Barak is sleeping much better these days, but he's still waking up a few times a night for a little comfort and reassurance. Last night, or really this morning, he woke up at about 3 am for same. So I got up, gave him a hug, and he went right back to sleep with no trouble.
I, however, didn't. I got a snack, checked my email, got back into bed, and was wide awake. Because of the snack, baby #2 was wide awake too, and started letting me know with some gymnastics. I lay there enjoying that, and then something occurred to me.
Sooner or later, this baby is going to have to come out.
When I had Barak, I went into labor with zero fear. I knew it was going to hurt, but I have a pretty high threshold for pain and I thought I could handle it. I didn't want an epidural. I had a doula. I thought it was going to be fine. Most of my friends have managed unmedicated births, and I thought it reasonable to believe that I would do the same. So when I walked into the hospital, after two slow days of labor and about six hours after my water had broken, I really wasn't afraid. I thought it was going to be fine.
It wasn't fine. In the end, I had the most important thing, which was a healthy baby to take home. That, of course, is absolutely the number one thing I wanted and I have not lost sight of that for a second. I also got the second most important thing, which was that I avoided a C-section (by about five minutes, as my OB told me later).
But just about everything else went wrong, in ways that I never thought could happen in modern hospitals in developed countries. I don't need to go into gory details, but the short version is that it hurt. A lot. Even long, long after I had given up all thoughts of an unmedicated birth, and wanted nothing more than for it to stop hurting, I didn't care how. My main recollection of the whole experience is gripping the plastic bedrails with both hands and staring at my knuckles and hearing from somewhere far away a mantra of "make it stop make it stop please please make it stop," that sounded sort of like it was my voice, but not really, because my voice doesn't sound like that. I remember at one point, ten or twelve hours after the pitocin and after the third or the fourth or maybe it was the fifth epidural had failed, on the third or the fourth day, telling the nurse that someone had to make it stop now, no, not in five minutes but NOW, and her telling me that someone would be there in ten minutes, and my saying, no, ten minutes is not okay, you don't understand how much this hurts, if you understood you would never say to me to wait ten minutes, you would not page anyone, you would go down the hall and find them, right now. And I remember MHH saying under his breath that his wife doesn't usually talk to people like that, and I remember watching the second hand on the clock go around and around, and counting the seconds, ten, twenty, twenty-five, and in the end it wasn't ten minutes but more than an hour and a half before another epidural was in and functioning. I remember pushing, for more than two hours, and I remember the OB telling me that if I didn't push harder I was going to need an emergency C, right now, so push now, as hard as you can, and I remember so many people in the room around Barak on the warming table, and someone telling me it was a boy and my saying, why isn't he crying? I remember the room being dark, though of course it couldn't have been. In my mind, it was dark.
In the end, he was okay, although at first he wasn't breathing and they whisked him off to the NICU without anyone telling me what was wrong or whether he would be okay. I was left in the delivery room for hours, and then when I finally got a room nobody knew what was happening with Barak, and no one would let me see him for hours and hours, and I didn't know where my baby was or if he was okay and nobody would let me see him. When we finally got home, walking hurt for weeks, and we won't even talk about going to the bathroom. I had nightmares for months, and sometimes I still do.
It was awful.
So, here I am, and I'm in my seventh month and it's starting to dawn on me that somehow or other, this baby has to come out too. I told my midwife, very early on, that I'd had a bad experience I was eager not to repeat. She had me send my labor records from hospital #1 (for the record, one of the top L & D hospitals in the country, I've been told) and read them for the first time when I was there. Her expression went from professional to sympathetic to horrified, and at the end she was just saying, "Oh, my Gd," over and over. I tried to fill in what wasn't in the labor records, and pretty soon was crying too hard to talk. I can't do that again, I told her. I can't.
I mean, practically, I know that I could if I had to, because I did it once. But my very strong preference is not to. I don't feel like I was unprepared the first time. I have a pretty good idea of what went wrong--mainly tremendous failures of communication, and I know that I have done as much as I can about that. I know that my midwife understands what happened the first time, and she has given me a list of reasons why it won't happen again (first among them, she won't let it; second, there are no clueless anaesthesiology residents at this hospital, because they don't train anaesthesiology residents there). She also told me what everyone else has told me, which is that you never have to have your first baby twice. There are no promises, of course, but she thinks that this time will be very different.
This time will be different. This time will be different. It will be different, and so much better.
It will, right?
2 comments:
One would hope. I would have gone for a midwife the first time, but my insurance made it difficult and I had heard good things about this hospital (to be fair, I've never heard of anything similar happening there, and was told that "heads rolled" afterwards, whatever that means).
The main lesson I learned from this is that in a hospital, nobody believes you when you say you are in unbearable pain unless you a) scream and b) use four-letter words. If you calmly and quietly tell them you hurt more than you ever thought possible, all they register is that you're being calm and quiet and therefore it couldn't possibly be that bad.
Unfortunately that bit about the yelling and cussing is true mroe generally -- enough so that my EMT instructor had to make a big deal out of teaching us not to rely on the fuss someone was making as an indicator of whether they were, indeed, the most seriously injured. And still I find it takes most medics/EMTs/nurses etc conscious effort to turn away from the guy who's yelling about the bloody but superficial cut on his arm, say, to the quiet person who is going into shock and is the really critical patient.
I'd planned on a birth at the birthing center with my midwife, but ended up having to go to the hospital and getting a c-section after all. My midwife came with me. Of course she couldn't go into the OR, but she waited anxiously outside and made sure both the baby and I were OK and looked after once we came out. They had, for instance, neglected to put a cap on the baby, so she fixed that, and checked me out as thoroughly as they'd let her, too. She was also there beforehand to help with the breathing and so forth, to my husband's great relief, as he completely forgot all those hours of prenatal classes, and having her agree that the caesarean was necessary was a great comfort to both of us.
And, by the way, it really was necessary. Without it, at most either Robbie or I would be here now, and more likely neither.
So I do highly recommend the combination of midwife + hospital. And you really won't be having your first baby again, things should go much easier, and yes -- it will be different.
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