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My son recently turned 2, and on the eve of his birthday, I found myself reminiscing about the day I went into labour, and how it all went down. Taking this “stroll” down memory lane, reminded me a lot of the funny moments and some I would rather forget! LOL
Many people find my birth story to be hilarious, especially parents who know exactly what I’m talking about! I wanted a natural birth, and had hired a doula to help me achieve that goal, fully knowing that I may end up hankering for an epidural as – let’s face it – I had no idea what I’d be getting myself into!
This is how it all went down… It’s 3am and I woke up to find that my water has just broken. I could feel it starting to trickle out and just knew that if I moved or even worse, stood up, there would a tsunami-like gush of amniotic fluid. But wait! It’s 3am, do you know where your husband is? Oh yeah, I know! He’s sleeping down on the couch, where he has been for the last couple of weeks, due to my brutal hip pain that caused me to toss and turn all night long & prevented the both of us from sleeping. Now, I must admit, I am a bit of a neurotic sleeper – ok, I’m downplaying that just a wee bit. LOL I love white noise, & my husband has a general disdain for the fan that I like to blare full blast to create my white noise haven. One thing that never crossed my mind though, was that my neuroticism would soon become enemy #1. So here I am, lying in the bed, afraid to move, and wondering…. How the hell am I going to wake up my husband who’s sleeping downstairs, when I have the bedroom door shut, the fan on full blast, and nothing but a plastic bottle of lotion on my nightstand to try and carefully bang on the carpeted floor with, in the hopes of rousing him from his snoring and usual deep sleep! I tried and I tried, but do you think a plastic bottle does much of anything against a plush carpet? In case you’re wondering, it doesn’t! LOL Then it occurred to me! He might have left his cell phone on! So I called it and called it and called it until FINALLY he woke up! He comes tearing up the stairs and I yell at him: “Get me that towel that your Mom just gave us, that really big thick one in the linen closet cause you’re gonna have to diaper me with it, so I don’t gush all over the carpet!”, all the while thinking “Oh God, please don’t let her find out about this one!”
Sure enough, my husband brings me the towel and helps me diaper myself in it, (I’m sure he never pictured this on our 1st date! LOL) and then escorts me over to the toilet where I continue my “business”, or maybe it’s the baby’s “business”, but does it really matter? I didn’t have any real contractions at all for the rest of the night. I called the hospital in the morning and was told by the nurse to stay home if I wasn’t progressing, as the only thing they had for me right now was a chair to sit on. She sort of laughed, which I am sure was a result of them having a crazy shift, but it wasn’t all that funny to me! Little did I know….
So, about 12 hours later, after eating a Big Mac combo & continuously walking to hopefully help induce labour, (there was no way I was getting induced if I could help it!) we trod into the hospital to see our doctor and I was only 1 cm dilated. 1 cm? After 12 hours? You must be kidding me! She also told me that I might as well go home as they were so busy, and that I’d be much more comfortable there at home with my doula, seeing as I wasn’t really progressing. She told me to come back by 8am the next day to be induced, unless my contractions picked up before then. Our lovely doula arrived while they were monitoring my contractions, (contractions that were clearly taking a long break, and had possibly even gone on an extended lunch LOL) and then they discharged me. No sooner did we leave the hospital that they picked up. (Damn that Murphy’s Law!!) Nothing too crazy, but definitely getting stronger and more uncomfortable.
They started to pick up more rapidly and we decided to head back to the hospital. I had to go pee before we left (big surprise there!) and when I sat on the toilet I had the weirdest strongest pain and felt like I was paralyzed on the toilet. I was yelling at my husband, the poor soul, to call 9-1-1 for an ambulance as I couldn’t move or get off the toilet and I remember him yelling back at me in frustration “What do you think the ambulance is going to do for you right now besides force you off the toilet?” No matter how annoyed I was with him at that particular moment, I had to agree he had a point. So he yanked me up off the toilet until I could stand up and then that pain went away. It was the strangest thing, but it had passed and we made a run for (ok, waddle for) the door to get in the car while we had the chance!
My husband drops me off at the front door of the hospital and goes to park the car while I sit outside in a wheelchair patiently waiting (yeah, right) with my pillow on my lap that we were supposed to bring with us (I’m sorry, where are my tax dollars going again?). This wonderful old man decides to strike up a conversation with me about how he has I don’t remember how many grandchildren, and how it’s wonderful and ………….. I start thinking – “In case you were wondering Sir, I was just having a contraction and have no idea what the hell you just said, and although I’d love to chat it up with you on a good day, you may not get quite the same reaction today as you thought you might!”
Now, I realize that I’m writing a lot of detail here, but I think I need to, to really give you a clear picture of what really happened, and of course, for dramatic effect. But I promise you, it’s all 100% true!
So we head on up to the Labour & Delivery floor and are about to walk in the Assessment area when one nurse says to my husband, “You need to keep her out here for a moment as we are busy in here and will get you guys in a few minutes.” Ok no biggie…. A few minutes pass by and then another nurse comes out and asks my husband if we’re in labour. (Ya think?) My husbands says yes and then she says “Well then you should really get her in here, why on earth were you waiting out here in the hall?”. (Oooh nooo…. I think my husband is going to let her have it! But he doesn’t, and on in we go).
So I get onto the gurney (Wow, I’m so lucky, and here I thought it was going to be a chair! LOL) and they check me. Wow! Another 2 cm’s after all this time! Why so fast? Not!! We’re at a total of 3cms now and I have to go pee once again. My husband walks me to their washroom, which is down at the end of the hall and you HAVE to walk through the visitor waiting room to get there, which is fabulously pleasant! NOT! We get there and I go pee. Then, once again, when I went to get up I had that crazy pain again and couldn’t get up off the toilet. My husband got me up off it again and I remember saying to him, feeling disappointed in myself that this pain was so brutal, nothing like I had ever expected and that I didn’t know if I could do this without drugs. I had previously told him not to let me have drugs unless I really needed them and truly wanted them, not just in a moment of so called “weakness”. I had no idea until after the birth that what I had been experiencing was back labour and every time I sat on the toilet, our baby moved and his head and spine would be grinding up against my spine. This time, the baby didn’t turn back around when I got up, so the pain was brutal! He patiently walked back to the room with me, taking only a slight step each step of the way due to the excruciating pain. He told me later that it took me 30 mins just to get back to the bed because I couldn’t really walk. He also later said that while making it back to the room, he felt more and more self-conscious as the visitors kept staring at us as we took so long to pass. I’m sure they were thinking “Oh, what a whiner!”. (But you know how the saying goes – Take a picture, it lasts longer! LOL) Getting up onto the gurney was a whole other issue. Once I was on there, it was insane! My contractions were coming so fast and so strong and were on top of each other for just over an hour straight. I never had those coming and going type of contractions at that time, the ones where you have a break in between, even if “break” means only 30 seconds. The next one was coming full force before the last one even had a chance to stop peaking. Now at this point, I knew there was no way in hell I could do this without drugs, and when I asked (more like demanded) for an epidural, the nurse nicely pointed out that I was still in assessment, and until I was in a birthing suite (which were rammed and I wouldn’t be getting anytime soon), I could not receive so much as a regular Tylenol!! How nice! We’re really enjoying our stay at Hospital Hotel! Thanks for having us!!
During the time that my contractions were piling up on me, I remember my husband and my doula trying to talk to me, trying to touch me and generally be helpful & keep me on my birthing plan goals. Part of the time they seemed like they were in a far away place, off in a distant land, and other times they seemed to be so close to me that I felt like they were stealing my oxygen. All I know is that I was in so much pain from all the contractions coming at once with no break in between that I was laying tensed up on that gurney like I was tied into a straight jacket for just over an hour straight. I had been so tensed up for that period of time, that for the next few days after the birth, every single muscle in my body ached like I had just had one hell of a work out at Gold’s gym! I know at one point I said through gritted teeth, (quite rudely I’m sure) L-E-A-V-E M-E A-L-O-N-E!! I’m sure I threw in a “D-O-N’-T T-O-U-C-H M-E or two at some point too! LOL
Turns out, I had been chanting and carrying on worse that I had thought, according to my husband’s re-telling of it. I really hadn’t wanted to be that girl, you know the one that sounds like a drama queen diva type! I had wanted to do this gracefully – but what do you do when you’re backed into a laborious corner (a.k.a. the assessment bed) with no drugs and contractions piling up on top of one another? You uncontrollably let ‘er howl of course! Duh!! LMAO
My husband had no choice but to sit back and watch this crazy show progress and ended up nervously eating all my Kashi granola bars and fruit popsicles I had brought with me to keep me hydrated and energized. But I suppose he really needed the energy for what was to come next!
So the nurse comes over to check me, acting as if she was thinking “What’s all this moanin’ & groanin’ about?”. She checks me and starts saying “OMG – how did you dilate to 9 cm so fast?!”. She starts racing around everywhere, making distressed phone calls and then yanks me up with force off the bed. My husband comes back with a wheelchair for me and she shoves it out of the way and yells “I can get her there faster on foot!”. Now why on earth the assessment room is not right next to the actual birthing area is beyond me. At the hospital I delivered at, it’s sort of at the other end of the wing, accessible by a long corridor and oh yeah – how could I forget that you have to go through the visitor waiting room again as well to get there! So here I am, barefoot, dragged by the nurse down the hall & feeling like the baby’s head was going to fall out onto the floor. (As if it would be that easy! LOL). I’m not even sure if my gown was closed as we raced passed the visitors anxiously awaiting the birth of their new loved one! LMAO I remember along the way hearing the nurse say something to my husband about the Operating Room. My mind started racing and I started to think I had to have a C-Section because something must be wrong. I must have wondered out loud because then the nurse said to me that I’d be “delivering like Mary & the baby Jesus” as they had no where to put me but on the Operating Room table! Now, you try getting up onto an operation table with a small stool and make the hike up there when you’re 9 months pregnant! Never mind when you’re in labour and you feel like the baby is going to come out of you with the force & pressure of a NASA lift-off! Now, I do have to say that at some point, while I was being dragged on foot to where we’d be delivering our little “Jesus”, he changed positions again and went back to the normal birthing position, THANK GOD! (Yep, that’s me still screaming out of relief! LOL)
Just to give you a picture of what it was like in there, it was your typical sterile looking operating room, and the only person we had in there with us until the doctor got there was a different nurse (I’m sure the original one raced out of there as fast as she could to overdose on Tylenol Migraine from all the noise I had been making), my husband, and God bless her – our doula.
With some help, I eventually got my whale-like self up on there and started pushing. I love how they tell you to push longer and harder but you don’t have any idea how the hell to do it effectively. No one ever told me to push like you were having the hardest, longest and most urgent poop of you life, but then again, there probably hadn’t really been any time! Here I’m thinking you have to push with your vagina, because, well hell, isn’t that where it’s coming out? Oh no, you have to push with you’re a-hole! (Future note to self!)
So my husband, who thought he would have a nice time sitting up near my head and not having to see what the good Lord makes happen up close and personal (He had previously passed out one time after receiving stitches, so there was no way I was going to let him see this, pass out, and then have to cope with that too! LMAO), had to grab one leg and the doula had the other and had to try and force my legs back to allow me to try and come up in a semi-sitting position to try and push. Now, first of all, I’m not the skinniest chick on the block (who is anyways when you’re 9 months pregnant?) and I used to ride horses a lot, so I have some pretty strong legs. Because I was lying flat on my back on the table, I was pushing them backwards and it was a struggle to keep my legs back. Add that to the fact that most delivering women don’t appreciate having to do a set of military style sit ups without proper support just to try and get into the proper pushing position, like one might have if you slipped the orderly a $100 bill on the way in to get yourself a birthing suite with a proper birthing bed!
So here we are, all of us getting to know each other in a way we never thought we would have to, LOL and eventually I feel the craziest burning ring of fire that felt like little “Jesus” was trying to pry open my vagina/birth canal with his newborn little hands! Turns out that the burning ring of fire sensation was probably the episiotomy I had to have as a result of “failing” miserably at the military style sit-ups I so lovingly referred to earlier! Then after a few more pushes, out popped our little “Jesus”!
What a blessing it is to have a little one come into your life! Right from the get go, we were in love with him. We had spent so much time wondering beforehand whether we would have a boy or a girl, and the funny thing is that when he was lying there on my chest, it hadn’t even occurred to me what gender he was, not until our doula said minutes later, “Aren’t you going to tell her what it is?” Obviously my husband had seen what he was when he came out, but once the doula prompted my husband on this, he came out of his birth-laden stupor, and exclaimed “Oh yeah – it’s a boy!!!”
While I was getting stitched and cleaned up, I had a horrible case of verbal diarrhea. I remember at the time thinking to myself “Why the hell can’t I just shut up?”. I later found out that this is totally normal behaviour after some women birth their babies. I was chatting up the nurse, asking her how she liked her job, that her name (Patience) was fantastic, how much did my son weigh, and on and on, and on, and on! And I mean on and on! LOL Even my husband told me to hush up because I was likely annoying people! LOL But I just couldn’t stop!
Now, overall, did my son’s arrival go according to our birth plan? Well, yes & no. My doula sat back with my husband as they had no choice but to quietly watch my drug-free back labour induced hysteria, and my husband probably had a bad case of the runs he never mentioned from all the whole grain granola bars and 100% real fruit popsicles he had eaten that night. And our doula probably didn’t love the fact that she had to take off her shoes & soggy socks before going into her house to scrub them down after they had gotten soiled during the impromptu delivery that didn’t have the set up of a regular birthing room to catch all the birthing fluids. I had pictured gracefully delivering our first born in a proper birthing suite, doing all sorts of pain management techniques with my husband and doula, while I delivered our little guy naturally without the drugs. While the back labour was hell on wheels that I can’t even begin to properly describe, and hope to hell I never experience again, our little guy (being the Aries that he is) got all bossy on us when he was good and ready, and impatiently forced his way outta there in the end! And without the drugs! So did it go according to plan? For the most part! LOL
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