Birth Story Part 2

Friday, 9AM. Morning. One thing about birth is that it exists completely out of time. Anything out of arm's reach was also out of my mind's. It was almost like I was in my own little sack, just like Margot, with everything on the outside muffled and distant. This became more and more the case as the day wore on, and it was a very handy tool, blocking out pretty much anything that got in the way. 

By 10, after confirming I was 4cm dilated, the midwife gave me the go-ahead to get in the tub, which is really what I'd been waiting for this whole time. I am, in general, a fairly dedicated taker of baths so I knew that the birthing tub was right up my alley. We'd rearranged the bedroom to make room for it, bulky and blue, like a kiddie pool for giants. Adam had taken great care to purchase the right attachments in advance so that we could run a hose from the regular tub to this special tub, providing an abundance of dreamy, warm water. 

I was in that tub pretty much straight from 10:05AM to 2:37PM. (Gotta love this kind of detail.) This was the glory period. I loved it so very much. We started listening to the CD that my pre-natal yoga teacher had made for me, a series of chanty kind of songs that really put a person in a baby-having kind of mood. The water was comfortable and warm and eased a lot of the pain for me. I ate watermelon in the tub. Slept a bit. Oh! And the tub had handles on the edges, which were perfect for gripping with all of your might during contractions.

There is a video, actually, of me in the tub. I asked my friend A to record me having a contraction. None of you will ever, ever see this, of course. But I find this little factoid to be descriptive of how excited I remained for big chunks of my labor. The pain was incredibly intense, but intermittent, and I found the whole thing so...I don't know...cool. Also, at noon, the midwife had checked again and I was at 6-7cm. I was just amazed that things seemed to be going so well. At another point, she suggested I try and touch the baby's head, which I could do! I think that at that point, we all thought that pushing was imminent. 

2:37 PM. The note just says, "Out of birth tub". Then at 2:42 it reads: "Hanging by sheet over door." This is maybe the point where a home birth really does look pretty different from a hospital one. Maybe not? I do wonder what comes to mind for people when they read "hanging by sheet over door." It doesn't sound good, does it? Newsflash: It isn't!

Adam helped the midwife rig a sling, more or less, with a brown sheet gathered up like rope and tossed over the bathroom door with a loop on the front. Then they closed the door so the loop could withstand my full body weight. I put my arms through, my back to the door, and during contractions, hung there by my armpits. This is some old school midwife style, designed to help the baby come on down already. My midwife never said this to me explicitly, but the notes confirm Margot was sneakily moving the wrong direction, back up to her original, cozy location. 

I was only in that position for fifteen minutes or so, before we moved to the birthing stool. Did I mention this is a home birth? There are stools. I spent an hour there. I ate three spoonfuls of yogurt. And I told my midwife I felt the baby moving down. The rest is a blur. But then my midwife suggested I try to push a bit. I was elated. I had done it! This whole thing was going to work! There would be a baby soon, born in my house. This is my favorite note from her journal: "Pushed a little. Said it felt 'neat'!" What? Neat? That is crazy. But seriously I was on cloud nine. This was the best thing ever. 

I'm building this up, I know. What happened next is that my midwife checked my cervix, and discovered I was still just 6cm dilated, same as I was at noon, and that Margot was higher up even that when we began the night before. It was a serious let down, to say the least. This was around 4:30PM, and thus began a major shift in my mood, and the mood of the house.

The midwife was having me walk up and down the stairs, which was fairly excruciating. Also, everyone on the team got hungry. What? That was weird. Who eats food? Someone ran to the little coffee shop by our house for sandwiches and salads. I remember wandering around the downstairs while they ate, feeling blue, and fighting a bout with hopelessness -- my first creeping thoughts of, maybe we should just give up and go the hospital already. Adam and I convened briefly on the back porch. It was so strange to go outside, to breathe regular earth air, to imagine the rest of the world still cruising right along. He told me it would be OK to change plans if I wanted, and I felt deeply grateful to him for saying so, but also instantly certain that I wasn't ready to go there. 

That said, my midwife was protecting me from some detailed information about the setback, and I could feel it. Different people have different needs in these kinds of situations. I can get why some women might not want to hear every detail of what might be slowing things down, but that's not me. I needed data. Without it I was a little lost. For me, the "pain of childbirth" fell into two categories: pain with a purpose, and just plain old pain. The former is a hurdle, but a necessary step on the way to something awesome. The latter just hurts, a lot. And I lost my purpose. I couldn't imagine how this would ever end. 

I powered forward sort of in and out of this tough brain space. I did, eventually figure out to tell my midwife I needed to know what I was pushing for. I needed a short term goal. She told me the baby needed to turn, and drop, which was more or less enough information. She gave me a lot of homeopathics to try and get labor going. I toiled. I hung on the door some more. It's crazy to see how much time passed in this phase. At 8:45 PM she checked me again, and I was still at 6cm, but Margot had indeed dropped. I was temporarily re-energized, convinced anew that a baby might actually get born somehow. But by 10PM things were stalled again. We decided to go ahead and rupture the bag of waters to try and get things moving. There was meconium, a sign that Margot was in distress. The midwife reassured me it was light; we were still in the clear. Twenty minutes later, things changed. Just in the middle of a sentence, like it was no big thing, she said, "Yep, we need to go ahead and transfer." To the hospital. A wave a disappointment started to rush over me, but then it just stopped. "Ok," I said, and began working on a major downshift to the next phase. 

Wow. This is long. But it was long! Part 3 coming soon

Comments

[Jenny]

You are killing me with the suspense (even though I know what ultimately happened)!!!