So Nick and his dudela walk into the hospital bar...

Ha, no, I'm kidding. I'm a frayed knot. If you know that string joke.

So here's the deal. It dawned on me, as we were walking to work this morning and I would stop every so often to catch my breath after a particularly sharp internal stab to the crotch that actually, I'm not a person who likes to suffer in silence.

In other words: my labor is likely to be rather hard on Nick.

I relayed my epiphany. He wasn't all, "Oh? Do you think so?" More like, "Um, hell yes."

Clearly it's something he's known for quite some time.

I told him that our doula will be very helpful to him as well. To which he replied, "I've been thinking about it, and what I'd really like is a dudela. I need the support. I need someone to hang out with me at the hospital bar."

I'm not kidding you when I say that the night I was induced with Jordan Nick asked one of the nurses where the bar was. He wasn't kidding.

They were rather stern in telling him, in no uncertain terms, that hospitals don't have bars. Although he wasn't joking, if you can't see the humor in a husband's offer to administer the suppository, you aren't going to laugh about a hospital bar.

Now, on the one hand, I think a hospital bar is a great idea. It could be a huge revenue source. Most visits to the hospital are for sad reasons, and you leave wanting something to take the edge off. It would be kind of nice to be there with the edge off. I don't know how that never occurred to me during my myriad visits.

Candidly, all those times my dad was in the emergency room, I'd have headed straight to the bar rather than sitting in the wretched waiting rooms.

But then you figure it's a rather bad idea as well. Because I'm sure the last thing hospitals want are drunken imbeciles wandering the halls. People might get so drunk they'd wind up in the emergency room. Plus there'd be the risk of drunk drivers. Liability would probably be high.

I suggested that Nick's dudela could bring him a flask. In my mind, his dudela would be this big, muscular guy who would sit around and talk football or something else stereotypically manly.

And then, then my dear husband had the temerity to say, "But the dudela isn't going to be a guy. My dudela needs to be a hot woman who can massage my shoulders and sympathize with how stressed I must be."

Pretty sure we won't be hiring her anytime soon, uh, ever.