Labour Intensive
Our first baby was due on November 5th, 2019. Around 3:30am on November 6th, I started to wake, restless. I felt a few pains in my belly, a little discomfort, nothing serious. I dozed for about 30 minutes before I got up to connect with my body and see if the time had arrived. I sat on my couch in the dark and held my protruding abdomen, feeling it pulse more regularly. My husband awoke around 6:00am, and asked what I was doing. “I’m in labour”, I replied through the darkness, “You should go back to bed, we don’t know how long this will be.” If only I had known. Actually, it was probably better that I didn’t know.
The first day (yes, there were multiple days), we spent at home, in calm anticipation. We went for a walk, enjoying the unseasonably warm winter sun. A few times we had to stop for me to hold my husband’s hands tightly as I breathed through a contraction. I called one of my sisters, who upon answering the phone sounded more on edge than me (Side note: months earlier, when we told her I was pregnant over FaceTime, she took a deep breath, closed her eyes, and said “I am so ready for this.” It was adorable. I’m not sure she felt the same about me going into labour. Extra side note: When we told my other sister, she immediately burst into tears and started making a list of things we needed to get to prepare to be parents. Gosh, my siblings are so sweet and hilarious). When she calmed down a little, she enacted her plans to trek from her home 9 hours away to get to the Island to support us. I told her not to rush, that these things are unpredictable and could take time (again, if only). She rushed just the same.
The whole waking day passed. We spoke with our lovely Doula, Shannon, and assured her that we felt confident as a team to take on the night and that she should stay home and sleep in her own bed. We would call her at any hour if we felt we needed her. My sister arrived in the late evening and gave my husband a break from timing contractions and holding my hands. That was big for me. During the whole process, I needed to hold someone’s hands during almost all my contractions (that and breathing deeply, but more on that later). I would sub in a table or a counter top now and again, but what made me feel the most supported was holding tight to someone. It made me feel grounded and stable, and like I wasn’t alone. My sister told me later that the hardest thing was knowing she couldn’t do anything for my pain. My husband understandably sympathized, since he was the one I leaned on the most throughout the labour and birth.
We slept a stilted night, and awoke early the next morning to call our Doula, who arrived swiftly. Somehow, I wasn’t feeling incredibly tired, although I couldn’t eat or drink much at once. My husband was constantly following me around with a water bottle with a metal straw poking out reminding me to hydrate. For those of you who know the stages of labour, I was at this point still in Early Labour, and it had been over 24 hours. I had been coached to expect the entire birth process to take about 24-30 hours, so this was already going on a bit longer than expected. But what to do? What to do indeed. In my birth prep, I read stories about women who felt they had emotional blocks of sorts during their labours, and once they overcame them, they found progression more easily. I felt I had something holding me back. Around 10am, I told my husband to take a nap so he could refresh himself. I genuinely wanted him to rest, but I also felt that I needed a solely female presence to explore my block. I sat on the floor with my Doula, and asked if we could talk through how I was feeling. I didn’t yet know what it was that I needed to express, so I just let the words flow. My Doula was also our Child Birth Educator, and she does wonderful Prenatal Yoga classes, so we had spent quite a bit of time with her during my pregnancy. She has a warming energy that made me feel comfortable to explore what I was feeling. What ended up coming out was “I feel like I am failing, because this is taking so long.” I already felt like I wasn’t doing a good job as a Mother! Who isn’t surprised? You all know how I hate to be late. I felt like my body was failing my baby by not getting them out into the world in a timely manner. My Doula reminded me that however my labour was going to happen was the way it was meant to happen, and that I was not failing. Tears spilled over my face, as I breathed through my contractions and repeated to myself I am not failing. I felt the block break, and knew that I could move forward. (For anyone considering having a Doula present for your birth, I highly recommend it. It is wonderful to have someone there who is knowledgeable and committed to helping you and your partner through the process.)
We had already notified our Midwife team (we were to have a Midwife Student, Sarah, present for our birth as well) that I was in labour, and since I wasn’t yet in Active Labour, they asked me to come for our 2pm appointment at the clinic that was scheduled for that afternoon. Walking into the clinic panting and shaking every 8-10 minutes was not something I was interested in. There was a reason I told family ahead of time that I would be keeping labour notifications to a minimum - I didn’t want an audience. I mentally decided that we needed to move on. I ate, I breathed, I held hands, I changed positions, I threw up, I drank water, I willed my body to pass into the next stage. And it worked. I’m not saying it’s magic, but I am saying that women in labour are very powerful (Obvs, I mean we are pushing another human out of our bodies), and not just physically, but mentally. By the time 2pm rolled around, my contractions were closer together and I had reached Active Labour (4-1-1: One minute contractions, about 4 minutes apart, for an hour or more). Time for the hospital.
Now, our hospital here does not have access to an OB, nor any of the major labour interventions, including pain medication. No surgical team, no epidurals, none of the big stuff. It does have a lovely little birth room with a big tub, and great nurses. We decided to risk delivering on the Island because we really wanted our baby born here, in the same hospital as my husband. When we arrived, we met with our Midwife and Sarah, and I had an exam. Only 2 cm - I needed to get to 10 cm before any pushing could happen. They told me I wasn’t ready to be admitted and I had to go home. I was deflated. It had been about 36 hours and I was so tired. All my plans for an intervention-free birth were draining away as I considered what would make things move along. Making a birth plan is a great way to prepare, and to make sure you and your partner are on the same page, but don’t get hung up on it going the way you plan. Thankfully it was still early in the day, and there was an option: a morphine-gravol injection to ease the pain a little, and make me sleepy, so I could let my body get a little rest. Do it. Give it to me. I was drowsy by the time we got back to the car. I rested a few hours, waking for contractions, dozing in between, and we went back to the hospital. Another exam - 3 cm. Not much progress, but enough to encourage our birth team. It was up to us now, whether or not we wanted to stay on Island or head to the ferry to go to a bigger hospital. We decided to stay, and come back early in the morning and check progress again. I got another shot and we went home. I dozed in bed and my husband slept on the couch - and by slept, he said he mostly just laid awake and listened to me have contractions all night from the other room.
Friday - Day 3 - broke and we headed to the hospital around 5 or 6am. 7 cm - enough for our team to admit me and say I could stay if we wanted. We did. At this point, I had been in Active Labour for a long time, which meant I was having contractions every few minutes. I waddled about, always with someone helping me, from the bed, to the exercise ball, to the toilet (a surprisingly comfortable place to sit while in labour), always switching. The hours stretched on. I’m not sure when I went through the phase they call Transition before you start pushing, but it was as described to me - unpredictable and confusing. I was told mine went on for about 20-30 mins, but I had no concept of time. Or space, location of my body, whether I was conscious or not. I do remember feeling like I was dreaming, like I was going in and out of sleep, like I had exited the room. I knew I was talking nonsense, about things that were no where around or relevant, but I had no idea what I was saying. My husband told me at one point I looked at him and said “I don’t know what is happening to my body.” It was the only time during labour I felt totally out of it. I can’t describe it any better than that - it was supremely odd. When it ended, it was time to push. The sad thing for me though, which I only realized later, was that my contractions weren’t what I expected. I felt like I was losing them, like I couldn’t connect with them or the timing. I pushed for hours without any result. I got in and out of the tub and the bed. I squeezed my husband’s hands (sadly, my labour lasted so long our Doula had to leave to attend a critical appointment of her own, the one period of time she would be unavailable while I was pregnant) and prayed that it would change. Finally, our Midwife told me to stop, that they needed to call for a medical transport to Vancouver Island, as I wasn’t progressing. I should have delivered by now. My baby was head down, face backwards, which is ideal, but was crooked, so its shoulder was caught and in its current position, pushing could potentially endanger them. They called for an ambulance to take me to a ferry - none came, the ferry left. They asked for paramedics to take me to a water taxi - they actually did show up, but refused to take me since I had been in labour for so long, which in the end I was very grateful for. Then we were waiting for a helicopter - 45 mins, which turned into an hour and a half. Having very little concept of time at that point, I’m not actually sure how long this all took, but I think it was about 4-5 hours of them trying to coordinate something. The saving grace was that the baby was holding steady, no signs of distress. Me on the other hand…
This all sounds like it could be a bit traumatic so far, but honestly, the only time that felt really unbearable was the waiting during pushing. You can’t push pause on labour - it is happening whether you do anything to help it or not. Eventually, what I think of now as my “real” pushing contractions showed up, and I sure could feel them. They wracked my whole body, as with each one I curled around myself as I felt my body’s mammalian instinct for birth continue. I was given a gas mask hooked up to a tank of Nitrous Oxide (laughing gas) to help with the pain. But either it wasn’t hooked up properly or I drained the tank, or something (basing this on it feeling like it did absolutely nothing and on the fact that after the birth, they gave me a new tank which made me feel immediately woozy), because all that I found helpful about it was having somewhere to scream into. My Midwife told me to pant through the pain, which was good advice to save my throat. My body continued to attempt to expel the baby as I lay there doing nothing. My poor husband could only watch me writhe, and beg me to drink water and eat a few almonds at a time. We timed out the shift of the nurse who was attending us. She told me I should run marathons and kindly wished us luck. A new nurse started, Kelly-Ann, who clearly had done this many times, and ended up being a star support.
I said earlier I would touch more on breathing. Everyone apparently focuses on something different during birth to get them through. For me, it was breathe. Whether that was just my preference, or it was because I had done prenatal classes that really focused on breathe, I’m not sure. That is where my strength came from though. In and out. Strength in, Love out, that is what my mantra was. I couldn’t bring myself to eat much, but I knew breathe would guide me. When you push, you have to hold your breathe so you can bare down and not let all your effort blow out your mouth. It was with this strength that our baby was finally born.
Around 4:30 pm, in my 61st hour of labour, my Midwives did another exam, and said that my body had passively (aka through a few hours of body wrenching contractions) moved the baby enough that they were comfortable letting me push. I wasted no time. The next contraction came and I went for it. Lift your legs they said! With what energy?! My husband and Kelly-Ann each took a leg. Only a few pushes in, my Midwife said she needed to give me an episiotomy , which would be only the 3rd of her fifteen year career. The baby needed more room, and it needed to come out. Staring at the needle of freezing and imaging the knife, in my head I just thought “No.” I held my breath. Push one, a head. Push two, and our baby was out. I held my breathe so tightly and pushed so hard, that I burst so many blood vessels in my face and neck it looked like someone had spritzed me with burgundy paint. After all that, I am fairly certain it only took about 10 minutes and 5 pushes. It was fast and furious. A Baby Boy! Born at 4:41pm, November 8th 2019, in the Salt Spring Island Lady Minto Hospital.
I didn’t hear my baby. They had tossed him on my chest for mere seconds before whisking him away. My husband and I agreed ahead of time that no matter what happened to me, after the birth he was to go with our child. I watched him rush to the table with the nurse as she administered some resuscitation. By the sounds of things, he had tried to knit a sweater with his umbilical cord, and had it wrapped twice around his neck, under each arm, and around his abdomen. Thankfully, he didn’t need much additional help, and was breathing and crying on his own in minutes. Our baby was here, and by all accounts so far, a healthy little guy. He was little though - 6lbs 8oz, which for his gestational age was only in the 6th percentile of weight. That had been a concern while he was in utero, but considering he came out just fine, and my husband had been nearly 10lbs at birth, I was quite happy with his size.
There is truly no way I can express the relief my body felt after he was born. I still had to deliver my placenta, which was painful but felt quick. My whole body relaxed, and my magical post-birth hormones kicked in. I had energy and light and was just so happy. I was talking and cracking jokes. My husband and sister, who we saw a few hours later, couldn’t fathom how. I was just high. I honestly think the whole ordeal was more emotionally exhausting for my husband than it was for me. He had to watch it all, plus, felt helpless against the pain of the person he loved the most. And not sleeping for 3 days also didn’t help. He was exhausted. He was a champion birth partner. I was so, so lucky to have him committed to me with such devotion and kindness. Thank you, my darling.
We still got transferred to Victoria, as Baby Boy Williams (as he was known for two weeks) and I both needed some extra post-birth care. Nothing terribly serious, but more than our little hospital could offer. We stayed at Victoria General Hospital for four nights, surrounded by an awesome team of Nurses and Doctors who were at our beck and call for every possible new parenting question we had. The stay there is a whole other story, but aside from being away from our own bed, it really was great; like having training wheels on for our first few days as parents. Even though we were both feeling pretty confident about it already, it was lovely to have so much support.
Did I need to share a 3,000 word account of this event? Probably not, but I wanted to have it for myself anyways, plus, I have had several people ask for it. If you made it all the way to the end and still want children, I commend you. And can honestly say, that although the details are fresh enough in my mind (many of which I omitted for length), the memory of the pain has completely faded away. I can remember it being there, but not what it felt like. It is so temporary, and a small price for what you get on the other side. I truly enjoyed carrying a child, and although the birth was a little more than I bargained for, I feel stronger knowing I made it through. And for any Mamas-to-be out there - if you have questions, reach out! Building your tribe of supportive parents is so important.
I don’t intend for all my pieces going forward to be about Motherhood, but it is bound to creep in as I learn on the fly, and am challenged in new ways. Like the fact that my baby is 3 months old today (or was, when I was able to write this!), and this is only the second time I have made space to write since he was born. His name is Weston, by the way, and he is an amazing little being. I love him so wholly. We have embraced being a tiny, sleep-deprived family. Every day our house is full of love and adventure (and diapers). Some days are challenging, some are bliss. Each day is new, and unpredictable, as is our future. All we know, is that we are in it together, and we couldn’t be happier.