TWENTY-FOUR (COUNT ‘EM, 24) HOURS OF LABOR

“Childbirth is not beautiful,” she writes. “Children are beautiful. Childbirth is disgusting. Anyone who says otherwise has never met a placenta. I’m surprised ob-gyns don’t have post-traumatic stress from seeing a few of those a day.” - Scottoline

What does it mean to go through 24 hours of labor? What does one do through 24 hours of labor? How does one keep sane through 24 hours of labor? Have I mentioned I went through 24 hours of labor? Only to end up with a C-section, oy. 

It is true that the pain and the details can get blurry in one’s pregnancy and post-birth brain. I can’t exactly remember all the pain, but I remember getting pissed. Pissed that they don’t tell you how unpleasant and violating it can sometimes feel to be in labor in a hospital. So I’m telling you now what to watch out for.

1. Several doctors peek into your hoo-ha. The longer you’re in there, the more doctors and nurses you will encounter because they change shifts. These doctors, they do internal exams every few hours. One might poke you in there to break your water, another might go in there to check how far you’re dilated, and yet another might go in there to check that the estimation of dilation of the first doctor was correct. 
2. Internal exams are a bitch. They are a bitch. A bitch. I am aware that the previous two sentences are not exactly grammatically correct, but it just feels right. In the medical shows they say so-and-so cm dilated, but they don’t tell you how they know. I went into labor mistakenly thinking that they measure the cervix through ultrasound. But NOOOOO! They measure it by sticking their fist in there and seeing how many fingers they can poke through your cervix. For me this meant check at 1cm, 3 hours later it’s 1.5, 3 hours later it’s 3, 3 hours later it’s 1.5 again! It took a lot of strength not to smack the doctor upside her head. 
3. When they say they will break your water, watch out. They will come in with a monstrosity of a crochet hook. It really looks like a crochet hook, a really big one. It will be scary, I can allay fears only by saying that it doesn’t really hurt. After all those internal exams a skinny metal wand with a hook at the end is a piece of cake.

If you've never met a crochet hook, here's what it looks like. Photo credit watermarked.

1. If you are in a teaching hospital there may be up to 50 doctors and nurses attending to you by the time the 24 hours are through. Some of them will stand around doing nothing, learning I guess. It’s annoying. It sort of makes you feel like you’re part of some  freak show as they watch someone else stick their fist up your hoo-ha.
2. Boredom. Bring all your gadgets and tricks to entertain yourself.
3. The royal annoyance of hearing activity in other delivery suites. As I lay there for hours on end, I had to listen to squads of nurses and shouting “push!push!push!” in unison as they cheer on the nth woman lucky enough to be at that point. This is followed by rehearsed gushes of cheerful congratulations. I must have heard 5 deliveries by the time they wheeled me to the OR.

OK so those are the annoying and painful things. I don’t want you to think that there is nothing magical about childbirth, after all most other women say it is magical. It can be fun if you have someone around to talk with. I was lucky that my husband can see the humor in the smallest things, so a lot of chuckles were shared as we ribbed nurse after nurse about their silly uniforms. 

So after giving the little guy a more-than-fair shot at squeezing himself out of my womb, my wonderful and unusually-perky OB decided it was time to open up a new door. They had already popped my water bag which made my belly deflate considerably. It was sort of freaky, like my skin was shrink-wrapped around the baby. To be honest I was glad he made the call to do a c-section. I was exhausted beyond the ability to push. It is a total cliche, but it needs to be said, it truly is worth it.

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.