On the day before Ellie's due date, I woke from a restless sleep and realized the reason I couldn't sleep very well was because I was having some intense cramps. I'd been having 'practice labor' (aka false labor for the less positive, and believe me, it was frustrating) for about four days prior. Given what happened with my first pregnancy, my doctor really wanted to get the baby delivered; she'd told me at my last appointment that we'd induce on Thursday if the baby hadn't come on its own before then. (We didn't know the gender at the time, although my husband and I were pretty sure she was a girl and everyone else - except my dad - thought she would be a boy.)
So when my cramps woke me up, somewhere between 6:30 and 7 in the morning, at first I thought it was more practice labor. It didn't take long for me to figure out that these seemed more serious than the ones I'd been having the last few days. I was trying to clean up the kitchen (nesting can be such a bitch, although at the same time, it's a really interesting phenomenon) and kept having to stop every few minutes to breathe through another surge.
I should note, here, that I'd been practicing hypnobirthing techniques again. I'd used hypnobirthing and sounding to get through my labor with Abigail without any meds (except those they used to induce her), and the meditation and breathing exercises associated with the practice had been calming to me during my stressful pregnancy (otherwise known as nine months of please-don't-die-please-don't-die-please-don't-die). I could tell when I was doing the breathing exercises that the sprog, as we fondly called Ellie while she was in the womb, really enjoyed them. She'd move around a lot and kick, and I just somehow had the feeling they were happy kicks.
Anyway - I digress. So due to my practice of hypnobirthing, I really didn't think of the surges as painful, they just felt like intense pressure. I was, however, surprised by just how intense they were. I was sort of vaguely timing them as I got the kitchen into decent shape. Finally at 7:30 - my husband does not particularly enjoy being woken up, but I figured this was a special occasion - I woke up my BB and told him what was going on. He got up (if not cheerfully, at least without complaint) and hung out with me, timing my contractions. Around 8:30 or 9 a.m., I told him to call the doula. I still wasn't in what I considered to be pain, but it was getting more intense and I wasn't sure how quickly things would progress. After all, my mom's labor with me lasted exactly one hour, and I admit I hoped for a fast labor.
Our doula, Candace - who is awesome and I cannot possibly say strongly enough how very emphatically I recommend a doula for every and any birth situation - came over and hung out with us. She had essential oils and other similar good things, and an incredibly calming presence. Needless to say, after Abigail's stillbirth, our anxiety levels were fairly high, although my husband and I were both doing a pretty credible job of focusing on the positive and staying calm. Candace helped a lot. I was playing a Bob Dylan mix I'd made - titled 'Just like Bob Dylan's blues' - that I had on repeat and in the early afternoon, BB made me the perfect cowboy egg, which is an egg fried in a hole cut in the middle of a piece of bread. Finally, around 3 o'clock, after the surges had been steadily getting more intense and I was having a hard time finding comfortable positions to labor in anymore, we left for the hospital.
I think it was snowing, but not enough to make driving dangerous, for which I was thankful. I'd been a bit nervous about the car ride to the hospital, simply because I wouldn't be able to move around like I could at home, but since I couldn't get very comfortable even when I was moving around, it seemed like a moot point. Happily, the ride wasn't as bad as I'd feared. I either had nine or 13 contractions en route to the hospital - I think I had nine in the car and four on the walk from the car into the hospital and up to the birth center.
Into the triage room we went - my doula had to wait in the hall, which seemed kind of lame, but I guess hospital regulations required it. The first nurse that came in was one that had been there during my labor with Abigail, and we were so happy to see her. She'd been wonderful then and she was wonderful now; she remembered us and even mentioned Abigail by name, which meant a lot to me, as you can imagine. She had me lie down for a cervix check and immediately commented, "Whoa, where's your cervix, girl?" It's funny how much of labor is a blurred memory, but I remember that sentence vividly. She thought I might be dilated to 9 already but put me down as an 8.
So we toddled on down to the delivery room. I was so far dilated that the pediatric nurses were in there getting the little bed warmed up, ready for the baby to just come on out. There followed by far the most challenging part of the labor - the part where the sprog did not want to come out. I labored for a while and they asked to break my water; I didn't want them to, I just wanted it to all happen naturally. After 20 or 30 minutes (I think) they talked me into it, and then I began to push.
I pushed for an hour and a motherfucking half. Holy god. Now that part was painful. The on-call pediatrician was not my doctor, nor even one of the four other women in my doctor's practice; he was the one outside doctor that they contracted with to cover their on-call rotation, and he was not oriented towards natural childbirth like all the other doctors were. Oh, and did I mention that the Superbowl was on? Yeah, well, it was. Saints-Colts. I'm almost positive he was going back to some waiting room and watching the game in between coming in to check on me (read: harrass me to get the baby out more quickly).
Long story short (ha!), somehow I ended up trying to give birth to this baby on my back, which intellectually I knew was the way to create the least amount of leeway for my pelvic bones, but I really did not have the energy to argue. I felt like I was trying to give birth to something with the diameter of a dinner plate. I managed to get her almost crowning - apparently they could see her hair - but then they lost her heartbeat. At that point the doctor basically said he wasn't fucking around anymore - he'd been tolerant of my natural birth ideals up to a point - in fact, I'm pretty sure I'd pushed his ideas about what birth should be like about as far as they could possibly go. But when it got to the point where he thought my heartbeat was hers, and found out it was mine and they couldn't find the baby's heartbeat, we pretty much all got on the same page right quick: get the baby out NOW.
I suspect I'm pretty lucky I didn't end up with a C-section, or maybe she was so far down the birth canal they couldn't have really done one at that point. Faster than you can say 'episiotomy', he'd sliced me and gotten the foreceps out. I pushed again, and out came the head. Another push and the baby was all the way out.
I don't know if everyone was talking or why I couldn't hear anything from the baby, really: like I said, one's memory gets fuzzy in labor. I know that as soon as she was out, my husband said, "It's a girl," with eminent relief and a small note of triumph in his voice (we were right!). I looked down and saw this tiny thing covered in white, but I couldn't tell if it was simply due to the vernix or because she, too, had been stillborn. I said, "Is she alive?" and my doula closed her eyes and smiled and said, "Yes," with both joy and pain in her voice. "Thank god," I said, and laid back. When I looked back over, the baby was over with the pediatric nurses and my husband, being swaddled and weighed and all that good stuff.
It turned out that she'd been sunny-side up, so instead of pushing out the narrowest part of her head, in such a way that the bones of the skull conveniently collapse to make things easier on the mama, I had to push out the widest part of her head. The umbilical cord was wrapped once around her neck and once around her shoulder, too.
I'd said in my birthing preferences sheet that we wanted to spend our first hour with her before she went to the nursery. Well, it took the doctor somewhere between 45 minutes to an hour to stitch me back up - an experience nearly as painful as the delivery, might I add - but it was a total blessing in disguise because we got to spend another hour after that with her. As soon as they'd weighed her and measured her and swaddled her, they gave her to my husband; he carried her over and put her in my arms, and we just watched her as if we'd never seen anything so amazing before in our lives (we hadn't).
She was so awake and alert, it was incredible to watch her taking in everything. She nursed some and I'm quite sure I cried, although I don't really remember it. We decided almost immediately that her name was Eleanor - we'd had a short list of favorite names, but wanted to wait until we really met her before we chose one. It took a lot longer to decide on her middle name, about four days, I think, but we finally managed to choose between the two top contenders.
Anyway. If Labor Day is a tribute to determination and belief in one's principles and hard work, then this seems like a fitting topic to me. I think it's safe to say that Ellie's labor was the hardest work and greatest achievement of my life.
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| Taken today, en route to an arts festival |
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