I tilted to the side, my heaving, ten-ton belly leading the way, and listened to my prenatal yoga instructor read other people’s birth stories.
The birth stories were filled with courageous tales about natural childbirth. C-sections, pitocin, and epidurals were the common enemy, and these ladies were waging war against them. Armed with doulas, midwives, candles, and soothing music, they fortified their minds and bodies against the need for intervention of any kind.
My stomach weighed thirty pounds, and I knew that in order for the baby in my belly to exit my otherwise small body, I would need drugs as early and often as possible. I tried to remain nonjudgmental, but the condescension and know-it-all-ness of natural childbirth advocates was just too much.
Everybody says you’ll know exactly when labor begins, but the first twinges of cramps were ambiguous. I got in the bathtub. I took my ninety-pound dog for a walk. I called my husband at work and notified him that I may or may not be in labor.
Then it kicked into full gear. The contractions started coming fast and furious, and I decided to take a shower in preparation for a journey to the hospital. With each contraction, I crouched on the floor of the shower, on all fours, and wailed. My prenatal yoga instructor had informed us that movies and television shows depicting women screaming in pain were terrible. While it is painful, she said, it is beautiful, and controlled noises like “ooohhhhmmmm” were much more effective than screaming. Well, I screamed. Dramatic, painful screaming.
By the time my husband and I arrived at the hospital, it was ten o’clock on a Friday night. My nurse called my doctor, and though I was only about two centimeters dilated, I was told to get an epidural and go to sleep. We’d start in the morning.
Well, I wasn’t quite ready to be dismissed. I requested to be unhooked from the monitor so that I could walk the hospital hallway and try to reach four centimeters before I succumbed. By 1:00 a.m. my pain threshold had been crossed, and I requested the epidural. At 2:00 a.m. the anesthesiologist crankily submitted answers to a few of my paranoid questions: Would I be paralyzed by the epidural? Would I die? Would it be painful as the catheter wove through my spine?
The epidural felt very lopsided, and I became quite anxious. I could not feel anything on the left side of my body, from my hips down. The right side, however, felt as though the epidural hadn’t even taken hold. I asked to roll onto my right side so that the drugs could perhaps drain from the left side to the right side. I started to curse the anesthesiologist, and became convinced he had done a poor job because of my irritating questions.
The monitor showed that my contractions had completely stopped. So instead of relaxing and sleeping, I became even more anxious. I had been in labor for almost ten hours, and the nurse said we’d have to start pitocin in the morning. I thought about starting all over again and thought I was going to die. Meanwhile, my left leg was so numb that I thought I was going to lose it—my mind and my leg.
At five o’clock in the morning, after not sleeping a wink, the nurse discovered that the way I was balanced on my side made the monitor not able to pick up my contractions. I was still in active labor, and was more than five centimeters dilated. That was good news!
By 8:00 a.m., I was eight centimeters dilated, and by 9:30 a.m., I was ten centimeters dilated and ready to push. By then, it felt as though I had “hot spots” in my stomach where the epidural wasn’t working. The pain was so intense that I was having trouble breathing, and the nurse had me use an oxygen mask.
