Jul 27 2009
11 Days and Counting
There is so much to write that I haven’t written yet that I’m not sure where to begin. That probably means that the beginning is the best spot, otherwise I may just wander through the endless wilderness of the last several days with little or no narrative force, and who wants that?
I don’t know if it’s normal for all women to stress about having a baby as much as I have. I don’t mean the pregnancy and all that, I mean the physical act of labor and delivery. It doesn’t help that in 7th grade science class we saw video of a live birth or two, one of which included an episiotomy. Who thought this was a good idea to show a bunch of 13 year olds? Since then the idea that if I had children, something like that would have to happen to my body has been hard not to think about. And once I was pregnant it became nearly all-consuming.
When you do a lot of research about this kind of thing it is inevitable that you encounter all that mother-judging-craziness that is out there in so many of the parenting and pregnancy books. Most of the time I’d be flipping through whatever propaganda was being promoted to get to the part I actually cared about. Once in a while a book would attempt to objectively present a variety of options, but there was always a point where that objectivity would fly out the window. Still, there are things many books agree on and they conspired to make things difficult for me.
I was never worried about the natural childbirth option or all the very creative ways to work through labor. I read all about them, but knowing myself I figured the epidural would be a better fit. I had the appropriate mindset about preferring a vaginal delivery but not beating myself up if we had to have a c-section. The one thing I hadn’t really been prepared for was what would happen if I passed my due date, probably because everyone was convinced I wouldn’t make it that long. This brought up the big, looming specter of induction. And induction is one of those things that everyone seems pretty united against in the world of pregnancy and birth.
I figure after my experience with it I would add my two cents. I have no way to know if my induction was typical, but I do know that since 99% of what I read on induction had a negative slant, it can’t hurt to tell a positive story. (I actually read only one story of an induced labor that was a good experience in all my months of reading. Fortunately I read it only a few days before having the baby and it helped calm me down a lot.) Deciding to induce was hard, especially with all the research-induced guilt that came along with it. Even harder was deciding to induce earlier than most people probably would have. We had a whole week available and we pretty much took the first available day. There were a huge variety of circumstances that contributed to the decision. But the big thing for me was the thought that if we waited until that week was up and had to induce then, if there were any complications and I had to stay a little longer in the hospital, we may still be there when Eric had to go back to work. Thinking about him having been home for all those weeks specifically to prepare for and help with the baby and then not getting to use any of it was hard. Thinking of going home without a good transition was harder. There were a lot of other factors, but for me that decided it, and I don’t have an ounce of regret.
As for my labor story, I know it’s one of those things a lot of people will ask about so I figured I’d go ahead and share what I can recall. We went to the hospital the evening of our actual due date. My body was completely primed and ready except for the whole cervix thing, which was still totally closed. When we got there and I got all hooked up to everything we had a slight change of plans. All those contractions I’d been having had faded as far as I knew, but the monitors showed that they were still there even though I didn’t notice them anymore. It meant we had to change the medications I’d been set for to help dilate my cervix, but it wasn’t a huge deal. Well, except for the fact that the position of the baby had his butt pointing out and up right at the top of my belly and the monitor had to be constantly adjusted since he kept pushing it off. (Also, monitors hurt, y’all!)
I was told I’d be allowed to eat one last time if I wanted to, naturally I did want to, and naturally the only food available at that time of night was a McDonald’s in the hospital. How McDonald’s got into so many hospitals is beyond me. But it did provide a little bit of symmetry. I could only eat with one hand since the IV in my left hand was pretty painful (perhaps the most painful part of my labor, believe it or not, since it hurt acutely for a really really long time) which meant the only thing I could really eat at McDonald’s would be chicken nuggets. Which I did, and it seemed appropriate since we’d nicknamed our baby Nugget months and months previously. (We are still calling him that, by the way. It is his most commonly used nickname thus far despite the fact that now he is outside the womb he is definitely baby-shaped and not at all nugget-shaped.)
I got my dilation meds, Eric and I stayed up a little while, and then he slept while I dozed off and on inbetween getting my blood pressure checked every five seconds. The plan was to start the pitocin at 7 a.m. At quarter to six my water broke and contractions started all on their own. (Well, contractions I could actually feel, anyway.) Skipping from the kind of labor where I couldn’t feel my contractions and had to watch the monitor to know if they were even happening to having full-on water-broken contractions was a bit weird. And it means I still don’t know exactly what to expect if I ever do start labor the way most women do, but I think I’ll live.
The midwife came after a while, I got checked, I was already starting to dilate, and they added some pitocin to my meds. (Ah, pitocin. Yet another thing where every book will preach about how evil it is. My Mom said she’d been given pitocin for nearly every one of our births despite the fact that these days they’d say she didn’t need it. She survived and we are all intact.) I’d spent a long time thinking about when exactly to get the epidural. I’d read that working through without an epidural for a longer stretch in the initial stages could help shorten the length of labor overall. One of my major concerns was a really long labor that would go nowhere and eventually turn into a do-I-have-a-c-section conundrum. So I wasn’t the one to suggest the epidural. That came from Eric and my saintly nurse, who both looked at me after a couple hours and said it sure looked like I could use it.
Happily, there was no shortage of readily available anesthesiologists. I needed one of them three separate times, and they always came within 5-10 minutes. Halfway through labor I had a window of feeling in my lower-right abdomen, and then at the end I had a stripe of really heavy pain across my lower back. From my reading I knew that these could easily be fixed by the anesthesiologist so I sent for one and that was that.
That was all that really happened between the epidural and the end that I can remember, except that my saintly nurse came every so often to move me into some interesting positions in bed. (She called it her Cirque du Soleil routine.) She insisted it would help speed things along and make sure I continued to progress. No complaints here. I dozed off and on, but every time I was checked I’d dilated even more. The nurse insisted I’d be delivered by 3 p.m. and I kind of chuckled at her. But sure enough around 2:30 when the midwife came to check me, I was dilated to an 8 and then was swiftly at a 10.
The pushing part took some effort, since my last visit from the anesthesiologist had been just a little while previously and the extra meds I’d been given made me drowsy. I would push three or four times in a contraction and then sleep until the next one. So the 70 minutes of pushing went by pretty quickly for me, at least. When Graham finally arrived, it was in a quick rush, all at once. He had a little bit of bruising (mostly evident in his big lips in those earliest pictures) but looked remarkably good for what he’d been through that day. We finished at 4:00 p.m. on the dot, an hour off from our nurse’s guess (which sadly meant she had to miss the birth since her shift ended at 3) and about 12 hours before either I or the midwife expected.
Eric and I spent the next several days looking at each other every couple hours and saying, “I can’t believe it happened so quickly.” (The next-most-common thing we said was, “I can’t believe he fit inside me/you.”) All those months of stressing over labor and it turned out to be not only easy but mostly pleasant. Now if I can just repeat the experience exactly (except for that nasty IV) for the next one we’ll be set.
Our couple days in the hospital started slow and difficult but gradually got easier. That first day post-labor was not an easy one for me at all. But since leaving I’m doing surprisingly well and have been off all pain meds for a long time. Graham has been a champ through all of it, doing almost everything perfectly. Almost because he has been a slow learner with breastfeeding. That’s another place where the this-is-how-you-must-do-it form of mothering is most hardcore. According to many of them, not breastfeeding your baby in the first two hours of birth will mean you are a complete failure as a human being. It took Graham several days. We met with our hospital’s lactation consultants and will go back again this week to check his progress. Happily, he seems to have the hang of it. Well, happily in most ways. But it was much easier for me to pump for 15 minutes every few hours with the possibility of missing a pumping every now and then than it is now when I must be up for every feeding. I’m still adjusting and so is Graham but I think we’re getting used to it.
Being at home has helped a lot. Being at home with three of Graham’s grandparents has helped, too. It certainly makes everything feel a little less real since so much has changed at once. It’s like we came home from the hospital not to our lives but to new lives in a small baby-raising commune where everyone works together to help with the baby and make sure I’m drinking enough fluids. The help is wonderful since we’re new to it all and Eric is going back to his rotations today. We’re still not sure how we’ll swing it with just the two of us, but we’ll have plenty of time to figure it out.
