I was having the time of my life.
Nothing had prepared me for this possibility. At best I had hoped to cope well
and to retain my sense of equanimity through the process. At the most I had
hoped to have a sense of control over my own body. At the least I’d wished to
retain a sense of self through the process. But this – this was something else!
I had never felt more keenly the
power of my own body – not when I hiked up steep trails, not when I danced the
night away, and not even when I successfully managed a difficult yogic pose. As
I sat on a birth-stool I knew this was the most visceral thing I had ever done
in my life and the most visceral thing I would ever do.
I had done the exercises and the
yoga and practiced the breathing. I was eating better than I had ever done in
my adult life. I had read many books and visited dozens of internet sites on
the subject. I had heard the stories and been to the ante-natal classes. Each
person told me their truth of giving birth. Some said it was the most
painful thing they’d done. My mother told me her dislocated elbow had hurt more
than childbirth. One friend told me that it was the loneliest thing she’d done
– eventually it was just she and the baby. Most said that the best thing about
it was that eventually the pain would end.
There I was, sitting on a
birth-stool, my mother on one side of me and my midwife on the other side,
feeling my baby inch her way out of my body, to begin her life as an
independent being. It was 6.30 a.m. in the morning and I was in an alien
nursing home environment with an unknown obstetrician. This was not how I had
planned my baby’s birth.
I’d had an incredibly happy
pregnancy, marked by lots of delicious sleep in the first trimester, travel in
the second and incredible pampering from my husband, family and friends in the
third. This included my very enjoyable visits to the obstetrician which were
marked much more by teasing camaraderie and discussions on art (my husband,
Abhay edits ART India and my OB an art lover) rather than anything to do with
my pregnancy. My doctor treated my pregnancy as an everyday non-event and never
ever mentioned that I was on the wrong side of the magic figure before which
women “ought” to reproduce. This also included the hour-long conversations I
could have at my meetings with my midwife, as also my ante-natal classes with
my childbirth educator where my over-informed questions were welcomed rather
than shushed. My thrice-weekly yoga class with kept the endorphins flowing.
Further, a Craniosacral Therapist had even managed to cure my sinus, a
condition I had lived with for over a decade!
I knew that my baby in the last
few weeks had descended and was in the Left Occiput Anterior (LOA) position,
one of the most facilitative for her birth. I had a midwife I trusted and an
obstetrician I felt comfortable with. I was ready and it looked like my baby
was ready too. The evening before my daughter was born my husband, a friend and
I had been on a longish walk and then sat around drinking herbal tea until
almost midnight. As we talked and laughed, I wondered how many days of such
leisurely teatime we had left.
It was 3.30 am in the morning
when I woke up wanting to use the loo – a completely unremarkable occurrence in
late pregnancy. It had only been about ten days since the weight of my tummy
had become an obstacle and so I got out of bed in my newly unwieldy fashion
only to feel a trickle of water and thought, ah it’s starting, the labour is
starting. I was then nearly 39 weeks pregnant. I imagined from all that I had
read that I would get back into bed, sleep for a few more hours, call my
midwife in the morning and then figure out when to head for the hospital. And
then within fifteen minutes I found myself in the middle of what seemed to be
the most excruciating contractions. These made me rather anxious since
everything I’d learnt had suggested that the onset of labour was slow and the
contractions mild at the beginning.
I woke up Abhay who woke up my
mum. By 4.30 a.m. My midwife arrived and tried to time my rather erratic
contractions. “I really feel like pushing”, I said feeling rather confused for
pushing was supposed to come later, much
later! My midwife was unfazed and said she’d better check how far the
cervix had dilated. Two minutes later she looked up and uttered the most
terrifying words – “Your baby is ready to be born,” she said. “It’s two inches
from crowning. We need to find a hospital close by.”
Apparently I was not going to get
to my chosen hospital and more importantly for me, I wasn’t going to have my OB
present at the birth. Not wanting to be in an alien hospital with unknown
doctors, I suggested to my midwife that we do this at home given that my baby
was ready. She said she didn't have anything with her and our best bet was to
ask my OB to recommend someone close by. I was trying to deal with the idea
that I would have to give birth without the reassuring presence of my doctor
whose high fives and teasing humour I had counted on to make my birth easier.
And so it was that I found myself
in an unfamiliar nursing home, in the labour room, where one other woman was
already labouring – which meant that Abhay couldn’t come in as there was
another woman about to give birth too. A resident doctor confirmed what we
already knew – my baby was ready to be born. Now it was her and me in this
life’s momentous journey. I asked my midwife, desperate for some measure of
control, if we could use the birthing stool and before anyone could figure what
we were talking about, my midwife had calmly set it up on the labour room table
and I was already sitting on it by the time My OB’s obstetrician friend, came
in.
None of us want to be faced with
a stranger when it’s finally time to actually birth the baby but having been
put in this unenviable position, I couldn’t have asked for a better emergency
obstetrician even if I’d taken time out to interview for the job! He smiled at
us reassuringly even when my midwife produced my birth plan which she’d very
wisely asked me to get my original doctor to sign – I of course hadn’t thought
to keep it so close at hand so was very grateful for my midwifes foresight. He
read through the plan carefully and said – we’ll try and do as much as we can
the way you want. And he was as good as his word.
He was completely unobtrusive and
let my midwife lead and for that I can’t thank him enough! Flanked by my
midwife and my mother, I would hold both their hands through each contraction.
As I sat on the birthing stool I discovered that this new unknown doctor went
to school with my brother, was a consultant gynecologist to one of my best
friends, and went to medical school with my childbirth class instructor. He
joked that it was foretold that I would have him attending my daughter’s birth!
Even as we spoke I was struck that it was possible to have a coherent and even
mildly amusing conversation while giving birth.
Through it all my midwife used
warm compresses on my perineum to help it stretch more easily. I'd read in a
hypno-birthing book that I could breathe my baby out. This sounded like a plan.
Also elsewhere I'd read that if the baby was born slowly it gave the vagina and
perineum time to stretch so it wouldn't tear. So I went slow, not pushing too
hard. The contractions felt more like intense pressure than pain and strangely
I felt able to control how hard I pushed. Between contractions my midwife used
a doppler to measure my baby's heartbeat and each time I'd ask, “ Is it ok? and
feel a sense of relief when she confirmed that my baby was indeed holding up
well.
By this time my midwife figured
out I was in no hurry. In an earlier conversation days before the birth I'd
confided that my greatest fears, medically speaking were a c-section and in a
vaginal birth, tearing. She figured rightly that I was going to take this very
slow. So she gave me a push – she suggested that if my baby wasn't born soon, I
might have to move off the oh-so-comfortable birth-stool and perhaps (horror of
horrors) lie on my back (at this point I was of course too far inside myself to
recognise a bluff!). But her bluff worked – no way was anyone going to get me
off that stool. In two pushes my baby was out. The actual crowning felt like
someone was smashing a giant cannonball against my vagina, it felt like the
ring of fire I'd read about. But it was mercifully short and in what seemed
like seconds my baby was in my arms, her umbilical cord still attached, my/her
placenta still inside me.
But most importantly, even in the
throes of that intense pain I felt in charge, I was controlling that pain – I
was pushing my daughter’s head out into the world, it was my stage and I was performing. My body felt ready to do this – to
take on this challenge. My worst fears of childbirth had always been of loss of
control rather than of pain and here I felt completely in control. I was the
subject, never the object. If there was pain, it was something my body seemed
to understand what to do with.
A few minutes later, the doctor
asked if he could cut the chord. I asked if it had stopped pulsating. He said
it hadn’t and he would wait until it did. Eventually it was my midwife who cut
the chord! He asked if I would place a tablet under my tongue to help the
uterus to contract faster. I looked at my midwife who nodded. At that point I
think both she and I were too grateful for what had been a dream birth to
protest at this apparently mild intervention. I took it. In a few minutes I was
looking at the beautiful whole placenta and fragments of the amniotic sac. I
looked at it in awe while my midwife examined it to ensure it was complete. I
had torn only very slightly. I had two stitches which later felt alien but gave
me no trouble.
Hours later in the hospital at
least three of the nursing staff visited me separately to check out this
unusual creature, a woman on the wrong side of thirty-five who had given birth
to her first child without any medication. None of them had ever seen such an
event!
A few days later I looked up
precipitate labour on the net while my baby slept. Reading about it was oddly
pretty scary, quite different from living it had been. For many women, the
roller-coaster of precipitate labour means dramatic changes in the way they
intended to give birth – sometimes too short a labour is as much of a problem
as too long a one. Women didn't get to the places they planned to be, babies
were born on the road, women ended up with unfamiliar people in their birth
rooms, the outcomes were not always comfortable for the women.
For me, luckily my precipitate
labour and the four-hour from start to finish labour and birth was a wonderous
experience, one that inspired awe in my body. For me it was self affirmingand
joyous and a little bit like an unexpected gift – I expected labour, that is,
hours of work and effort and I received this almost blissful experience that
made me feel more a person with free will and agency not less. Giving birth was
a high like no other I've experienced. Within hours I honestly felt, “I can do this again!”.Of course in a
day the hormones and with it the high all come crashing down but that's another
story!
Sometimes I wonder what it was.
Perhaps a mix of things.Sheer serendipity. Genes (my mother had me in six hours
start to finish). My brilliance (without false modesty) in knowing I needed a
midwife to help me birth. (For without a midwife I would most certainly have
had a very different birth story). My conversations with my daughter about a
month before her birth where I'd tell her how she and I had to work together to
help her be born, that we were a team and we could do it together. My
disciplined yoga, breathing and exercise regimen (and never ever before or
after so far in my life). An obstetrician who never ever mentioned the words
elderly primipara and who assumed that I would have an easy pregnancy and
birth. The can't-say-how-wonderful-it-was-enough birth stool which gave me a
sense of control and power.
If I think back and analyse it,
because I ended up in an unfamiliar space with an unfamiliar obstetrician, my
midwife became de facto my primary caregiver. My birth plan listed my initial
doctor as my primary caregiver and the others –the midwife, Abhay and my mother
as supporting cast. Perhaps in an odd way this helped allow her to assume a
more active role in my labour than she might otherwise have.
For hours after my birth, my
mother and I looked at each other in awed bewilderment – “What was that?,” we asked each other. Having
heard stories of my own birth, where my mother walked around almost until it
was time for me to be born, I had imagined that I would have a fairly good
birth but this short, beautiful, completely non-medicated and
fully-in-my-control birth is something even I could not have dreamed of.
If I had to do it again, I would
change only one thing. I would have had my baby at home.
