Simply Mother

Our first daughter, born in a hospital, with medication, July 30, 2003, weighing 6 lbs 9 oz and measuring 18 inches long.

Foreward

When my first child was born, I never would have considered myself naturally-minded. I’d never thought to question the common beliefs and practices of modern obstetrics. I never imagined it would be necessary. Isn’t that why we have doctors, to do the research for us? And shouldn’t we be able to trust them to provide us with the best care, based on the most up-to-date science?

Maybe we should, but it turns out we really can’t–especially not in the field of obstetrics, where most of the common practices go blatantly against huge amounts of scientific research.

What follows is a retrospective view of my birth–it didn’t occur to me to write the story down until nearly a year after her birth, when I finally began pouring through books on natural childbirth. You might sense a little bitterness about some of the things that happened. I was very lucky. My labor was quick. I didn’t require a lot of the common interventions imposed on moms with normal labors by doctors with busy schedules.

Still, there were things that happened that were unnecessary, and those things caused problems. Problems that led to a two week stay in the NICU.

So yes, there’s some bitterness. Mostly, I am annoyed with myself for being so trusting and uncritical, for taking everything I’d heard about labor and birth–and everything the doctor and nurses told me–and swallowing it whole.

I strongly encourage new parents to do a bit of research. Seek out good information before you hand your health and safety and that of your baby over to any caregiver. Don’t buy everything they say just because they have some authoritative initials after their name. Don’t let them frighten you. Get second opinions. Most importantly, find a caregiver who believes that birth is normal and that in most cases, can most safely be carried out without medical intervention.

Without further ado . . .

The Beginning

I’ve had intense contractions regularly since about 32 weeks. At 35 weeks I even go to the hospital, contractions over a minute long, coming every 2-3 minutes. I’m told it’s “real labor” but given a shot of something that makes it subside enough that they send me home. I continue to have these kind of contractions for almost another two weeks.

Two days before I hit the 38 week mark, I walk around Provo with my mom for a couple of hours in the evening. I start trying to sleep sometime after midnight, but can’t. I haven’t been sleeping well at night–contractions are intense. Around 2am, I take Tylenol PM to help me sleep.

3:09 am: Still wide awake, all of the sudden I feel leaking. I sit bolt upright and blurt out, “Oh my gosh!” and run to the bathroom, water gushing everywhere.

(Matt later told me he looked at the clock and thought, “This had better be good.”)

From the bathroom, I call out: “Either my water broke, or I have no control of my bladder!”

I sit down and let the liquid continue to pour out. This probably isn’t real. I’m pretty sure my bladder muscles just completely stopped working.

Then I see a tint of pink and become convinced otherwise. We quickly get ready to go, grabbing a diaper to sit on in the car.

At the hospital, I am giddy and excited. I refuse the wheelchair they offer, even though the contractions had started again in the car and are becoming pretty intense.

4:15 a.m.: I’m in the hospital bed, fetal monitor strapped around my belly. The nurse checks and declares me 4cm.

“Most people go about a centimeter an hour, but first labors are usually longer.” she informs me. Okay, so if I’m lucky, maybe I’ll be ready to start pushing by 10.

The Dreaded IV

A nurse comes in and says I need an IV. Even as trusting of the medical establishment as I am at the time, past experiences with needles and IV’s lead me to question whether it was really necessary. Answer they give without hesitation: Yes, of course.

It is the worst part of the entire experience.

I have very bad veins and tell her this.

“Oh no, I see a good one right here. This will be easy.” (That’s what they say every time I need to be poked for something, and every time the “perfect vein” lets them down.)

“Okay,” I tell her, “But if you miss, please take the needle out and try again–don’t move it around while it’s inside my skin!”

She misses (the vein rolled, she says), and guess what she does next? She starts fishing around for the vein WHILE THE NEEDLE IS IN MY HAND. Despite being asked explicitly not to do that very thing.

Fishing doesn’t work anyway and she tries two more in that same hand and by the end of it, I have terrible bruises on my hand and arm (where it eventually goes in) that will last for weeks.

The whole ordeal takes a full 30 minutes, and did I mention I’m having contractions every few minutes throughout?

Of course I’ll take your body-numbing drugs!

When a contraction comes, I have a really hard time. It is strong, I’ve had absolutely no instruction on how to breathe with it or work with my body or anything, and also, there was this mean, rude nurse fiddling with a needle inside my hand!

Just at this moment, another nurse comes in and asks if I am ready for my epidural because the anesthesiologist is here and you never know when he’ll be back.

It must be mentioned here that when I went in for one of my prenatal visits, I asked my OB what I needed to know or do to prepare for labor. Should I take a class? Is there one he recommends?

His very helpful answer?

“Oh, you’ll get the epidural, you’ll be fine.”

I asked if he was sure I would need one, and he said pretty much everyone who is even considering pain-relieving drugs gets one. He said there is occasionally a girl who is totally convinced she will NOT have drugs, and maybe she will make it without. But not likely. It’s just that painful.

This is the only thing I’d ever heard about labor. It’s excruciatingly difficult and trying to do it without medication was pretty much the definition of insanity. When I was little, my terror over labor had me convinced I would never bare children–I fully planned on adopting, solely to avoid the pain of childbirth! I have a pretty low tolerance for pain, and everyone I’d ever heard talk about it only described how horrible it was.

So when I was offered an epidural, already in pain, knowing it was sure to get 100 times worse, since I was only at a 4 (or so I thought), and having been assured by my OB and the nurses at the hospital that there aren’t any negative effects from it–and in fact–it doesn’t even cross the placenta, I readily accepted.

What?? Why did I believe this? How could I be so naive. Everything crosses the placenta. And how do they get away with telling women that these drugs have no side-effects? The negative effects of drugs commonly used during labor, including the epidural, pitocin, and even IV’s, have been documented over and over again in their own medical journals! It’s just not talked about, so we are all left in the dark.

I am terrified of the needle, but it turns out to be nothing. Matt holds me and I’m surprised when I’m told it’s all over.

5:00 a.m.: The epidural works immediately and I can’t feel a thing. Everybody leaves the room once I’m all doped up, not to check on me again for TWO HOURS.

(It isn’t necessary to utilize actual humans to monitor laboring women when we have expensive machines to do it for us, see? I would surely beep or something if anything was amiss.)

Matt goes to sleep on the couch and I settle in and call my grandparents in a later time zone. Everyone seems sure I’m not going anywhere for several hours.

Surprise, I’m ready!

7:00 a.m.: My cervix hasn’t been checked for three hours; no one has checked on me at all for more than two. Finally a nurse comes in to see if maybe I’ve gone another centimeter but she doesn’t even put her hand in because as soon as she looks at me she shouts, “Oh my gosh, you’re crowning! I better go call the doctor! Don’t push!” and runs out of the room.

This gets Matt up! With a mirror, I can see this little black circle–her dark hair showing.

How long has my baby been sitting there like that, totally ready to come out, just waiting for me to give a little push?

The nurse’s prohibition (“Don’t push!”) has me afraid to cough–will my baby fall out? I’m quite tense, making sure not to laugh–terrified I might need to sneeze.

For an hour, the nurses come in and out getting the room ready for the doctor. All while my baby–who has possibly already been waiting in the birth canal for hours, waits some more, my body continuing to contract every minute, trying to get her out.

Still, I get Pitocin?

8:00 a.m. Yes, a full hour after he was called, and potentially up to three hours after my baby entered the birth canal, the doctor arrives. And I’m wondering why they’re still being so pokey about letting this baby come out. (For the record, this would be humanly impossible if my body wasn’t completely numbed up. Without drugs, if a baby is ready to come out, there’s really no holding back!)

The nurses are carefully lining up sharp instruments for the doctor’s convenience and one of them is injecting something into my IV bag. I ask what is it and she nonchalantly responds, “Oh, it’s just Pitocin. It helps the placenta come out after the baby is born.”

Huh? You mean, my body doesn’t have a natural way of getting it out? Oh right, Oxytocin, the natural hormone that pitocin attempts to replicate. It is the hormone that makes contractions and is naturally released after the baby is out. It can be strengthened simply by breastfeeding, but sometimes it takes a little while for your body to be ready to expel the placenta, and apparently my doctor was in the habit of speeding up the natural process, even before knowing how long it would take.

But again, I am uninformed. And so trusting. If they say it’s needed, it must be, right?

Pushing in Record Time

Once the doctor gets himself all situated with his tools at the ready, he and the nurses watch the monitor, and one of the nurses tells me, “When we say push, I want you to hold your breath and push down there.”

She says push and I do, and both the doctor and nurse yell, “WOAH! Okay, that’s enough, stop! Stop!”

I guess they are surprised that she just started coming, but I don’t understand why they want me to stop.* They’re watching the monitor again and I realize I have to wait till it tells them I’m having another contraction. So they can tell me. And I can push. This makes so much sense.

*I didn’t know it at the time, but it turns out, this is when he found he “had” to do an episiotomy. When I ask him later if he did one, he replies, “Yes, and you obviously needed one too, because you still tore a little bit,” and I am content with that at the time, but later, upon further investigation, I want to rip his head off because of course I tore once he got it going with a nice straight cut. You know how you can cut a tiny slit in a piece of fabric and then you can just pull on it and it will continue to rip down that line? Same thing happens with skin–you give it a little cut, add some pressure, and sure enough, it will continue to tear.

He also said something like, “It’s a lot easier to sew up a straight line than a jagged one.” Well, sure, and since ease of the doctor’s job is the most important thing to consider here. . .wait! No? It’s not? Could it be possible that a somewhat jagged tear actually heals better or faster?

Surely there must be some reason why doctors continue to slice through the perineal skin, connective tissue, and muscle, right? Hasn’t research shown that it prevents deep lacerations? Well, no, actually.

8:07 a.m.: They tell me I’m having another contraction and I push her head out. I see her come out in the mirror and I just laugh with glee! With the next contraction, the rest of her body comes out and I actually have the nerve to ask the doctor if I can hold my baby right away. He consents and I get to hold my little naked bundle on my chest for a few seconds while Matt cuts the cord (before it stops pulsating–again, I didn’t know, and my doctor isn’t going to bother to tell me.)

A bit of trouble. Ya think?

Then the doctor tells the nurse to take her from me so she can “work on her.” She’s not making much noise and she’s working really hard to breath. Sometimes they just need a little jump start after all that work coming through the birth canal, he tells me.

(No mention of the fact that maybe she’s been sitting in the birth canal for a dangerously long time. Or that IV’s have been shown over and over again to lead to both mom and babies ending up with water in their lungs, causing respiratory problems. Or that, statistically, epidural babies are consistently limper, drowsier, and “harder to get going” than unmedicated ones.)

The nurse puts her in a hard little bassinet and starts beating on her with a stick! I am horrified and I keep looking at Matt like, “What are they doing to our baby? Make them stop!” He just says they know what they’re doing, it’s okay, but I think he’s worried too.

My mind is occupied with dread for my newborn daughter while the doctor is taking care of business, telling me to push the placenta out and stitching the episiotomy.

During the suturing, he looks over at my baby and the nurse who is still beating on my sad baby’s back, and says, “Why don’t you take her on over to the nursery.”

And she does.

And I freak out a little.

“Why? What are they going to do with her? What is wrong with her? Why can’t I hold her?” She’s fine, the doctor said. Some babies just take a little longer to start breathing well on their own, and they have some equipment to help her in the nursery.

If she is really fine, why can’t I hold her? Why can’t they just put an oxygen mask on her or something? Don’t babies need to be close to their mother? Something about skin-to-skin contact? Body heat? Breastfeeding? All of these things have been shown to improve the problems she was experiencing, and even at this time, many apparently less primitive hospitals have already adopted “Kangaroo Care” for sick and premature babies.

Not this one, unfortunately. Or the one she was eventually transferred to. Where she ended up staying for almost two weeks. No, here we get griped at for getting too close to our own baby–something about overstimulation.

She was checked for signs of prematurity and other problems and the only answer we ever got was that she had a bit of water in her lungs (hmm). She was put on a respirator in the NICU, but probably would have been out of there in a couple of days, maybe sent home on oxygen*, had she not developed an infection while there–surrounded by a bunch of sick babies and doctors and nurses who we watched go from baby to baby without washing their hands.

Afterword

I really wish I had been more assertive and known what to do once we were experiencing problems.

While she was still at Timpanogos Hospital, and under that oxygen hood, I remember asking Matt why they couldn’t just put one of those little nasal canula things on her so I could hold her, instead of having her lay flat on her back, with no covers or anything, heated by a lamp, and barely even allowed to be TOUCHED by her own mother! It really bothered me, but I thought there was nothing I could do. They were the authorities and they knew best.

If this happened now, I would be a lot more demanding. I would say, are you doing this because it’s convenient or because it’s better for her?

I know we were very blessed. I came home, eventually, with a wonderful, healthy baby who has been so ever since. I did not get cut open needlessly.* I was not bothered by being strapped down or not being able to eat or drink because my labor was so short.

But I also know there was a lot of time and money spent correcting problems that didn’t need to be there in the first place.

And that is the entire problem with the “medical model of care”–as opposed to the “midwifery model of care”, the latter of which emphasizes being very attentive and aware, detecting potential complications and averting them before they become problems. Rather than waiting for a major problem to surface at a time when it is too late to do anything but rely on drugs and high technology–all of which carry their own risks and cause their own series of problems.

(*Not to imply all c-sections are needless. Some are truly life-saving and unavoidable. But certainly the national average of higher than 30% rate of surgical births includes a great many that could have been avoided with better care.)

The problems we experienced, combined with the answers I found when I looked into why (because no answers were ever given at the hospital, besides the “mysterious” water in her lungs), led to our decision to seek more natural approaches with our next births.

More Birth Stories?

Would you like to read about my second birth? A Hospital Birth, medication-free thanks to Hypnobirthing

Or my third? A completely natural homebirth.

Filed in: birth stories • family • health • pregnancy | July 30, 2003