Joanna & Tony’s baby, Felix, was due after the Covid shutdown in NYC but, fortuitously, decided to be born just shy of 37 weeks and shortly before the shutdown. They show up to a prenatal visit almost 6 cm dilated (technically called “active labor”) yet not even feeling any labor sensations. Their doc tells them they need to go straight to the hospital, where they spend many hours in the waiting room and triage but then proceed to have an unmedicated labor and birth. Joanna & Tony are the only couple thus far to take Birth Matters class, give birth before graduating, and return to class with their newborn in tow to share the birth story with their own cohort!
Resources:
Gamenighttrivia.com - Tony Hightower
Joannascutts.com - feminist writer
livingnowyoga.com - Juliana Mitchell
Mt. Sinai West / Dr. Kahn & Dr. Brown
NY State Patient Bill of Rights (or Google your state’s similar BoR)
*Disclosure: Links on this page to products are affiliate links; I will receive a small commission on any products you purchase at no additional cost to you.
Sponsor links:
Free “Pack for Your Best Birth” Packing List (with free mini-course option)
East River Doula Collective (find a doula, attend our free “Meet the Doulas” event)
Birth Matters NYC Childbirth Education Classes (Astoria, Queens and virtual)
Episode Topics:
Miscarriage a year before getting pregnant
Almost a year to the day later, she’s pregnant
Experiencing no nausea
Visiting London around Christmas 2019
Doing prenatal yoga, taking birth classes
Going in 36.5 weeks for a prenatal, discussing induction, then does vaginal exam and discovers she’s 6 cm dilated
Being told to go straight to hospital, sitting in crowded waiting room for a long time (~2 hrs)
Getting steroids for baby’s lung development since it was before 37 weeks and GBS antibiotics because they didn’t have her test results back yet
Waiting for a room for ~6 hrs in triage, eventually getting one
Doing a lot of breathing
Sensations came on very gradually
Water broke fairly late -- Dr. Brown comes in and artificially ruptures the membranes
Around 5 hrs in L&D room
Reframing pain as intensity
Standing lots through labor and moving and stretching
Signing release for nitrous oxide but never using it
Pushing and breathing felt tricky, not liking the nurse’s directed pushing
Asking to touch baby’s head and realizing she’s the only one who can do this, not being sure she can
Significant tearing -- painful
Getting pitocin for 3rd stage
Felix was small, coming straight to Joanna’s chest
Delayed cord clamping
Tony cuts cord
Immediate skin to skin briefly before they had to do testing since he was (barely) pre-term, Tony goes over with baby
Moving into postpartum unit for 2 days, feeling alone despite being in a shared room
IBCLC coming to see her, starting expression of colostrum, pumping, Felix having a bit of trouble latching at first being so early
Feeling exhausted, sending him to nursery
Going home after about 2 days
Born Feb 22 in morning, her parents come from London to help, her parents get back to London the day before the shutdown
Not having anything they needed
Babywearing
Breastfeeding coming easily but having uneven supply
Trust your instincts
A baby can’t cry forever
Decide what your main hopes for your child’s character (“north star”) are (theirs is, “Be kind, stay curious”)
Interview Transcript
Lisa: Joanna and Tony, welcome!
Tony: Hello!
Joanna: Hi!
Lisa: So good to see you again, you both hold such a special place in my heart because you have a very exciting story to share that was right before the shutdown. Do you want to introduce yourselves first a little bit? Just give us a sense of how long you've been parents and just the basics.
Tony: Sure.
Joanna: Sure. I'm Joanna. So as you will hear, I gave birth February, end of February, 2020, to our first baby, our son Felix. And I'm a writer, I work from home. We live in Astoria, which is how we found Lisa's wonderful birth class. And yeah, we've basically been here. We've gotten to know the neighborhood right around our front door, really, really well. And for the last year.
Tony: Yep. And I'm Tony. I work from home as well. I'm a professional quiz host. I run a trivia company and so instead of doing a lot of work in bars, since the shutdown I've been doing streaming quizzes, and so it's been good that I've gotten to be home as well. And so this has been a two studio, two workplace household for the last year I say in the 13 months since Felix was born. So yeah, we're here.
Lisa: Nice. Well, so let's back up and would you please share a little bit about how your pregnancy went? Were there any developments to note along those months of pregnancy, as well as what were the different ways that you prepared for the journey into parenthood?
Joanna: Sure. So I think they, the most significant pre-pregnancy experience that we had was that I had a miscarriage almost exactly a year before I got pregnant with Felix. I'm 41 now, but we knew that we wanted to have a child, but I also was pretty sure I didn't want to have too many interventions. Our approach was, if it happens, it happens. If it doesn't happen, we'll see how we'll deal. But, so I was able to get pregnant that first time and went to the OB, my current OB. And she said, it doesn't look like it's a real, it hadn't taken essentially.
It wasn't the egg wasn't fertilized. It was an empty sac. I think they call it or something like that. And so something was showing up. And in a way, because it was very clinically explained, I never really felt the loss because I never really felt the experience of it all still felt very strange and not really real. And it never really became real because right from the beginning, she was like, yeah, this is not…
Tony: Yeah, don't, don't put any weight on this.
Joanna: This is not a real, it's not a thing. And so I just took the other one because with M anyway, she gave me the pills. I took them home and that was difficult. And that was, that was the summer of 2019. I guess... 2018?
Tony: 2018.
Joanna: 2018. That's right. Yes, of course. Summer of 2018. And then weirdly, when I went, when I got pregnant again, it was almost exactly a year. I think I went back and I looked at the dates of the appointments and it was really, really close. It was almost exactly a year. And I went back and she was like, "Oh yeah, right. Okay. This time it's real." So it was like, okay, here it goes. And my OB is very no nonsense and very, very brisk. And so she just sort of sat me down, ran me through what to eat, not eat avoid, but her main takeaway, which I really took to heart was live your life. I can remember her saying that, she was like, "Okay, you're pregnant. Live your life." She was very kind of, when you go out, you don't have to really change what you're doing. She said, "Make sure you carry a snack and some water wherever you go, but you're not ill or you are perfectly fine."
Tony: Cut back on the wine. But everything else is pretty much fair.
Joanna: Yeah. I think that that very no-nonsense approach was very helpful. And I was also very lucky. I didn't have any nausea really at all. I apologize to everyone out there who is listening to this and throwing things at the... no, I was very lucky. And that was actually something that the first time with the miscarriage that I had been concerned about, because one of the things that people say is that if you're sick, it's I think this is just a comfort that there's, it's a really good sign that you're really super sick because you know, it's, it's real and it's really happening. My mother told me that the same thing happened to her that she just never got sick. And so I think it's, that's how I'm built, I suppose. So..
Lisa: It's a nice blessing.
Joanna: Yeah. So it was, it was a good thing, although it didn't mean that the whole thing was so unreal. I had to keep reminding myself. No, wait, I can't have a cocktail. No, wait, this is actually happening. I had to sort of remember it. That first trimester was...
Tony: Like, "Why is it so hard to sleep on my stomach? Oh wait-- like literally. There were times, you were forgetting. You were just like. Yeah, we had to keep thinking, oh wait. Yeah. Yes, yes. Pregnant.
Joanna: Yes.
Tony: That's a thing.
Joanna: Oh wait, is that a thing I can do? Should I eat that? You know, you sort of…
Tony: Yeah. It really didn't affect the flow of our lives barely at all.
Joanna: In the beginning, at least.
Tony: In the beginning, yeah.
Joanna: And then yeah, I got to Christmas and we went home to London to see my family and I sort of saw the extended family and that was really nice. And that's the last time I've seen most of them.
And so yeah, everything was fine. And then after, after we came back in January, it was definitely a lot harder to move around and do things.
Tony: You were in the third trimester at that point.
Joanna: Yeah. I hadn't, I didn't gain that much weight, which was something that my OB was slightly concerned about. And I had low iron. I'm trying to think of the things that were not but that, that was my main issue. I didn't like most of the tests and everything were fine, but it was the iron was something I had to supplement with. I had to go and buy these horrible supplements when I was in London. And that was my only real intervention I had to make. But in a way, the timing worked out quite nicely. So my due date was March 22nd and we'd always sort of mentally said, well, after Christmas, after the New Year, like that's when we start kind of taking this really seriously. And that's when we started getting the nursery in order, which is in the corner of our bedroom and figuring out, but we sort of were able to put a lot of things off. So we started the birth classes, I think, at the end of January or the beginning of February. Yeah, so that was when we sort of started taking it seriously.
I did prenatal yoga. I'm very glad that I was able to do that. I did that at an Astoria's studio, The Yoga Room, which had a wonderful practitioner who was just very warm and I didn't really expect it. I've done yoga anyway, so I'm pretty familiar with it. So I thought it would be more for exercise, but it actually, it was a really lovely opportunity to meet people who were also pregnant at the same time and to hear the different experiences. And sort of hear how far along someone was and what they were having to deal with physically. And you got to see, I think what was really nice for me was seeing you just, aren't often in a room with 15 or 20 other pregnant women. And so it was a really extraordinary thing to sort of look around and see like different body types, different just how differently people carried themselves and carried their babies and how there would be somebody who was there at 35 weeks smaller than somebody who was there at 25 weeks.
And you just got to see a sense of just, oh, this is so unique to everyone. And that I think apart from your class, that was the only other prenatal kind of experience I had. Apart from one of my closest friends, coincidentally lived in New York and she was also pregnant at the same time. And our babies were due a few weeks apart, as it turns out they were born a week apart, but they would due about five weeks apart. And it was her second baby. And so she was really able to give me a lot of pointers. And she had a much harder pregnancy than me. So I also had a sense of perspective and sort of feeling like in what was normal, what wasn't. And so... yeah
Lisa: Before you go on I...
Joanna: Yes.
Lisa: I just want to mention, since you brought up the prenatal yoga that this teacher has come up several times on the podcast, because she's amazing. She's a friend of mine. Her name is Juliana Mitchell. Everybody loves her!
Joanna: Juliana! I was gonna say... Yes.
Lisa: Yeah. And so if anyone would like to seek out prenatal yoga classes or regular yoga classes as well, her website is: livingnowyoga.com, I'll be sure to link to it in the show notes you can find out for now at the time we're recording it, it's April, so things are still virtual. So she teaches virtual, I think currently by donation classes. And as the world starts opening up, I'm sure her website will post which studios she's teaching in and hopefully you still in Astoria, but we'll see. I know she also used to teach in Manhattan before the shutdown, so we'll see there's to going to be a little bit of a redistribution, probably of where people are teaching as things open up and don't open up. But yeah, I just wanted to mention her by name so folks can find her.
Tony: She definitely, she helped you a lot.
Joanna: Yeah.
Tony: She was super helpful
Joanna: Yeah. She would always make time for people to ask questions after class. And I think I was asking because I was having problems later on in the pregnancy. The thing that really was tough for me was having, I had a lot of gas and constipation and pain that, as it turns out might have been contractions, but I didn't know that at the time. So I think it was, but she gave me pointers for sort of easing some of that. And just kind of, as I got deeper into the pregnancy, she was helpful with when people had questions about birth, she was so generous with her time. So I would definitely second that.
Lisa: Nice. Well, so anything else you wanted to share about pregnancy or preparing for parenthood before we launch into your birth story?
Joanna: I mean, no, I don't think so. We made a lot of lists, and then we disregarded them.
Tony: We made a lot of lists; the making of the lists was a good exercise and had things kind of moved on and, and you delivered closer to the due date, they probably would've come in a lot more useful. So I would recommend making the lists even if you don't use them. Cause then you've at least got it clear in your head, getting it out of your head and onto page or onto a document is a good practice. And if it makes you feel like, okay, maybe we're not missing anything large. And it turned out that we kind of weren't, but it was, yeah. It just, the way things turned out, it was like, okay, well we're just going to have to improvise a lot of this.
Joanna: And you can do a lot more, you can manage quite well with improvising, as it turns out.
Tony: Yeah, you know, as a species we've been doing this for hundreds of millions of years.
Joanna: Although as our OB pointed out, she's like, "Yes, people used to give birth in fields, but they also died!"
But we were lucky because Tony's job is very flexible. So he was able to come to all of my appointments and I gave birth at Mount Sinai West in Manhattan, so we're in the Mount Sinai system. So we had the ultrasounds there as well.
Tony: Yeah. Everything was on the west side of Midtown.
Joanna: Yeah. But we made a point as much as we could of like, we would go to the appointment and then we would go and get lunch or something afterwards and sit down and make some lists and make some, just kind of compare notes. And I remember those days really well. There's a branch of Shake Shack right around the corner from my OB. So we would always go to the OB and then go around the corner to Shake Shack. And there would be three pregnant women in line. Literally, this was not, we were not the only ones who did this and I recommend to make it a time to have if you can time it. So you have a little bit of time to debrief. It's also helpful to just go over.
Tony: A bit of ritual is also a good thing.
Joanna: Yeah, those appointments are always rushed and quick, and there's a lot of information and a lot that you need to process. So we would be like, okay, what are we, what do we...
Tony: What do we need to...
Joanna: what do we learn?
Tony: What's our take away...
Joanna: Yeah. So that was helpful.
Tony: That's where we were going into day zero.
Joanna: Yes. As it turned out
Lisa: And remind me, I believe you made it through two thirds of the class series with me before baby made an early debut?
Tony: I guess?
Lisa: I think you made it through the first two weeks, which was class one, two, then three, four.
Tony: Yeah.
Lisa: And I think then you had the baby before classes five and six, which has all the afterbirth topics.
Tony: Right.
Joanna: Yes, that's right. So yes, we had an appointment, a regular appointment and it was with my OB. So at the practice at Westside Medical Associates, there's about five or six doctors in the practice and I had rotated through seeing all of the other doctors so that if one of them was on call when I gave birth, they would, I would know them. So I hadn't seen my regular OB Dr. Kahn for over a month. At that point, I was having the weekly appointments. And so I went back in to see her and everything was fine. And this was, I was 37 and a half weeks at this point, 36 and a half weeks. And we were making plans about the due date. And she said, I want to schedule you to come in because they no longer like people going past 40 weeks. And she said they were actually, we were talking about scheduling. And she said, they're actually talking about revising your due date down a bit so that instead of giving you 40 weeks, they calculate to 39 weeks. Because a lot of people, especially I was geriatric as being 40. So it was
Lisa: Lovely term, right?
Joanna: Lovely term. Delightful term.
Lisa: Thank you so much.
Joanna: Yes, that was, that was a good mood booster all the way through
Tony: That's right. Geezers us.
Joanna: Yeah. But knowing that I'm a higher risk. So I sort of said to call me, just leave it because I was hoping not to be induced. And she said, no, I'm going to induce you on the due date if he doesn't come.
Tony: If it hasn't happen yet, yeah.
Joanna: So we just got done making all these arrangements and she was like, "This is when I'm on call. So we can, we can book it so that I'll be there to deliver." And then she looks at the chart and she said, "When did you last have a vaginal exam?" And I said, "Well, none of the other doctors have given me one." So she's like, "Oh, it's been like a month since you had a vaginal check." So she put the glove on, it gave me the exam.
Tony: It was super informal.
Joanna: It's just kind of at the end of the appointment, she said, this is fine. Let's just make sure.
Tony: And then her eyes got big.
Joanna: And she's like, wait, how far along are you? You did the math again. And she was just like, wait, you're six centimeters dilated. And she was kind of like...
Tony: Change of plan.
Joanna: How long have you been walking around? I mean, obviously, I didn't know. I had no idea and she's like, "You've been walking around. No, you can't go home." And I can sort of see the wheels turning and she went out and talked to someone and we were just like, "What does this mean?"
Tony: She didn't really officially say like, "You can't go home now. You're in, you're in labor now." She just, she was like, "Hold on." And she walked out of the room and we're just kind of staring at each other for what felt like an hour.
Joanna: Yeah.
Tony: It was probably five minutes, but it was: is this it, what do we do? And then I'm starting to think like, okay, if I have to go home and get like a, throw some stuff in a backpack, we have the list.
Yeah, yeah. We were like: ok, what's on the list.
I'm thinking in my head, if I have 10 minutes in the house to go and just throw stuff into a backpack, I got to go there. I got to go there in the house. I got to go there in the house. I gotta go there in the house.
Joanna: Yeah. We hadn't yet packed a hospital bag.
Tony: Because it's three weeks out. Why would we do that? And yet,
Joanna: Yeah, three and a half.
Tony: Three and half weeks.
Joanna: So she came back in the room and basically said, get in a cab. You're going downtown to the hospital, which is about 20 blocks south.
Lisa: Do you remember if they did monitoring to see if you were having regular contractions?
Joanna: So I had had the previous appointment, I'd had the monitoring. I was strapped up to the machine that monitors the baby's heartbeat, I think.
Lisa: Probably for a non-stress test, maybe.
Joanna: Yes. The stress test. That's right. That was the most recent appointment.
Tony: And he seemed to be fine. Very normal.
Joanna: Normal. And I still wasn't having, I had had this pain that I had thought was either Braxton Hicks contractions, or the regular sort of gas. It was really painful. I mean, it was really like a stabbing pain, but I could ease it by moving. So I still don't know really, exactly what that pain was, but it certainly wasn't bad enough to prompt me to call the doctor. I probably should have.
Tony: We just thought it was gas.
Joanna: And actually in a way I'm very glad I didn't, because I feel like if I had gone in any earlier and I had been dilated or this conversation had happened a week or two earlier than the baby would have to go into the NICU. And probably…
Lisa: Right.
Joanna: It could have a much more dramatic scenario. So I was very lucky. I feel like I say that a lot and I feel very lucky, but the timing actually meant that nothing too severe, he was three and a half days off 37 weeks. So off being technically full term. So even though he was three and a half weeks early, he was actually really only three days early in terms of what actually mattered developmentally.
Tony: Yeah. He'd almost fully cooked in there. He was almost completely done.
Joanna: Yeah. But we didn't really know that at the time this was February 26th and my due date was the 22nd of March. I'm a month early. In my head this is not good. We don't know how big is he. We don't even know, but they had tried to measure him but obviously those measurements are pretty.
Tony: Yeah, there's a bit of guesswork involved.
Joanna: Yeah, and they're not terribly precise. So, so we went to the hospital, but she was kind of like, "They're gonna check you out, see what's happening." At this point, we thought what was going to happen was we would probably go to the hospital and then I wasn't feeling any contractions. So I was like, this is probably fine. They'll just send us home and we'll have a nice, good night's sleep in our bed. And then we'll come back in the morning and maybe have the baby. But at that point we were sort of fairly convinced we would have some time. So we went down to the hospital, we went and got a sandwich first. And then we went in and we had done the hospital tour like a week before, which was really good, I think. So we knew the lay of the land and we knew how to get in and get out.
Tony: We knew where to go and what to do and how to get there.
Joanna: So that was helpful. And then we basically sat in the waiting room for a really long time. People were coming in and it was really crowded and...
Tony: It was crowded. And that was a little stressful. We were fine, but stressful things were happening all around us.
Joanna: Yeah. There were a lot of people who clearly...
Tony: Agitated, yeah.
Joanna: Feeling pain and trying to figure out what was happening. It seemed to be like, they were slammed, but this was sort of a Wednesday afternoon and apparently is kind of normal. They were just always busy.
Tony: Yeah.
Lisa: About a week later when the shutdown happened and everybody left town and it became a ghost town. Very different story. But in your timing, yes. Crowded.
Joanna: Yes. So this is still, yeah, this is the end of February. We were reading, we were on our phones, kind of reading news articles about Italy's shutdown, which had just started, I think. I was like, God, this is really hard. This China thing is now in Italy. Like, oh my God, like what's happening? My, obviously my family is in Europe. It was definitely this thing that was out there on the horizon, but nobody's in masks. Everybody's just...
Tony: hanging out.
Joanna: Hanging out. Well, I guess the doctors were in masks.
Tony: Yeah, like, you know, it was a hospital environment.
Joanna: But no one in the waiting room is in a mask or anything. So, yeah, we just waited and then eventually we got moved into a triage room and that's when it became clear that things were sort of starting to happen. That's where they hooked me up to a monitor to measure the contractions. And that was when we sort of learned to look at the output that kind of remembering what we've learned from you about the way that it peaked and how you learn to look for the peak and the dip and...
Tony: Yeah. And the distance between them and all of that. Yeah,
Joanna: It's funny. I don't really remember.
Tony: I remember talking to the OB that was on duty was somebody that we had actually talked to already.
Joanna: Yes. A really wonderful doctor.
Tony: Yeah. Dr. Brown. She was wonderful.
Joanna: Yeah, she was fantastic.
Tony: She was great. And I remember talking with her when she came in and got for about an hour, I was like, "Can I go out and get some food for us?" And she's like, "You might want to do that." And I said, "Is there any chance that we're going to be able to go home and pack a bag or something?" And she was just like, "Nope, she is not leaving here without a baby."
Joanna: So, yeah.
Tony: And I was like, all right, fine. So I went, I ran down the whole and dropped 60 bucks on snacks. And then I went to Jack Rabbit Sports.
Joanna: Oh, that's right, yeah.
Tony: The running store.
Joanna: This was a great idea.
Tony: And I picked up a box of running gels. We run a little bit. That was great because I just kept feeding them to her during this entire process.
Joanna: They were a great little energy boost.
Tony: Yeah. They're built for long distance runners. We take them.
Joanna: They don't usually sell them by the box. But Tony had gone to in. He was like, "Can I have, can I take the whole box?" And they were like,
Tony: Why? And I'm like, my wife's in labor, she's run a couple of marathons. She knows how these work, she just needs it. And they were like, "That's a great idea." And I'm like, just give me the damn box. I got to go.
Lisa: Yeah, just be sure that whatever type you get ideally should not have caffeine, but all the other stuff - awesome.
Tony: Yeah. They make them with, or without it, there's a thousand different styles of them. And it's the ones that have caffeine are very clearly marked with caffeine.
Lisa: Yes.
Tony: Just don't get those.
Lisa: Right.
Joanna: Yeah. We didn't get those. But also, while this was all still going on. I was still in the triage room watching the monitor, but the main concern they gave me is the lung development that they were concerned about because the lung development is the last thing that happens. So they gave me some kind of steroid that was supposed to sort of speed up the, if anything was sort of still coming together, this would speed it up. This is my very, again, nonmedical understanding. There was that and they also gave me the test or the test that I had gone in to have at the OB before they realized I was dilated was the swab to test if there's antibodies, if there's any kind of, they need to give you antibiotics, I think.
Lisa: GBS.
Joanna: Yes. So that was the test, but the results hadn't time to come back.
Lisa: Right. Yeah, that test, that test is usually done between 36 and 38 weeks. So you were right in that window.
Joanna: Right. Yeah. So they had done the test and so they gave me the antibiotics anyway, just as a precaution. So those were the two things that I was, I saw I was on a couple of drips and they were, when that was the most inconvenient part. I really didn't like having the wires in me, but otherwise it was just, it was just long and tedious and uncomfortable. And I could hear people, there was a woman across the hall who was much, I think, further on, further on than me...
Tony: Having a hard time.
Joanna: She was having a hard time who was really vocalizing a great deal. And there was like one there's only one bathroom toilet that the waiting room shared. So it didn't, so all of that kind of stuff was really unpleasant. And when we finally got out of the triage room into the birthing room, that felt really good, but that was about 10:00 PM or something. By then... Was it about 10:00 PM?
Tony: Yeah.
Joanna: I vaguely remember that. Like we had been... We'd been there since lunchtime.
Tony: Yeah. For seven or eight hours at that point.
Joanna: And it was just, and it was really just a question of waiting until there was a space. So once there was a space, they moved me upstairs to this birthing room. So we didn't have, we had an inflatable ball that we had planned to use the plastic, the rubber birthing ball we didn't have.
Tony: There was, there was
Joanna: So we didn't have to get anything.
Tony: There was no chance of that happening.
Joanna: So I didn't have anything.
Tony: We're at the mercy of what they had, so.
Joanna: Yeah. It didn't have any kind of calming music or anything else just had you, but thankfully I did have you.
Tony: Yeah, I got to be there, which was really nice.
Joanna: And yeah. And, and things kind of at that point moved at this point, I can't really remember clearly how I felt. I remember fixating on the, on the peaks and the troughs, like going up and down on the, and following that little hill.
Tony: Yeah, the rest of the rest of the time felt like it was just one long breathing exercise. From once when we got into the birthing room for whatever it was, the last four or five hours of your labor, it just felt like this is just we're tracking your breathing exercises. And we were timing it. We kind of made a little game of how long it was between them and, and just like tracking them that way. It was a way to pass the time we were talking about stuff, but it was just, it felt like small talk in between. We were able to have like 15 seconds of small talk and then a wave would happen and be like, okay, well that's fine. Okay. Fine. Good, good, good. We can keep going.
Joanna: And I think I would say it came on very, very gradually. I think that was the part that I looking back sort of when people have these things about like, however, how many hours was your labor? I kind of don't really know because I don't know when I would start it from.
Lisa: Yeah, because you did a great job at ignoring.
Tony: Yeah.
Lisa: Like our talks about it in class, ignored it as long as possible. You totally did that.
Joanna: Yep.
Tony: Yep. Yeah, no, that
Joanna: yeah, it was like when we went and had the sandwich outside the hospital, I was like, "I'm not really feeling anything. Like I know I'm supposed to go straight there, but really you have to go straight there." And then I'm sitting in the waiting room for probably an hour or two before I went into the triage room. And then the triage room, I really do remember. It's just like now I'm bored and tired. And I was standing up a lot. I didn't really sit down or lie down much and moving around. And then when we got into, my water breaking, that was fun. When I went into the room, the birthing room, I think that I have…
That happened fairly late.
It did happen quite late. And I actually the doctor, Dr. Brown, because she would come in and out; she wasn't there the whole time. And she... she'd come in and sort of check and see how it was going. And at one point she just said like, I think we need to move this along. I'm going to try breaking your water.
Tony: Breaking your water. Yeah.
Joanna: Did she end up?
Tony: Yeah. She did. She took the little tool and punctured the sack.
Joanna: So I had an enormous amount of amniotic fluid, really drenched everything. Like there was like water, everybody had said late on in the pregnancy is probably not going to be very much. You might not even notice.
Tony: No, we were ankle deep.
Joanna: Like the bed was soaked. I really just did not expect that. And I was just kind of like in my unmedical brain, I was like, "Well, maybe that's why I wasn't feeling things because it was..."
Lisa: You had more of a cushion.
Joanna: I had a pretty good cushion.
Lisa: Yeah. That's fair.
Tony: It's like running in a swimming pool versus running on land. It's like, there's very low impact. Whatever he's doing in there is just he's punching water. He's just punching water.
Lisa: Once that happened and you lost a lot of that fluid, did it change how you were perceiving the strength of the contractions?
Joanna: I think so, but I'm not sure how much of that was sort of just psychological in the sort of like now it's really happening.
Tony: We're into the final turn here.
Joanna: I mean, again, looking back, I think that was it, but I didn't, I didn't have any pain relief then or earlier.
Tony: There was no time.
Joanna: I mean, I think that would have been time, but I wanted to try to avoid it because I just wanted to try to avoid it. I sort of thought I would see. And it never got to a point because it was so gradual, there was never a point where I was like, okay, this is now unbearable. And really the point at which it got to the point where I was like, okay, this is now unbearable, that was when I was pushing.
Lisa: And do you mind my asking how long you were approximately if you have a sense of this, how long were you in the waiting room? How long were you in triage before you had got admitted into your room where you gave birth?
Tony: It was a couple of hours in the waiting room. Before you got into triage, and then you got into triage and you were in triage for...
Joanna: About six hours.
Tony: About six hours. Yeah. About six hours.
Lisa: That's usually a pretty cramped space.
Tony: It was just a long wait.
Joanna: Yeah. It was smaller. Yeah. I don't remember it being,
Tony: It was small. It was definitely small.
Joanna: It didn't feel super cramped. It was just, I think it was partly the, just that uncomfortable sense of like, this is a transitional space and it's not...
Tony: And we weren't able to kind of like plunk our stuff down and be like, okay. Here's where we are.
Lisa: Yeah. And that's a really long time to be in that space.
Joanna: Yeah. That's a really long time. Yeah. So I think it was probably from about 3:30-4 o'clock
Tony: Through to about 10.
Joanna: Through to about 10 before we got the room opened up and then he was born in like...
Tony: 3:30 in the morning.
Joanna: 3:30 in the morning. So it was another few hours. The sense of time...
Tony: Yeah. And the birth room was more comfortable. It definitely was. The bed was more comfortable.
Joanna: Definitely.
Tony: There was a space for me to sit and, and a space for like us to kind of.
Joanna: That was the thing, you didn't really sit down. It was a long time, but it was such a strangely gradual process that I think I didn't really have a sense of time.
Tony: Yeah, and we had plenty of stuff to focus on too. Partly because of your classes and partly because of the stuff we talked about, we kind of had a sense of like, okay, here's the thing we can focus on while this is happening and we were able to kind of maintain that for even a few hours at a time in the middle of all this, which I think really helped because if we hadn't had nothing to focus on where we're just like, we're speculating and we have no idea that would have been a lot more stressful for us to say, okay, like, yes, we're following your peaks. Here's how you interpret the waves of what's happening to you. And we can kind of interpret it even just armchair side, to be able to like interpret this stuff was really helpful. Even just as a parlor game, like, okay, we can make a game out of it.
Joanna: But, no, Tony was fantastic. We didn't use a doula or have anyone else in the room with us. And a lot of the time it was just the two of us, which was nice. There were a couple of things that really had helped from your class. And the one that I had mentally absorbed was the difference between pain and intensity and the framing it as intensity. And that definitely helped me to think about this as the waves coming on, but not in terms of pain because I stood up, I was on my feet pretty much the whole time, I think.
Tony: Yeah, up until the very end. You, you, you stood up as, as much as you could.
Joanna: And I was doing a lot of moving around. I was doing a lot of stretching and like...
Tony: Dancing.
Joanna: Like Martha Graham and it was very instinctive. Like I was not really thinking about how to move. I was just moving. And you were there to sort of hold on to you and kind of squat down or, and actually to the extent that I didn't realize when they finally put me in the bed to push, I didn't really want to sit down, but I was like, okay, this is fine. But when I actually did sit down and lie down in the better, I was like, "Oh my God, I'm exhausted." I hadn't thought about tiredness, but my lower back was screaming because I just, I had been on my feet for hours. And it was that sensation of relief that you get after sitting down just in normal circumstances, like, oh right. I'm exhausted, three o'clock the morning. I've been up since like.
Tony: Whatever.
Joanna: Whatever. And I've been, I've been standing or moving for most of that time, then I had to push. And that was probably the worst part. They brought in gas and air. What did they call it here?
Lisa: Nitrous oxide.
Joanna: Nitrous oxide. And I, well, they offered it to me and I said, sure, at that point I was like...
Tony: Whatever.
Joanna: Whatever, I'm sure I'll try it. If it will help. And they brought it in and I had to sign a release, which I don't remember this being like really? Okay. And I was I tried to like, sign that and I managed to sign this release and then, and then we just never used it. Then I think Dr. Brown was like, "no, no, it's happening; legs up in the stirrups."
Lisa: That's interesting. I don't think I've heard of it being offered in the pushing stage. So that's interesting to hear that.
Joanna: It was shortly before.
Tony: It was shortly before. It was before that.
Joanna: Maybe it was before.
Tony: It was before. Like, it was, it was just to kind of help get you to get you to that stage.
Joanna: Maybe it was just after they broke my water
Tony: Yeah. And then you signed it. I remember that whole thing. And then just in case we have to help you along to the next bit, and then you signed it and literally within five minutes, like while they were still like setting everything up. Yeah. Dr. Brown was like, "Yeah, you know what? We're there."
Lisa: Never mind.
Tony: Never mind. It's not needed. We don't need it. Forget it.
Joanna: So yeah, I never had any, I mean it, which is good. I was very proud of myself and not having any pain relief, which I know is a weird macho thing, but it did actually help me. I think I definitely wouldn't suggest there's nothing weak about having pain relief, but it did make me feel strong, I felt very, well, I can do this. I got this far, I got to this point and in a way, I'm glad that I didn't have the nitrous at the end because I was like, "Okay, no, I'm there, I've done it. And now I've just got to the last part and see it through." And the hardest part about pushing that I remember was that I couldn't figure out the breathing. We had a nurse who we did not like who was very aggressive about that. Our doctor was a wonderful sort of calming, very calm authoritative person, which is exactly what you need. But this nurse was a lot more sort of anxious and she was kind of counting and this slightly, like really kind of yelling and I felt…
Lisa: Directed pushing.
Joanna: Yeah. And I was just, I couldn't work out just like breathe. And I couldn't, I actually stopped the stop them at one point. And I said to the doctor, I don't understand how I'm supposed to be breathing because I hadn't practiced this or anything. And she actually, and she took me...
Tony: And then the doctor said focus on me.
Joanna: Yeah.
Tony: Don't focus on her, focus on me.
Joanna: Just ignore this. And so I tried to do that and follow her, but it was a weird thing to coordinate the sense of the pushing and the breathing were difficult to coordinate, I found. And it was more like, just like my brain was trying to override my body or trying to understand it and getting confused.
Tony: And you were like, "How far along are we? I don't even know." I remember, I remember worrying about that.
Joanna: That was the thing I asked them to like, when his, you said his head is out,
Tony: I was like, "I can see, I can see the top of his head now." And you were like, "What, what?"
Joanna: Can I, can I feel, cause I couldn't, I couldn't tell. And I kind of, it didn't feel different from like other kinds of pushing.
Tony: Like pooping?
Joanna: Yeah, honestly. And so I was like, I don't kind of believe you and I, so…
Tony: I remember grabbing your hand, I remember grabbing your hand and being like, "Here, feel it."
Joanna: And then I touched his head. Then I was like, "Oh my God!" that was a real moment of this is really real. And then I was terrified. Then I was like, well, wait, I'm so tired. What if I can't like, they're like, "Push," they kind of make it sound like there's an alternative. Like, well, what happens if I don't? Cause at one point in his head, like went back in a bit.
Lisa: Rebounding,
Joanna: Yeah, and I was like, now what?
Lisa: It's normal, right? But we don't like it because it's like, "Wait, no, you're supposed to be born!"
Joanna: Yeah. I was like, wait, surely there's only one way this can go at this point. But it feels...
Tony: Like you gonna stop now and have a cup of coffee? No, that's not how this works.
Joanna: I think that was the time that I felt the most, this is me, there is literally no one else in the universe who can do this but me and all these people in the room are looking at me and I have to do it. And it feels like I'm gonna rip in half, but I have to do it. And that was a real, I can remember that feeling of, I don't think I can. And--
Tony: I remember us using marathon metaphors a lot. It was like...
Joanna: Yeah, you were definitely coaching me through it. I probably told you to shut up at one point.
Tony: Actually, no, you never told me to shut up.
Joanna: Really?
Tony: Which
Lisa: Just in her head.
Tony: Since, since, yes. But not, not at that time.
Joanna: No, 'cause you were very good and...
Tony: I was like, this is like you're at mile 25. Yes. Everything hurts. Everything sucks, but you just stumble through the next mile and you're done.
Joanna: Yeah. And that actually having run the marathon and that was, yeah, because you were like, you're at Central Park, you're coming into Central Park and it was like, "Yes, I am. I've done this. I know how to do this." And then, yeah. And then finally that happened that I could feel, and I couldn't feel his head, but the rest of him came out, I really felt that I just kind of like, not in a bad way, but just like, oh, that's a baby.
Tony: That's a child. That's a child. That's a child, oh, yeah.
Joanna: And that, that was the real, that's the sensation that I will never forget. Like I can, I forgot a lot of the other things, but that is like a physical memory, like in my body of how that felt.
Lisa: And were you feeling the urge to push or not?
Joanna: I was, but I think it got somewhat overlaid with this anxiety and the stress of being encouraged to push. And I know that we had talked in your class about how this is something that they're trying to maybe do less of, but certainly they were, if this was a sort of old-school approach, then the nurse was sort of an old school kind of person. And she definitely was like, this is how it is done. This is how it has always done. And she was not really willing to hear me. And I think I said like, "Can you not count? Can you let me," cause the counting was difficult.
Tony: The counting had nothing to do with it
Lisa: It makes it confusing, right?
Joanna: It made it so confusing.
Tony: The counting had nothing to do with your rhythm and your breathing. She was in her own head and it was just like...
Joanna: Yeah. that was the one part that I think I found of the whole experience that I was like, I would ask them to change or have, I would want to have done differently was that I just, I felt kind of yelled at and I felt stressed because, like I said, I didn't understand what they were asking me to do between my brain and my brain and my body were not in sync. And especially after all of this kind of the way that I reminded me of that, like the way I was moving before I got in the bed, which was very much, it was totally instinctive. I'm like, I don't know why I need to put my leg up the wall here, but I do. And it was just like, that was how I had to move and it was completely instinctive. And then I was in the bed and I'm glad I was glad to be in the bed, to be honest, it wasn't that I wanted to be crouching or because I had been, I hadn't been in the bed at all up until that point. And when I finally laid down, I was tired and I understand, obviously that's the crunch time. Like that is the crucial moment.
You really do have to be...
Tony: Present.
Joanna: On it, but it was definitely pressure that I, it didn't feel natural, but honestly the whole thing, the pushing really didn't feel, I tore quite badly. And I think that was part of it. I don't know if there was a way that I could have prepared differently for that, but it definitely was like, I needed to be, I was pushing against something. I was pushing it through something that was not fully letting him out. And that was the part, I think the worst, honestly, the worst pain that I really remember very vividly was being sewn up. That was the part that was really. And the, what is the drug that they give you?
Lisa: Numbing? Lidocaine?
Joanna: No, the, no. The drug that is supposed to, Pitocin, they gave me Pitocin to...
Lisa: To help your uterus to start to contract and shrink, yeah.
Joanna: Yeah. And that was a drip as well. I asked to be taken off after a little while and they did, because it was, I just hated having the, it was painful and....
Tony: Yeah. Like, is this necessary? Is this necessary? And they were like, "Actually it's fine. We can take it out."
Joanna: Yeah. Because that was...
Lisa: Yeah, because you had an unmedicated birth. So...
Joanna: Yeah.
Lisa: It remains to be proven whether that Pitocin, that standard Pitocin for the third stage of labor is actually evidence-based.
Joanna: Yeah.
Tony: And like they mentioned that in the room, like they were like, "We're not worried, there's no, there's no proof that this is helpful. So if it's bothering you, we can stop it."
Joanna: I think I refused it earlier on. I said, I didn't refuse it. And then I think later on that nurse gave it to me without asking, and then I asked to be taken off it later.
Tony: Yeah. You didn't argue too hard against it, but then.
Joanna: But it definitely didn't make me feel good. It was unpleasant. So I can remember that immediate aftermath where I was being sewn up and Felix, because he was small. And so they gave him to me immediately and you cut the cord, didn't you?
Tony: I cut the cord.
Joanna: Yeah.
Tony: They waited like two or three minutes for the blood to stop coming through. And all of that, they did the, they did the waiting, which was good.
Joanna: Yeah.
Tony: Yeah. And then they
Lisa: And had you specifically requested that?
Tony: No, they just...
Joanna: They basically handed you the scissors.
Tony: No. But basically what happened was that they, she waited, she was like, this is fine. She had a bunch of other stuff to do. And she was like, there's no rush. There's no rush on this whenever you're ready. And it was fine. And it wound up being about, I don't know, it wasn't five minutes, but it was certainly more than three, maybe three or four minutes. And then she was like, she kind of checked it to see like, nothing was coming through it. She's like, "It's fine now, you can go." So she was on the same page with that.
Joanna: Yeah, that was all good. We didn't, yeah, there was a lot of things that I think in the class we had sort of mentally registered as things we might have to ask for or advocate for or push forward that were actually offered. So for the most part, it was less-- I wasn't like gearing up for a fight, but there was a little bit of me that was like, I'm going to have to,
Lisa: And that's because we have so many care providers in the city and such a broad array of practices that I just have to teach in that way. But that's wonderful that they didn't have to do so much advocacy.
Joanna: Absolutely. And we didn't, but it was also with different people. Like I was saying, this, this nurse that we had, who was older, who was definitely kind of very traditional and like...
Tony: Yeah, she'd taken a more proactive role in, in all of this.
Joanna: Yeah.
Tony: We would have had to advocate like that for her.
Joanna: Yeah. She was a lot more cautious, I think. And our doctor was wonderful and she was very relaxed and was also very down with the idea of not having interventions. She didn't push me towards the epidural or any of the other, I don't even remember being offered the epidural.
Tony: No, it did come up. There was a conversation about it. It was one of the, like, there was a discussion about it and we're like, "We'd like to hold off if we could." I remember having that conversation with her and she's like, "Okay, that can go either way. Sure. That's fine." And then at a certain point, like a little later on, I think actually the other nurse said, well, we should do the epidural and Dr. Brown was like, "Oh, it's too late now."
Joanna: That's right and now I...
Tony: Forget it, don't even think we've passed that line. So forget it. We're just going to go on.
Joanna: And in a way that was good. It was like, I was able to make the decision for myself when I felt very able to make it, because I felt like I was still fine. And I was like, no, this is fine. I can handle this. And then to sort of have the decision taken out of my hands later, I don't think she was lying. I'm sure it was too late, but it was like, oh, I was like, okay, well it's too late now. But also I felt like that means it's nearly over. I think that was also helpful, knowing that that third stage was short and having a sense of like, this can't actually go on like this really intense phase isn't going to last for like five hours. I don't have to hold on for that.
Tony: Yeah. Like every, every segment of this was a little shorter than the segment that came before and realizing that that was how it was gonna fall made it a lot easier to deal with. It's like, okay, this is intense. This bit sucks, but it's okay. It's going to end. And yeah, it seemed like it shifted normally up through all the gears until he was out.
Lisa: And I'm thinking about the timing. You were there, I believe, when there was a shift change, right? So you had mentioned Dr. Brown earlier, was there for part of the labor. Did you end up having Dr. Khan for the birth?
Tony: No. Dr. Brown was there for the entire time.
Lisa: I was wondering if you'd like to observe or comment on the emotional aspect of meeting your son for either of you who would like to share.
Joanna: I think at the beginning it's this kind of this moment of just sheer kind of like the strangeness of there's another being in the room is unimaginably strange for a while.
Tony: It's just weird to have, there were two people here and now there's three people here, it's just weird. And honestly that feeling has not gone away from that day to this, just to look at him and go, like, "We just, we just made you. We made up a name." We could've called you anything. You'd be thinking about that all the time. Like we talk about that. We just made a person.
Joanna: I know.
Tony: They let you do that?
Joanna: Yeah.
Lisa: Bizarre, right?
Tony: Yeah.
Joanna: It really is bizarre. I think also for me, it was that, that transition for like, I'm not pregnant anymore. and the thing that had sort of come to be so defining and at the forefront of my mind, oh, it's just back to just being me now. And this, I felt very, it was a sense of pride, but also just kind of like, I was really amazed. I was like, I grew you in my body and then I squeezed you out of my body and now you're here. And that was just a really kind of, I felt very powerful in that moment. I think it was taken over a little bit by worry, because he was small. That's the point where we sort of were like, okay, now it matters that he was early and we have to get him checked. And so he... after he was on me...
Tony: They handed him to me.
Joanna: They handed him to you and then they put him in the, there was like a heated bassinet...
Tony: Yeah. They handed him to me while they were fixing you up. And they just basically gave me a, gave me a thing of formula and said, feed him. Yeah. So I was like, okay, sure. And he, and he took to it immediately. And I remember being really relieved that he knew how to suck on a nipple. Literally I just got it close to his mouth and he was like, oh yeah, yeah, that, that I want that. And drained like half a bottle of formula right out of it. He was five pounds, 14 ounces at birth.
Lisa: That was my birth weight and my mother's birth weight.
Tony: There you go. Five 14.
Joanna: There you go!
Lisa: A good number!
Tony: That's good. It seems to have worked out for him. He certainly was small, but you know, we kind of, I'm like, okay, fine. He's small. That's fine. We'll deal with it. But yeah, I remember him feeding okay. And then we put them in the under the heat lamps.
Joanna: That's where they did all the tests.
Tony: They did all the tests and all of everything else and the weighing and everything. And it was all fine. It was as good as it is.
Joanna: I was really anxious at that point because I was still being sewn up.
Tony: Yeah. And I remember moving between him and you.
Joanna: And I kept saying, every time you came up to me. I was like, "Please go over there and I want you to hold him. I want you to touch him." Cause I couldn't see him or touch him. So I was just please go and...
Tony: I was doing plenty of that.
Joanna: No. I knew you were rationally, but like emotionally, I was just, I need one of us to hold on to have sight of him at all times. That in my mind, that that was only a few minutes, I'm sure. But it feels like a really long time that I was being physically held at the other side of the room having to be sewn up. And while Tony was over there and I was like, I felt very far away from Felix at that point.
Tony: You were.
Joanna: Yeah, looking back, I'm like, I'm not really sure. I've never said they had to do the test. I'm not really sure why they didn't like why I couldn't have held him while that was happening. But, but I didn't really think to...
Tony: They put the heart monitor on them and they put all sorts of other stuff on them. And they were just like to make sure that, and just, they needed him to kind of calm down after the birth.
Joanna: His glucose levels, they had to check and that was…
Tony: They had to check all those other things they had to make sure that, and I remember the nurse was like, he's got to go to the NICU because he's premature. So they brought him and they brought him to the NICU...
Joanna: Pediatrician. The pediatrician. Yes, that's right. We hadn't chosen a pediatrician. So we had to use, we use the hospital pediatrician to register the birth and everything. She came in...
Tony: She came in and looked at him and was like, he's breathing, right? Yeah. Okay. Yeah. Is his heart rate is regular? Then my work is done here. Don't bring him in. Don't bring them into the NICU; he's fine. She didn't even touch him. She looked at his chart and was like, what are you asking me for? He's fine.
Joanna: She came in twice. Because she came in once to check him then the nurse, this anxious nurse came in and she called her back in. And the second time actually the pediatrician was, was kind of short with the nurse and she's like, "This baby is fine. Give him to his mother," because she was holding over in the heated bassinet and kind of was fussing over him. And I guess understandably because he was early and they still would test...
Tony: I get it, but like that he got out and he was fine. He was calm. You know…
Joanna: But then they, then they gave, finally gave him back to me. That's when...
Tony: Yeah, he cried a little bit. And like, he cried at birth, apparently babies do that. Once he kind of calmed down, he had a little bit of formula, they put them down in the heated bassinet and he just kind of relaxed. He was like, okay, okay. His eyes weren't even open yet, but I was touching them and holding them and talking to them and being like, okay, welcome to earth, whatever it is you say to a child. And then he was fine and be kind of relaxed. And I think he may have even gone to sleep. Like I don't, I wasn't sure. But he just relaxed. And he was like, okay. Okay, this is fine. I'm on a stable surface. Everything is fine. I'm warm. It's okay. And he was fine.
Joanna: And then they moved us into the post birth room, which was a shared room, which was fine. And so I was there for two days and that was hard. I think that the postpartum first couple of days were really harder than the birth in some ways, not in intensity, but just in terms of like as long period of time, I felt, I actually felt very alone. Even though you were there a lot of the time, like you went home to sleep and you went home to get me clothes and stuff and bring the things we never packed, but I remember feeling very, it was a strange space. It was a small room with curtains around it. And there's like a pattern on the curtain. I think both of us will remember till our dying day as you're staring at it. And there's partly like my roommate, her baby cried a lot and she was upset that she had a lot of family coming in and out that this is also very pre-pandemic thing. Tons of people constantly coming and moving in and out. And with Felix, I was trying to feed him, which was actually okay. They had a breastfeeding consultant come and see me, which felt good and helped me out with the expressing the colostrum. And I gave him that with a spoon, like they kind of had you collect it with a little spoon and then give it to him.
Lisa: Was he not able to latch at that point?
Joanna: He was having a little bit of trouble. I mean, it was also partly because he was a little bit small. And so people were worried about him not eating enough. He was having a little trouble latching, and then they brought me a breast pump. One of those sort of mechanical there's plug-in ones. You know, the pumping was fine. I got used to it, but I had them take him away to the nursery overnight, which I'm really glad I did because I got to sleep. It was nice to just have a few hours of not having the responsibility, which was definitely, I think, necessary.
Tony: You needed to get your feet under you as well.
Joanna: Yeah. They took them away and then they brought him back and he was all clean and changed and fed and I didn't have to do any of it. And then when he brought it back to me, it was like, well, diapers are your responsibility. The wrapping, the swaddling, the everything else, the feeding, he slept a lot. But yeah, that was, I definitely remember that period in the hospital, I was just feeling very sort of tight. This feels like it was endless time and they would bring meals at times that were completely, that felt very unpredictable. And like, it's like 11:00 AM. Why are you bringing me lunch? And it's like fish or something. I was like, I really don't want that
Lisa: Before noon!
Joanna: Yeah. It was just like a weird, you know, the timing was odd or whatever.
So it just, it was a relief to get out of there and home, although also terrifying.
Lisa: Did you have that very daunting feeling as you left with your baby as they sent you home?
Tony: Well, they were just like, "It's time to go now and here, take the diapers, take the receiving blankets that are here and just, you can go now. The three of you can go now.” I remember that being a really weird moment.
Joanna: We had him in the car seat.
Tony: And we signed him out. They gave us a copy of his birth certificate and his hospital records and everything.
Joanna: Yeah, there was a bunch of paperwork that took ages and I was like, can we just?
Tony: But then they just said, "Go! This is your child now, get out of here!"
Joanna: Go to the pediatrician within a couple of days and everything in it.
Tony: Best of luck!
Joanna: Yeah, so we got him. And it was raining. I remember it raining. So we had to kind of, we called a cab and then we had to, you just called a cab.
Tony: I hailed a cab, yeah.
Joanna: And so we got down the steps and into this cab and the driver's like, "Okay..." And you strapped him in and I had him in the back. I was in the back of the cab, like with my arms, like clamped over the car seat. And you were in the front.
Tony: Making small talk with the guy.
Joanna: And he had three kids. He was talking.
Tony: He was like, "I know, I know the drill. This is exciting. This is cool. Congratulations. It's all good. I've done this a million times. It's really okay."
Joanna: Yeah, yeah. I remember actually, it was daunting in some way, but I actually remember that feeling really nice to feel free of the hospital and free of that little tiny room. Because when I was able to sort of get on my feet, we could walk around the hospitals up high and we were on the 14th floor or something, so these incredible views out of the window, out across Manhattan. So Tony would wheel him in his little bassinet up to the window and Tony showed him Manhattan and you know, "Here's where you were born." I remember that being really nice, but they were, they kind of didn't like us going, you weren't allowed to take him anywhere, right?
Tony: Yes. I was not allowed to go, yeah.
Joanna: I had to be with you, obviously.
Tony: Yeah, cause he was attached to you. He wasn't attached to me.
Joanna: Yeah, there was like an alarm.
Tony: I'm literally just some guy. You were the mother, but I'm just some Schmo. It was okay, I understand.
Joanna: Cause what I really wanted was to lie in bed while Tony took him out while he walked around. Take him for a walk, do whatever. I'll just lie.
Tony: Well, once we got home that happened. There's been a lot of that, honestly, since. Yeah. And yeah,
Joanna: We got home and, and so we were so lucky he was born on February 27th in the morning and because he was due in March, my mom and stepdad had booked to come out and visit us from London in April, which at that point, you know, when he would be a month old. But then that just felt so far away. So she was like, okay, we'll come there for like three days and we'll stay in a hotel near you and we'll be there.
Tony: Yeah.
Joanna: So they did that, which as it turns out was amazing. So it meant that...
Tony: Yeah, they flew back two days before the shutdown.
Lisa: They could have gotten stuck here, oh my goodness.
Tony: Yeah, London locked down, yeah.
Joanna: Yeah, they closed borders, basically London locked down basically the date they got back. And at that point we were like, oh, you know, by the time late April that's two months away. It will be fine.
Tony: My dad turned 75 last summer. And we were like, well, we were planning to go to Montreal. He would have been four or five months old at that point. And we were thinking, okay, sure, let's just do that. And it quickly became clear that, oh yeah. That's, that's not happening.
Joanna: So we had, yeah, we had a week of friends coming in and bringing us sandwiches and bringing us food and that real immediate newborn moment where it's oddly kind of nice and social and he's sleeping all the time and you don't really have much to do...
Tony: He doesn't mind being passed around.
Joanna: Everything is so weird. No one's expecting anything from you, so it's kind of nice. And when my mom was here, we were able to, we went out for dinner. We all just went out cause he was asleep and then we took him out in the little, in the stroller and the bassinet and he just slept through dinner. It was great! So then that all fell away after two weeks and he was like, oh, I'm awake now.
Lisa: Yes. They wake up right around that time.
Joanna: They wake up and everybody else went away. The city went away like the world went away. So then we were really in it.
Lisa: But before that, I just want to mention that I've had students who've given birth before they finished their birth class, but I have never had, until you, someone come back and share their birth story with their birth class cohort before the graduation!
Tony: That was funny.
Joanna: That was so much fun. I'm so glad. I kind of can't believe that we did that. We got a cab up to a place and we were like, yeah, this will be fun. And we'll show and tell it's all true. Everything she's saying is true. No, it was really nice. And we were able to, I think was that the last class or the penultimate one I think?
Lisa: Yeah, it was either five or six, next to last or last class. I can't remember which.
Joanna: And so we, yeah, that was great. And so we were able to come in with Felix. At that point, he was still just asleep the whole time and yeah he...
Tony: Yeah, you told most or some of the story, and we talked about the parts of it, the breathing exercises and your recommendation of the Haakaa thing to help express, that was a massive help. For the first few months that was...
Joanna: The day we got back, I think I remember, we realized we needed all this stuff we didn't have and including that and we went to get some bottles and lots of things that we just sort of abandoned after a while. But at the beginning we kind of thought, "Oh, you know, I'll pump and Tony will be able to feed him at night." And we did that for a little while, and then, but we just placed this massive order at Target and Tony took a cab up, you went up to the subway up to the nearest Target and just picked up all of this stuff.
Tony: Yeah.
Joanna: We had so much we didn't have, we didn't have anywhere for him to sleep initially, we had a bassinet.
Tony: Yeah we had a travel bassinet, the little stroller bassinet which was where he slept for a good long time, though, that was where he slept. And it was fine.
Joanna: We had a ring sling that Tony wore a lot and Felix would sleep in there.
Tony: Yeah. When you have problems sleeping, that was often a thing where I would just...
Joanna: Yeah. You'd be sitting at your desk working with this baby slung...
Tony: It was really nice.
Lisa: On you. That's where they want to be. So biologically appropriate and it's good for you because your hand’s free.
Joanna: Yeah.
Tony: Yeah. It's great.
Joanna: I was pretty lucky with breastfeeding. I didn't have any serious problems. I've always, I always had a very funny,
Lisa: That's so nice to hear.
Joanna: Yeah. I had an uneven distribution. My left breast was always less; just didn't produce as much. And yeah. Now I'm feeding him. I'm still feeding him in the morning and evening. And at some point that will end, but for right now, I'm just doing that. And that's only ever on one side. And my doctor said that the pediatrician was like, that's fine. You know, he can manage on one.
Tony: He never liked formula.
Joanna: We never gave him formula. We didn't really give him any after the...
Tony: Really. In his life he has consumed a grand total of, I think, two bottles of formula.
Joanna: Yeah.
Tony: One of them at the moment of his birth, one after that.
Lisa: I was wondering if, was his blood sugar low, you said they tested that. And I was wondering if that was why they so soon after birth wanted to do formula.
Joanna: Yeah, I think it was probably that. I think the glucose levels were definitely something they were monitoring. I actually think he wasn't. I think again, it was that the nurse who was overly cautious.
Tony: Yeah, they didn't, they didn't, there wasn't a reason behind giving him formula right away. They were just like, "Here, you know, give him something to focus on." I think it may have been as much that as anything else.
Joanna: He was sort of on the bubble. Like he was sort of at the, wherever they draw the line, he was kind of at the line and so they monitored him more closely than they might otherwise have. And the same thing with jaundice, that was something that they were concerned about. And he was a little...
Tony: He was a little yellow.
Joanna: Yeah. He had a little bit of jaundice, but again, he was kind of right at the cutoff. And when we took him to the pediatrician, that was also still a thing that she was monitoring and he sort of had to make the cutoff before they would decide whether he needed to go in and have treatment. And he, again, just kind of made the cutoff. So he was fine. They were mostly concerned, I think, about his weight because once he dropped that extra birth weight, he was down when he left the hospital...
Tony: 5.6 or 5.7...
Joanna: 5.6, 5.7 something like that.
Tony: At birth coming home, that's where he was.
Joanna: So he was definitely starting to be kind of, he was small and he was, he had these little skinny chicken legs.
Tony: Yeah, but he never didn't have an appetite. He was always hungry. So clearly it was all right.
Joanna: And he was feeding.
Tony: He picked it up.
Joanna: And he fed and he sorted out the latching.
Tony: That was pretty quick. He figured that out, fairly...
Joanna: He figured that out pretty fast.
Lisa: Great! And if, no pressure on this at all, but if you would like for me to share your websites on the work that you do, if people would like to check out your books Joanna or your quiz, virtual quiz parties? I don't know what you call those, Tony.
Tony: That's really what they are. I don't think there's a terminology for them yet. Everyone's still coming up with these things, but yeah. I do a lot of private parties and a lot of corporate functions and stuff from this chair. My company is gamenighttrivia.com Game Night Trivia, I've been spending a lot of time building out, shooting video. So I've got a vlog as well under my name, Tony Hightower. So, and I'm shooting like jeopardy videos and that sort of thing and some other things. So that's what I'm doing.
Joanna: Yeah. I'm working on my second book. I write about, feminist cultural history, I guess you could say. And so I'm working on my second book, but I also write for magazines and newspapers and things. So I'm Joanna Scutts, S C U T T S. And so everything I do is at JoannaScutts.com and that's where you can find my books, you can buy my books, it'll help us pay for daycare. My book so far, yes the second one is not quite ready for approval yet. It will come out next summer.
Tony: The second one's coming out probably a year from now.
Joanna: A year from now. So yeah.
Lisa: Exciting. Well, as we wrap things up, is there anything else that you haven't gotten to share that you wanted to share and/or any tips or special insights you'd like to share with folks on similar journeys, expectant parents or new parents?
Joanna: I think that, yeah. We've learned a lot from you. We've said to each other that there's a huge range of normal constantly, when it comes to babies, that is true with babies as it is with pregnancy. I feel like every now and then there's a few things we did, a lot of things you do wrong as a few things we did right.
We got a diaper subscription, which has made life much easier from Honest. That's just like a month or every six weeks or so. That was one of those things where like that works. It's great, comes on schedule and they, and they kept it going through the pandemic.
Tony: Yeah, I'd say just know that it's going to be all right. You just do what you're doing and trust your instincts. Your instincts are actually really, really good.
Joanna: A baby can't cry forever.
Tony: Yeah. That's a very important thing.
Joanna: Something I had to tell myself a lot, he will stop crying, even when you're in the middle of it and you think it's never going to end. He cannot cry forever.
Tony: Yeah, and also super long crying jags, just look at the clock, watch the clock. It's it feels like he's been crying for six hours and you look down and it's been like four minutes. That happens a lot. It sounds awful, but he's just getting it out. Once he learns words, he'll cry less. Trust that you know what you're doing and kind of have a sense of what kind of person you want the child to grow up to be. And you can start steering things toward making the child kind of look at that as an ideal. You can do that from the jump, from the very beginning. You know, even before they understand their own personhood, you can kind of say, well, I want them to be a kind and generous person. Well, okay. Then you can just set yourself a "prime directive", to use the Star Trek term, and ours has always been to be kind and stay curious. That's what we want the child to be. So we're just like, okay, that's fine. And so we're just leaning everything on that. And whenever we're stuck as to what to do, that's kind of a nice North Star to follow and to have something like that, regardless of what it is, it really makes things a lot easier. And then after that, just trust that you know what you're doing, the more you trust yourself, the better off you're going to be. I think that's really what it is. The moments where things have gone wrong or the moments of anxiety or the moments where we've overextended ourselves. And that's when things have gone slightly haywire. And when we've got a sense of what we want to do, then that's when things have gone well. That was true through the pregnancy. That was true through the birth, certainly in the birthing room, that was our instincts were like, "Well, okay. Here's what we want. Okay, let's just, let's just follow that. Even if we don't know the specifics of what's being asked, as long as it does this, then we're fine." And certainly ever since then in these 13 months, we've been lucky that we've got a relatively easy-going kid who, all his senses work and he's got what he needs to get started. But certainly, when we've been in doubt, just trust what we know and trust that we're going to be able to, you know, anything we don't know, we can work out and that's been our guiding light.
Joanna: Yeah, I think that's yeah. Trust yourself for sure. And ask for help.
Tony: Yeah don't be afraid to ask for help. Sometimes trusting yourself means knowing what you don't know.
Joanna: Yes. And people have been through it and you know who you want to trust, you know who to ask you if, you know the friends who you're close to, whose kids seem like great kids, you know, those are the friends who you want to turn to, like, you don't need to ask everybody. You don't need to ask the internet at large, like...
Lisa: Right! You can choose the advice you take.
Joanna: Yeah. And people, yes, exactly. And I, I really think, yeah, choosing your mentors and you could hear, you can listen to a lot, people will tell you a lot and you can listen and nod and discard as you need to. And every now and again, someone will tell you something absolutely vital that you take to heart and that you say to yourself over and over, and it's, you can't really prepare for that, you don't know where that's going to be, but I think that's yeah, that's it really.
Tony: Yeah, and take lots of notes. Take lots of pictures. I'm already noticing how fast it's going.
Joanna: Yeah. Really. Yeah.
Tony: The good parts don't last, the bad parts don't last. There's always more. Just chronicle what you can.
Lisa: Well, thank you so much to both of you. It's been so nice to reconnect after over a year since I saw you last.
Tony: Yeah. I feel like our time together last year was kind of intense and a bit truncated. So I'm really glad that we're able to put a proper bow on our time. I'm really, yeah, and really, you were super helpful.
Joanna: Really, really. There was so much that we learned that we used, that was so fresh in our minds obviously, but like the pain relief techniques, and I think it gave Tony confidence and in me, confidence in his abilities and him confidence in his abilities that I think we knew that that meant that we didn't have to think about hiring somebody else, bringing somebody else in.
Tony: I wasn't freaking out about, oh my goodness. I guess I'm the doula now. That wasn't such a horrifying thought as it might've been otherwise.
Joanna: Yeah. Without that class, those classes, I think he would have been reading the internet frantically.
Tony: Yeah. I would have been like sitting there with my phone and be like, okay, do this. Now try this. It would have been a lot of that and it wouldn't have gone as smoothly.
Joanna: You know, you having practiced the massage and everything that you had practiced, we used that.
Tony: Yeah. The massage, those techniques, we used those. For sure.
Lisa: All right. Well, thanks again. Hope to see you before long.