I sat in a wooden rocking chair watching the snow storm out the window, breathing through mild contractions. A nurse came in to start an IV.
“I’m not going to need that,” I said.
“Well, you might,” she said, claiming it made more sense to do it sooner rather than later.
Again, I refused. “It’s all in my birth plan,” I said.
Left alone again with Guy, I suddenly got hit with a wave of nausea. That’s when my mother arrived to watch my peculiar obstacle course from the chair to the bathroom, where I threw up, back to the chair, to the bed, to the toilet again, back to the bed, to the bathroom floor. I attempted listening to music, which only annoyed me, then visualization, but my body twitched in rebellion.
When the nurse checked my progress, I begged, “How long will I be at one centimeter?”
Frustrated by sprinting in place, I began caving to weakness. When Guy left the room for a moment, I completely lost my last drop of cool, as if my strength had walked out the door.
“I can’t take this anymore,” I yelped.
My mother, an RN, breathed a sigh of relief as if to say, thank God, and asked if I was sure. Of course, I wasn’t sure, but rather than huffing and puffing through several more hours of the same agony without progress, I felt the need to change the situation. My doctor came in at that moment to witness my uncertainty, knowing what an issue this was for me. Guy soon returned, startled to find me crumbling.
“You can do this,” he said, and asked if I could be examined again, even though the nurse had just done it less than an hour before. The doctor checked me this time and found that I had suddenly dilated to five centimeters. I almost didn’t believe it. At that point, I knew I could hang in there. Guy rubbed my back, my mother let me squeeze the life out of her hand during contractions and the nurse saved me with a quick demonstration of Lamaze breathing, which hustled me through the next several hours.
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