The Gory Details (Gross)

Gory Details #26: "Womb with a View"

It's my birthday. Well, not my birthday. I'm rather old. It is however one year since I, the Gore Monger, first appeared in the pages Nocturnalooze.com. I couldn't be happier to be one. For my birthday, I thought I'd write a little about the real birthdays. Childbirth, for those of you who've never been there, is the goriest thing humans do just to make themselves feel important.

First the basics,

The whole idea of labor it to push a twenty inch long fifteen centimeter wide baby through a ten centimeter wide opening using this steroid induced baseball glove of muscle. Anything, urethra, colon etc. that gets in the way is crushed like the useless grape it is.

The timing is coordinated by a bunch of hormones whose power over the body is complete. They decide the date and time of birth. No questions asked.

What I'm trying to say is this; late in pregnancy, a woman is carrying around a cannon capable of firing a ten pound ball, through a key hole at a time of its choosing. Women in late pregnancy can be a bit touchy.

The most immediate problem is one of space.

The opening in a woman's pelvis is about ten centimeters (give or take) which is much less than the typical child head and doesn't even touch the width of child's shoulders. What to do? Simple, crush the child. The oversized ball of muscle that the uterus has become pushes the child through the opening whether there is space of not. This is possible because the skulls children are not fully formed at birth. They have openings call fontanels and plates that slide over each other.

That's right, during her forcing and straining, a mother forces her child's skull bones to slide back and forth under each other as they struggle for room. Sometimes children are born with their faces bruised. Sometimes their heads are misshapen. Always they've been through hell.

The other space issue is hard to discuss in a magazine that aims to be PG-13 and a half or so, so let's just say that there can be tearing...on the outside. Very bad. Very gory. Doctors frequently choose to cut rather than let the tearing take place.

For more gore, don't forget, the baby doesn't live alone in the uterus.

There are many tasty things that live where babies live. What happens to some of them during and after labor can be quite interesting.

To start with there are the umbilical cord and placenta. These two discolored lumps serve like a big filter and tube, pulling yummies out of mommies blood stream and sending it off into jr.

During labor, one end of the umbilical cord comes out with the kid and the other end follows later with the placenta. Together these are known as the afterbirth. Imagine a big piece of liver attached to an unfilled sausage casing. It's revolting.

The amniotic fluid also lives with the child in the 'ol Mommy Condo. This pale golden fluid acts as brake fluid between the fetus and the outside world. People tend to think of it as a kind of magic elixir, and that it may be. It is also pretty gross however. Skin cells, baby urine and all different kinds of good can end up floating in it.

The worst adventure that it becomes a part of, in my opinion is menconium staining. What happens is this; for some reason the fetus gets upset and takes a poo. Now its not a regular "dropping as quarterpounder and some fries" kind of poo. This is fetus poo. It's dark green to the point of being black and is as thick as tar.

If the baby dumps menconium, where does it go? Why into the amniotic fluid of course. So children are born stained black by their own...

Even the baby itself can be pretty gross at delivery.

Developing fetuses have fine hair all over their bodies. It's called Lenugo. By birth it's supposed to be gone, set to drift in the amniotic fluid, but many babies still have some; maybe on their ears, maybe on their noses or shoulders. This stuff picks up any nastiness in the amniotic fluid to form gross mats on the baby's body. Additionally, newborns have been getting massive loads of progesterone from their mothers. They are sometimes so swollen that it is difficult to tell what gender to assign.

Finally; they go long, painful moments without oxygen as they transition from inner to outer world. A newborn will often be purple, or red in the chest and face and blue at the extremities.

All this means that a young father, after months of preparing for the "bundle of joy" will finding himself listening to his spouse's fading cries, looking a cone headed, blood smeared purple demon version of the Michillan Man with black streaks of God knows what on it and thinking, "There was a bowl of free condoms right there at the bar."

Now get out there and write.

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