My Hospital Birth Experience: Part 2
August 12th, 2007 by MamaBearIt was 6:30 am, I was 6 cm dilated, and my OB just broke my waters. I’d been in active labor for over twelve hours. Oh goody, I thought (as I lay there in agony), we’ll finally get this show on the road and I’ll get to meet my daughter. Yay!
(Long before she broke my waters, when I was in the relatively blissful state of 3 cm dilated, Dr. OB came into my room to tell me she’d run some tests and discovered that I had HELLP. Because of this, I couldn’t have an epidural or I stood a good chance of being paralyzed for life. At the time I actually said, out loud, “That’s okay ‘cause I didn’t want an epidural anyway.” I may have even smiled smugly through my puny 3 cm contractions. She gave me a knowing look and exited quickly.)
By the time I got to six centimeters dilated, I was tearfully begging for an epidural. I thought irrationally (the pain will make you do that) that maybe the nurses didn’t know about my condition and that the anesthesiologist could just run up and give me an epidural anyway, while my OB wasn’t looking. I figured we could all keep it hidden from her when she came back. If she noticed the plastic tubing sticking out from my back, I could just say, “Oh, that? That’s not a legal liability staring at you, Dr. OB. That’s just my, uh, plastic tail. You never noticed I had a tail?”
Unfortunately, I think she may have foreseen this scenario, so all my nurses were very much up-to-date on what I was and was not allowed to have. No amount of begging resulted in anyone giving me any kind of epidural.
They did give me a little intravenous Nubain, though. Nubain, for the uninitiated, is an analgesic similar to morphine. While normally I balk at the idea of someone jabbing my vein with a needle and keeping the needle in there, I totally did not mind it in this case. So, a vein in my hand was eventually located and the IV was inserted. It stung, but I’ve had much worse IVs before.
I thought this would take the pain away. I really did. It didn’t. What it did was keep the pain just as intense as before, but made me even more tired. It would have been very difficult to stay awake at all if not for all the Cytotec-induced cattle prodding contractions and the pain that came with it.
I labored on until 1 pm. They checked me again (AHHHHHH!) and I was still at 6 cm. I’d labored for seven more hours and hadn’t progressed one iota. If I hadn’t been so busy at the time, my fury alone may have resulted in somebody’s untimely demise. Probably my own.
At this point, I was begging for not only an epidural, but a spinal, a cesarean, euthanasia, anything to put an end to the agony.
So then the game plan changed. No, I couldn’t have any of those other things, but I could have pitocin. What is pitocin, you say? It’s a “labor enhancer” or synthetic oxytocin. It makes the contractions increase in intensity, if that was even possible at that point. With the little energy I had, I expressed my adamant opposition. “No! Nonononononononono!” I told them. I told them good.
When I was finished with my tantrum, I was hooked up to a pitocin drip. To the OB’s credit, she upped my Nubain, as a consolation prize.
I became very loopy, drugged and quieter but still in complete agony. The electric cattle prodding continued to intensify, and I sobbed and moaned pitifully as I lay on my side in the hospital bed. Though I’d torn off the hospital gown hours before, I was boiling hot, even as others in the room wore sweaters and wrapped hospital-issue blankets around their shoulders in the air-conditioned birthing suite. My body barely moved, yet I was doing the most arduous physical work I’d ever done in my life.
This is why they call it labor, I thought.
