The long, dark corridor

I'm about to go visit the hospital in which I will experience the worst pain of my life. It's called "The Stork Tour," and it is a tour of the hospital where little "Pearl Earle" (as my office-mates are calling her) will enter the non-liquid world. I am not a total whimp, but I wouldn't say I'm the toughest girl out there either. On two ends of the spectrum are my sister, who voluntarily performs surgery on her own feet without so much as a wince, and another member of the family circle who, God bless her, cries every time she gets her blood-pressure checked. So I figure I fall somewhere in the middle. I'm definitely in the "use drugs if possible" camp. When I broke and dislocated my baby toe 7 years ago, the E.R. doc said, "Can we try this without the anesthetics first?" I naively said yes. Many tears later, he went to get the shot. So how will I do? I don't know, you tell me!