I am too wiggy from the pill to react much to this. I think I must have been wheeled into a delivery room, and I sort of have a wavery memory of Kathy handing over the reigns to the next midwife on duty, Susan Nickel. I think this changing of the guard typically occurred at 6am, and that would fit in our timeline quite well (wake up, water broken 4:40 am. Leaving the house by 5 am, arrive at 5:30, dilation checked etc. and then you’re hitting 6!) So we’ll say at 6am, Susan introduced herself to me.
The fuzziness of the next couple of hours cannot be overstated. The sleeping pill probably helped me relax, all over, and made me go from broken water to baby-in-arms in 2.5 hours. But it made me a fruit loop, and in my lucid moments it caused me not a little anxiety to know that here was the biggest challenge of my life, and I was not possessed of all my faculties, not by half. I had done so much to mentally prepare for my labor experience – but what are you going to do? I soldiered on, as a laboring woman must.
The contractions were one on top of the other. There was no more of this dilly dallying with the walking and the talking and the checking the monitor and the laughing and the cognition. It was all animal, all instinct, and all ouch. The pain is sort of hard to describe – the image I have is of one of those old fashioned washing tubs, full to the brim of water and clothes, and someone sticking a large pegged dowel in the center and twisting it all very tightly. My tummy was the washer, and the contraction was the twist – tighter and tighter and tighter until the blessed release, and then almost immediately tighter again. Patrick tells me that I squeezed his hand very painfully in this time (scoff. SCOFF.) He watched the monitor and contractions were through the roof, though I think my insane mumbling and thrashing were enough to tell him that. I say now that labor wasn’t as painful or difficult as I thought it would be, and it wasn’t, but it also was no walk in the park. It required a great deal of me, and I gave it my all.
Sometime in the 7 o’clock hour, one of the zillion females running in and out of my room asked me how I was doing for pain, and did I need any pain medication. I remember feeling ashamed, and this is so stupid, but I looked at dad with shame in my eyes and whimpered yes. Yes, could I please have help. I reasoned (I was somewhat capable of reason by this point) that I was 5 cm a little before 6am. It was now 7 something am. I probably had 4 or 5 more hours to go, and the pain would probably get worse. I didn’t think I could handle much more pain than I was in, or that many more hours without help. So, I caved. Give me the epidural. I need help.
Some young nurse-type person matter of factly set things in motion. A few moments later, my right wrist was being rubbed with alcohol, at the knob of the outside bone, and some other extremely young nurse-type person was fumbling with an IV. She kept messing with my hand in the middle of contractions, and I really wanted to jerk it away and scream “JESUS! LET ME BE! You have CLEARLY never had a contraction in your goddam young-ass life, have you??? Do you KNOW what this feels like! Do NOT touch me right now, you stupid five year old IDIOT.” But, I’m me, so I submitted to her inexperienced groping without verbal complaint. She got the IV in, and the anesthesiologist was on her way. And then I started having seizures.
I had one seizure, and was like – what the HELL is happening NOW? It was a very similar feeling to throwing up – not the nausea, what I mean is that my core was tightening up completely of its own volition, in a very violent, jerky, and inevitable way. There was no stopping it. It was very strange. It happened again a few seconds later, and then again, and then a lightbulb went off. “Hello?” I called to the first young nurse-type person. “I think I may be pushing here. This is too weird.” My body jerked, jerked again. I was flopping like a fish on the bed, and wondering if we could possibly be at the pushing stage already. It had been like 2 intense hours at this point.
The girl fetched the midwife, who checked my dilation. For the second time that night, I saw a pair of glasses with two astonished eyes blinking at me from between my knees. “You’re 9 and three quarters, dear girl. Almost there. You sure you need that epidural?”
So, here is where I became superwoman in my own mind. I had dilated 8 and three quarters centimeters in a couple of hours, which was a pretty intense experience. I had done that without meds. I had always planned that if I got an epidural I would dial it down during the pushing stage, so as not to slow things up. Ah, what the hell, I thought. I’ve already rocked the last 9 and three quarters, I can do the final bit on my own. “No,” I said, “just go ahead. I can do it.”
Because of a procedure I had done years ago, I had some crackly scarring on my cervix. We weren’t going to get to 10 cm without some, er, digital facilitation, so during my next contraction the midwife dove in up to her elbow and hooked that last little quarter centimeter off your head, where it was hung up. Duuuuuuuuuuuuude. Oooooooooooooooooouch. That hurt VERY dearly. But anyways, here we were at 10 cm and ready to push. The contractions changed a bit in character. They spread out somewhat – got a little longer, a lot more painful (who knew I had that much more on the pain spectrum to go?), and there was a lot more resting time between them. The delivery nurse, whose name was also Susan and who had a lilting, lovely Scottish accent, helped me get into a good position and began to coach me. It’s surprising that such a natural event can benefit so greatly from other people telling you what to do. I found out later that Susan-the-Nurse had actually never had a contraction. She had birthed one baby via C section. Funny, isn’t it?
I remembered from my birthing class that I wasn’t to hold my breath during pushing, because holding my breath would deprive you of oxygen during a time when you most needed it. So when Susan-the-Nurse told me to hold my breath and really push hard, I still tried to breathe through it. Puzzled, she asked what I was doing, and when I answered she said “Well, dear, I’m sorry to tell ye your teacher was wrong, but she was. You can hold your breath, it’s ok. You’ll need to do it, to get this baby out.” So I held my breath on the next one, and it did really help. In between pushing I would relax my arms and legs and lay flat, but when a contraction would come, they made me pull my legs back by my ears. I really didn’t want to do this. This really made the contraction hurt even worse. I understood the reasoning behind it, and I did it, but man did it take every ounce of will I possess to get me to move those legs by my ears when all I wanted to do was curl up into a ball.
I pushed 3 pushes with each contraction – a 10 second count for each. I would let Dad know another one was coming by a look, or squeezing his hand, or a quick nod (who knows if he was getting the message, but it was the most I could muster), and then the nurse and/or midwife would come back and help me hook back my feet and count. I pushed, and everything came out of me – it was the messiest mess of a mess I’ve ever had the joy of sitting in. But the midwife kept me wiped off and clean, and replaced the soiled bed pads every few moments, to ensure that you would slip out into a relatively clean environment. I know that when you were still kind of high up, I did long, sustained pushes, with lots of groaning and grunting. Then, as you got closer, the midwife wanted me to slow down, and had me make short little grunting sounds. I have to say that my acting training helped me here – I was willing to make whatever fool noise she asked me to make, do whatever embarrassing yoga leg bend move they recommended, whatever made this damn process go faster. After, I don’t know, say half a dozen pushes, she asked me if I wanted to hold you right away or get you cleaned first. I started to cry – it was so close! So close! I said right away, please, I want him right away, and then came another contraction and that was it for talking. “It’s going to start to burn now, dear,” said Susan-the-Midwife, and just then I screamed “Ahh, it’s burning, it’s burning!” I knew that she’d just told me it was going to burn, but I could no more stop myself from saying those words than I could stop myself from pushing you, too fast, too fast. Susan-the-Midwife tried to slow me down but there was no slowing you. Out came your head, at which point Dad stopped looking. Out came your shoulders, those brutal shoulders that tore my skin. I felt the tearing, something like the way a pumpkin feels when you tear the goopy seeds out, and remember thinking – I really thought THAT would hurt more. It was delightfully non-painful, and anyway it was done, and you were out.
You were out.