The Baby Cometh

Just a quick notice: Nam’s water has broken.
I am sitting in a VIP post-op room by myself, as I am not allowed in the maternity ward. This hospital has a strange policy of not allowing husbands into the delivery rooms. It’s a policy we came asking about just yesterday in anticipation of the baby’s target date of May 11. It’s this policy that started us planning on checking out hospitals in the big city of Khon Kaen, an hour away.
We were going to go this weekend, when a doctor we saw before is on duty. Hell, we were talking about going today after lunch. Then her water broke. I threw the go-bags in the trunk, helped her in the car, and we were off. On the way to the hospital I told her we had plenty of time to get to Khon Kaen if she wanted to do it there, but that’s not what she wanted so we are here at Mahasarakham Hospital.
My son is positioned buttocks-first, so there really is no choice for a first-time mother, he will have to be delivered by Caesarean (linguistic note: they call it a “Caesar” here). When we got here, Nam was dilated 1cm. That was around 90 minutes ago. It is maddening to not be in the loop here. However, there is an upside for us. Nam has many friends here, bith nurses and doctors. One of them has promised to get me in to see her in about ten minutes (14:30). So I’ m sitting here cooly describing what has happened to this point, but actually feeling quite anxious about my wife and her upcoming procedure, scheduled for 6:00PM. The reason they are waiting so long, apparently, is that they have to wait for lunch to digest.
There, now you know everything that I do. I will update as things happen, but will post this when I go home to pick up some things later this afternoon. It will reside on my desktop as an rtf file until then.
Oh, by the way, I am so glad we decided to eat at home today instead of going out as planned.
UPDATE: I’m picking up a very weak wifi signal around here. I’m going to go look for it.