The day I got to thirty-seven weeks pregnant I woke up at 7am with “gas pains.” You can see where this is going; I could not. I had stayed up late the night before watching Sons of Anarchy and trying to make a ridiculous curtain out of photo slides for the baby’s room (don’t ask). I’d experienced a bit of … leakage, but was passing that off as “bullshit my body is doing now because I pee every time I laugh.” Thus the text I sent my doula (yeah, yeah) at 8:22: “Hey Mollie! Sploosh update: had a panty liner soaking incident last night and low belly pain this AM, but whether or not this is the real thing or just vag drool and a badly cornering crap is anyone’s guess.”

A tendency toward glibness can be a gift; it keeps you from panicking too quickly and can help leaven a heavy situation. It can also lead to you sitting on the toilet trying desperately to pass a stool that turns out not to be a stool at all. After an hour or so on the can, I called my doctor—I’m not a complete idiot—but only managed to connect with the clinic’s answering service and a vague-sounding young woman who told me I should go to the ER, maybe, whatever. It was a pretty crappy clinic. I was convinced that were I to go to the hospital I would be met with scoffs and told to go home and fart on my own time, so I stayed in the bathroom, trying to poop, taking a bath, stroking the tiles very, very gently, and intermittently howling.

Around noon I became concerned that this “gas situation” might be hurting the baby, so I made an executive decision to call a car and go to the stupid hospital. Just like in the movies, I was in the back of a cab making little hoo-hoo-hoo sounds and trying to assure the driver I would not have a baby in his car, though I couldn’t guarantee I wouldn’t crap all over it. Luckily for everyone concerned, the hospital was only a mile away; when I got out of the cab I was holding my belly and bellowing like a sow. I was put in a wheelchair and whisked into an examination room, where I stroked the wall very, very gently and waited for a real doctor (they’d sent in a med student to take my family history; I was impolite to him). A real doctor showed up, took a look at my lady parts, and took out a walkie-talkie. “Clear a labor room,” she said into it. “Wait, am I in labor??” I asked. “You,” she said, clearly biting off the words “you idiot,” “are having a baby RIGHT NOW.” She said this because I was 9.5 centimeters dilated. That promise I made to the cabbie could very easily have been false, and I would have had the New Yorkiest of all possible birth stories to tell.

Only one thing saved the cab’s upholstery: the baby was coming face-up. This is not nearly as worrisome as a butt- or feet-first baby, nor as awful as that thing where their head gets jammed to the side and they’re somehow coming … neck-first? Yikes—but it does make the whole process a bit more difficult. There was an awful lot of pushing. I moaned piteously for ice.

It is perhaps worth mentioning here that I also had sort of a comedy bit prepared. In the labor scene of the imaginary movie I had been screening in my head for weeks, I had some great zingers, my favorite being something along the lines of “This is a hospital, right? Why don’t you go find a surgeon and see if she can’t figure out some way to make it physically possible to go fuck yourself?” Some ladies make playlists, some assemble sweet layettes; I, apparently, come up with needlessly vulgar insults to fling in the face of whoever is unfortunate enough to be on hand to bring my child into the world.

But: back to my face-up baby, stuck in the canal. After a couple of hours we had all had it with the pushing; I asked if maybe they didn’t have one of those vacuum thingies handy? They did. Three contractions, a Hoovering, and a big doctor squeezing down on my belly later, out came the baby. The placenta was less eager to make its debut; the cord snapped, and my OB—a … brisk woman—reached on up there with her hand to pluck it out of me. She regarded it quizzically: “That’s a really raggedy old-looking placenta,” she said. I tried to think. Had I gotten my placenta from a thrift store? Am I that cheap? I couldn’t remember. I took a look at it; it looked like Freddy Krueger in a bowl.

But raggedy old Freddy Krueger had done his job—the baby, while on the smallish side, was just fine, they said. She was fine, she was here in the world, and, much to my surprise, the world carried on like normal. Outside, it was still just a sunny, hot afternoon, Thursday just being a regular old Thursday, nothing different.

Reprinted with permission from Grand Central Publishing, Copyright © 2015 by Emily Flake