Birth story, Part II

Things start getting a bit fuzzy from here on, because I was so tired and greater pain and hence disorientation were ensuing. I know they put me on an IV shortly after admitting me, and that it was administered by a nurse in training, under the supervision of a more experienced nurse. I completely understand that a nurse has to be trained, and has to have first-IV-insertion experiences; if every patient refused to be that person, how would nurses be trained? That was with the calm, rational side of my brain. With the pain-riddled, needle-phobic side, I was inwardly screaming, “Get this novice off my arm NOW before I slap her!” Yeah. She hurt me quite a bit and did not get the IV in properly. The experienced nurse informed me that my “vein was about to pop.” I didn’t like the sound of that. They took out the bad IV and put in another one. I had bruises all over my arm and a surprising amount of pain—who knew an IV could be so painful. This turned out to be true for the next four days of recovery. The IV area hurt and every time they swished something through it, flushing it out, the pain was bad (though compared to contractions, not much).

Some time after the IV, they started me on pitocin in the hopes that the labor would pick up speed. They also gave me a dose of Fentanyl through the IV. It had to be administered in installments of 3, each one given during a contraction. So the nurse and I would sit staring at the monitor that showed my contractions, and then she’d stick a little more Fentanyl in, with each of three contractions. I discovered that Fentanyl doesn’t do much to help with pain, but makes you sleepy. So then I was sleepy and in pain, instead of fully in possession of my senses and in pain. I think I must have sounded a bit disoriented when I was conversing with people, but was not nearly sleepy enough to actually go to sleep. The contractions also got a whole lot worse on the pitocin—-much more painful. Now I could feel the pain in more than just my uterus; it radiated through other parts of my body and was longer in duration. This period of the labor went on and on and on, with little to differentiate it. Nurses came and went, checking on my “progress,” and there were two doctors who came and went and checked on me, too. I think one was a resident, because the other doctor would sometimes ask her questions, what she thought of this or that, like it was a test, and then either agree with her answers or qualify them.

My parents arrived around 1 on Thursday afternoon, and my Aunt Sally, Uncle Tim, and cousin Megan arrived sometime later. When my mom walked into the room, she took one look at me and burst into tears. This was distressing. The whole time I was having the contractions and in pain, I would look at Mark to see if he was distressed, too, and equally convinced that I was going to die, and it was immensely reassuring when he didn’t appear to think I was going to die. Mom, poor soul, looked like she thought I was done for. (Dad claims he expressly told her not to cry when she saw me, too.) Mom is a big believer in the power of breathing through contractions and in the “focal point,” which she had selected for me—a pink conch shell with a lot of little edges and points to focus your eyes on. So she began waving the shell in my face during the contractions, while other people were commanding me to “breathe through it.” Megan took a now-comical picture of Mom leaning in toward the bed, waving the shell mesmerically in front of my eyeballs, while I moan and scream with my beautifully matted hair clinging to the sides of my head. I was doing my rhythmic breathing, and I did try to focus on the shell, but at some point the pains were so bad that I was kind of screaming. I tried to modulate the screams into the low-pitched moans we were told to do—for some reason, low-pitched moans are supposed to be more helpful than loud, high-pitched screaming. But to be honest, I am not sure I succeeded.

The whole time, I could watch the contractions on the monitor. The line would shoot right up into these scary pikes, and when the contraction lasted a long time, you could see it going along, level, on and on and on, at the top of the mountain. Then someone would say, “I think it’s subsiding now,” but sometimes it would shoot right back up and not be over. What I really wanted was for someone to estimate how long they tended to be and then tell me how much more pain I could expect, as in, “45 more seconds; 30 more seconds; 15 more seconds.” That was the only thing that ever gave me any hope. The doctors and nurses kept checking me, and at some point they said I had dilated to about 4 cm. Whoopee!

My family kept me company, and it was nice that they chatted about other subjects, like George W. Bush’s stupidity, the Israel-Lebanon war, and The Daily Show. I wasn’t capable of responding much or participating in the conversation, but it was reassuring that life was going on, despite the utter horror that mine had become. I think if they had all looked panic-stricken and talked about nothing except my failure to progress, it would have been worse. (Well, Mom looked panic-stricken, but I can forgive her.) Mark’s family came and went at some point—I’m not quite sure when, since time blurred together so seamlessly.