The Gory Details

(Edited for TV version. But look, it's still a birth story, so don't read it if you'd rather not know!)

As I posted earlier, I went in for a regular appointment last Thursday, February 28. The doctor found I’d dilated to 5 cm, was 80% effaced, and was having contractions during the exam (as I had been for weeks--yawn). She suggested scheduling an induction (“things could happen very quickly, and they’re predicting snow”), and even if I didn’t want to do that, she wanted me to go to the hospital to get onto a monitor to track the contractions.

I was disinclined to induce and hesitant to get excited over another false alarm. I also figured we only live 5 minutes from the hospital (and Sam’s truck has 4-wheel drive!), so why worry about getting there? But I went to Sam’s office and we decided he’d teach his next class and I’d get my things together, and then we’d head over to the hospital since the doctor had suggested it so strongly.

So we made our way over there, got checked in around 5:00, and found that I was now dilated to 7 cm. Still no real discomfort. Our childbirth educator had told us to come to the hospital when the contractions were intense enough that you couldn’t walk or talk through them, but mine had never gotten that strong. I got hooked up to a monitor, and after a few more hours, when they checked again, I was dilated to 8 cm. By this time, Sam and I were sort of snickering in disbelief (incredulous over our luck) and the doctor was pronouncing this a Very Unusual Labor.

At 10:30, the doctor returned to say that if we wanted, the next step would be to break the bag of waters and help the baby descend further down. He offered me an epidural, but it sounded absurd--I still wasn’t feeling any pain. He explained that the epidural mostly functions to anesthetize you during the first stage of labor while you are dilating to 10 cm, and then during the pushing phase, they back the epidural off so that you can feel to push. To be honest, it just seemed like a lot of hassle for a short period of relief since I was already almost at 10 cm—they’d need to put an IV and hydrate before doing the epidural itself, and then I’d possibly have a longer and more difficult pushing stage. So, against all my plans, I opted against it.

They broke the bag of waters, and for a few minutes, I didn’t feel much change at all. “A hundred years ago,” the doctor said (immediately piquing my interest with the promise of a little historical lesson), “you would have had a really easy labor—you would have just suddenly felt the urge to push.”

Sounds benign, doesn’t it? “The urge to push”? But it was a sudden, crushing pain that I absolutely needed, without knowing why or knowing how I knew, to relieve by bearing down. It hit me within literally minutes.

A side note: For the rest of my days I will thank God that my doctor that afternoon sent me to the hospital where the water was broken in a labor room, instead of my having had it happen out shopping or something somewhere and being catapulted instantly into the pushing stage of labor, say, on the floor of the Gap, or the side of Rte 19.

Anyway, at that point, I realized another thing that was different from what we’d learned in childbirth class (the class, I think, was excellent—my labor was just pretty far out of the ordinary): in class, they’d said contractions might typically be a minute or so long, with about a minute in between that we’d use to catch our breath and focus for the next one to push effectively. But my contractions were coming with only 10 or 20 seconds in between; I had no time to rest and focus, and sometimes I didn’t even know when to stop pushing—if I stopped too early, the pain was unbearable; if I pushed longer than I needed to, I might miss the few seconds of relief I could experience.

I’ve never been completely out of control due to physical pain before, but within those few minutes, that’s pretty much what happened—and why I’m so glad it was in the privacy of a room with my husband and an immensely kind nurse. I pushed for about 2 ½ hours total. The first 30 minutes were difficult as I learned how exactly to push, but rewarding because by the end of those few minutes, Sam and the nurse could see the baby’s head and had already told me about her dark hair, making it real to me that this was our baby coming (!).

But then, she sort of got stuck. Without being too indelicate: she was pointed downward, and needed to come upward a few degrees to come out. So all of my pushing, which could only be directed one way (you’re bearing down), was fruitless for the next hour and a half—I kept pushing as hard as I could, but I couldn’t push her into the correct position to make her exit.

I was feeling very faint, especially by the end, and then I heard Sam say to the nurse, “Isn’t there something else you guys can do? Maybe the vacuum extraction? Because I don’t think she can keep pushing for much longer.” And the nurse said that the doctor didn’t want to do an intervention because it would be uncomfortable without anesthetic. Then Sam said, “I completely respect his expertise . . . it’s just that I know Tara, and I know that she can’t go much longer.” The nurse said, “Yeah, I can see she’s pooping out.” And from my state of vague consciousness, I thought simultaneously, “I love this man!” and “I wonder what they’re going to do when they realize I can’t push this baby out?”

Then the doctor was standing over me and saying very gently, “Now, I can help you, but it might be a little uncomfortable.” I felt as if it were the kind of offer you get from Jesus, and to be honest, at that point, if he had handed me a knife and told me to perform my own C-section, I’d have grabbed it and begun without a second’s hesitation.

So then there was a quick set change—they broke down the bed for delivery and moved some lights around, the baby nurse came in and got into position by the bassinet, and I thought, “Oh, this is good—at least they think something is going to happen now.”

The doctor applied this little electric suction cup and vacuum pump to the baby’s head and guided her upward and out as I pushed. The cup came off once or twice, and I felt the “discomfort” (tearing) but didn’t even care—in fact, I didn’t even want to react because I didn’t want the doctor to stop what he was doing—it felt like my last hope of getting the baby out. And within about 20 minutes, to my complete disbelief, her head appeared.

That’s the moment where people have all kinds of beautiful revelations about their love for their child. But all I could think was to try desperately to calm myself: “You don’t have to push her head out anymore . . . you don’t have to push her head out anymore . . .” and then suddenly, with another push, they placed this little warm damp animal with its mop of dark wet hair and its expression of unabated shock onto my belly, and I thought, “Wow—there’s a person there!” And I got to touch her—I just couldn’t believe that an actual person had come out of my body.

That was at 1:50 a.m. February 29. In the next few minutes, Sam cut the cord, and I vaguely remember the doctor saying soothingly that he would do the rest of the work, and I felt this strange pulling sensation as he delivered the umbilical cord & placenta. Then I saw Sam holding this little be-toweled bundle and heard him burst out laughing, “She looks bitter!” Allison Clare’s eyes were wide open, and she just looked so surprised, and then I got to hold her, and my parents came in.

Afterward they cleaned us up and got us moved over to the room where Sam and I would stay for the brief time remaining of the night. I’d never been injured or hospitalized or anything before, and I felt pretty ravaged and very shaky, but also exhilarated.

I still can’t believe that our bodies can actually make people . . .