> I'm sort of hoping he'll post some comments about his own experience through all of this
Indeed! Hi. :^) It seems weird to refer to you in the third person here, so I'll go for second for now.
> one of my very few regrets about my labor was not getting someone else to start doing a count for me. I'm not even sure it was ever apparent to anyone else that I had been counting
It wasn't to me, and I was paying pretty close attention. :^/ This whole part was really intense for me, because I was totally focused on you and your breathing, and trying to read how close you were to the end of a contraction, so I could shift from "you can do it" to "almost done", the latter of which seemed helpful anyway.
> The bathroom of the labor and delivery room was by then even more horribly and hideously far away than the bathroom down the hall had been from the exam room
It wasn't actually physically farther away, but I don't doubt that it felt that way. :^(
> I can't remember what Josh said to encourage me
Possibly just "come on, we're going to do it now". :^) Figuring out when you needed someone to figure out what you wanted, and when you needed someone to tell you what to do, was also a fairly intense on-the-fly learning experience.
> Finally settled into exam position, the midwife checked me, and announced that I was at 6 to 7 cm.
FWIW, I was also really crushed by this. I don't know if you were aware of it at the time, but I was leaning pretty hard on "this is totally it, this is the really hard part, you just have to make it through this really hard part and then it'll all get good, that last centimeter is the hardest, you're totally almost there". My first couple of thoughts were "the midwife must be wrong, she looks younger than the first one, maybe she underestimated, maybe she's lowballing, maybe ..." But when she started talking like she thought the epidural would be a good idea, which their practice generally doesn't encourage as a first resort, it seemed pretty clear that she wasn't kidding.
> I remember being furious.
You were really unhapy. I couldn't necessarily tell at the time if it was more like fury or more like despair, possibly a lot of both. :^(
> In Chaos's notes, the first choice was "try another two hours" rather than "try the tub"
I remember it as "another couple of hours, in some different positions", and she probably did mention the tub more than once, since it's generally something that people say is helpful, and it was clear that you hadn't tried it in a while or for long. (But I think you totally tried it long enough -- for whatever reason, it was totally not working for you, and not going to work for you unless it had been like a jacuzzi tub that you could sit up in.)
no subject
Indeed! Hi. :^) It seems weird to refer to you in the third person here, so I'll go for second for now.
> one of my very few regrets about my labor was not getting someone else to start doing a count for me. I'm not even sure it was ever apparent to anyone else that I had been counting
It wasn't to me, and I was paying pretty close attention. :^/ This whole part was really intense for me, because I was totally focused on you and your breathing, and trying to read how close you were to the end of a contraction, so I could shift from "you can do it" to "almost done", the latter of which seemed helpful anyway.
> The bathroom of the labor and delivery room was by then even more horribly and hideously far away than the bathroom down the hall had been from the exam room
It wasn't actually physically farther away, but I don't doubt that it felt that way. :^(
> I can't remember what Josh said to encourage me
Possibly just "come on, we're going to do it now". :^) Figuring out when you needed someone to figure out what you wanted, and when you needed someone to tell you what to do, was also a fairly intense on-the-fly learning experience.
> Finally settled into exam position, the midwife checked me, and announced that I was at 6 to 7 cm.
FWIW, I was also really crushed by this. I don't know if you were aware of it at the time, but I was leaning pretty hard on "this is totally it, this is the really hard part, you just have to make it through this really hard part and then it'll all get good, that last centimeter is the hardest, you're totally almost there". My first couple of thoughts were "the midwife must be wrong, she looks younger than the first one, maybe she underestimated, maybe she's lowballing, maybe ..." But when she started talking like she thought the epidural would be a good idea, which their practice generally doesn't encourage as a first resort, it seemed pretty clear that she wasn't kidding.
> I remember being furious.
You were really unhapy. I couldn't necessarily tell at the time if it was more like fury or more like despair, possibly a lot of both. :^(
> In Chaos's notes, the first choice was "try another two hours" rather than "try the tub"
I remember it as "another couple of hours, in some different positions", and she probably did mention the tub more than once, since it's generally something that people say is helpful, and it was clear that you hadn't tried it in a while or for long. (But I think you totally tried it long enough -- for whatever reason, it was totally not working for you, and not going to work for you unless it had been like a jacuzzi tub that you could sit up in.)