Day 273: In the Hospital

So Mary's water broke around 9:30 last night. We were returning from a filling and delicious ribs dinner at Redbones in Davis Square. We've spent the night in the hospital, but still no major contractions, even after steadily increasing dosages of pitocin.

Today would be an auspicious day for a birthday. December 28 was my mother's birthday, and mine is also a 28th (November). I'm hopeful because, though contractions haven't started in earnest yet, everyone says Mary has progressed very well already without them, and labor should be fairly quick after they do.

So we've been here all night, finally got situated in our very nice room around midnight. But since there's been no pain, we've been able to grab a few winks of sleep in between nurses and doctors coming in to adjust dosages and check vitals, etcetera. The reclining chair available to prospective dads is a device worthy of the learned torture specialists of the Spanish inquisition... or the Bush administration. Around 4 AM I transferred myself from that chair onto the cold, hard, linoleum floor so that I might get some real sleep. Which I did, for two hours or so.

Waldron's Hypothesis

While down there, I had time to speculate on the event which might have caused the water break. Since Mary's not permitted to eat, I was thinking how lucky she was to have just come from an enormous meal like the one we had before coming here. And it seems like every woman has a story about how the onset of labor followed some particular meal she ate. I'm pretty sure that it isn't Chinese food, or Indian food, or spicy shrimp, or delicious ribs from Redbones which triggers labor. Hell, the chances are pretty good that any random nine months' pregnant woman has just recently completed some notable meal or another.

However, maybe it isn't what they eat, but rather, the fact that they ate a big meal. In early human history, given the absence of medical assistance combined with the prospect of a lengthy labor, mightn't a woman who recently ate a large meal be stronger, better able to survive labor than one who hadn't? If so, wouldn't a propensity to delay labor until a large meal has been eaten confer a distinct survival advantage that would quickly spread throughout the gene pool? Seems to me that survival advantages directly tied to reproduction are the ones which would be the ones quickest to take root as an evolutionary change.

Just a thought.