My First Birth Story

This blog post picks up where a previous blog post left off. If you did not read the preceding blog and need more context to fully understand my birth story, you can check out My First Pregnancy Experience!

Now, to be clear, I hold no judgment toward women who choose an induction. My main concern with the whole induction quandary is that we as women deserve to fully grasp and understand such a process before being put through the process. Not just what is being put in our body and what it is meant to do (which is to induce labor) but we also need to be made aware of how it does that and what our body does in response to that. I had previously seen a friend be induced at a point where it does not seem that her body was ready. I saw her struggle in that. I had personally not wanted to do that to myself. I was getting desperate though. Luckily, I had another friend suggest that I ask my doctor if we could try a membrane sweep. (A membrane sweep is a more natural way of trying to induce labor by stimulating the release of prostaglandins, or the hormone that helps you to dilate.) My doctor obliged. I did still request to schedule an induction if I made it to my next scheduled appointment.

In the hours that followed that visit, I began to intuitively feel like labor was coming. In a crazy twist, a freeze warning was issued in our area for that night. Being that we lived on the other side of a pretty large hill and I trusted my instincts, we ended up staying with close family. The next morning I woke up with real contractions. They were not painful, but they were not Braxton Hicks. They were not false labor either. I just knew it. What I did not know is that I would not be mirroring my mom’s super fast labor times. My mother’s labor with me was a grand total of five hours long, from first contraction to last push. Because of this I was prepared for more of a sprint than a marathon. …Oh buddy, was I in for a marathon!

Around eight o’clock that night, the contractions had finally intensified to a point that made going to the hospital seem acceptable. I knew that once I was admitted to the hospital I would no longer be allowed to eat so we picked up some chicken nuggets on the way. I had already been in labor longer than all of my mother’s births combined, so being fed seemed like a solid plan. When we arrived at the hospital I was met by a revolving door of nurses because it was the weekend. I would not see a doctor for many hours. Most of these nurses were kind and tried their best to deal with me in a tender way as they proceeded to check me and guess dilation in a somewhat excessive and consistent rotation for the next two and a half hours. One nurse in particular however seemed to forget, or possibly not care, that there was in fact a real human on the other side of this little experiment I kept being put through. Ultimately, it was thought that I was not far enough along in the labor process to be admitted. Just to be triple sure, I was attached to a monitor and told to sit completely still for twenty minutes so that this monitor wouldn’t miss anything. This was just flat out too much. Zero out of ten, do not recommend. When that bit of torture had ended, they once again concluded that they were not ready to admit me. I was welcome to wait there if I desired, but I did not desire. The moment they took that monitor off of me I jumped up and started putting my clothing back on. I was not sure if I would just be walking around the hospital or going back to our current home base, but I knew I had to get out of that place immediately.

We did make the decision to drive back to our home base, but by that point my contractions had intensified to a degree that made sitting in a car unimaginably difficult. Kyle slowly drove down a dark and empty interstate. I stood up and held the handle on the car ceiling, swaying my hips back in forth. Upon returning to the house, we got a call from the hospital letting us know that the doctor had decided to admit us and I said, “Thanks, but no thanks. We’ll see you later.” I told Kyle and the family members that had been on this journey with us to go ahead and get some rest. I said there was no use in them losing sleep too. I’d be in labor either way, I didn't think it would make a difference… I was wrong on the second account. It made a difference, a huge difference. It made a lonely, isolating, and terrible difference! I stared at my snoring husband who was asleep on the couch as I bounced on my labor ball. I had told him to go to sleep. He had told me to wake him up if I changed my mind. I had changed my mind. I did not like this loneliness, not one bit, but it was me dying in a movie theater all over again. Was I going to wake him up? No, I wasn’t. Why, you may ask… Because I was not asking him to lose sleep so that I had someone there to watch me labor. That was not logical. I could not understand why I felt this way. Why could I not do this by myself? The answer is simple, but not one I understood at the time. We are not meant to do these things alone. One needs help to carry the emotional weight of their experience. So much so that one may not notice how much others were carrying for them until they are no longer doing so. Fortunately for me, I was not the only one unable to handle my lonely laboring. One of my family members could not either. She came out of her room to inform me that she had been staring at the ceiling for an hour. She said she couldn’t keep picturing me bouncing on this ball all by myself. If she wasn’t going to sleep in there she might as well be out here. To which I said, “Thank God!”

It was probably somewhere around three in the morning when I finally built up the courage to head back to the hospital, but I begged Kyle not to let them make me sit still again. I was admitted relatively quickly this time and had to take an IV as soon as I was. I did not handle that well, but by seven that morning my room had seven people in it. Everyone was chatting and joking, which was cool until things really started kicking. My nurse suggested I take a shower and the crowd emptied itself into the waiting room. The shower was the best thing I’d experienced since the birthing ball. I was relaxed and honestly, pretty pain free. I could have stayed in there forever but alas, hospital protocol demanded my exit. Because of the baby monitors inability to get wet, I was ripped out of heaven at the sixty minute mark in order for constant monitoring to resume. In hindsight, I wish I would have fought a little harder to get back into the shower. I had wanted to try for a natural labor and I really do feel like I could’ve had a whole a baby in that shower without an epidural had I advocated for the chance.

Unfortunately, I had not slept in thirty-two hours and the moment the water cut off I began to feel the sharpest and most intense pain of this entire experience. Before getting into the shower I had been dealing with difficult, but bearable contractions. In the shower, as I said before, I was feeling virtually nothing. What awaited me outside of the shower was an utter shock. At eight and a half centimeters, the hits were fast and furious and they did not let up. I was asked to sit still in my bed because the nurses were not getting a good read on the monitor, but I couldn’t do it. I was asked to relax. I couldn’t do it. I was finally so overwhelmed by the requests that I was failing to acquiesce in the midst of a tirade of contractions that I began to ask about the epidural. Again, looking back, I wish I would have voiced my true wish to get back in the shower instead. I could have been more still in the shower. I would have been relaxed. They would not have been able to monitor the baby, which was the problem they were trying to solve, but it would have solved a lot of problems for me. I held onto the hand of a friend we had invited to be there during the birth (for support as well as documentation purposes) discussing in a strained way whether or not I should get the epidural. I was scared that I would not be able to sit still while receiving the jab, that I might move if I even felt something touch me. My friend explained that compared to what I was enduring in this moment, the epidural would be a piece of cake. My nurse let me know that I would probably be able to take a nap if I got it, and by this time, I was levels of exhausted I had never been in my life. I was being hit with pain that I believed I could manage if given access to the tools, but I felt like that access had been cut off. So, reluctantly, I asked for them to bring in the anesthesiologist. As my nurse was making the call, I looked at my friend and said, “It’s not gonna hurt that bad?” she responded in the negative. “A walk in the park compared to this?” she responded in the postive. I said, “Ok… ok.” trying to talk myself into sticking this big, fat needle in my back.

The pure level of exhaustion probably was my saving grace. The anesthesiologist waited for a contraction to hit as I folded myself into my female family member. She held me like a child as I let the guy do his thing. Whatever pain was supposed to be caused by the numbing needle was covered by a contraction. Whatever pain was supposed to be caused by the epidural needle was covered by the numbing of the previous needle. A weird sensation swept through the bottom half of my body as my contractions slowly drifted off. It felt strangely like they were becoming ghosts of their previous selves. Soon I felt nothing other than tired, so very tired. Before I knew it I was napping in between being turned from side to side every half hour and the volatile shivers the epidural gave me. It certainly was not the best or most uninterrupted sleep I had ever had, but it was something.

I am not sure how long it was after receiving the epidural that I was checked and told it was time to push. It was a bit jarring though, like being jolted out of a heavy sleep. One second I was laying around, a calm had finally settled over the room. The next second I was being given a ten count and practice pushing. The “practice pushing” never ended. We did it again and again as the room slowly filled with many, many strangers in scrubs. I pushed and pushed, seemingly to no one’s satisfaction. An oxygen mask began to be slammed onto my face in between pushes by a well meaning lady with rather bad aim. The lights were bright, the room was loud, and there was just a lot going on around me. The doctor finally arrived and after watching me a couple of times, said, “Do you feel where the pressure is? I need you to push with the pressure.” I looked this woman square in the eyes and said, “I feel nothing…” “Nothing?” she questioned. “No thing.” I responded. Surprise spread over her face, “Then you are doing incredibly well! You don’t feel anything?” I confirmed that fact, yet again. She disconnected my epidural, realizing that my extremely small stature had not been taken into account. She gave me some tips on how to position my body in such a way that would optimize the productivity of my pushes and I finally began to hear a chorus of resounding assurances that I was doing something that was working.

Moments later, I could see my child’s face and I was being told to come deliver my own baby. I gave the doctor a stunned look, as that was not something which had occurred to me that I would be doing. She encouraged me to come forward and I did, grabbing my first child under the arms and pulling them up on to my chest. It was surreal and mind boggling and profound. Profound, this was an adjective I had heard another woman use to describe child birth in a YouTube video just weeks before. I had rolled my eyes in response, thinking “Yeah, right… ok.” She was right, though. She was more than right. Laying in that hospital bed having just delivered my first born, I could not come up with a more accurate description of all I had just gone through. It did not go fully according to plan. There are things I would go back and change now that I have the benefit of hindsight. There are things I would do differently now that I have more knowledge. It was truly traumatic in many ways that I did not even process fully until after I had a whole other baby. Even so, it was humbling and empowering, simultaneously somehow. It was in fact profound.

Photos by Abby Andrews Photography.