Giving Birth, Chapter 4

The doctor directed the nurses to give me a little pitocin, to see if we could get things started again.  I was nervous about that, truthfully, given my last birth and how much the pitocin made the contractions hurt.  Still, there wasn't much else to do at that point, so they put me on the lowest dose.  The plan was to keep me on the pitocin until my water broke or until the clock pointed to an hour that didn't constitute the middle of the night, at which point my doctor would come in to break my water.

It started to become a reality for me, then.  I was having a baby.

Awesome.

Since it was official at this point, Hubby and I took some precautions.  I clipped all my fingernails short.  He wrapped his hand in an ace bandage.  We had learned, the last time around, that I will break the skin on his hands after only a few contractions.  It never quite got to that point; he'd found a rag to wrap around his hand before too much time had passed.  Still, we figured it would be good to minimize his pain this time around.

Again, or perhaps still, we waited.  I still dozed in and out a little bit from the morphine, but I was definitely more awake than I'd been for the beginning of the night.  I felt the contractions pick up a little bit, but nothing that really helped things progress.  In fact, I stayed at a 7 for the next few hours until my doctor came in.  They even upped my dosage of pitocin, but I felt no different from it.

When the doctor arrived, I fought a desperate fear.  My doctor is awesome; she's very personable and friendly, and happens to be pregnant herself.  However, when Schprid was born, they had to break my water and the very next contraction was the most painful thing I've ever felt in my life.  Hence, this time around, I was scared to pieces.  The doctor and I chatted for a couple minutes, then she broke my water and left.  I waited tensely for the next contraction to hit.

Fortunately, my pitocin dosage was much lower this time around, and there was very little difference between the contractions before and after she broke my water.  I was relieved about that, but still a little nervous.  I remembered birth not being fun the last time around.

As I lay there, Hubby holding my hand, the contractions started to build in intensity.  I imagine I felt more like what normal women feel when they go into labor naturally.  Once they started, however, the intensity built quickly.  It wasn't long before I felt like my body was being torn into pieces.  I whimpered, moaned, squeezed, and at one point even bit Hubby's hand.

For all this time, I had been on my back.  However, I remembered last time I liked being on my side for some of the contractions, simply because I felt that my body was doing what it needed to do to push the baby out.  This time, when I tried rolling to my side, I felt like the same terrible pain that had before been somewhat localized around my hips was instead able to explode all through my back, belly, and even my legs to some degree.  That obviously wasn't going to work.

Hubby was great.  He did everything this time that he'd done before.  He held my hand, he talked to me about happy things.  He tried to talk me through it.

But this time, he was my only support.  I hadn't done much to prepare myself mentally for the rigors of giving birth, and the doctors and nurses were far less involved this time than they were last time.  If I had been able to think about it, I would have realized that the benefit of having a midwife over a regular doctor is that they are trained in natural techniques, in helping to minimize the pain.  I would have realized that doctors, with every good intention, have themselves become so dependent on drugs that they have lost the ability to help deal with the mental and physical stress of having a baby.  I would have realized that, even though I hadn't felt most of it, my body had been laboring through the night and I was tired.  I would have remembered that I hadn't eaten dinner the night before, and so I didn't have the strength that I normally do. 

However, I wasn't able to think my way logically through what was happening.  Instead, I was the one actually dealing with the pain.  Every minute or two, another wave of pain would threaten to tear me apart.  I had little time to recover from one before another would hit.  To make matters worse, the nurses would occasionally check me and report that I still had not progressed beyond a 7.  With all of these factors working against me, I surrendered.  I want to say that I broke, that I really couldn't take it anymore.  The truth is, I simply didn't want to.  I found that I no longer cared about things I thought were supposed to be important to me.

And so, I asked for an epidural.