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| On the evening of May 12th, I started having some mild contractions--baby #2 was on the way. My first experience with labor and delivery left me quite nervous about how things were going to go this time. In a nutshell, I tried to go without any pain medication, ended up having severe "back labor" and tried to get through it on their mildest med--Nubain. It was a traumatic vacuum delivery, followed with ABO Incompatibility related jaundice. Needless to say, just about anything that could've gone wrong did--including refusal of Matthew to breastfeed. With all of that in my mind, I decided to just stay home as long as I could and try to deal with any pain in a natural way this time around. I actually slept until about 2 a.m. when I watched the clock to see how quickly the contractions were coming. They were about 5 minutes apart. With our hospital being 30 minutes away, I thought we'd better call and get prepared to leave. Coincidentally, we had an induction scheduled for 8 a.m. that morning so my parents had taken Matthew to spend the night with them. (My due date was 5/1, so I was going on 2 weeks late.) I called and got my call back from the doctor "on call" who said to come on in. Now here's the funny part (NOW it's funny, but it wasn't at the time). Here I am really starting to feel the contractions after I got up and moved around to get dressed. My husband had taken a shower while I was on the phone with the doctor. Now he decides to go into the kitchen and make a pot of coffee! I'm bracing myself against the kitchen counter with contractions less than 5 minutes apart now...and he's
making sure he has his morning coffee for the road! I guess I was masking
the pain well (or something). Anyway, the coffee finished brewing and we
hit the road for our 1/2 hour journey. Got there and got set up in a birthing room. I was all set to do it naturally this time...until that horrible "back labor" reared its ugly head. I remembered what I had read in preparation for the chance that I'd have back labor again. I asked for ice and had Frank hold it on my back. I also had him holding a tennis ball there. Neither worked past the first few contractions. As the contractions got stronger, I was getting really desperate. With my first labor, the back labor went on and on for several hours. I was afraid of history repeating itself with another long labor. I decided to ask more about epidurals. I decided it was the way to go. Now mind you, a friend of mine and I had really come down on women who go for epidurals (we were faithful watchers of a tv show called A Baby's Story and it seemed like 90% of those women had epidurals--even after taking yoga classes and other preparations for natural births). I was feeling really ashamed for making the choice to have one, but at the same time needed a way out of the excrutiating pain. Seemed like it took forever for the anesthesiologist to make it over to my room (about 45 minutes). Once that began to work, it was amazing. I think I was at 5 cm when they finally got the epidural going. Because of that, it didn't slow my labor and actually helped it along because now I was relaxed. This baby had never "dropped" so the epidural allowed my body to work the baby down to where he needed to be in order to push effectively. When it was time to push (about 9 a.m.), I pushed a few times and there he was--all 9 lb. 15 1/2 oz. of Nick! I was still mad at myself for having the epidural and shared my disgust with the doctor. He told me that because of Nick's size, I should be thankful for the epidural in that it helped move him down the birth canal easily. I thought about it more and stopped beating myself up over it. As the day progressed, I still wasn't really sore from the delivery! I have changed my judgemental attitude towards epidurals--even though my "dream birth" is still to go completely natural. I'll try for the natural way next time and see how it goes. I learned a lot about myself and cutting others some slack when it comes to these issues where there seem to be clear cut answers (until you're in the situation yourself, it's so much easier to say what you "would" do). The most important part is that you end up with your baby "on the outside" to cherish and love!
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