Tell me about your labour and delivery

In My Humble Opinion
41

The more I look around, the more sites I see that make it sound like pregnancy (and labour and delivery) are an Illness which Must Be Dealt With. Yes, there are things that can go awry, but on the whole I think a lot of people would be just fine if they were left alone.

My sister-in-law is a physical therapist. She deals with patients who have had complications from having an epidural gone bad. I haven’t asked details, as it hasn’t been that important to me. Perhaps I’ll call her tonight.

Just to reiterate here - I’m not afraid of an epidural. I just don’t feel that it’s necesary in my case.

42

Not to be snarky, but that’s about as welcome to many women as people who “push” natural childbirth on “any pregnant woman”. When my wife was pregnant a co-worker tried to inform us of the error of our ways…that labor was “no time to find out what your pain threshold is”…as if that’s the reason we (read my wife, obvioulsy) was choosing this.

My wife doesn’t post here, so I’ll be her proxy :wink: She was having fairly regular contractions…but not real close together. We went to her midwife (CNM, part of an OB group) and she was at 4cm dilation. This was a Tuesday in July. We (and the CNM) thought she might deliver that night…but the contractions never really progressed beyond that point…so off to bed.

Wednesday morning, she was about the same point. We went to do some walking at an indoor mall (too hot and humid outside). We were freaking out some of the senior citizen walkers there, because she would have to stop to ride out a contraction every once in awhile. Came home…the back pain was getting worse, so I called the CNM who told us to go the hospital. We threw the giant birthing ball in the car and headed off to the hospital. The wife never actually got a chance to use the ball…the CNM used it as a chair :slight_smile:

At the hospital she was at 6cm. Went into the shower for probably 30 or 45 min…when the pain got to its peak. Nurse looked again and she was at 10 cm ready to start pushing. The CNM got there shortly after. The missus never had any narcotics, but did have a bag of pitocin after pushing for a couple of hours…it was either pit or probably forceps, pretty easy call.

After the pit, the kid popped out shortly after.

http://homepage.mac.com/beagledave/PhotoAlbum4.html

FWIW…we took the birthing class at the hospital which was Lamaze oriented, but got more useful info from a Bradley book (even though the Bradley folks seem to have a huge agenda about hospitals and doctors, IMHO).

Good luck gingy!

43

I think giving birth is like almost everything else in life: there’s a wide variety of what’s normal. I don’t think it’s right to go into the hospital thinking “Oh, I’ll just have the epidural and then it will be easy”, but I think it’s probably also wrong to go in thinking “I’ll never let them give me anything for the pain!” I know women who’ve had more than one kid, and very different experiences with different kids. A woman who has a very hard, painful labor the first time, may have quite an easy time the second time around, and vice versa. My opinion going in was “Well, I’ll try to handle it without the drugs, but if things get too rough, I’m not going to try to find out how tough I am by not taking the drugs”. I think probably the best thing is to arm yourself with as many facts as you can, and keep an open mind. But it’s your body, and if your mind is made up, don’t let people push things on you that you don’t want!

Best of luck, Ginger!

44

My kids were born a long time ago (almost 15 years for the last one), and I’d probably do things differently now, but here’s what happened then:

First kid - I started having back contractions in the middle of the night, but I didn’t realize that I was in labour until the next morning. I thought I just had a backache, but I finally realized that it was rhythmic. We waited until the afternoon, when they were 10 minutes apart, then headed to the doctor. Once there, I did a little walking around for a while, but once my water broke, around 9pm, they wouldn’t let me out of bed and had me strapped to monitors. Things weren’t too bad until 10 or 11pm, but the pain got pretty bad, and I got really tired of it, and asked for an epidural then. At that point, though, they told me it was too late, I was too close to pushing. They gave me demerol and I hated it! I was falling asleep between every contraction, just waking up for the pain, then, when I started to push, I wasn’t making any progress. I pushed for three very loooong hours, finally giving birth at 3:22am - about 26 hours of labor in all, but only the last 4-6 hours were really bad. I don’t really remember much about that time other than the pain, since the Demerol really knocked me for a loop. I just remember that it was not a pleasant experience.

Second kid - I was going on three weeks past my due date, and the doctor decided to induce. I was up at the hospital at 1pm and they broke my water. Nothing happened. They started pitocin, and I started to have contractions. This time I had decided that there was no way I would have Demerol again after the first time and I didn’t really need anything else, so that’s what I did. Being induced made the contractions more painful (at least that’s what it seemed to me), and when it came right down to the end, the baby wouldn’t come out and his heartbeat started to drop, so they had to use forceps for the actual delivery. Now, that was painful. It didn’t last long, though, and my son was born at 11:58 pm, less than 11 hours of labor that time - piece of cake!

What would I do differently? I would wait longer before I went to the hospital and I would eat and drink something before hand (they wouldn’t allow anything more than ice chips while I was in labor, and I got thirsty!). I think I would insist on moving around more and staying away from those monitors, at least for a while longer than I did. I still would not take any pain medication - for me it wasn’t completely necessary, and I don’t want to have medication that is not needed. I would not be induced again unless it was medically necessary - I think my son was just not ready to be born and that’s why he wouldn’t come out. And I wouldn’t have my husband in the delivery room - he was not very supportive, and he yelled at me when the pushing took so long for my first child.

45

:eek:

46

To be fair, he was getting all stressed out and frustrated since there hadn’t been any progress, but I really didn’t need that at the time. I needed a cheerleader, not Attila the Hun.

47

Warning - My mother was pissed after this.

I was in actual real labor for about two hours. I did the midwife thing, but in a center attached to a hospital. I went in around 12:30 AM and since I had called ahead the big jacuzzi was filled when I got there. I curled up in there for a while, and just kind of floated, very Zen until I mentioned that I really felt like pushing and my mom scoffed (I mean really, we were only about half way through the second CD out of the pile we had brought.) My midwife checked and I was fully dialated. I got out of the hot tub and onto the bed and two pushes later there was baby. I did yowl a lot during those, but it was all over quickly. (It was a lot like me seeing a large spider.)

It was a really calm time, actually. I haven’t felt that in tune with my body and the rest of the universe before or since. Everything worked just as it was supposed to, and I just floated along with it. No drugs, no strategy, not big deal. The midwife bit was really hands off, which worked well. I could eat and drink, if I cared to. (I wasn’t there too long, though they did make me eat something and nap before they would release me. I liked the midwife philosophy of educating me to knwo what the steps were so different things happening didn’t flip me out, and then just paying attention to how I was doing and how the baby was doing. During labor she checked our heartbeats on occassion - if anything was going wrong we would have gotten more intrusive, but we were fine so we just got left alone to go about our business. Good fun. I’m up for it again as soon as I am actually prepared to raise the result.

48

Goodness.
I didn’t even feel the needle when I got my epidural.

I don’t now if they gave me an episiotomy, but I know i had about 100+ stitches.

49

I can’t imagine going into it completely closed off to the option of pain meds. I really thought I was going to die on the table until I got my epidural, at which point I told the anesthesiologist I loved him and asked him if he would marry me. :smiley:

The way I see it, there’s no point in being a martyr. No one is going to think less of you because you had an epidural or pain medication. And the birth is no more natural if you go without. I pushed that kid out of me, and it was pretty f’n natural even if I did have an epidural.

50

First child - went into the hospital at 4:30 in the morning, finally got a C-Section at 10:30 that night. (And the only reason I’d gone to the hospital was because I thought I had a UTI and the pain was so bad I couldn’t wait for the doctor’s office to open. Turned out I’d been in labor since the night before.

Second child VBAC- went into the hospital at 6:00 at night, got an epidural as soon as they would let me, had the baby 12:00 the next afternoon. The thing that stands out the most about this is that in my sleepy, hazy state, I was mostly asleep, but kept having dreams about people in vampire clothing riding a comet. Woke up the next morning to the news, which was blathering on about the Heaven’s Gate suicides.

Third child also VBAC - went to the hospital 3 separate times, only to be turned away each time. I was still 2 weeks away from my due date, but the Braxton-Hicks were so strong and so constant that I was unable to do anything. I also had an excessive amount of amniotic fluid, and was told that if my water broke, I was to go directly to the hospital (incidentally, my water has never broken on its own). After being turned away so many times, my midwife finally asked for permission for me to be induced; my blood pressure was getting pretty high, I was barely able to eat, and I was truly in a lot of pain. I got the approval on Tuesday to go in on Wednesday morning.

And Tuesday night, at 8:00, I started having the most horrific, insistent contractions. I went to the hospital again. The midwife met me there, took one look at me and said I definitely had the “labor face” and admitted me. They gave me an epidural, which didn’t take. A few hours later, having not slept for days, and still in tremendous pain, I asked them to try again, and they did, but they also didn’t kick in. I started pushing at somewhere near 6:30am. At 8 - almost the exact time that I was to be induced - I had the baby. The funny part was that the Dr that I had was a big, gruff man that I didn’t like. When I saw he was delivering, I burst into tears. He’d broken my water for the previous two, but a different doctor had delivered (because my labors take on multiple work shifts). He had been so distant and unfriendly (to my eyes, at the time, anyway) that I really, really didn’t like him. Anyway, I was too ready to give birth to complain (aside from the tears) and the man was a godsend. I don’t know what happened the first two times, but this time he was cheering me on, telling me how great I was doing, and getting truly excited as things started to really happen, and let out a big whoop when I finally delivered. It was great :slight_smile:

51

I had induced labor both times, first because my water broke and I wasn’t going into labor after 6 or 8 hours, and second because the baby was running out of room.

The first time I went without medication, but with the aid of a Bradley course and a doula. It was pretty grueling and I ended up with an episiotomy and a tear and lost quite a lot of blood, which may have contributed to nursing troubles.

The second time I went for about 8 hours with no medication, but finally decided to get an epidural. It was great–the baby had been hanging around too high up and we weren’t getting anywhere. I was just getting dragged out. Twenty minutes after the epidural took effect, the baby was out. I controlled the pushing and had no problem supporting myself. It had no discernible affect on the babe at all–all his Apgars were at the top of the scale. I did have another episiotomy, but it was much, much smaller than the first (4 compared to 30+ stitches.) He was a bigger baby, too, almost a pound heavier than his sister.

I think part of my problem the second time was that I was more aware of the hours (potentially) stretching in front of me. Maybe I was just getting to old to deal with that stuff!

52

I’m not completely closed off to the option of pain meds. I simply will not have a spike stuck in my spinal cord for any reason, and I would prefer not to have any drugs as it impedes the newborn’s breathing and heart-rate. I don’t see this as being a martyr at all.

53

If for some reason, it does come down to you choosing pain meds or perhaps needing it (an unplanned c-section, God forbid), you should opt for an epidural rather than a spinal block (sometimes called a saddle block).
When I had the c-section prep class, the nurse who taught it made sure we knew that. The spinal takes effect quicker, and the docs prefer it, since they can start sooner, but the epidural affects you and the baby less, and there are fewer side effects. The spinal was also the one that causes terrible headaches aftewards.
At least I think that was the reasoning - it’s been eight years. Anyway, I just remember her drilling into us that we were to not let the doctor give us a spinal block. Always go for the epidural.

54

Not to harp on the subject, but I was very oogy about the idea of a needle near my spinal cord as well. It was actually a breeze. The only difficult thing is sitting still for the minute that it takes to set up.

55

I’ve had three children. Combined time of labor for all three babies- 8 1/2 hours. Total painkillers for all three labors - two dinky injections of Novocaine.

Child #1 - In labor for a total of 3 1/2 hours, no painkillers, but Novocaine for the episiotomy.

Child #2 - In labor for a total of 3 hours, no painkillers, but Novocaine for the episiotomy.

Child #3 - In labor for a total of 2 hours, no painkillers at all, not even for for the episiotomy (Doctor was really, sorry, but I barely made it to the hospital - there was no time for such niceties.)

56

Child #1: Fifteen days overdue. Had weak crampy pains all day, went to the hospital at 9 pm, midwife informed me I was only 1cm dilated. Since this was my first baby, she assured me, with only 1cm of dilation and the baby’s head not even fully engaged, there was no way the birth was imminent. She gave me a sleeping pill, sent my husband home, and put me to bed, telling me to rest well because they’d start the induction the next morning at 7ish. Flodjunior was born at 1:54 am. He weighed 4.71kg (10lb 6oz). I had some nitrous during the end of the opening phase and into transition, but nothing for the actual delivery. I did get a novocaine shot before my episiotomy was stitched up, but nothing for the actual cut - in fact I wasn’t even informed I’d been cut until I got the shot. I never did like that midwife.

Child #2: Only five days overdue. Weak crampy pains all day, went to the hospital at 8:30 pm, midwife informed me I was only 1cm dilated. She listened to me when I explained how the first birth had gone, and got everything ready for a new birth at any moment. Baby was born at 12:34 am, weighing four kilos on the nose. No pain killers, no episiotomy, nitrous while the midwife stitched up a tear. I liked that midwife a lot; she came in twice while we were in the maternity ward to look at “the big beautiful baby” and to ask how my stitches were healing.