A Medicalized Birth

Now I am all in support of home births for those women who have the courage and emotional balance to do it. I am not one of those women. There was never a question in my mind that I wanted a magical birth free of pain. I had already gone through so much physical pain during the saga of our (equally medicalized) conception, was not in the mood for more. I would not necessarily advocate pain medication during birth, it is really and truly a personal choice based on a woman’s threshold for pain. Some superwomen can smile through the sensation of having a jaws-of-life clamp squeezing their belly and pushing a baby through their 10-cm diameter birth canal. I am not one of those women.

So I asked for all of it. Before the drip by kind OB told me that he was feeling generous today, he would let me eat whatever I wanted. By this time I was starving, I must have not eaten for more than 12 hours. What was near Medical City that was still open late at night? McDonalds ick. So I went full monty and sent my dutiful husband out for a quarter pounder, a large coke zero, and a large fries. He took a picture of me to commemorate the moment, some of our final moments as DINKS (dual income no kids).

Photo from McDonald's

Except for a few choice friends, nobody will ever be shown that picture. I looked horrid, all swollen in the face, but happy. Until I saw that picture I imagined myself as I was pre-pregnancy, with a full face of make up and looking ready to conquer the world with eager eyes. Instead I found that I looked fat and tired, pale with bags under my eyes, acne across my face, and hair all unwashed and askew. 

I digress, this is supposed to be about the medication. Through 24 hours of labor I must have had, on top of the initial epidural drip, 4 “refills.” Those things don’t last very long, after a few hours you start feeling the pain again. Epidurals are magic, it made my painful contractions feel like Braxton Hicks contractions where I can feel only a pleasant squeezing. For the epidural virgins out there, the procedure can be intimidating. First, it’ll take an army of doctors and nurses to administer it, including a big burly man whose job it is to hold you down in a fetal position while someone else administers a spinal tap. There’s a small needle pinch to numb you in the site where the big needle goes. Then the big needle goes, into your spine, you can feel the doctor poking around in there looking for the sweet spot. After you’ve been tapped, they run a thin plastic line across your back and tape it to your shoulder, Through this line they feed the magic contraction-numb-ers. 

Photo from: http://solutions.3m.com.sg/
This is what an epidural looks like

On top of the epidurals, I also had the rest of the stuff they give women for a C-section. Was numbed completely from the waist down. That was very very strange and scary, good thing I was already so tired and almost in shock from the cold of the OR that I couldn’t completely process it in my brain. 

So all in all it was an extremely medicalized birth, with all manner of pain killers. What would this mean for my breastfeeding prospects? The question I never did get to ask myself. I only realized what it meant a week after Baby J was born.