launching the meeple, part 3
Jul. 11th, 2009 09:17 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
I would have liked to finish this back in April, but, hey, better late than never.
So, there I was, ready to push! ... and not really sure what my options were. I'd been open to the idea that I might end up wanting the epidural, but somehow in all of my reading and thinking about labor I'd assumed that I'd be pushing unmedicated, and had planned to push squatting as much as possible, to open my pelvis and use gravity. Squatting, however, did not seem to be in the picture. I definitely had some feeling and control in my legs (except for a big numb patch on my left thigh that took most of the next day to fade, as I recall) but not the strength or balance to be on my feet, even with a squat bar. This blind spot in my preparation meant that I had absolutely no better ideas when the midwife and nurse began to explain how to push lying on my back with my feet in the air, the very position I had hoped to avoid.
It felt every bit as awkward and unnatural as I had expected. Nobody in their right mind, needing to take an enormous crap, would ever lie down and pull back on their knees and point their ass at the ceiling, and yet there I was. I could feel my contractions and my muscles, so it wasn't that hard to figure out what I needed to be doing, which is something I had worried about, with the epidural, but it felt hard to really commit to something so ludicrous. Being encouraged to "push for the ceiling" was not actually helping.
I asked about a position change and was helped onto my side, bent into a sort of sitting position with my feet braced. I should digress, here, and say that throughout the approximately two and a half hours of pushing, I think at least one of Josh or Chaos was usually holding my feet (or both, when I was on my back) and I have nearly no idea which one, or when. (I sort of recall that Josh was on the left side of the bed and Chaos was on the right for at least some of it.) I did most of my pushing with my eyes shut, or at least that's how I remember it now, and my world was all breath and core; my feet were out there somewhere, meeting some sort of resistance, but Josh might comment that it was actually mostly the midwife or the nurse with my feet and I'd believe that too. The one thing I remember really clearly was Chaos being there with the lovely cold wet ice chips between every contraction. Earlier, laboring sitting on the corner of the bed, I'd sort of stuck my hands out for things between contractions - water bottle to the left, cold damp washcloth to the right, occasionally chapstick (Blistex Spa Effects Relaxing, which smells like vanilla and plum - look, I didn't especially care about having music or a focus object or whatever (I did make a cd but we never played it, and we never touched the Labor Bingo card), but what lip balm I wanted for my labor was very important to me) - and they were always *there* to be handed to me, and I think a big part of that was due to Chaos running around fetching ice and refilling water and things, and so it was important that this make it into the story somewhere, that she was my water baron and ice chip hero. And, like I was saying, possibly somehow involved with the feet.
Pushing on my side was better than pushing on my back, but it still felt fairly weird. According to notes, I tried again on my back, and then on my side again. At some point in here (4:45, the notes suggest), the midwife suggested using pitocin to speed up my contractions - they were about eight minutes apart, at that point, and she was worried that I wasn't getting enough of them to make progress. I felt like I could handle a faster pace, and also, if it was going to take a hundred pushes, or whatever, to get the baby out, that I was eager to get through them and actually HAVE A BABY at some point, it having been over twenty-four hours since I woke up in labor. So I got some pitocin and my contractions speeded up to about every... four minutes? three minutes? something like that. It was good - I had time to relax between them, and then I could feel one start to come on, and at first I was sort of tentative about it - "um, I think I could push?" but after a while it started to be much, much easier to be pushing with the contractions than not be pushing and I think my warnings of imminent pushing got correspondingly more definite. (I think the midwife had suggested wait a little with each contraction so that I could do my strongest pushing with the peak of the contraction and not tire out before the end of it - she had suggested three pushes, but I found that I generally wanted to do four because it was easier to do that extra push than try to stop and ride out the tail of the contraction. Josh told me later that he got the impression that she wanted me to determine the length of my pushes myself and was kind of annoyed with the nurse, who kept loudly counting to ten for me, but I actually found the counting really helpful for both holding the pushes and keeping a pace, so, go interfering nurse.)
My interest in alternate positions hadn't abated, and so they determined that the epidural had worn down enough that I could try kneeling - the head of the bed was raised and I leaned over it, curling forward and tucking my chin to push. This was great - I was finally bearing *down*, like gravity and years of pooping on a toilet suggested. I wasn't able to stay up there all that long - I was tired, and kind of wobbly - but that was the point where pushing really came together for me, and everything after that felt much more natural despite being back on my side again. After kneeling I pushed for a long time on my side, until we got into the homestretch and they suggested I go back to reclining - I didn't mind at all this time though, because I knew this was it, and I was getting into that position for delivery!
Pushing had definitely been getting intense. It didn't hurt, exactly, not sharply, but it was hard to deal with. I felt very very stretched - I remember saying something obvious like "it's reeeeally big!", and I was pushing with everything I had, thinking that if I could just get that thing *out* of there it would feel so good for all that pressure to let up. I still didn't realize quite how close things were, and then they were turning on bright lights, and bringing out the mirror, and telling me that when the head came out they were going to tell me to blow, whoo-whoo-whoof, and it was crucial that I stop pushing and blow. I looked in the mirror and everything was very red and I saw the head - it looked dark green to me, dark and greasy. I remember asking if I could touch it and someone told me I could touch it and I reached down and it was firm and warm and it was kind of confusing that there could be a head right there. Things were getting very confused, to me - I wanted the baby on my skin, at delivery (so I could start getting it all nice and inoculated with my skin flora before anyone else was touching it), and so someone was moving aside my hospital gown, and there were some other people in the room doing something and I think the midwife was wearing a face shield and I still didn't realize quite how close things were, there was more head but I had this vague memory that sometimes you see some head for quite awhile before the baby actually comes out, and had the vague notion of another twenty minutes or something - I think at some point I asked someone "ten more minutes?" and she maybe laughed, or something, or said "you're doing it, go, go", and I can remember seeing myself pooping (you pretty much can't get a baby out without squeezing out everything nearby, which seems perfectly natural to me, but apparently some people are worried or embarrassed about this, so I want to make a point of mentioning it) and then SOMETHING and this crazy flurry of hands and they were saying "blow, blow!" and this enormous gush of fluids, red and yellow. That's what I really remember, this impossible waterfall pouring out, and meanwhile I was trying to blow but something was slipping and slithering on out and then it wasn't there any more, that pressure was finally gone and they were passing something up and there was a baby on me.
There was a baby. All I saw at first was the mouth, this big oblong mouth, wider on the ends than in the middle like one of the pieces of a tennis ball, crying - people were reaching in to tuck a blanket over and around it and to towel off the head and slip a hat onto it and I just remember that mouth, and a scrunched red little face and holding it to me and saying "hi, hi, it's okay". (At some point someone must have confirmed that it was a girl, but at that point it was still just the meeple, and genderless, and in fact it took me a couple of days for it to feel natural to say "she" and "her" instead of "it".) I have no idea what to say about those first moments - I didn't find words for them at the time, and now all the words I think of are someone else's. My baby. Holy shit.
Things afterwards are blurry with occasional sharp moments - Josh might be able to help me reconstruct some of the sequence here, or he might not. I remember having to push once or twice for the placenta, which was easy ("the placenta will be easy, it has no bones", the midwife said, very reassuringly, which was the exact phrase they had used in childbirth class, and I remember wondering why they were so obsessed with this, whoever would have thought a placenta had bones anyways? I felt great, I could have pushed out the baby again if I had to, I had a baby!), and to cough for some reason? I think they re-wrapped the baby at some point, and I know Josh was holding it at some point. They brought me the placenta (this was one of the five points in my birth plan aka "labor preferences" - getting to see and poke the placenta, because how often do you get to see a placenta? I figured my best shot was at the one I had personally produced) and I poked it and picked it partway up and had blood on my fingers and under my nails for the next twelve hours or so. Oh, sometime before that Josh must have cut the cord; I think I missed this entirely while I was just staring at the face end. There may have been a certain amount of back-and-forth where we kept unwrapping bits to look at, sneaking the hat off to see all the dark hair, etc, at least I seem to remember seeing her in parts and it being a long time before I saw all of her at once. Eventually Josh followed her off to the nursery for her official weigh-in and bath etc and I got stitched up which was pinchy and unpleasant despite the lingering wisps of epidural. (I'd asked if I was going to get a local and the midwife agreed and then said, no, wait, you got me, you've got the epidural, and I was all, oh yeah! but it was still pretty wince-inducing.) At some point Josh and baby came back and Chaos left and Josh and I took naps (we agreed we needed to sleep before making a commitment about The Name, just in case we were being sleep-deprived and stupid about something; we'd also agreed we wanted The Name before we called anyone to announce the birth, leading my mother to Freak The Fuck Out because she hadn't heard anything for awhile, sigh.)
Sometime later that day we got moved to a post-partum room; I guess we had to wait unusually long, much like we had for a labor and delivery room, but we didn't particularly mind. The one really annoying thing was that the delay in transferring to the recovery side also for some reason delayed me getting the damn IV line out of the back of my hand, which was a major pain in the ass while trying to hold and latch the baby. We ordered meals, a variety of personnel came and went, my dad managed to call from the ship (we hadn't been able to place the satellite call from our phone card, for whatever reason). Tuesday morning, I finally brushed my teeth - the longest (since Saturday night) I had ever gone without, in my entire tooth-having life. Our days and nights were all mixed up and run together - we had a gorgeous view of the trees along the Charles River and I remember seeing various pretty times of day, sunsets and sunrises. We were profoundly zombie-like, but zombies of joy. At one point Josh and I were standing together at the window and three Canada geese flew by, near and a little below our window. I just remember the entire world seeming newly beautiful and amazing, most of all our tiny, perfect person. I remember at one point she was awake and not eating and I took her to the window and showed her blue sky. When we left we told Juniper we were taking her *home* and nearly got too weepy to go anywhere.
The key moments in my parents' birth story - the one my parents like to tell me every year, at 5:02 pm (I somehow doubt I'm going to want to tell Juniper hers at 6:47 in the morning) - are when my dad first made eye contact with me, and my mighty first blorting noise that broke a particular angelic silence. I think the key moment in my story happened sometime in that first hour after she was born, after she'd calmed down, when I was still holding her. I said I thought I might try feeding her, expecting one of the nurses to, I don't know, give permission, or deny it, or jump in with instructions, and instead their response was more like, completely nicely and respectfully, "what are you asking *us* for?". And that's when it hit me that I was this baby's PARENT, and she wasn't somehow on loan to us from the hospital: I/we had both the final authority and final responsibility for taking care of her. 6:47 had all the drama and blood but that later moment is when my life really changed forever. Juniper Hazel is 103 days old now, cooing and grabbing her toes; her smile is better than blue sky and I cannot believe how lucky I am to have her at the end of this story.
So, there I was, ready to push! ... and not really sure what my options were. I'd been open to the idea that I might end up wanting the epidural, but somehow in all of my reading and thinking about labor I'd assumed that I'd be pushing unmedicated, and had planned to push squatting as much as possible, to open my pelvis and use gravity. Squatting, however, did not seem to be in the picture. I definitely had some feeling and control in my legs (except for a big numb patch on my left thigh that took most of the next day to fade, as I recall) but not the strength or balance to be on my feet, even with a squat bar. This blind spot in my preparation meant that I had absolutely no better ideas when the midwife and nurse began to explain how to push lying on my back with my feet in the air, the very position I had hoped to avoid.
It felt every bit as awkward and unnatural as I had expected. Nobody in their right mind, needing to take an enormous crap, would ever lie down and pull back on their knees and point their ass at the ceiling, and yet there I was. I could feel my contractions and my muscles, so it wasn't that hard to figure out what I needed to be doing, which is something I had worried about, with the epidural, but it felt hard to really commit to something so ludicrous. Being encouraged to "push for the ceiling" was not actually helping.
I asked about a position change and was helped onto my side, bent into a sort of sitting position with my feet braced. I should digress, here, and say that throughout the approximately two and a half hours of pushing, I think at least one of Josh or Chaos was usually holding my feet (or both, when I was on my back) and I have nearly no idea which one, or when. (I sort of recall that Josh was on the left side of the bed and Chaos was on the right for at least some of it.) I did most of my pushing with my eyes shut, or at least that's how I remember it now, and my world was all breath and core; my feet were out there somewhere, meeting some sort of resistance, but Josh might comment that it was actually mostly the midwife or the nurse with my feet and I'd believe that too. The one thing I remember really clearly was Chaos being there with the lovely cold wet ice chips between every contraction. Earlier, laboring sitting on the corner of the bed, I'd sort of stuck my hands out for things between contractions - water bottle to the left, cold damp washcloth to the right, occasionally chapstick (Blistex Spa Effects Relaxing, which smells like vanilla and plum - look, I didn't especially care about having music or a focus object or whatever (I did make a cd but we never played it, and we never touched the Labor Bingo card), but what lip balm I wanted for my labor was very important to me) - and they were always *there* to be handed to me, and I think a big part of that was due to Chaos running around fetching ice and refilling water and things, and so it was important that this make it into the story somewhere, that she was my water baron and ice chip hero. And, like I was saying, possibly somehow involved with the feet.
Pushing on my side was better than pushing on my back, but it still felt fairly weird. According to notes, I tried again on my back, and then on my side again. At some point in here (4:45, the notes suggest), the midwife suggested using pitocin to speed up my contractions - they were about eight minutes apart, at that point, and she was worried that I wasn't getting enough of them to make progress. I felt like I could handle a faster pace, and also, if it was going to take a hundred pushes, or whatever, to get the baby out, that I was eager to get through them and actually HAVE A BABY at some point, it having been over twenty-four hours since I woke up in labor. So I got some pitocin and my contractions speeded up to about every... four minutes? three minutes? something like that. It was good - I had time to relax between them, and then I could feel one start to come on, and at first I was sort of tentative about it - "um, I think I could push?" but after a while it started to be much, much easier to be pushing with the contractions than not be pushing and I think my warnings of imminent pushing got correspondingly more definite. (I think the midwife had suggested wait a little with each contraction so that I could do my strongest pushing with the peak of the contraction and not tire out before the end of it - she had suggested three pushes, but I found that I generally wanted to do four because it was easier to do that extra push than try to stop and ride out the tail of the contraction. Josh told me later that he got the impression that she wanted me to determine the length of my pushes myself and was kind of annoyed with the nurse, who kept loudly counting to ten for me, but I actually found the counting really helpful for both holding the pushes and keeping a pace, so, go interfering nurse.)
My interest in alternate positions hadn't abated, and so they determined that the epidural had worn down enough that I could try kneeling - the head of the bed was raised and I leaned over it, curling forward and tucking my chin to push. This was great - I was finally bearing *down*, like gravity and years of pooping on a toilet suggested. I wasn't able to stay up there all that long - I was tired, and kind of wobbly - but that was the point where pushing really came together for me, and everything after that felt much more natural despite being back on my side again. After kneeling I pushed for a long time on my side, until we got into the homestretch and they suggested I go back to reclining - I didn't mind at all this time though, because I knew this was it, and I was getting into that position for delivery!
Pushing had definitely been getting intense. It didn't hurt, exactly, not sharply, but it was hard to deal with. I felt very very stretched - I remember saying something obvious like "it's reeeeally big!", and I was pushing with everything I had, thinking that if I could just get that thing *out* of there it would feel so good for all that pressure to let up. I still didn't realize quite how close things were, and then they were turning on bright lights, and bringing out the mirror, and telling me that when the head came out they were going to tell me to blow, whoo-whoo-whoof, and it was crucial that I stop pushing and blow. I looked in the mirror and everything was very red and I saw the head - it looked dark green to me, dark and greasy. I remember asking if I could touch it and someone told me I could touch it and I reached down and it was firm and warm and it was kind of confusing that there could be a head right there. Things were getting very confused, to me - I wanted the baby on my skin, at delivery (so I could start getting it all nice and inoculated with my skin flora before anyone else was touching it), and so someone was moving aside my hospital gown, and there were some other people in the room doing something and I think the midwife was wearing a face shield and I still didn't realize quite how close things were, there was more head but I had this vague memory that sometimes you see some head for quite awhile before the baby actually comes out, and had the vague notion of another twenty minutes or something - I think at some point I asked someone "ten more minutes?" and she maybe laughed, or something, or said "you're doing it, go, go", and I can remember seeing myself pooping (you pretty much can't get a baby out without squeezing out everything nearby, which seems perfectly natural to me, but apparently some people are worried or embarrassed about this, so I want to make a point of mentioning it) and then SOMETHING and this crazy flurry of hands and they were saying "blow, blow!" and this enormous gush of fluids, red and yellow. That's what I really remember, this impossible waterfall pouring out, and meanwhile I was trying to blow but something was slipping and slithering on out and then it wasn't there any more, that pressure was finally gone and they were passing something up and there was a baby on me.
There was a baby. All I saw at first was the mouth, this big oblong mouth, wider on the ends than in the middle like one of the pieces of a tennis ball, crying - people were reaching in to tuck a blanket over and around it and to towel off the head and slip a hat onto it and I just remember that mouth, and a scrunched red little face and holding it to me and saying "hi, hi, it's okay". (At some point someone must have confirmed that it was a girl, but at that point it was still just the meeple, and genderless, and in fact it took me a couple of days for it to feel natural to say "she" and "her" instead of "it".) I have no idea what to say about those first moments - I didn't find words for them at the time, and now all the words I think of are someone else's. My baby. Holy shit.
Things afterwards are blurry with occasional sharp moments - Josh might be able to help me reconstruct some of the sequence here, or he might not. I remember having to push once or twice for the placenta, which was easy ("the placenta will be easy, it has no bones", the midwife said, very reassuringly, which was the exact phrase they had used in childbirth class, and I remember wondering why they were so obsessed with this, whoever would have thought a placenta had bones anyways? I felt great, I could have pushed out the baby again if I had to, I had a baby!), and to cough for some reason? I think they re-wrapped the baby at some point, and I know Josh was holding it at some point. They brought me the placenta (this was one of the five points in my birth plan aka "labor preferences" - getting to see and poke the placenta, because how often do you get to see a placenta? I figured my best shot was at the one I had personally produced) and I poked it and picked it partway up and had blood on my fingers and under my nails for the next twelve hours or so. Oh, sometime before that Josh must have cut the cord; I think I missed this entirely while I was just staring at the face end. There may have been a certain amount of back-and-forth where we kept unwrapping bits to look at, sneaking the hat off to see all the dark hair, etc, at least I seem to remember seeing her in parts and it being a long time before I saw all of her at once. Eventually Josh followed her off to the nursery for her official weigh-in and bath etc and I got stitched up which was pinchy and unpleasant despite the lingering wisps of epidural. (I'd asked if I was going to get a local and the midwife agreed and then said, no, wait, you got me, you've got the epidural, and I was all, oh yeah! but it was still pretty wince-inducing.) At some point Josh and baby came back and Chaos left and Josh and I took naps (we agreed we needed to sleep before making a commitment about The Name, just in case we were being sleep-deprived and stupid about something; we'd also agreed we wanted The Name before we called anyone to announce the birth, leading my mother to Freak The Fuck Out because she hadn't heard anything for awhile, sigh.)
Sometime later that day we got moved to a post-partum room; I guess we had to wait unusually long, much like we had for a labor and delivery room, but we didn't particularly mind. The one really annoying thing was that the delay in transferring to the recovery side also for some reason delayed me getting the damn IV line out of the back of my hand, which was a major pain in the ass while trying to hold and latch the baby. We ordered meals, a variety of personnel came and went, my dad managed to call from the ship (we hadn't been able to place the satellite call from our phone card, for whatever reason). Tuesday morning, I finally brushed my teeth - the longest (since Saturday night) I had ever gone without, in my entire tooth-having life. Our days and nights were all mixed up and run together - we had a gorgeous view of the trees along the Charles River and I remember seeing various pretty times of day, sunsets and sunrises. We were profoundly zombie-like, but zombies of joy. At one point Josh and I were standing together at the window and three Canada geese flew by, near and a little below our window. I just remember the entire world seeming newly beautiful and amazing, most of all our tiny, perfect person. I remember at one point she was awake and not eating and I took her to the window and showed her blue sky. When we left we told Juniper we were taking her *home* and nearly got too weepy to go anywhere.
The key moments in my parents' birth story - the one my parents like to tell me every year, at 5:02 pm (I somehow doubt I'm going to want to tell Juniper hers at 6:47 in the morning) - are when my dad first made eye contact with me, and my mighty first blorting noise that broke a particular angelic silence. I think the key moment in my story happened sometime in that first hour after she was born, after she'd calmed down, when I was still holding her. I said I thought I might try feeding her, expecting one of the nurses to, I don't know, give permission, or deny it, or jump in with instructions, and instead their response was more like, completely nicely and respectfully, "what are you asking *us* for?". And that's when it hit me that I was this baby's PARENT, and she wasn't somehow on loan to us from the hospital: I/we had both the final authority and final responsibility for taking care of her. 6:47 had all the drama and blood but that later moment is when my life really changed forever. Juniper Hazel is 103 days old now, cooing and grabbing her toes; her smile is better than blue sky and I cannot believe how lucky I am to have her at the end of this story.