Birth Story: Part Two

Due to my Type A personality, check-in at the hospital was a breeze because we’d already done a hospital tour and I filled out all our admittance papers online weeks earlier.  I still wasn’t in pain and generally felt really on top of it! This is really key for people who want to have a natural birth. It’s important that mentally you feel prepared, calm, and like you can do it. Well, I may have gone into it feeling confident, but the odds were stacked against me in the first hour we were there. I think you’ll be able to see why.

To put it frankly, the first nurse I had did not seem to be a proponent of natural childbirth, mentioning only that she had done it both ways (without pain medication and with it) and preferring not to comment on what she thought was the better experience.  Then, to make matters worse, she asked me for my living will. Granted,  it was hospital protocol for her to ask me for this, but there’s no better way to freak out a woman in labor than to tell her that there is a possibility she is about to die and become rude with her when she tells you she’s a DNR. . . Nevermind .There is a better way to freak out a woman in labor. And that brings me to the lovely phlebotomist that visited me next. 

What this man was about to tell me was something I had seen circulating Facebook and had spent days trying to forget, as the first time I saw it I cried (blame the pregnancy hormones if you want to, it terrified me plain and simple). 

“So you’re gonna have a baby, right?”

Not exactly the confident and professional attitude you’d like to see in your medical professional. This guy already wasn’t impressing me and I should have known then to request someone else, even if all he was doing was a blood draw.

“Yep!”

“Wow.  I'm glad I'm not in your position! You know they say that the pain of childbirth is like breaking over 30 bones in your body at the same time. I’ve heard that there’s this like, pain scale thing. I don’t know how they do it, but they can measure pain. Well, most people can only take up to a 40 on the pain scale and childbirth is supposed to be like, 70. You’ll be fine if you get the epidural though. You’re getting an epidural, right?”

“Actually, I was planning to try to do everything naturally.”

“Wow. You’re crazy. I’d change my mind if I were you. Every nurse or doctor that walks in here—I’d be asking them for pain medication. More pain meds! That’s what I’d do!”

What do you even say to that? I wanted to throw something at him for being so insensitive, but unfortunately he was the one with the sharp object and not me.  I was already nervous, but this blow was really hard to push out of my mind. 

Susan, my midwife, came in to check how I was progressing. At around 5pm I was 3 centimeters dilated and pretty comfortable all things considered. Pleased with my progress, she said I’d be checked again around 9pm and hopefully I would be further along. She also told me (discretely) that she wouldn’t let the current nurse touch me and that I’d have someone different by 9pm when it was time to be checked again. In the meantime I was supposed to walk and relax. 

I did as I was told. I walked around. I watched the NCAA championship game (Louisville vs. Kentucky). I Facebooked. I walked around some more. I found it very difficult to pay attention to much of anything and every time I had a contraction I found myself evaluating how bad it was after my conversation with the Phlebotomist of the Year.  I was pretty nervous.

9pm came around and so did my new nurse.  The good news was that she was supportive of natural childbirth and a lot friendlier than my previous nurse. The bad news was that she went to high school with me! She was one grade above me during high school.  We weren’t friends, we weren’t enemies, we were just acquaintances .  Let me tell you—you don’t want to have an acquaintance as your labor and deliver nurse. When it comes to these kinds of matters you either want to know the people in the delivery room with you really well or you want them to be complete strangers that you won’t recognize or see again. Once more, my anxiety level went up.  To make matters worse, I wasn’t progressing well. In the four hours since I’d been checked I had only dilated one more centimeter. Not ideal, considering my water had broken nearly 12 hours prior. My nurse talked to my midwife about the situation and they agreed that if I wanted to, I could go until around midnight-ish without any medical intervention, but if I wasn’t making better progress soon after, I’d have to start Pitocin. 

I really didn’t want Pitocin. I knew that if I had it, it would make it even more difficult to have the natural birth I was hoping for. For those of you who aren’t familiar with Pitocin, it causes your contractions to go on steroids. I would be looking at a more painful labor. Since Pitocin comes with some side effects including increased heart rate and decreased blood pressure, it also makes it more likely that one will have to have birth interventions including c-section, vacuum, and forceps delivery—all things I was trying to avoid by putting up with the pain of a natural birth. 

My stomach sank.

END PART TWO