Science writer Katharine Gammon thinks she’s gone into labor, but her doctor says she hasn’t.

Katharine Gammon is an award-winning freelance science writer based in Santa Monica, California. She has written about a wide range of topics, from childhood memory to sexually-transmitted diseases in koalas to designing cities on Mars for publications like Wired, Popular Science, Newsweek and Scientific American. Katharine grew up in Seattle as the child of two scientists, attended Princeton University and received a master’s degree from MIT. She taught English in the Peace Corps in Bulgaria before discovering science writing. With two little boys under age 4, she has endless fodder for her blog Kinderlab about child development, and in her miniscule free time she rides horses and wants to spend more time under sail.

This story originally aired on May 12, 2017.

Story Transcript

So it’s 9:47 on a Thursday night this March, and I’m about to give birth on a sidewalk in Santa Monica.  I know, right? 

But let me back up a minute.  I’m a science writer, as Brian mentioned, and my whole life is speaking to scientists and explaining it to the public.  I’m the daughter of two scientists, and it’s something I take very seriously.  My first son was born right on time a day before his due date and so I knew that, given the data from him, I had about an eighty-five percent chance of delivering my second kid right on time, or about right on time. 

But I was still a little concerned when I woke up about a month before my due date with excruciating pain.  I thought I might be in early labor, even more so because I sent emails to my editors telling them that my drafts might be late and they might have to give me a little wiggle room.  That evening, after the labor pains continued all day, we packed our bags and headed to the hospital. 

But minutes after arriving at the hospital, a tall, gray-haired man, who I’m going to call Dr. Bernstein, informed me that I was not in fact in labor.  He said it was pre-labor.  Contractions weren’t strong enough.  I wasn’t dilated.  His exact words were, “Go home.  Take a Benadryl.  Try to get some rest.  This might happen on and off for the next five weeks so you should probably just relax.” 

You can imagine how I felt.  I was in a lot of pain and I was very frustrated.  So my husband and I took our bags and did the walk of shame out of the hospital with no baby.  On the car ride home, I started to cry a little bit.  I just couldn’t imagine how I was going to live the next month of my life if this was going on and off and on and off.  I couldn’t do anything about it.  My husband, Evan, is the most optimistic person in the world, but I could tell that even he was starting to get a little frustrated with the situation. 

But I’m a big believer in scientific authority.  Like I said, I spent my daytimes trying to convince the public that things like climate change and vaccines are real and good and we should do something.  So, armed with this new information, I did exactly what the doctor said.  I went home, I took a Benadryl, and I went to sleep.  The next morning, I woke up and I said, “Okay.  This is my new reality.  I’m just going to repeat to myself the mantra, ‘I’m not in labor, I’m not in labor.’” 

So the whole day, I went through, picked up my son from his emergency overnight.  I’m not in labor, I’m not in labor.  I went to the park.  I’m not in labor.  Went shopping for a dinner party that we were throwing that night.  I had to put my head down at the checkout stand at Vons because I was doubled over in labor pain, but, no, I’m not in labor. 

We threw the dinner party around seven that night and our friends came over.  And I had to explain to them that I wasn’t feeling very well, but I was definitely not in labor. 

But somewhere between the roast pork and the dessert course, I suddenly found myself armed with a new piece of information.  My body just couldn’t hold still.  The pains were getting stronger and stronger, and I was unable to deal with them so I excused myself from the party.  I went to the bathroom.  I took a very long, very hot shower.  Then I went to the bedroom and pulled on pajama pants and put on a T-shirt, and I lay down in the bed.  I could still hear the dinner party happening just outside the door, and there were happy voices and laughing over the dessert. 

I lay there in bed and I rolled around and tried to get comfortable.  I was going to play a game with myself.  I was going to wait ten minutes to see if this pain went away because I wasn’t in labor after all.  I'd been told that I wasn’t in labor. 

So I did yoga, I breathed, I didn’t breathe.  Then I came up with a new mantra.  I’m actually in labor, and not just labor.  Like it is really advanced labor.  Somehow I had cruised through centimeters one through ten and now I was in transition and I was about to start pushing. 

So my body started to shake very violently, and that’s when I called my husband.  I said, “We can’t stay here any longer.  We need to go, like, now.” 

He had his glass of wine.  He's like, “What?  What are you talking about?  You're not in labor.”  I said, “No, no, no, no.  This time, this is real.” 

So we took our bags, which were still packed from the night before, and we headed out the door.  Then my husband waved to our friends at the dinner party.  “We’ll be back in an hour,” he said. 

As soon as we stepped out onto the sidewalk, I grabbed the wall next to our house and I said, “Honey, we waited too long.  This baby is coming.”  And to describe a little bit about labor, you go through the first stage and then there's a transitional phase, which was probably what I was experiencing on the bed, which was excruciating.  And then there's the urge to push.  People have described this in scientific literature as a truck plowing through your body.  There is almost no way to stop this.  But I tried. 

So my husband says, very optimistically, “Get in the car.  We can make it to the hospital.”  I said, “Okay.  Okay, I'll try that.”  And I stepped into the front seat of our Subaru and closed the door behind me, and we were off like a shot. 

He suddenly realized from my shaking that this was totally real and the baby was coming imminently.  He took a right, then a left, then a right, and suddenly we were on the freeway… only to see a sea of brake lights, because this is LA after all. 

At this point I was just screaming, “Fuck you, Dr. Bernstein!  Why did you mansplain labor to me?!”  And my husband heroically crossed several lanes of traffic to get off the freeway to take me to the closest local emergency room. 

While we were in the car, the contractions were hitting me, just plowing through my body and I was gripping my knees together trying to keep this baby inside me and this baby was pushing his way out.  And I felt myself rip as we were taking a right-hand turn.  But suddenly we pulled up at the ER and I saw the glittering lights over there on the right and it said Emergency Room. And I was still in the car and the baby was still inside me. 

I opened the door and I took one step out of the car… and, bam, everything changed.  The first thing that I noticed was the feeling of being warm and wet from the waist down.  And the second thing that I noticed was that there was something in my pants.  The baby, from the force of changing the gravity from sitting to standing, had emerged from my body and was currently in my pajama pant leg. 

So most parents imagine holding their newborn like this in their arms, but I was holding him like this so that he didn’t fall on the sidewalk.  Worst of all, the third thing I noticed was that the baby was not making any noise.  I must have made a noise, though, because Evan ran over from the driver’s side and, without saying a word to each other, I lifted up my pant leg and the tiny, bloody baby slid down into his arms.  He was kneeling in front of me on the sidewalk.  

Still the glittering lights of the emergency room were over here, but no one knew that we were there.  And at that moment I looked down and I saw the baby and I saw my husband holding him, cradling him to his chest, and the baby looked up me and gave this ginormous yell.  And I knew that everything was going to be okay because he was pink and he was screaming, and Apgar blah, blah, blah – it’s great. 

But we still had this problem, because we were like conjoined triplets.  I was attached to the baby through my pant leg.  The baby was being held by my husband and none of us could move.  We waited a full minute, which felt like several hours, before someone emerged from the emergency room to check out who these people were on a darkened sidewalk.  The guy’s eyes got really big when he took in the situation of me covered in goo and the tiny, bloody baby with abrasions on his forehead from shooting out into the cotton pajama pants. 

After that, everything started to go just boom, boom, boom, boom.  Super fast.  A bed was brought out and then they held up curtains as they took my pants off.  I was like, "Why don’t you cut them?”  But they took them off very carefully and put them in a plastic bag. Then they cut the cord right there on the sidewalk with something that looked like safety scissors.  Then they came out and offered warm blankets, and my husband was like, “No, I’m good.”  They were like, “No, dipshit.  It’s for the baby.” 

Then suddenly I was on the bed and the baby was on my chest and we were being wheeled into the glorious hospital with the glorious doctors and the drugs and all the things that I wanted for my birth.  And there was this standing ovation in the waiting room as we entered as everyone got to see this tiny, tiny baby.  He was so small.  He was only four and a half pounds when he was born, which might have been why it was so easy for him to just sloosh out on the sidewalk. 

We texted our friends after we got into the hospital – it was seventeen minutes after we left home – a picture of the newborn baby.  They were very surprised and they agreed to spend the night at our house because our sleeping toddler was still there.  That turned out all right. 

And I still believe in scientific authority, but I do think that it’s important to trust your own instincts in situations, especially when someone who’s tall and male and has gray hair tries to explain your own body to you.  Thank you.