Thirty-four years ago tonight, I pulled an all-nighter.
OK, maybe I did sleep a couple of hours, but not all at once.
My wife Brenda--Duck, to her friends--and I were expecting our first child. The due date was supposed to have been July 14th, but that one came and went. I was working second shift at the old W. R. Grace fertilizer plant on Grant Line Road in New Albany, and living in a townhouse apartment in Clarksville, on Greentree Boulevard, just across from where the O'Reilly's Auto Parts store now stands. The site where the Grace plant stood then is part of the Wal-Mart, across from the National Guard armory.
I had worked second shift, and just got home. I looked around, and Duck was nowhere to be found downstairs. So I went upstairs, and saw the light on in the bedroom and also in the bathroom, with the bathroom door shut. There was a notebook next to the bed, and when I walked over and saw what was on it, I calmly turned around, went downstairs, and walked back out to our car. The notebook had times written down on it, and the times were 8 to 10 minutes apart. So, realizing it was gonna be a long night, I got back in the car, and drove to the nearby Convenient Food Mart. I bought a frozen pizza, brought it back to the apartment, preheated the oven and baked it...and then ate it. All of it. Long nights following a long shift at work require a lot of fuel, y'know.
Then I went back upstairs. Between trips to the bathroom, Duck had managed to write a few more times on the notebook. So I then made the mistake of asking her why she was spending so much time in the bathroom. She explained to me that one of her friends had told her that she could speed up her labor if she took an enema. So while I was at work, she gave herself an enema--a difficult task for a pregnant woman--by lying on the stairs. [I didn't ask for details...so I can only guess.] But when she decided that the enema wasn't working fast enough to suit her, she gave herself another enema. The second one worked...with a vengeance, apparently.
So finally she was able to stay out of the bathroom for minutes at a time. The pains were getting closer, so she called her OB doctor. [Turned out that HER doctor had decided to go on vacation that week, so his partner was on call.] At around 1 am the pains were close enough that we headed to the hospital, after getting ahold of the OB's partner. Due to my insurance, we had to go to Floyd Memorial Hospital...and in 1980, what we now call the "old section" of Floyd was ALL there was of Floyd.
Once we got to the 4th floor, I spent a lot of time in the waiting room. And of course, the first thing they did to Duck when she got to the hospital was to give her yet another enema. The nursing staff would only allow one person in the labor room with her at a time, so I split my time there with her sister Donna.
Friends, if you have never been involved with a woman going through labor, you have missed a huge slice of life. Sometime during the night, during one particularly rough labor pain, I was called things that no human being should ever be called. I was told that, if this is what having sex leads to, my sex life was over right here and now. And I was told things that I can't recall simply because I'd been up since early the previous morning.
Off and on, I was able to doze in the waiting room . The TV shows at 4 am on the cable channels in 1980 were bizarre...or at least that's how I remember them. I saw one religious show, where the man on the screen was explaining some prophecy, while wearing sunglasses. Then he removed the sunglasses...to reveal another pair of sunglasses under those. And a few minutes later, he removed THAT pair of sunglasses, and he had another pair under the second one. I'm pretty sure I didn't imagine that, but then sleep deprivation between "good old-fashioned cussin's" makes the mind wonder if it saw and heard what I thought I saw and heard.
Finally, around 10 o'clock that Wednesday morning, I was summoned to the delivery room. I put on the paper gown, the mask, the hat, and the funky shoe covers--a challenge for my size 13 feet--and then waited until I was given the OK to enter. What seemed like two minutes later, at 10:23 am on July 23, 1980, our son Mark Andrew Knight was born. I don't remember what he weighed or how long he was, I just remember he was healthy, and the ordeal phase was over.
Not counting the teenage years, of course.
But that's another story for another time.
Happy birthday, Andy!
