Birth Story: The Ugly

When I prepared for my childbirth, I "knew" that labor was unpredictable, but I did as much work as I could to ensure that Corey and I were educated and well armed to avoid the one major thing that was a bottom-line, unacceptable birth choice for me: a C-section. It was my greatest fear. The very sort of birth I could not allow myself to have. The thought of having my body splayed open, my organs removed from my insides and placed on my chest, my baby extracted by a doctor I had never met...these thoughts horrified me.

The moment MW's heart rate dropped to 40 (infant heart rates average 120...they typically do emergency c-sections at 90), I knew somewhere inside that my greatest nightmares were about to be realized. Luckily, I guess, I was too drugged up at that point to sufficiently panic. In the span of an instant, a surgical team, a slew of residents, and a pediatric team were in my peaceful labor room. The dim lights and calming Snatam CD were erased by blinding white lights, by screaming, frantic residents who forgot to unplug one of my IVs before yanking my bed down the hall.

In the pandemonium to get Miles out of my womb, people forgot to inform Corey about what was happening. They sort of left him wandering around, wondering what would happen to his baby.

I remember the 24 minutes leading up to Miles' birth in small spurts. I remember when they lashed my arms to the table, crucifixion-style, and ran a blade up my chest to see where the spinal stopped numbing me--my stigmata.

I remember pleading with the room at large to not take my organs out of my body and the anesthesiologist having an awkward silence, not wanting to tell me it was already happening. Then I remember being handed a form, someone apologizing that I had to sign with my left hand. We all then discussed our left-handedness. At least four people in the room, none of whom revealed their names to me or ever addressed me by my name, were left handed. I remember hoping the OB was not one of them, returning to a memory I had where left handed surgeons needed to stay in med school an extra year to master the right-handed surgical equipment standard in all ORs.

At some point, I started pleading for Corey to be there and someone said, "Who's that???" in an angry voice, as if I were asking for my stylist or my yoga teacher or someone insignificant. They slammed an oxygen mask on my face, yanked a hair net angrily onto my head, and someone complained that I had pubic hair, which was in the way. The terror I felt bubbled deep from inside me, so intense that even the pounds of anesthesia couldn't numb it. The only body part where I had feeling was my hands, and they began to twitch uncontrollably, to express my fear. They ramped up my meds until I couldn't move or feel anything, and when Corey came to hold my hand, I was barely aware of it.

Someone asked me the name of my baby as I began to feel a great shoving, a pushing and yanking and pressure as they wrangled him out from my 5-inch incision. It was the first time I said his name. Miles. I remember it felt almost sinful to say it there, in that space. And then I heard him cry, but I wasn't allowed to see him. Corey caught a glimpse of him, but I was in agony, strapped down and violated and unable to even set eyes on the baby I carried for almost 42 weeks, for 289 days. I sobbed uncontrollably.

Because I couldn't see him, because I never saw him come out of my body, I felt a strange disassociation with him, as if he wasn't really the baby inside me. I started begging them to show me my placenta, needing to glimpse at the thing that nourished my screaming baby I couldn't see. But they threw it in the trash and wouldn't show it to me. They were busy counting sponges to make sure they didn't leave any inside of me. I saw the cart of gore, the rack of sponges mottled with my insides. But they threw away my afterbirth.

And then they brought Miles over to Corey, caked in shit from head to toe, silent and staring at us, and I couldn't hold him. I couldn't move my parts to even touch him. Corey had to place Miles near my lips so I could kiss him, had to get him near my hand so I could extend one numb finger to touch his cheek while they put my insides back inside me.

When it was all done, when I was closed again, they told me I would carry Miles back to the room. They had to wrap my numb arms around his body as they wheeled me down the hall. I have no memory of this, of holding him. I have an image, though. Not the picture of a woman rapturous from having delivered her baby, but a picture of a body ravaged and filled with drugs, and a baby about to fall off the gurney because his mother can't feel her arms:

For two straight weeks afterward, I spent hours each day crying, mourning the birth I couldn't have and weeping for the wound in my body, crying because I was so damaged I couldn't even sit up to change his diaper for 3 days. A lot of people told me I needed to be grateful that I had my healthy baby, to focus on him. But that's not what I needed to do. I needed to mourn. I needed to talk about what happened to me, the tragic loss of control and how it was particularly hard for me, queen anal extraordinaire, to handle. I needed to come to terms with the fact that I had not failed at birthing, that the circumstances of Miles' arrival didn't indicate a failure of my body so much as a cry from Miles for a different entry. I wept for what could not be and for the physical pain and debilitating results (for me) of what did.

I spent hours in the hospital each day rehashing the whole thing with my mom, with the midwives, filling in the gaps of what happened. Talking over and over again about vomiting rainbow Jello on Corey or wanting to remember how I began breastfeeding with my arms still numb. How I itched myself raw after reacting poorly to the Demerol. It wasn't until I found a website where other women discussed their traumatic births that I began to feel better, to feel validated in having these feelings.

My love for my son remains unchanged. But that is a completely separate thing from the birth I prepared for, for the natural childbirth I wanted to gift him but didn't/couldn't. From the rite of passage of womanhood I feel anguish over missing. I wanted to deliver him, to pass him from my body through my birth canal, to feel the agonizing splendor of birthing my baby.

Each day, I am a tiny bit more at peace with what happened. But I have a long way to go and I still have nightmares and wake up sweating, remembering the faceless voices talking about his heart rate. Miles is here with us now, and he is great (if screamy).

But I am a long shot from being healed, physically or mentally, and I need time to grieve and cope.

Birth Story: The Bad

Around 8pm on Friday, after I had been in labor since 2am, something bad happened. I begged the midwife to examine me and tell me about my progress. She warned me that the labor would be the same whether I was 5cm or 9, but I had told her in advance that I like lots of facts and numbers. I like to mark progress. When she had last checked me 3 hours before, I was at 5cm and had convinced my brain I could certainly handle 5 more hours. A finite number. An end to the waves of contractions.

She checked me. I was still at 5cm. I lost my shit. The baby had not yet dropped, my water hadn't broken, but yet I had been experiencing final-stage-quality contractions since 6am. Plus, Miles sort of rolled over so he was sunny-side up (like his dad was upon delivery) and the weight of his 8lb body was pressing against my spine. Back labor.

Labor transitioned for me from totally manageable to excruciating. I couldn't breathe or see or move and there were very few breaks at all between contractions. The midwife felt I needed pitocin to make the contractions even stronger to get the baby into my pelvis. At this point, every limb of my body was shaking involuntarily, I was dying of hunger, and I was completely spent. I knew that I could not breathe my way through intensified contractions. I began begging for an epidural.

Somewhere along this point, the nursing staff remembered that Corey and I were donating our cord blood and that the triage nurse had forgotten to take 3 vials of my blood. Amidst all this chaos, they had to get someone in there and draw blood from me. The first nurse was a disaster. My wrists are still bruised from failed attempts. They got someone else, who was smart enough to stick me while one contraction began to fade, giving her a 40-second window to get her goods. This woman also managed to get an IV in my hand in the middle of a full blown contraction. I wish she had been working with the anesthesiologist, because that man could not stick a needle in painlessly to save his soul.

I can honestly say that the application of the epidural was one of the worst things that has ever happened to me. The anesthesiologist told me I would have to sit still while he inserted the needle. Sit still! Through contractions! At this point I couldn't even sit up let alone sit still. I managed by myself while he gave me the lidocaine injection, but then putting in the epidural itself was a completely different story.

I had been rocking on the bed, flailing all my parts just to get through it all and Corey had to hold one arm and leg while the midwife took the other half of me to hold me still. Then, on top of the sitting still, the anesthesiologist told me I had to slump. My whole life, I've been working on good posture. Ten years of rugby have taught me to always keep my spine straight and, in the midst of my most difficult trial, I had to hunch my back. Plus, I had an enormous baby inside my stomach that really got in the way of any sort of forward bending. As I considered the irony of this, three 90-second contractions hit me right in a row and I knew I would surely die.

Only I didn't die. I screamed and whistled and breathed and Corey squeezed and I got drugged up and fell back into a comatose-like fog while the midwife called her OB backup to examine me and break my water. At this point, I really stop being able to remember everything on my own. I know that almost immediately, I dilated to 7cm and Miles' head finally dropped. I saw the nurses opening the cupboards and drawers, which filled me with momentary joy because the Lamaze instructor told us that when they start opening the cupboards to reveal the medical equipment, you know you're close. It was 10pm. I remember that because I asked the midwife if she thought my baby would have a Friday birthday or a Saturday one.

Except then the OB came back and told the room at large that he didn't like the thick, black meconium (baby bowel movement) oozing out of me and he especially didn't like the baby's heart rate, which began a rapid decline.

At this point, I became afraid. The very fact that he was in my room at all meant I had deviated from normal. I know this because the midwives specialize in normal. Through my entire pregnancy, they reassured me of their expertise in normal and natural but also of their ability to recognize when something was not normal. At my last visit, I signed a wealth of consent forms authorizing them to exercise their judgement and bring in the medical team if there should be an emergency.

My last clear memory of my labor is of the midwife holding my hand and telling me she needed to insert the internal fetal heart rate monitor, the one they have to screw into the top of the baby's scalp. We had specifically discussed this as a last resort intervention, because I didn't want ANYTHING screwed into the top of my baby's scalp. That is when things became traumatically awful.

Some Notes on Delivering at Magee

The Lamaze class instructor will tell you all sorts of things to be prepared for your delivery at Magee hospital. Many of these turned out to be false, false lies!

To start, she said there'd be popsicles. Since they don't let you have food while you do the hardest work of your life, I was glad to know I could at least have popsicles. I mean, it's July. Everyone needs popsicles. When I first got into triage and learned that, despite my contractions coming every 2 minutes, I was only 1cm dilated, the midwife asked if there was anything I needed. "POPSICLES!" I told her, very calmly amidst a big one.

About an hour later, she reappeared with a smooshed, 23-yr old orange popsicle and a cup. "This is all I could find..." It was at the bottom of the freezer, broken, but I ate it anyway dammit. When you actually get to your labor/delivery/recovery room, you can order popsicles from room service, but this takes 45 minutes and they get weird when you want 15 of them. Note to others: Bring your own popsicles.

The instructor also told us there would be "everything you need" for a good shower. I took this to mean soap, shampoo, and towels. Possibly a bath mat. They have only soap. When my little sister wanted to give me a sponge bath in my post-partum room, she asked the nurses for toiletries and towels. They gave her a handful of washcloth-sized scouring pads and some J&J baby soap that was meant to double as soap and shampoo for me. We ended up drying me off with those super-absorbant hospital gowns and then having to wait around for a dry one of those to emerge.

There were other wee lies that were less annoying, like that I'd get a water bottle or other ammenities. But so much of my labor experience revolved around the shower and wanting to consume calories that I felt it prudent to make known that Magee does not, in fact, specialize in frozen treats or spa towels.