When it came to the last month of pregnancy, I joined the unfortunate ranks of those mothers who are driven to distraction by "false labor", or Braxton-Hicks contractions. About half a month before I was due, I had contractions that came to 20 minutes apart, and so we duly went into the hospital in the middle of the night. We got there, and I was monitored on the fetal monitor for an hour or so, only to discover that it was not true labor, and we needed to go home and wait. This happened again on Christmas Eve, a few days before my due date. We got quite fed up with the frequent night-time contractions, and increasingly nervous and impatient about the impending due date, as most new parents will do. My due date came and went, and still nothing had gone anywhere.
We rang in the New Year, sat and chatted for some time about Sprout's refusal to be a tax deduction for the previous year, and finally headed to bed around 3 am. We got there, repeated our previous efforts to bring on labor the same way the pregnancy itself was begun <smile>, and prepared to go to sleep when "Uh, darling, I'm sitting in a pool."
"Huh?"
"My water just broke!" Whereupon, of course, we did the standard mad dash about the house making sure that we knew where everything was, and that we had our bags packed for the hospital. This was especially important, since my husband is hypoglycemic, and we could not depend on the hospital food to be safe for him. A few hours without eating, and he would have made a poor coach.
We had decided to wait out the early part of the labor at home, and did not go in to the hospital until my contractions were 20 minutes apart. We left at 5:30 in the morning, optimistically taking with us games to play during the break between contractions. The Bradley method worked well for me, though I can tell you that it is always interesting trying to relax completely through a contraction, in a car, at a light, in the middle of the night, while leaking amniotic fluid onto the cloth diapers put down to protect the seat of the new car. We had just purchased the car a few days before, because our old minivan had electrical problems, and could not support the use of the lights for extended periods, meaning that we could not make it to the hospital and still make it home, if we had to go at night. I knew about the tendency of amniotic fluid to crystalize in a fern pattern, and could just envision it happening to the just-purchased upholstery.
When we got to the hospital, we went through the now-familiar procedure of checking into the Labor and Delivery department, where we were pre-registered. They settled me into a suite, strapped a fetal monitor to me, and recorded my progress for a while. Eventually my doctor came in, examined the readout, and my belly, and told me that I did not seem to be progressing, though my water had broken, meaning that I was in fact in labor, and would be staying until I delivered this time. In fact, my hospital followed the common practice of requiring delivery within 24 hours of water breaking, or else labor is induced, for fear of infection. My reading since has indicated that this fear is groundless, but at the time it was a point we had not covered adequately.
This rule meant that if I did not progress on my own, they would induce labor early the next morning, 24 hours after my water broke. Delivery after two nights without sleep did not sound like a promising option, so I accepted the challenge to walk around and bring on the labor. I walked for one hour straight. I think this was the first, last, and only time I have done this since I first became acutely ill with Chronic Fatigue and Fibromyalgia, the acute manifestations of my Environmental Illness.
After walking for an hour, and exhausting myself in the process, I was monitored again, and told that I was still not progressing. I was given the choice of walking more, which would have left me too tired for the labor that lay ahead, waiting, and risking delivering in the morning after a second night with no sleep, and allowing them to give me Pitocin to speed up the process. None of these options were attractive, but on the assurance that it would not affect my daughter at this stage, I accepted the synthetic oxytocin, knowing that the books said that Pitocin contractions were unnaturaly hard, frequent, and less wave-like. This also meant that I would have to remain on the monitor, and could not move around freely, or labor in the water, as I had intended. My water breaking so early also eliminated water birth as an option, for fear of infection.
At 11:30, I allowed the hospital staff to hook me up to an IV drip, and begin dripping Pitocin into my veins.
This fairly rapidly brought me to the point where contractions were 2 to 3 minutes apart, but I was able to breathe through it for the first 3 hours with some degree of relative ease. It interrupted conversation, and I'd go limp, and as long as the room was kept dim and quiet, all went easily and pain-free.
My husband had had far too little sleep, and had nothing keeping him from sleeping, and so he took a portion of this period to lie down on the small area provided and try to get some sleep. My lack of apparent progress did not satisfy the care providers, and they increased the rate of my Pitocin drip once or twice. When the contractions reached the point where I could no longer easily stay on top of them, I called to my husband, who woke and stayed by my side from 2:30 until our daughter was born, missing only one contraction from that point out, and that only for the world's shortest trip to the bathroom.
I had brought with me a copy of the album my husband, a gifted musician, had written to help regulate breathing during yoga. The music is wonderful, and very relaxing. We have had to warn everyone who listens to it not to play it in the car, because those who have done so have been known to miss exits, and drive much too far. Since it was geared toward yogic breathing, it makes maintaining an even relaxed breathing rhythm much easier when listening to the music. I found, during the first stage of labor, that each contraction took 4 breaths, no matter how intense they were, or how close together. When they came, I'd relax into one of the comfortable positions that the prenatal exercises helped my body find easily, and just breathe through them.
As a result of this, and the steady reassuring coaching of my loving husband, I looked far too relaxed to be progressing as quickly as my doctor had hoped. Due to the fact that my water had already broken, she did not want to risk premature and unnecessary internal examination, and so each time she came, she made only external observations, and decided to hold off on checking my dilation. At 6:45pm, my doctor came in, said she thought I might be as far as 4 to 5 centimeters dilated, and she'd be back to check on me at 9:30.
What she didn't know is that by then the contractions had changed, somewhat. I had had a few minutes of panic at the transition from each stage of labor into the next, an emotional marker that is highly reliable, but which was mistaken for nerves and low pain tolerance by the nurses at first. I had therefore not said anything when, after several hours of exactly 4 breaths per contraction, they were suddenly taking longer, and I had the urge to push. I fought that urge as long as I could, though I would involuntarily catch my breath and grunt now with the start of each contraction. I was laboring in a leaned back, sitting/squatting position, and it felt like something was s-t-r-e-t-c-h-i-n-g inside me, like the neck of a cotton turtleneck that has been washed on hot, and is now stretching out permanently as it is being put on. This feeling intensified, until at last I told my husband about it, and he looked under the sheet - to see a growing ring of hair.
He ran out into the hallway, a decision he now regrets, and hollered "We've got a head - anybody want to catch?" Then he came running back into the room, where he was joined almost immediately by the only person available on the floor, a young woman interning. She seemed blown away and overwhelmed, and I tensed due to the disruption at the last minute, causing a tear forward, not back, as Sprout's shoulders emerged. The intern, just in from the hallway, caught Sprout as she came out; she had had no time to wash, glove, or even remove her watch. Sprout came out in about a minute and a half. She was born at 7:25, 40 minutes after the doctor had told me she thought I was less than halfwar dilated.
As we had agreed in advance, my husband moved into position, and stayed with Sprout from that moment on. When she came out she was purply for a moment, and the umbilical was the intense, turquoise/robin's egg blue that the books had told us, but which is impossible to imagine until you see it in person. Almost in a breath, a wash of perfect colour spread over her whole body, and she gazed up at my husband with those intense, sodalite/slate newborn eyes. She had been born with her cord wrapped around her neck, but a moment's pause had been enough to allow the intern to slip the loop over her head, freeing her. Sprout had an unusually long umbilical, so it's not surprising that she had played with it - she loves necklaces to this day.
Some people worry about the baby being born with the cord wrapped around its neck, but I can tell you from experience that it does not need to be a source of problems. Our intern was not fully trained, but even if she had not known what to do, my husband and I both did, from our reading. When the head is out, the mother should pant for a few moments, allowing the midwife or person delivering to check the neck and/or cord; if there is a loop of cord around the neck this allows the necessary time to free it without danger to mother or baby.
A few moments after her birth, when the blood in her cord had drained back into her body, Sprout's cord was clamped, and my husband was allowed to cut it. From that point on, he stayed with her as she was taken across the room to be weighed and measured, and cleaned up some.
That is why he was not there to stop the intern, who, during my distraction and exhaustion, began pulling on the umbilical cord, rather than waiting for the placenta to loosen and deliver 20 minutes later, or so. Naturally, and unhappily, it came off in her hand. At this point, she did something that proves to me that she was in far over her head: still unwashed, ungloved, and without removing her watch, she reached in past my torn flesh and began to manually deliver the placenta, pulling at it with her hand, and tearing it some in the process.
My doctor came in, found her doing this, and finished the delivery properly scrubbed and gloved. Then she began the hour-long task of sewing up the layers of tissue torn, while the first of many units of antibiotics began running into my veins. The unnecessary manual delivery of my placenta by an unwashed intern had put me at risk for infection.
My doctor, and the staff, took to calling me the "Iron Woman". I don't know why - the entire process of labor and delivery, with the exception of the tear and the guddling around the intern did inside me, was less painful than my periods have ever been. I didn't enjoy having needles in my private parts for an hour or more while I was repeatedly injected with local anaesthetic, and stitched, since I'd torn clear down to the muscle. But I'm used to making light conversation through pain, and apparently OB's aren't used to Bradley births.
The nurse, who had seen more Bradley mothers, said that I had progressed a bit better than usual for a Bradley birth, but not at all uncharacteristically. Birth is natural, and once we accept that, it is obvious that our bodies know what to do. Sheep do this every year, and I think I can do what a sheep does. <smile>
Even now, when I wish to relax my body, to relax pain away, I think back to labor. For me, that was the time when my body was in tune with its natural abilities to the greatest extent that I have ever known, and I have never relaxed more completely before or since.
Sprout had been born so quickly that she had some small bruises on her face and head, but none of the "molding" or reshaping that often happens in the birth canal during labor. Her gaze was such an intense experience that I felt I could fall forever into her eyes, and there I would find the secrets of the universe. I was right. In her I have found the secrets of the universe: love, and parenthood, and life reborn in an eternal chain.
Sprout slept in my room from the first, though, due to the timing of her birth, I spent two nights in the hospital. It was wiser, considering the risk of infection from the botched delivery of the placenta. I agreed to recommended antibiotic treatment, and reluctantly accepted pain medicine to relieve the pain from the tear, and the guddling in my insides. I insisted that the pain meds and Sprout's nursing be arranged such that she was consistently nursed right BEFORE I got my dose of pain meds so that she would get the lowest possible levels in her breast milk. I did not go through drug-free pregnancy and drug-free childbirth in order to drug my child in my milk.
Part of the night she slept in my bed, cradled in my arm with the railing up. Part of the night she slept in her bassinet. My husband slept on the ledge provided, and lifted Sprout for me every time she needed moved. When she fussed in the night in her bassinet, before my husband had time to wake and lift her to check her diaper or to hand her to me to nurse, I would sing to my Sprout, and from the first, she calmed instantly at the sound of my voice singing to her. She remained enamored of music, not surprising, since she had kicked in rhythm with the music through an entire song when I was only 7 months pregnant. For some time she would only quiet at times if we sang Italian chamber music to her, though she loves many kinds of music.
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