! And then I am like OK, how am I supposed to feel? I am not talking about morning sickness or anything of that physical nature, I am thinking feeling wise. It's like they say there's a baby somewhere inside me, but where, what, what am I supposed to be feeling? Is that all right to be wondering like that?

And technology, God bless it has an answer to all these confusions in my head struggling with my happy part of the brain. Doctor sends me to sonography and it was there and then that I felt in love with... no there was no baby there...with a point. There was a point the size of a walnut may be and Susan kindly told me that it's my baby. The point was not even moving but I could feel it was live. There was another life in me! It was superb, yet strange! Hey I am not that kind of a person that feels all the time : oh, sweet, great, cute. Sorry to disappoint you but hey that's who I am so bear with my logical, wanting to make sense out of everything nature as you read along. I can promise you if you are in the same boat, you will have a fun ride. And if you are not, hey just read on, what have you got to lose? Just adding another 5-10 minutes to that bunch of God, I wasted my time.

So, here I am out the door with a Black and White print of my so called uterous with a black point in it called our baby. I could not walk. There were too much stuff going in my head. I rush to the restroom, unzip my pants and let my belly out. I stare at it and ask: baby are you there? There is no movement inside me but there is a new vibe in my heart. It pounds faster as I am handling my new emotions. And then I discovered a big fact. All these years that I talked about abortion so easily, what a bull shit, none sense speaker I was. Don't get me wrong. I was/am/will be 100% pro abortion right, but now I understand that it is a huge, huge decision to make, that indeed from even the very early on, there is life growing inside the woman. I just hope that no woman ever faces that situation and I hope if they do, they don't get a chance to do a sonography. To me , that can make it a lot harder.

So, we celebrate the Life inside me! The Life that is growing because of us! Some sort of pleasure neither of us could experience without the other, without our love.

And as the initial excitement settles in me, my brain switches to baby delivery mood. And my quest starts for facts, figures, methods, right and wrongs.

And now I am tired, I'll tell you the rest in my next episode! :)