Missed the post about the week leading up to G's birth? It's pretty interesting, trust me. :-) Read here.
…I
got in bed around 8:45. I read for a bit and fell asleep around 9 pm, only to
be awoken at 10 pm by a horrible pain my back…
Let me preface this post by explaining something about
myself. I am not normal. I am a very weird person and do things in a very
specific way in order to work with my personality (crazy, Type A, resistant to
change, stubborn, overreacts). Therefore, many of the things I did to cope with
labor, or purposely put myself in denial seem really odd probably to a lot of
people, but it’s what worked perfectly for me.
Okay. Now, to be honest, I don’t really know exactly when I woke up, nor when I went
to sleep. I do know that it was sometime between 9 and 10. The pain in my back
was really sharp and didn’t subside. I’m sure I had had some Braxton Hicks
contractions at some point, but don’t really know. I think it was my first “real”
contraction and I kind of knew that. I remember looking at my phone and seeing
that my mom had called at 9:15 pm and thinking that I was glad I hadn’t been
awake to answer because she has this creepy intuition and probably would have
known something was up.
I thought that the pain would subside and that I would be
able to go back to sleep, as is suggested for women to do in early labor…but it
didn’t. I remember that drinking a very strong cup of Red Raspberry Leaf tea
can help your uterus figure itself out—basically if you’re in false labor, it
will help stop the contractions and if you’re in real labor, they will continue
to intensify. As you can imagine from the timeline of this story, the latter
happened.
I was getting up and going to the bathroom (to umm…empty my…bowels…)
every 10 minutes or less, and trying to walk through the contractions. I had my
bloody show pretty early on and was like—cool—bowel emptying and bloody show,
these are like the first real labor signs
I’ve had. At the midwives, they don’t usually “check” you in the weeks prior to
your due date to see if you’re dilated unless you ask them to because it’s only
one of many indicators of the birth timeline and isn’t really helpful. For
example, for me, if I found out if I was 5 cm at my 38 week appt, I would’ve
been anticipating and probably would’ve been super nervous and anxious and not
slept at all the week before. So, I’d never been checked and had no desire to
be. I wanted to be ignorant. No expectations. Just trust my body to do what it
needs to do when it needed to. I know my personality and I know how to work
with it—that was my prescription, not
necessarily my advice for everyone. So, you can understand that it was a little
surreal to get those first real labor signs. I knew that at some point I would actually give birth,
but it was a distant reality. This made things a little more real.
Now, I know that bloody show isn’t necessarily indicative of
impending labor, and that it can happen days, even weeks before the real deal.
Early on in my birth story reading (I literally read HUNDREDS of natural
childbirth stories to prepare), I learned a few things:
- Many first time births are start and stop and that I shouldn’t get excited and tire myself out
- “Signs” of labor are different for everyone and a “textbook” case is super rare. Everyone has different timing and I shouldn’t measure myself by an arbitrary birth measuring stick.
- Every contraction is working to do something, let your body work and keep loose…eliminate all tension
- Timing contractions is okay, but if you’re a Type A personality, it’s probably a mistake and will be a waste of your brain cells/energy/emotions (therefore, I never, not once, timed any single contraction, so everything I say is absolutely approximate)
- Bad back labor/pain probably meant that the baby was posterior (spine to spine)
Anyway. Like I said, I had totally psyched myself up for a
marathon 3 day labor. After a few times of this bed/bathroom thing, I gave up.
I figured. You know what. Sleep is not
going to happen for me. It’s NOT GOING TO HAPPEN. Instead of getting worked up
and upset that I can’t sleep, just be productive.
I also thought about my back labor. To be honest, back labor
was the one thing I was most fearful of. I know that posterior births take
longer, have a higher incidence of tearing, and are more painful because of the
back labor. The longer part was what worried me at the moment, because I
already felt like the back pain was unbearable. I couldn’t imagine going
through another day or 2 days of this, and then still having energy for
delivery. I used my iPhone to search how to flip a posterior baby. I tried a
couple of the things, which had me on all fours and resembled yoga positions.
It actually kind of helped with the pain too, in a small way.
Like y’all saw in the last post, I had made a lot of
tortillas. I decided I would go ahead and make bean/onion/cheese chalupas for
the freezer to have as a quick meal in the upcoming weeks. So, while having
some nasty back labor and contractions (now closer together maybe 5ish minutes apart? Who knows.), I
cooked.
At this point, I couldn’t stay stationary and I had to do a
little “labor dance” to get through the contractions. I would put my hands on
the counter and lean over and just move my hips back and forth. It didn’t
really help or lessen the pain, but it was something to do to get through it. I
also paced back and forth. At one point I also used the countertop to be
counter pressure against my back. (By the way, I never really felt much in my
belly, it was just firm…maybe the back pain was so much I couldn’t feel
anything else???)
It didn’t take long to make the chalupas, so I cooled them, wrapped
them up in 3 foil packages, and put them in the freezer. By this time, I was
thinking—hmmm I wonder if this is real
labor? Should I wake Chris up? This is starting to feel intolerable. No, I
shouldn’t wake Chris up because he is sick and he needs to rest. Plus if I’m in
real labor, at least one of us should get some sleep.
It was about midnight now, I think. I really made a point
not to look at the clock because it stresses me out to look at time while I am unable
to sleep, ignorance is bliss in this case. I remember praying and thinking
about Jesus and Mary a lot during this time, specifically Mary in the manger
giving birth in such nasty conditions, wondering how she dealt with labor.
Although she is without sin and was chosen at the beginning of time to give
birth to the Savior, God didn’t give her a “pain pass” on labor.
Once I finished the burritos, I was hoping to do something
else productive, but all of a sudden, contractions were happening so quickly
that I couldn’t do anything else. I was
down on the ground on all fours swaying my hips side to side. Again. Did this help with the pain? Nope. Why did I do it? No idea. Just instinct.
I really kind of felt like some kind of animal because I couldn’t really think,
I could only respond and relax. I remember thinking, this TOTALLY SUCKS! If I’m not in real labor right now, I don’t want to
know what the ‘real thing’ is like….I am an IDIOT! There’s NO WAY I can do this
for much longer. OMG I am totally going to wimp out and get pain medicine.
Self doubt is annoying, but I just kept doing the same thing
over and over, completely ignorant of how fast or slow time was passing. Eventually,
I heard Chris wake up to go to the bathroom. He must have seen that I wasn’t in
bed, so he opened our bedroom door and saw me bent over the table swaying in
pain. Bet he didn’t expect that…
I checked the clock and saw that it was 3 am.
Next up in G's birth story? 3 am-6 am. Stay tuned!
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