Milo's Birth Story - Part One

This may only be of interest to pregnant women and med students, but I always liked reading them when pregnant, so here goes...

At 6:30am on Nov. 1st I woke up with what felt like some sort of intestinal distress. After lying in bed for a while it occured to me that the intestinal distress seemed to be coming and going every ten minutes or so, and perhaps I was actually in labor. I lay around in bed being happy about being in labor for a while, wondering if this was really it or not, nudged Steven on the other side of the bed and told him not to get too excited but I thought I might be having mild contractions, and then got up at around 8:00 or so and began puttering around the house.

A few hours later I told Steven it seemed like things might be a while, so he should just go off to school to teach his class. I spent the rest of the morning making lists of things for my mother to do, straightening up the apartment and generally feeling pleased with myself. I instant-messengered my father and told him I thought I might be having contractions. He thought perhaps I was being a bit nonchalant.

By midafternoon the contractions were strong enough that I had to sit up and start to take notice of some, so I started timing them. They were about 8 minutes apart at that point. By 4pm they were strong enough that I called Steven and told him I thought he should come home. Two hours later we had dinner - I couldn't eat much at that point, but figured i should try to get some sustenance - and decided to time some more contractions. They were 5 minutes apart.

Now, here's the thing: in all the birth classes they tell you to go to the hospital when the contractions are 5 minutes apart, lasting 1 minute, for an hour. They weren't lasting 1 minute at that point, closer to 30 or 45 seconds, but they were definitely 5 minutes apart. We waited another hour and they didn't seem to get any longer, although they did get more painful. I sat on my birth ball for a bit and Steven massaged my back and I breathed through the more painful ones. Still, I kept feeling like, is this it? This doesn't seem agonizing.

At around 6 or 7 Steven called the OB and told her what was going on. The doctor on call, not my OB, said we should come in to the hospital. It all seemed completely confusing. I was clearly in labor but the contractions just weren't that strong, and it seemed sort of early to go to the hospital. My understanding on when one goes to the hospital was when one couldn't possibly take another minute of the pain. And even though I'd already had 12 hours of labor, the pain wasn't beyond the realm of types of pain one might reasonably expect to experience in life. So we waited.

By 10pm the contractions were painful. Painful enough that I couldn't talk through them and had to concentrate on breathing. I never understood, pre-labor, what people meant when they said that at some point ht epain is great enough that you can't talk through it, but that's what happens. It gets intense enough that all you can do is think about the pain. You can form a thought but not a sentence. You lose any interest in communicating what you're thinking to anyone. So off we went to the hospital.

The second we got to the hospital I understood why people choose not to give birth in hospitals. At home I'd been laboring in relative comfort. The lights were low, I had my bed and my pillows and my purple Vitamin Water. At the hospital I was immediately asked to fill out forms, which I did between contractions, and then given a chair in a hallway to wait in while the triage room freed up.

In the mean time, we had made the mistake of calling our parents when we got in the cab to tell them we were on the way to the hospital. This meant that every five minutes either my cellphone or Steven's phone would ring with a parent or sibling on the other end demanding to know what was going on. And yet again, here's an instance where having divorced parents really sucks because for my parents every new piece of information we received had to be relayed not once but twice. So between my mother, father, brother, and Steven's parents the phones didn't stop. Were we at the hospital yet? Had we been admitted? How long would my labor take? When would the baby be born?

By 11pm we'd gotten intot he triage room and the OB on call checked me. I was 1 cm dilated. Or, in technical terms, nothing was happening with my lazy fucking cervix. I'd been in labor for 18 hours and my cervix had done nothing that might facilitate pushing a baby through it. And so they sent us home with the instructions to come back when something changes. Come back when something changes? Like what? What might change? There might suddenly be a baby's head sticking out somewhere? Then could I have my epidural?

And so we gathered up all our bags (the food bag stocked with Odwalla bars, peanut butter and crackers and Laughing Cow cheese, which we'd now taken to calling Hospital Cheese because Steven kept telling me I could eat it when we got to the hospital; the clothing bag filled with maternity clothes I'd grown out of in the hopes that I'd be able to wear them home, Steven's clothes and clothes for the baby; another bag with my extra long comfy pillow and assorted god knows what) and, dejected, took the elevator back down to the street.

After a brief comic interlude where Steven was unable to find a cab while I suffered through contractions on a street corner in the Financial District at midnight, we returned home. At which point my Night of Hell began. For the next ten hours I wandered around the apartment as my contractions got worse. Sometimes I sat on the birth ball, sometimes I lay in the bathtub for a bit, sometimes I lay down in bed, sitting up when a contraction hit to breathe through it. As the hours wore on I did less breathing and more moaning. Pre-labor I'd wondered whether I'd be a moaner. I've never been one to vocalize pain that much - I'm much more likely to lie in a corner in a ball - but this was a pain like I'd never known, and I groaned and moaned and cried my way through it.