Childbirth 1963


I had put off having children until we had both graduated from college. The draft still existed, so my husband enlisted in the Navy as pilot/officer. Now I was ready, but my body hadn’t gotten the message. Finally, I wrote my mother (I was in Florida and she in California). She suggested vitamin E and I conceived in 2 weeks.

We decided to return to CA for Christmas. The budding Naval aviators got the holidays off.  We drove with one other officer.  The guys  were to alternate driving to make it straight through. Fortunately, I did not have morning sickness with either pregnancy.as I stayed awake the whole time, afraid they wouldn’t.

Back in Florida, I had to make a decision about which hospital to have my baby. The much closer hospital was in a very small town. The larger Navy hospital was about 40 miles away and not by freeway. Due to my mother’s experience I chose the larger hospital. In retrospect, it was probably not the best choice. Both would have been fine and the closer one much easier on everyone.

As I said, I never had morning sickness. The only issue was fainting if I opened a can of coffee.  I drank tea and hubby made his own coffee. However, I was concerned about the spraying. Summer is mosquito season and every day trucks rolled by spraying. There was no schedule to the timing, except that it happened whenever we took the basset hound for a walk. There was nowhere to get out of the way and often we were directly sprayed.

Time for delivery came and went. My parents had scheduled my father’s vacation for right after her birth so they could be there with me. Baby waited for their arrival time and then labor started as we were leaving for the airport. The airport was about halfway to the hospital, so we just picked them up on the way. Not really hard labor although my water broke at the airport, fortuitously in the ladies room.

Pensacola is an old, old base and still has the high walls they thought to kept out mosquitoes. It does not keep out roaches as I learned later. The hospital didn’t think I was close to delivery, so we drove around for a while. They finally admitted me. Then my husband drove my parents to our place, leaving me at the hospital. He must have returned, although I never saw him, because our Basset Hound decided to sleep in my parent’s bed. They wondered if we allowed it. No we didn’t.

Back at the hospital, I was left in room alone with a black corp wave observing my progress. A doctor looked in, ripped her for not letting them know I was close to delivering, and whisking me into the delivery room. The delivery doctor looked about 12 and I had never seen him before. His name was Tom Collins and he was a cardiologist. Gotta love the Navy.

They put my feet in the stirrups and were trying to tie my hands down, but I had been promised a mirror and was having none of it. They got the mirror up just in time for me to see she was crowning.  Too late for the arms.

It was a girl. They put her in a little bassinet and wrapped her up as it was air conditioned, being August in Florida. No one told me to keep my head down with the spinal, so I was lifting my head to see her. First thing I saw was a little foot waving over the top. I started laughing and someone went over and rewrapped her. They had barely turned around when the foot reappeared. More laughter. At that point she was picked up, wrapped up and taken to the nursery.

I was left on a gurney in the hall for a couple of hours while they fumigated my room. Florida has an abundance of wood cockroaches and the building was wood. I killed 2 myself before I left even with their efforts. I had a horrible spinal headache from not keeping my head level. And I found out later that the cardiologist delivered 9 babies in 3 hours that morning. I was lucky. In some military hospitals the ladies had to change their own beds. Not there.

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