Laboring for Nothing

The doctors in L&D start me on a Magnesium drip, to prevent me from having a seizure. It’s also a natural muscle relaxer. I HATE medicines. I always get strong reactions, and weird side effects. The magnesium makes me feel like I can barely breathe. They put a catheter in my uterus and fill it with water, making a balloon inside me. They tug on the catheter every four hours to open the cervix a little more – this is mildly annoying, but not nearly so bad as the urethra catheter they had to put in because I couldn’t walk to the bathroom. Wow. You don’t even realize you can feel things inside your bladder until you have something poking around in there. I would say “ouch”, but the real pain is yet to come.

Before they get a chance to start me on drugs to induce labor, they do an ultrasound to check if the baby is still breech. The technician looks around a while, says the baby must be positioned weird, she can’t find the heartbeat. She calls in the nurse, who tells me to hold on, she has to call a doctor. I already know what the doctor’s going to say when he gets there, but that same stupid part of my brain still continues to hope, right up until the doctor says “there’s no heartbeat, the baby’s passed”. I don’t go into denial, I don’t get angry, I don’t do anything except cry, and cry, and cry. My baby’s dead, that’s all I can think. I can’t cry for long though, the magnesium that makes it hard to breathe makes me feel like I’m suffocating if I cry. So I tell myself, you can cry as much as you want later, but right now is the time for courage, strength, and a lot of repression.

I decline a C-section – if they do one this early in the pregnancy, they have to do it the old-fashioned way, with a vertical cut instead of a horizontal cut (on the uterus; the skin cut is the same). This means I can never have a VBAC. Fuck that. There may be nothing but a dead baby to hope for at the end of this labor, but someday I might get another chance to give birth, and I don’t want to screw that up. I decline an epidural – I feel like I can stand the physical pain, and in fact it might give me some relief from all this pain in my heart that I can’t get out.

The doctors insert a pill in my cervix, which starts contractions. In the beginning, they’re not so bad, I can get through them with deep breathing, relaxation, and Fleet Foxes on my iPod. Four hours later, they insert a second pill, which really gets the contractions going. Now I feel it in my back, too, so I tell Scott to rub my back, hard, the way we were taught in the Bradley book. This helps more than I can say, but the contractions are coming less than a minute apart. I don’t realize it at the time, but Scott rubs my back with each contraction; he tells me later they last about a minute, and are 45 seconds apart, for 5 fucking hours.

Four hours later, they insert another pill, and tell me to call them if I start to feel pressure. The nurse leaves, and immediately I feel pressure. It’s like a dam opened inside me, and I feel the baby shoot down like a pinball. At the same time, I feel the worst pain I’ve ever felt in my life, like a super-contraction that just won’t end, and I make noise for the first time. I scream. And scream and scream and scream. There are a bunch of people telling me to do things, but I can’t hear them over my own screams. Finally a doctor screams back at me, which gets through the pain and I listen and do what he tells me, move how he tells me, push when he tells me. I feel the baby coming, breech, which I knew beforehand but didn’t expect to feel. I feel every elbow, knee, instinctually knowing this is not how a baby should feel coming out, and it hurts worse than anything I’ve ever expected to experience.

With a final push that takes everything I have, the baby’s out. It’s a girl (we didn’t know beforehand). The doctors tell me it’s all over, the placenta came out right after the baby, there’s nothing to do but relax. I sleep.