It didn’t really take me a fortnight to read those 89 updates. I was just really busy taking care of the one thing in my life that requires constant attention: my dissertation. ONLY joking. I’ve been doing Julian stuff. Dissertation’s on the back burner. I’m sort of regretting my internet-absence though. The blog hiatus meant missing the opportunity to do two things: deliver the line ‘May the 4th Be With You’ in a timely manner, and make derisive comments at the expense of the UK’s botched parliamentary/electoral system. I’m probably slightly more cut up over missing International Star Wars Day than covering the UK’s election though. The latter has always been a total joke. Maybe the Queen should stop munching crumpets and start running the country. Haaaaaaaa. But seriously. Clegg and Cameron? The DemoLiberal-ConservaTories? Double act of the century. Roll up, Roll up, pay extortionate income taxes so the UK can foot an EU bailout-tab for Greece and other attractions.
Anyway.
Andy took over the updates on the sprocket for a couple days there, not because I was catatonic with newborn-induced tiredness, but because I was tangled in a mass of tubes in the hospital for a while there. And because I was catatonic with newborn-induced tiredness. It wasn’t a priority to relay my labour experience to anyone when I had three inches of IV catheter dangling out of each wrist. The catheters meant that if I bent my wrists back, blood would gush up out of the IV canula. That would have been fairly hardcore though, bloodying a keyboard up for the sake of a blog post. Any by ‘hardcore’ I mean ‘plain stupid’. Moving on.
I’ve had a couple people calculating from Andy’s blog posts just how long I was in labour for and most of them have been bang on: I was in labour for approximately a decade. The midwives that delivered Julian told me that they don’t usually count the onset of labour from the get-go, rather, they start counting how long you’re in labour for from when you’re dilated to about 3cm. That’s nurse-speak for “YOU KNOW THAT LAST 14 HOURS YOU SPENT IN EXCRUCIATING PAIN? YOU DON’T GET TO COUNT THAT AS LABOUR”. Even if I only counted from when I hit the 3cm mark, I was in labour for a proper long time.
The Thursday before Julian was born I’d had some serious niggles. We drove over to Liverpool to pick Biery and Abbey up from their trip and I spent most of the journey experiencing freakishly strong ‘practice’ contractions. That night, we went to see Iron Man 2 (Boo Hiss) and I spent the film clutching a packet of Butterkist Popcorn with varying intensities, depending on when the contractions struck. I was up half of Thursday night feeling uncomfortable and angry that I couldn’t find any position to sleep in. Friday wasn’t much better. I was tired (but unable to sleep) and grumpy (from being tired and unable to sleep). We went out with Abbey and Biery in the name of distraction. I have no idea what we did on the Friday night though because that’s when things started to get weird.
You can probably tell this post is headed into the realm of labour and delivery. If you’re uncomfortable with that, you can just stop here and look at this Yoda Cloud picture.
Otherwise, carry on. Make your own adventure. Labour and Delivery were pretty straight forward for me. Some of the details aren’t really blog material, but I’m down to answer questions if anyone cares to ask them. Also, having a baby has been the biggest single event in my life, so if this post turns into a series, cut me a break.
By my dates, I was 42 weeks pregnant when labour started. Good job too; I was getting desperate enough to take the internet’s advice on induction. Not really. But, that is one good thing about being 42 weeks pregnant: you are so sick of being pregnant that you actually look forward to busting a baby out. Thank you, Evolution.
By 1am Saturday morning, the contractions I’d had sporadically on Thursday/Friday got uglier and regular. I felt like I might be in early labour but I was hesitant to whip out the champagne at that point because a) I don’t drink and b) I didn’t want to jinx myself and turn out to be in false labour. By the way. ‘False Labour’ is another one of those stupid pregnancy misnomers, like ‘Morning’ Sickness. There’s nothing false about the contractions that happen in false labour. Anyway. 1am Saturday morning. The contractions were maybe 40 seconds long every ten minutes or so and hurt like the dickens. By 4am, when I couldn’t handle writhing around in bed anymore, I took a shower, ate a Saturday-Morning-Cartoon-Watching size bowl of Coco Pops, played World of Goo, and wandered around the house in a bathrobe. Probably the sexiest mental picture I could paint of myself (I know, I had you at the word ‘Bathrobe’). I eventually woke Andy to tell him that I thought I was in labour. He drove Abbey and Biery down to the train station (so they could return to the states) and then returned to time the contractions for a bit. By the time he returned, the contractions were lasting a minute, and coming every seven. On the clock.
Contractions are weird. They hurt, and while you’re having them you feel a bit loony, but in between, you’re fairly sane. Well, you are at first. Saturday Morning I was grimacing and squirming through contractions and feeling totally normal in between but by the afternoon (12 hours in) the contractions got more intense and closer together and so by that point I was alternating between catatonia and making muffled squawks into a pillow and trying not to flail around like a fish out of water. The game-plan was to labour at home right up until the last minute when Andy would get his Formula 1 on and race me to the hospital. We hit a couple glitches with that plan though and ended up going to hospital a little earlier, as it ironically turned out to be the less stressful place to labour. The drive to the hospital was a bit surreal. I was still semi-convinced I was just in some magnificent display of false labour and that I’d be sent home again, but at the same time, I definitely entertained the idea that the finish line was somewhere in sight. I don’t remember much about the drive, other than biting down on the seatbelt now and again to get a grip on the pain, vaguely wondering if doing so made me look like a total nutjob.
It took a bit to get into a room and be seen by a midwife, but when I did, I was pronounced hospitalisable since I was dilated to 3-4cm. If you’re uncomfortable with the word ‘dilated’ and its application to something other than pupils (or Peoples, if you like early 2000’s ‘rap’) you should probably stop reading now. Maybe go back to that Yoda Cloud picture and call it a day. Long story short, the midwifes did me a favour and let me labour alone in a room for a while. The contractions were a lot harder to get through by that point. They were lasting a minute and a half and coming every five minutes. I remember a contraction finishing, looking at the clock and feeling intense anxiety, anticipating the next round of pain. The fact they were so punctual almost made it worse since I could literally count the seconds until I’d be incapable of saying anything other than ‘Yiiiiiiiiiiiiikes’ or ‘Buuhhhhh’. By that point, I looked like this:
That’s me. Having a contraction/praying to the god of pain to remind him that I’m a featherweight.
Midwife (Bev) said something like ‘You must have a high pain threshold’ at this point, because I’d been in labour for 16 hours without so much as a paracetamol. I think I responded with ‘No, I am weak sauce’ and returned to inwardly crying. The pain, combined with only having had four hours of sleep in the previous sixty hours or so, started taking it’s toll around then, so I got hooked up with some gas. I think it’s nitrous oxide they were pushing. I’ll be honest, it didn’t even seem to take the edge off the pain, but I enjoyed chewing down hard on the mouthpiece when contractions hit, and the amplified sound of my breathing kind of helped me regulate it. I was wondering if the gas was just a placebo and was just a bunch of regular air, but then Andy held a couple lungfuls of it, and promptly started giggling like an idiot. At first I thought he was laughing at me (I probably looked crazy during contractions), then I realised his pupils were super dilated. I was kind of jealous that the gas wasn’t having that effect on me. I could have done with a laugh at that point.
I got into a giant bath about then. Giant Bath:
It was actually kind of annoying to be honest. At first, the weightlessness helped ease the backache that accompanies contractions, but to avoid scalding a newborn (in case you deliver in the water) you can’t have the water any warmer than ‘tepid’, so I got cold rather fast and ended up shivering in between contractions and that just plain sucked. I think that by then it was twilight outside, so… around 7pm. Andy and I were both optimistic the baby wasn’t too far off arriving – Midwife Bev kept telling me that if I wanted to push, to do so, and the contractions were coming so close together, we were sure things were progressing. Then the midwife shift changed, and a new Midwife and a student trainee took over my case, declared I was still only dilated to a 7, and told me not to push. Confusing, depressing, and basically like hitting the mother of all snakes during a game of Snakes and Ladders. I couldn’t believe I’d been having such intense contractions for so long with no progress. The pain level maintained itself for another few hours and by early Sunday morning, the fleeting desire for an epidural had solidified and I asked for one.
I’m a poor writer so two weeks on from the experience I’m having a hard time conveying how intense the pain was without sounding cliche and somehow this entire post sounds relatively sedate when the experience was anything but. I was tired from lack of sleep, and the pain was unbelieveable. I know I would have coped with the pain better, had I gotten some sleep during the two nights preceding labour, but even so, the pain would have been overwhelming. I was getting mentally exhausted too by then; I’d already been in labour for Julian longer than Andy’s mum had been in labour for all three of her children combined. I’d also spent hours having back to back contractions with very little progress in terms of dilation and I was starting to feel like I was doing the worst job of having a baby known to mankind. When I realised I was still only dilated to a 7, and it could actually be a lot more hours before he arrived, I knew I’d be too tired to push effectively, hence the desire for an epidural.
In retrospect, I’m surprised I made it through 24 hours of labour before I caved. The sole reason I made it that far basically came down to Andy’s involvement. Obviously it was a tiring experience for me but it was no picnic for Andy either because he was so involved. He was always busy doing something for me. Reminding me not to hyperventilate, applying counter-pressure (which is crazy hard work, especially when you have a busted up wrist like Andy does), talking enough to encourage me but not enough to exacerbate my frustrated, already overstimulated self, getting me drinks if I fancied it, anticipating anything else I might need. Being in labour added a new facet to how Andy and I interact, I think. Up until that point, I don’t think I’ve felt so unsure of myself that I had to look to Andy to get me through something and I don’t think he’s ever been relied on by me that heavily before either. When labour got really hard, I remember thinking that Andy would get me through it, which is kind of a weird thought but it got me through another hour of contractions at least.
Anyway. By the early hours of Sunday morning, I was so tired and sad, I asked for an epidural. The reason why I’d been avoiding an epidural is because they’re a big deal. They have to be well timed and well dosed in order to do what they need to do without causing a cascade reaction, wherein you end up tied on a table with your feet in stirrups while a doctor gets a collection of freakish tools, hacks away at places that don’t need hacking away at, and yanking out a baby. It happens. The thing was, I’d been in labour for almost 24 hours, was utterly shattered, and I’d been dilated to a 7 for hours with no progress. The contractions weren’t letting me have any time to get myself together in between, and I was starting to feel really disconnected from myself which sounds ridiculous but I’m not sure how else to describe it. Maybe it was a result of the pain. I’d felt like my pelvis had been tightly clamped between the jaws of some kind of prehistoric predator for ages, but around this time, the pain was so intense, I would have believed someone if they’d told me I’d just shattered my pelvis into a trillion shards of bone and they were making a bid for escape out of my skin. I had this weird experience where I felt like I wasn’t connected to my body anymore, and that I was dreaming, only the pain was there to remind me that was not the case.
I was praying like a madman that the doctor administrating the epidural knew what he was doing (as a sidenote, the doctor who administered the epidural was Nigerian and seemed super excited when Andy mentioned he’d lived in West Africa for 2 years. I highly doubt he’d met anyone in Wigan who’d spent any time in West Africa so Andy was kind of novel conversation since he’d lived with some Nigerians and knew a thing or two). I basically wanted enough to numb the contraction pains so I could take a nap. Which sounds insane, but wouldn’t you want a nap if you’d gotten less than five hours of sleep over the last three days? The epidural was a really scary experience for me. They had me sit on the edge of a bed and promise not to move while they whipped out a fairly long needle and inserted a catheter in my spine. I was hooked up to an IV and next thing I knew, the pain had dulled, and I was napping. I woke up around 3:30am (they have the hugest clocks in delivery rooms) because the contractions were back with a vengeance. I couldn’t feel my feet but I could feel everything else. The epidural had totally done it’s job, and miracle of miracles, I was dilated to a 10. I had a bit of a Dorothy moment, because when I woke up from my epidural induced nap, there were three midwives, a student, and Andy standing around the bed. I felt so bad for Andy who had not had an epidural-induced nap. Long story short, the contractions were hitting hard, and I was given the all clear to push. In case any other maternomorphs are reading this, I spend most of labour moving around the room, kneeling over stuff, that kind of thing, but I delivered sitting at that prime 45 degree angle. The pushing part was surreal. The contractions were highly painful, but I felt a lot calmer about handling them. Pushing was tiring, but not nearly as frustrating as just dealing with contractions and feeling like you weren’t getting anywhere. Here’s a visual, check out my chi:
After an hour of pushing, two doctors suddenly arrived in the room throwing terms like ‘forceps’, ‘vacuum’, and ‘episiotomy’. Apparently, if you’ve been pushing for an hour, it’s protocol for them to do an episiotomy and yank the baby out. My birthplan had two main points: I did not want to deliver lying down, and I did not want an episiotomy. I felt super frantic and angry that even though the baby was under no stress, I was being told that they were going to have at me with a pair of scissors and what Carrie appropriately called ’salad tongs’. The minute I saw them preparing a tray with a suction vacuum and sharp implements I kind of went into overdrive and started pushing like a demon. Maybe the doctors just pulled that on me so I’d hurry up and get the baby out so they could go on their coffee break, but it worked. I experienced a world of pain, then a midwife yelling ‘PANT, DON’T PUSH!’ and then someone saying “he’s blonde!” and Andy updating me on how far out Julian was, some nurse offering me a mirror (I didn’t really fancy seeing that though) and then suddenly the pain receding, and a heavy little mass being deposited on my chest and Andy saying “he’s here!”
I hadn’t really given much thought to the actual moment Julian would arrive until it happened. I didn’t have any expectations of how I’d feel, or what it would be like because I’d been wrapped up in trying to get through labour. When I first saw Julian, he opened his eyes and I just felt overwhelmed. I couldn’t understand how two cells had turned into this breathing, crying, baby and that he was physically a composite of Andy and I with life breathed into him somehow. I couldn’t connect the kicks and weight I felt and carried for months with the baby in front of me, even though he was literally staring me in the face. I didn’t so much feel a rush of the warm fuzzies as much as relief that he was whole, and he was mine and that we’d made it. You hear a lot of women talk about the intense rush of love they experience for their newborn as soon as it arrives, and I felt a little strange that I didn’t experience that. I later realised that I’d loved Julian long before he was born, so naturally relief was the dominant emotion when I finally held him.
I ended up staying in hospital for a few days because I had some post-partum complications. It really sucked because Andy couldn’t stay with me on the ward, and so I ended up waffling through the first few days of parenthood semi-solo. I was also on a ward with a woman who kept singing the line ‘It’s All About the Benjamins’. Kept singing it. And she was flat. Worst. Nights. Sleep.
I was pretty thrilled when I was discharged and we could finally go home.
