It has been four weeks to the day since our baby was born. I guess now’s as good a time as any to tell the world the story. (Actually, now’s not really as good a time as any…three weeks ago would have been better but I’ve been in a bit of shock you see. My sincerest apologies.)
On Friday, August 9th I went to the hospital to be induced at exactly 41 weeks pregnant. I was extremely nervous to give birth in the first place let alone to be induced, which I had heard made the contractions come harder and faster with fewer breaks in between, and therefore made me very nervous to deliver our baby without an epidural, which I’d been hoping to do.
Why did I agree to be induced then? Because a) I was sick of being pregnant, and b) my doctor looked me straight in the eye and said that if I didn’t get induced at 41 weeks my baby could die, and that if I waited even three more days she would make me sign a waiver saying I understood that and wouldn’t sue her.
It was a scare tactic and even though I knew it was a scare tactic it didn’t make me feel any less scared. So yeah, I got induced.
The final pregnant photo, taken just moments before we left for the hospital.
We left at 6:00 am and I cried—sobbed, really—the majority of the 30 minute drive there. Poor Poor Kyle was so excited to have a baby but he couldn’t even show it because I was sucking all of the joy out of our lives with my terror. I still feel bad about that but you have to understand that childbirth has been one of my lifelong fears the way some people are afraid of heights or spiders or small confined places. I was face to face with my life’s greatest fear and I was not coping well at all.
I remember looking at all the familiar landmarks on that drive, thinking how the next time I saw that billboard it would still be advertising $1 McDonald’s soft drinks but I would have a baby. How everything would be the same except nothing would be, really.
At 7:00 I was dilated to a 2 (where I’d been for a week), so the doctor broke my water and we began the waiting game for contractions. Unfortunately, she saw a bit of a greenish tinge to my amniotic fluid which meant our poor little overdue baby couldn’t hold his poo in any longer and he pooed in utero. What did that mean, I asked. It meant that I would be asked to stop pushing for a minute when his head was out of my crotch but his body was still in (there’s a lovely image for you) so that the doctor could suction out his mouth and make sure he didn’t inhale any, and that as soon as he was completely born he would be whisked away to a team of NICU staff who would do more of the same.
So I don’t get to do immediate skin to skin? And I don’t get to wait until the umbilical cord stops pulsing to have it cut? And I don’t get to let him try to nurse within 10 minutes of being born?
Nope. All of my hippie hopes and dreams for this delivery were going up in smoke before my eyes. I felt so helpless because I knew I needed to give up on them for the good of the baby, but I also felt so sure that those other things were good for the baby too. And since I didn’t want to be giving birth in the first place I felt I deserved to have at least SOME things go my way.
It’s exactly that sense of entitlement that gets me into messes all the time. I should learn.
They found my blood pressure to be too high (which was a surprise to exactly nobody, given the level of tears I was expelling at an alarming rate), so the nurse was instructed to monitor it. Which she did. Diligently. For the next 10 hours. It never went down on its own so I had to be given medication for it (more interventions that I worried would affect my baby). Also because I was induced I had to be strapped to an IV and to fetal heart rate monitors. What I didn’t realise going into it was that I would be hooked up to all those things THE WHOLE DAY. It made any sort of movement at all really difficult, and especially the kind of movement I’d been planning on using to cope with the pain in place of the epidural.
When I realised that, I cried some more.
I also agreed to let a student nurse watch right before the doctor broke my water. I thought that just meant she would watch the water break, but as it turned out what I agreed to was letting her stay in the hospital room with us the entire day until the baby was born. So because of my high blood pressure and the induction, I automatically had two extra people hovering around me the whole day…they only left for lunch breaks and even then they got replacements to come in and hover some more. I hated it. I hated being attached to so many machines and I hated being hovered over and feeling obligated to make awkward small talk for what seemed like eternity.
So right off the bat my experience was disappointing. I held it together when the nurses were around but any time they stepped out to trade shifts I made sure to get a good cry in.
Anyway, the next four hours passed uneventfully. The hospital brought me breakfast and lunch but I couldn’t eat a single thing, not even toast (highly unusual for me, you know). I tried to nap but couldn’t do that either, for the stress, despite having only slept two hours the night before, again for the stress.
The pitocin to induce contractions didn’t seem to work so they kept having to up my dosage. Finally they bumped me up to the maximum amount and then at around 11:00 I felt the most horrific urge to both poo and pee at the same time. (I’d made sure to eat a lot of fruit the few days before because pooing during delivery is another huge fear of mine and I wanted to be nice and cleaned out for the big push. So I’d already pooed a couple of times that morning and thought it was unusual I needed to go again.) I went through the huge ordeal of getting unhooked and hobbling to the washroom with my IV to sit on the toilet, and lo and behold—nothing came.
I thought that was weird but what do you do, right? So I went back to bed.
A few minutes later the exact same sensation hit me again, so again we unhooked everything and again I sat on the toilet and again—nothing.
Around that time it occurred to me that I was probably having contractions. Only I was so surprised because I always assumed that contractions would feel like period cramps, but no! Not for me! Why had nobody ever told me that contractions feel like the most horrific need to poo (like, stomachache-level need) and the most stinging UTI-urge to pee both at the same time? I don’t know, but I blame every woman who’s ever felt one for not preparing me.
Once I figured out I was contracting I decided to try some of my hippie pain coping techniques. They all failed miserably. First of all I couldn’t do yoga because of the machines. I tried bouncing on a birth ball but it was so low to the ground it hurt my knees. Leaning over the back of the bed was more uncomfortable than anything else. Walking was a nice distraction but dealing with contractions standing up was a bad plan—plus I was only allowed out of my room for 20 minutes before I had to come back to be strapped up to the machines again. And I straight up forgot to try my essential oils.
Around 12:30 our doula arrived. We hired a doula because I’d read it was a good idea to do so, but our doula was also our childbirth class leader and by the time we’d sat through 15 hours of classes with her we were sort of having second thoughts about whether we even wanted a doula. However, we’d already paid the fee so I wanted to get my money’s worth, even though Poor Kyle wanted to just go through it without her. Anyway she got there at 12:30.
Poor Kyle was amazing and never left my side until the doula and I basically kicked him out to get some lunch at around 1 p.m. But even then he was only gone for a half hour.
When he got back I decided I’d had enough of the contractions. I asked to get checked one last time just in case I was somehow at a 10, but no luck: I was at a 5. Depressed, I decided I could not do 5 more centimetres and asked for the epidural despite feeling like a disappointment to myself and probably Poor Kyle (who said he didn’t care either way and that he’d probably have gotten one ages sooner). The epidural was terrifying, but terror was the order of the day for me so by that time I was getting quite used to it. The anesthesiologist was there within 30 minutes and 30 minutes after he got started my contractions just disappeared. (He did nick a bit of my bone during the process, causing me to jump and shriek but apparently it didn’t cause any lasting damage.)
After about an hour of no contractions I started to feel tiny tinges of pain again, which was quite perturbing to me. I felt that if I’d sold out to get an epidural I wanted to sell out COMPLETELY and feel NOTHING. They gave me a button and told me to push it as often as I wanted to top off the drugs. I pushed it every ten minutes. Just to make sure.
Blah blah blah, nothing exciting happened then until around 4:00 when the doctor came back to check my progress and said I was dilated to a 10 and ready to push.
Just as simple as that: you’re dilated to a 10 and ready to push.
I pushed for nearly two hours and the only thing that hurt was my head and chest from holding my breath for so long. The nurses had to literally keep their hands on my stomach to tell me when I was having a contraction. Poor Kyle stood holding my right leg for me and the student nurse was holding my left. The doula was by my head feeding my ice chips between pushes.
The strangest thing about pushing was how mellow it all was…in the movies there’s always this dramatic music and the woman’s voice is muted but you can tell she’s basically screaming. I didn’t scream at all, but I did grunt a bit I think. And nobody was shouting at me to push or not push, they were all just quiet and supportive, saying things like, “Good job,” or “There’s part of his head.” Not even with exclamation points, just statements. I kept looking around for the drama, but there was none to be had.
I didn’t want Poor Kyle to watch because that’s something you can never un-see (I know I wouldn’t want to watch him take a giant poo on a sterile table [I didn’t even want to feel the baby’s head when it was out, even though our doctor and doula told me too—I believe my exact words were, “That’s disgusting.”]), but he kept sneaking peeks so finally I just gave up. He watched the whole thing and in the end I was glad he did because afterward he got to tell me all about it but I never had to see a thing.
I was also glad because when our baby was born Poor Kyle gasped and said, “Whoa,” like he’d just seen a miracle or something, and although it was simple it was probably the rawest emotion I’d ever seen come from my husband. And it made me happy.
So now I’ve written 2,000 words about the birth of our son when really all I needed to do was post a few pictures and say this: Hutchinson Fairbanks was born on August 9th at 5:20 p.m. weighing in at 10 pounds 2 ounces and measuring 23.5 inches long. Baby Hutch is healthy and strong:
Poor Kyle is healthy and strong and totally in love:
And me? I’m healthy and strong and utterly floored that this tiny creature came out of my body.
Oh yeah. And I’m in love, too:
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