Crazy Taxi Ride
It was the day before MJ’s due date, and Tom and I were getting anxious, excited, and terrified of what to do if my water broke. How would we get to the hospital? Will we make it in time? What other signs should we be looking for to indicate that we should go to the hospital earlier?
A quick backstory to help you understand our situation at the time. We were in a car crash about a month before I got pregnant with a drunk driver. Sadly, we did not have car insurance as it happened during COVID-19 and we couldn’t afford insurance. 10 months later, I am bouncing off the walls, waiting for little MJ to let us know to go to the hospital. Friends of ours offered months before to take us, but MJ decided to come the week of the 2021 Jacob Zuma country-wide strike. The whole country was on fire, and fuel was scarce. So everybody was too scared to use their cars if it wasn’t an absolute emergency. Honestly, we weren’t even sure we would be able to get a taxi!
The story continues… So Tom decided that this morning we should rather be safe than sorry and ask friends to take us to the clinic, just to make sure everything was still okay. I had been having what felt sort of like very mild contractions all week, but they picked up a little more after waiting two hours in line at the shops the previous day.
Our friends helped us get to the clinic, but they didn’t want to risk driving to the hospital (about 20km away). We waited a few hours at the clinic. Unfortunately, another lady gave birth at the clinic, but she lost her baby. My heart was broken for this woman, but sadly, I also started praying so hard for MJ as well. This was my second pregnancy already; we sadly lost our first baby due to a miscarriage, and I couldn’t bear the thought of losing another child.
Eventually, the nurse was able to attend to us. I could see how deeply sad the atmosphere was and how exhausted everyone involved was. It was Saturday, so the clinic was short-staffed. The nurse apologized for making us wait so long, although I would’ve waited longer if it meant the baby could be saved.
She took my blood pressure per routine and then checked to see if I was dilated. She estimated I was around 1 cm dilated but decided to check my blood pressure once more. During the second checkup, I arched my back through a contraction. It wasn’t painful; it was just super uncomfortable. The reactions were involuntary, so the nurse started timing me and asked me to tell her when I had another contraction. After 2 or 3 more contractions, she decided to refer us to the hospital. Her previous diagnosis of me only being 1cm dilated made her hesitate to send us to the hospital, but after seeing the contractions, she decided it would be best to just wait it out at the hospital even if I gave birth a few days later.
As first-time parents, we had packed a ton of baby clothes, diapers, pillows, etc. In all honesty, we were so overprepared for a hospital stay that the nurses couldn’t help but laugh and ask us why we brought so much stuff. We had at least three travel bags of clothes with us, plus a pillow.
After the nurse told us to go to the hospital, we unfortunately missed the ambulance by a few minutes because they were called out to another emergency. So now we had to do a 3 km walk to the taxi rank; it was a very slow, long walk. It was as if, after being told the baby was coming, my contractions kicked into full gear. Right after we left the clinic gates, my contractions quickened, and unfortunately, these were not just uncontrollable arched-back feelings anymore; these were very painful real baby’s coming now contractions. Halfway to the taxi rank, I thought I might have the baby right there in the streets.
We finally made it to the taxi. Tom was practically carrying me and the bags by that point, just constantly motivating me to “we’re almost there,” moving slowly step by step as I could. There were only two spots left in the taxi when we got in. But for some reason, the taxi driver was still waiting for something. You could see he was anxious to go, especially with a pregnant lady in the taxi. He kept checking on us. While we were going to the hospital, my contractions were around 10 minutes apart, although all the bumps on the roads made me wonder if the baby was not going to slip out. I think the taxi driver might have been just as scared of a white woman giving birth in his taxi or on the side of the road. We finally got to the hospital; the taxi driver was kind enough to drop us off by the gate and not down the road as they usually do.
But the strangest, scariest thing happened… The moment I set foot on the hospital grounds, my contractions disappeared, as if the past hour-long contractions never happened…
In our next Post:
Stay tuned for what happened next inside the hospital and how MJ was born…
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