This. Is. Your. Birth. Story.
We all have one.
The tale of how our babies were brought into this world.
Maybe your water broke. Maybe it didn't. Maybe you were induced. Maybe you weren't. Maybe you were early. Maybe you were late. Maybe you're one of those incredibly patient moms who were able to push on past 40 weeks to allow their bodies and babies to decide when, where and how their birth would take place.
Was it a hospital birth? Was it a home birth? Was your baby born in the car or on the side of the road?
I LOVE birth stories. They just intrigue me. Every woman's experience unique and fitting, just like the babies that are born and then cradled into the loving embrace once they emerge from their mothers bodies. It is one of the most monumental moments in a woman's life if they so choose to bear children. These are the sweet moments in our life we will never forget. The ones we will cherish and reflect upon for years to come.
But what if you didn't like your birth story? What if things didn't go according to "plan"? What if we had this image in our minds of exactly how our stories would go down and then in a moment, all of that changed and our paths shifted.
What if even your end result...a happy, healthy, screaming, pink baby...still found a way to bring you down?
Traveling back into the depths of my mind I take you to 2013. They tell us it's a boy. My fiancé at the time and I are ecstatic. First time parents. Scared to death of course but over the moon none the less. My plan was an un medicated all natural birth. I ate as I should, I exercised as I should. I took my vitamins. I played by the rules. I wanted to give myself the best pregnancy and best possible beginning for our baby.
June. 40 weeks. 1cm dilated, 75% effaced. Doctor schedules an NST to check on the baby and decides he's nice and cozy in there. Another week passes. No progression or any signs of going into labor soon. He suggests induction. At this time was when I was ready to give in and I did. I was a first time Mom, who didn't know much about induction or what it entailed. All I knew is I wanted to meet my baby. My husband and I were ready. His nursery was waiting for him. WE were waiting for him.
I was 41w 3d when I gowned up and was admitted to a room on the L&D wing of our local hospital. An IV was started...just in case. I had a sandwich..I'd need my strength, they said. Cervidil was the medication that was began and broke my plan. But I was ok with that, as they told me it was just going to ripen my cervix up a bit. Then, other medications were drawn up into my IV to try to "just give it a little push". The minutes began to tick by on the clock. Then hours. For me, it was a very slow process. It is hazy. They gave me meds to sleep, which I welcomed because my body was already beginning to exhaust. The contractions weren't terrible. I was able to breathe and walk through them, roll around on the birthing ball, rotate my hips...I was doing good. But then, after discovering I'd only dilated to 3cms, they broke my water. That was when all hell broke lose.
The pain within 5 minutes was blinding. I wanted to crawl out of my own skin. I felt as though I was riding on waves of shattered glass being tossed about in the surf and crashing to a shoreline of blazing fire. I couldn't center myself. I couldn't find a place inside my own self to collect and meditate to bring me through each contraction more calm and peaceful.
I tried walking, but my legs shook so bad with every contraction I couldn't hold my own self up. I tried the bathtub but that brought no welcome relief. That was when I screamed for an epidural. But that wasn't in the plan....I told myself on one shoulder...while the other I could not bring myself to be able to deal with another moment of such pain. I told myself there was no shame in just getting a little pain relief to be able to push on. Even if the plan was broke, I would still be able to go on to birth my baby. We would get past the "no medication" clauses I had made for myself.
There's someone sitting in front of me. Knelt on the ground with their hands holding mine. I can't tell you to this day who it was...whether my nurse or my fiancé...but their hands are cool and I focus on that as I sit on the edge of my bed waiting for the relief to come. The needle is placed, medication is drawn and then I'm whisked back up into bed and handed a beeper that will allow me to administer the medication as I see fit for myself. This is nice. This is SO nice. Just to be able to breathe again. To be able to take a moment to myself to collect and reflect on the past...how many hours had it really been?
I labor. I wait. I'm checked. I labor. I wait. I'm checked. Then a moment comes that took me through another loop that I may never truly come back from. The doctor tells me my cervix SHOULD be progressed to the full 10cms but my body has appeared to have stalled out at a solid 8cm. I ask what this means, why can't I just lay here and labor longer? He tells me we could try to push pitocin and continue along but that it's not looking good and there may be no other options. He's felt my pelvic bone, he's checked babies position. He may be stuck. Your pelvis appears to be much too small and it's shape...less than desirable for a vaginal delivery. He says my pelvis could fracture. The baby's shoulders or clavicle could fracture. There could be distress for both of us.
I listen to him speak and feel as though I could literally watch as all my hopes of a natural birth scatter to the open window and dissolve into glitter as they float towards the starry sky above.
I think it's time for a cesarean, he says.
I feel sick. I ask for a bucket because I need to vomit. I ask for a phone because I need to call my mother who is 3300 miles across country and even though she can't help me right now, I need to hear her voice. I need to hear her tell me it's ok and to keep trying towards the delivery I had planned since I first saw those 2 pink lines.
But it's over. I try to weigh the pros and cons. I try every avenue in my own mind, different trails, different outcomes that I hope for but nothing makes sense to me right now. I'm exhausted both mentally and physically.
It's been 45 hours I realize. 45 hours from the start of the induction to this very moment in time with 30 of those hours active labor...and I still needed 2 more cms to bring my boy into this world. 2 more cms that may not come because my body isn't "built" for this. But how can that be? How is it that I can't do this? Women have been doing it for thousands of years...but then the thought occurs to me that every woman's body is built different and that women have died during childbirth. Babies have died during childbirth. Not just in underprivileged countries. But here, right in the United States. Right possibly in this very bed I'm laying in now.
Am I more scared to lose my baby or myself than I am of a knife? Well of course. That is the obvious decision and one at the time that I felt disappointed about but knew if that's the way it needed to be then so be it.
And so, 30 mins later, I laid there on a cold metal table, under the bright white lights of the OR, monitors beeping, the sterile field burning my nostrils as they prepared to pull my baby from an incision in my abdomen. My fiancé was more nervous than I was I think, he later told me he had tunnel vision and thought he was going to pass out seeing me there like that. But it wasn't my fiancé who passes out, but a nurse. She's on the floor with her feet up on a chair recovering. Other nurses are tending to her and all I feel is the tugging and pulling and the doctors are talking about their kids soccer games. The anesthesiologist isn't pleasant and downright pisses me off when I tell him I feel like I cannot breath. He tells me to blow on my fist, it will send a message to my brain that I am indeed able to breathe.
I feel pressure, so much pressure and then.....up over the blue curtain of that sterile field, a tiny, wrinkly potato with a full head of hair and a good set of lungs is screaming at me. He's weighed. His apgars are determined. He's bundled. And then there's my fiancé, he's there holding our little man, all 6lbs 13oz of him. A tear escapes my eye and it suddenly mattered not that he wasn't brought into this world unmedicated or vaginally. He was still grown inside of me and still emerged from my body, he still was there alive and alive and screaming at me still. Until I spoke his name with his little pink face up to mine, he was there and I was there and it was as if we had known one another forever already. He's perfect. Every inch of his skin is perfect even the blotchy red birth mark on his back. 23 years I'd dreamed of the day I would meet my baby and 9 long months, and 45 hours of labor I had waited for this moment. We didn't meet the way I had expected but did it really matter? No, it didn't.
I had not failed as I thought I did when my body couldn't push him out. How could I look at that little boys face and ever, ever think...that I had failed him somehow?
