This Friday, to be precise. We knew that this delivery was going to be a caesarian. Friday will be 37 weeks of gestation and the baby will effectively be “at term”, which means much less chance of problems at birth. The consultant felt it was a good time.

Which means we’re now just counting the days.

It feels rather weird. Firstly having a set date for something that more traditionally “happens when it happens”, and secondly because there’s no physical sign that the big moment is approaching. No clock counting down, no massive rocket being wheeled slowly across the tarmac, no opening the final doors on a Great Big Gestation Advent Calendar (I’d hate to think what the pictures would be).

Nothing. One Friday morning the baby won’t be here, and then at some point it will.

It’s all adding to my sense of detachment with the process. I know – I hope – that there’ll be the same moment that occurred when I looked into the eyes of Thomas for the first time and the bit of my primitive hindbrain kicked in and said LOOK I DON’T TALK TO YOU MUCH BUT THIS IS DEFINITELY A SMALL CHUNK OF US THAT HAS SOMEHOW POPPED OUT OF THAT LADY AND YOU HAVE TO MAKE SURE IT LIVES AND BASICALLY CARE FOR IT MORE THAN YOU CARE FOR YOURSELF AND WHILE I HAVE YOUR ATTENTION CAN I ASK WHY HAVEN’T WE KILLED ANY WOOLY MAMMOTHS RECENTLY? EH?!

That will probably happen again, and the detachment will be replaced by unequivocal attachment. There’s nothing like a tiny helpless being demanding your undivided attention to bring you crashing back into the here and now.

The here and soon. Gulp.

Goes and opens another door on the Great Big Gestation Advent Calendar. Ewww!

I really shouldn’t think of you as human. But I do. I am a human. And irrationality is hard-wired. The “what if” thoughts. What if the bundle of cells had successfully split into two people? What if in 6 months time I was the proud father of twins? How would that have felt?

I would have loved you.

But, competing with those thoughts in my head are the cold logical thoughts that I know I should trust. You were never a “you”. You were an it. No more human than a tumour. A malignant parasite that was threatening to harm my unborn child. I watched you on the screen, saw you kick, making me simultaneously amazed and sick to my stomach. This thing with no life… mocking life. Making me see life where there was none. Making me feel guilty for wanting you gone.

I would have loved the child you never could be. I hated the thing you were.

Yesterday I sat and watched on a screen as a thin needle pierced the tissue giving blood to the parasite and steadily burn it into oblivion.

For a moment, a brief horrible moment, it felt like we were killing you.

We weren’t, we weren’t killing anything. The thing on the screen was never alive, we were just allowing it to stop growing.

The parasite I hated so much is no longer a threat. There’s a very good chance now that the pregnancy will proceed as normal and the healthy baby will be born at term.

I although I thought I’d never get to meet you, in a strange way I will. Your identical twin will have your face, your smile, your laugh.

And although you never existed, we will still mourn you. Because we’re irrational humans, and that’s what we do.

You’d think I’d have learnt my lesson, wouldn’t you?

Thomas didn’t actually turn up until lunchtime on the day after that; and it had been, I can honestly say, a very long night.

Jane started the process of being induced on the Thursday morning. The drug they gave her didn’t do the trick, so she had to be put on a hormone drip in the evening. As this meant a night being constantly hooked up to machines and monitors, it basically threw out of the window any chance of the water birth that Jane would have liked. But, all along our guiding plan had been “whatever’s best for the baby”.

They encourage you these days to write a “birth plan” to tell the people involved how you’d like things to go. To my mind they’re pretty pointless, though. Either things are going swimmingly, in which case the mum’s in a position to dictate exactly how things should go without recourse to a written sheet, or there are complications, and it depends very much on what the complications are as to how they should be tackled.

Jane had an idea of a pre-printed flowchart that would allow you to describe what you wanted to happen in each eventuality, but as our midwife explained, there are so many eventualities that the flow chart would end up looking like a sea urchin trying to knit a map of the Underground. The flowchart, basically, is in the midwives’heads, in the form of years of training and experience. The best birth plan is to say to the midwife “I want a healthy baby, and if at all possible a healthy mum too, what can YOU do to make that happen?”

Which is what we did, once things started departing from the script.

Jane was taken from the maternity ward to the delivery suite. Top tip: if you come into hospital to have a baby, never unpack your bags until the baby actually turns up. It’s not like a hotel, and the bed they give you when you check in isn’t yours until you check out. Half an hour after we arrived in the suite, the bags we’d left in the maternity ward arrived, all packed up again. Except whereas Jane had packed them with a sense of order, the nurses had packed them with merely a sense of urgency.

The contractions soon became so intense that Jane was in a great deal of pain, and although the gas and air was making her the life and soul of the party, it wasn’t helping with the pain itself. Jane asked for an epidural. She knew she was in for a marathon night, and didn’t want to greet the baby after hours of agony. I didn’t either.

The long night began. The hormone and epidural drips started to do their jobs. All we could do was wait, and try to sleep.

The steady thumping of the baby’s heartbeat was as gently lulling as a train slowly clacking over tracks, and equally disturbing when it suddenly stopped. The foetal heart monitor occasionally lost the signal, and while we knew this was because the baby had shifted inside, it was still worrying enough to jar me out of sleep each time.

Add to that the regular monitoring to measure Jane’s pulse, blood pressure, temperature, level of “block” (basically how far up her legs the epidural was working, measured by how hot a bag of ice felt at various points) and level of dilation; sleep was out of the question. It all became a rather surreal experience. Strangely, I kept having to remind myself why I was there, what the point of it all was.

I wandered the corridors of the hospital, which I know well from my day job but seemed strange and alien at night. For example, the staff-only canteen area (where I stopped for a cheaper bottle of coke) had changed from a light and convivial coffee lounge to a dark dormitory with the shadowy bodies of overworked junior doctors snoring on the couches.

By the morning Jane had dilated enough to enter the next stage: pushing.

The epidural meant that she wasn’t going to feel the pain so much, but it also meant she wouldn’t be getting the uncontrollable urge to push. The midwife explained that she’d have to learn to push.

She soon got the hang of it. Timed with each contraction, she began to push.

And push. For two hours.

The baby, despite Jane’s new-found skills, was refusing to move much. He “turned a corner”, according to the midwife, but he still had a long way to go.

Jane was exhausted and in a lot of pain, despite the epidural. An anaesthetist was sent for, and arrived full of the cocksure bravado that seems to be an essential personality trait for that career.

“So I hear that this baby is coming out of the sunroof?” he asked, smiling.

“Not necessarily!” said the midwife. But it felt like an unspoken truth had finally been said.

While the anaesthetist busied himself with the epidural drip, the surgeon arrived and had a brief feel around.

“I’m sorry, this baby isn’t coming out by itself. We need you to sign a release for a caesarian.”

Jane couldn’t sign fast enough.

Things suddenly got incredibly busy. I was sent to put on theatre blues and joined Jane under a tent in the operating theatre, the business end hidden from us both. A crowd of attendants concentrated on preparing things while the anaesthetist explained that if his knock-out juice had worked properly, Jane would feel nothing more than a sensation that someone was “doing the washing up” in her innards. If it hadn’t worked, then it might be a lot more painful and they’d have to knock her out.

Jane reported a pain like someone pressing hard on her pelvic bone. The local anaesthetic hadn’t worked. It was time for a general anaesthetic to put her under while the sunroof was opened. As my only job in the theatre was keeping Jane happy, I was surplus to requirements.

I was ushered back into the empty delivery room where we’d spent the night.

24 hours of tension, a sleepless night, worry, panic and stale adrenalin suddenly rolled over me, and my stiff upper lip deserted me somewhat. I noticed one thing through the tears: as we weren’t going to be using the room any more, someone had hastily packed our bloody bags again.

I sobbed. I knew things were going to be all right. Jane was in safe hands, the baby was healthy, he just needed to get out. Things were going to be okay, I told myself. I just didn’t want to listen.

I made a couple of calls to both grandmothers to let them know what was going on, which calmed me down a lot. After I hung up, there was a knock on the door. It was the midwife, with my son.

My beautiful, perfect son.

I held him in my arms and he opened his crystal clear eyes and looked, fleetingly, into mine. I’ll never forget that moment.

An hour of bonding later and we were reunited with mum, and for the first time ever, we were a family.

I love it when a plan comes together.

What they don’t tell you is that it’s all a load of bollocks. Jane’s waters broke about yesterday lunchtime, and she didn’t even twig. It wasn’t until about 23:30 that she returned from the bathroom saying “we need to go to the hospital”. I’ll spare you the gory details as to why we knew her waters had broken, suffice to say it would have all been decided a lot sooner if I’d have had a set of Pantone colour swatches for comparison purposes.

Very early this morning, the hospital confirmed that the waters had broken. So, I thought, the baby comes now, yeah?

No, apparently not. We got sent home with a explanatory leaftlet (it’s very hard to leave a hospital without an explanatory leaflet) and told to come back in two days, if the baby hadn’t decided to turn up of it’s own accord.

So, whatever happens, I’ll almost certainly be a dad by tomorrow night.

I think that fact will sink in in about… ten years.