Labor Story, Chapter I: In which Newt asks for drugs

Me (about a half hour after giving birth): Apparently my body is about to be flooded with special hormones that will make me forget how motherfucking painful that just was, so you have to help me to remember. Don't let me romanticize this later, OK? Labor sucked. It sucked ass.

Mr. Newt: Romanticize labor? You won't romanticize labor.

Me: It won't be me, it will be the hormones.

Mr. Newt: You might romanticize the epidural, but you won't romaticize labor.

Me: That epidural was amaaaaaaaaazing. Oh my goodness, it was sublime. I want to give that anaesthesiologist a big kiss on the mouth.

Mr. Newt: See?

So, I've been meaning to write up a little birth story, because when I was pregnant I always found it helpful to read what it was like to go through labor and delivery. But I have this squalling newborn, and I seem to spend all my waking hours feeding him, gazing adoringly at him, or doing a sort of bouncing waltz step to calm his crying. This little dance, of my own devising, is quite spectacularly graceless, but surprisingly effective at soothing the savage newborn. If I were nice, I would post a little video, so that humanity could benefit from my technique. Sorry, humanity. Too tired.

So anyway, the birth story. Let's see, Wiley was born on a Monday around noon, but labor started, by my calculations anyway, late Friday night. About 2:30 in the morning a contraction woke me from a sound sleep. They followed in 10-minute intervals, and while the pain was certainly bearable, I could not sleep though them--or between them, as it turned out. So I got up and watched Animal Planet for a few hours, hoping that this was finally it.

By the way, has everyone seen Animal Planet's amazing Planet Earth series? You know those tree frogs and slime molds are really something if they can keep me distracted from labor. I should rewatch those things sometime when I'm not in pain. Wowee.

So, I've been thinking of how to describe the feeling of contractions and coming up a bit short. The best I can do is to say there's something metallic about them--like the muscles in your lower back and uterus have turned into a kind of steel mesh, which is clamping inwards. Friday night, they weren't too bad, so I just watched the tree frogs.

Around 5:00 am, I went to the bathroom, and there was a fair amount of blood in my drawers. I wasn't expecting this, so I got on the internet right away to google "bloody show" and see how much bleeding there was supposed to be. The internet insisted that "bloody show" was supposed to be mucous "tinged" with blood. I definitely had plain old blood, without apparent mucous content, so I was confused and a little concerned. My doctor wouldn't arrive in the office for three more hours at least, so while Mr. Newt still slept, I phoned the OB urgent care unit of my hospital to see if a nurse would talk to me about my incorrect proportions of blood and mucous.

The urgent care nurse refused to give out medical advice over the phone, and advised me to come in if I was concerned. I wasn't exactly concerned, assuming that surely labor involves bleeding, right? But you should understand, internet, that Friday afternoon was my ultrasound with Dr. Perky Alarmist and his offhand remarks about stillbirth and whatnot, so I think the adrenaline was already pooling in the pit of my stomach long before the blood started pooling in my undies.

I should back up and explain that. On Friday, as I was approaching 41 weeks of pregnancy, I had one final ultrasound to make sure the baby had good movement, fluid, etc., and it was safe to wait until Tuesday night to start our induction. Because our usual ultrasound doctor was away, we had an evil, smiling replacement.

I really don't think this doctor meant to be such an egregious prick, but unfortunately, he was our tenth doctor for this pregnancy, and he didn't seem to understand that we only needed him to interpret this one little ultrasound, not review our previous forty weeks of care. So in one ten minute appointment, he made a whirlwind survey of all the things that could have or still could go wrong with this pregnancy, starting from the beginning. Very helpful. First, he took it upon himself to explain our MSAFP score to us all over again, as though we didn't know why we had been getting monthly ultrasounds all this time, and explaining that scores just slightly higher than ours were correlated with all kinds of awful disabilities, stillbirth, etc., "not that we really need to worry about all that, since you aren't in that category" he kept saying, which begged the question of why he was going to so much trouble outlining the risks? Either he just liked the sound of his own voice or he had a mild sadistic streak, perhaps.

So when we got past the many ailments we might but probably wouldn't face, Dr. PA wanted to know if we were scheduled for induction? Yes, we said, at one day past 41 weeks. He then drew a chart, showing the risks of fetal demise at each stage of pregnancy, and how between 40 and 41 weeks, the risk of stillbirth actually doubles from about 4 to about 8 per 1,000, so not a lot in actual numbers, but a doubled percentage rise. And I think we can all agree that any dead baby is one dead baby too many. So again, the message seemed to be "this probably doesn't matter, but let me explain it to you in the most alarming possible terms anyway."

Despite our insistence that we were getting good care, and wouldn't let the pregnancy go on indefinitely, this idiot doctor then went into a bit of a rant on how people don't like induction, but really what is the worst that can happen? The induction fails and you end up getting a c-section? That's still better than stillbirth, isn't it? We agreed that it was indeed better than stillbirth (was he really implying that we didn't know that?), and that we had no philosophical objections to induction at all, it just wasn't medically indicated yet, as, for instance, that day's excellent ultrasound demonstrated. Also, we were scheduled for an induction in four days. He was a better talker than a listener, I'm afraid.

And then came my favorite part of the interview, when Dr. PA explained that the only real problem with c-sections was that they could limit the number of total births you could have. And while that might be an issue for a very young couple planning on a lot of children, surely someone my age wasn't planning for many more babies anyway.

Wow, nice. Now I'm needlessly endangering my child by recklessly passing my due date and I'm an old hag. All explained in the nicest possible way by this smiling jackass.

As we were walking back to the car later, I remember asking Mr. Newt if this doctor was really implying that had we been younger and more reproductively ambitious, it might have made sense to risk the life of our first baby in the interest of avoiding a reproductively limiting c-section? Did he really imply that? We weren't sure. So we went home and tried to exorcise the whole wretched appointment by eating Mexican take-out and watching Wall-E. That's when I woke up at 2:30 am. OK, so we're back to the original narrative arc now.

Oh my goodness, this is going to be a long one. Sorry, internet.

So since my head was full of dire warnings about the dangers of being post-term, and the on-call nurse said to come to urgent care, "better safe than sorry," I woke Mr. Newt up and we headed up to the city. I believe I already explained that the nurses in urgent care poo-pooed my bleeding as "very normal" and sent me right back home.

So, internet, just for the record, labor can involve bleeding. Also: bears shit in the woods.

So, home, for a long Saturday of TV, contracting, bleeding, and waiting. Unfortunately, amid all this, I didn't manage to do much eating or sleeping. By mid-afternoon, I was really feeling the night's lack of sleep and the day's lack of food. The exhaustion and low blood sugar seem to have sped up my contractions to the point where they were coming every 2-3 minutes. After an hour of this, we loaded up the car and headed back to urgent care. I believe I've already told the story of how we were sent home again, a paltry one centimeter dilated, but supplied with some phenergan, a sedative with anti-nausea properties.

Ah, the phenergan. It didn't take the pain away, but it helped me sleep between contractions when I was back home on my couch. I made a point of eating something, even though I didn't feel like it, and tried to drink as much water as I could, knowing that dehydration was making everything worse. But mostly I sat on the couch, dozing and watching very bad movies (something with a cigar-store Indian statue that comes to life and murders people?) while Mr. Newt rubbed my back.

All through Saturday night and Sunday, Mr. Newt was right there with me as I faced my second full day of labor pains. He sat at the dining room doing some work, and keeping one eye on a stopwatch. When he saw that I was due for a pain, he would move to a chair he had placed right behind the couch so he would be ready to rub my back once the pain started. Often I didn't realize he was back there until the contraction hit, and then he was always at the ready. Somehow he managed to be unobtrusive and completely helpful at the same time. I don't know how he does things like that.

By Sunday morning, the contractions were more miserable still. They would start in my back and then clamp down over my uterus. At this point, I was cussing myself for not paying more attention to Auntie Moonbat's relaxation techniques. Knowing I was going to ask for painkillers at the first opportunity, I had assumed the deep breathing and all that were just for the hard-core natural birth folks. Oops. Turns out, they won't give you any of the good drugs for what might be a long long time.

So I had to make up my own relaxation techniques. I found that it was best to keep my mind entirely off my midsection, if possible, but I still had to think about my body to help myself relax, so I concentrated on the extremities. I would say out loud, "Easy arms, easy legs, easy hands, easy shoulders, easy jaw" and try to unclench each body part as I said it. Or, if I had trouble with that level of articulation, I would just chant "easy, easy, easy" over and over again. The word itself has a breathy quality that made it more rhythmic to say than my first go at a mantra, "relax, relax, relax." Complicated consonant sounds are not compatible with intense pain. You can see that I had a long time to perfect this technique.

Mr. Newt said I always seemed better if I started a contraction with my "easy" chant, rather than the alternative "Oh shit, oh fuck" which sometimes slipped out if one took me by surprise. Of course, never in the process did I have any desire to say, "Fan my butt," so score one for me.

The doctor had warned me that the phenergan might slow down the progress of my labor, but I'm quite sure it had the opposite effect. It helped my body let go enough that my cervix finally started to get the memo on Sunday afternoon. I lost my real mucous plug in bits all during the day, and the contractions got both stronger and closer together. Around seven in the evening, things were happening at about four minute intervals, and we braced ourselves for a third trip up to the hospital.

Now, the problem with two false-alarm trips to the Labor and Delivery unit isn't the embarrassment. I don't care about the embarrassment. I would have done anything to make sure the baby was OK, and a few raised eyebrows among the nurses weren't going to discourage me from seeking out care for my baby. Twenty minutes of social disapproval are utterly inconsequential compared to a lifetime of regret. If I had it to do all over, I'm certain I would make those same two trips to the hospital. The first one bought me peace of mind, and the second one bought me drugs. Score and score.

No, the problem with two false-alarm trips to L&D is the fact that when you make your third trip to L&D, all your paperwork indicates that you are something of a frequent flyer around those parts. Everyone from the admissions lady to the main nurse gave us a bit of a dubious sideways glance on our third arrival, which made it hard to get prompt attention when I showed up Sunday night, even though I was in significant pain.

Perhaps because of our recidivism, Mr. Newt and I were assigned to an impressively incompetent triage nurse I came to think of fondly as Low Self-Esteem Jennifer. I've never known a nurse quite like her--she tended to explain to me how bad she was at all her various duties just before performing them. My favorite, and I wish I had been alert enough to appreciate the humor in this at the time, was when she spread a big cloth over her lap before inserting my IV needle, explaining that she wasn't good with IV's, and the results tended to be "messy." If I hadn't been in the middle of a contraction at the time, I might have found this somewhat alarming. As it was, I didn't give a damn what she did to my arm, as long as the IV would eventually carry sweet sweet drugs to my central nervous system. Come to think of it, OB triage might be exactly the right calling for Low Self-Esteem Jennifer.

But Jennifer's inexpert cervical check produced the epically welcome news that I was finally 3, almost 4 centimeters dilated, and could be admitted. "Do you know if you will want an epidural?" "Yes," replied Mr. Newt. "ASAP," I said.

It did take Jennifer several tries and some desperate digging around in my arm to get the IV going, but it didn't matter. As soon as she got the fluids running, she brought me a dose of Stadol, explaining that I hadn't asked for it, but she figured I could probably use it. My reply was an inarticulate grateful whimper, I think. I'm sure that counts as legal consent in OB wards.

As far as I'm concerned, Low Self-Esteem Jennifer earned her nurse-of-the-year merit badge that day. She ran the dose into my IV, and suddenly the world turned warm and began to glow with a soft inner light. It was like the best rum punch anyone has ever made, multiplied by that cozy feeling you get when you wake up from a very satisfying nap. I could still feel the contractions, but at a very great distance. My stomach unclenched, and things started to get better.

Well, this is getting much too long for anything that isn't in iambic pentameter. Baby is getting hungry, so I guess we'll get to the good part (the epidural!) tomorrow or when I can. Crikey, that baby is a tyrant.

Coming soon: Labor Story, Chapter II: In which Newt proposes marriage to the anaesthesiologist.