CW: Contains descriptions of traumatic childbirth / medical emergency. Mom and baby survive!
February 17th. One year ago today, at 11am, my spouse and I were arriving at the hospital for my scheduled induction. In a little under 24 hours, we would meet our son - who is now an incredibly active, adorable almost-birthday-boy. I’m excited to celebrate his birth tomorrow, but today my attention is called to what happened between checking in to the hospital, and welcoming our baby to the world. I wonder - how do you allow yourself to feel grief over an experience, when that experience brought you the best thing in your life? I could not be more grateful to know my son. I know this - so why does mourning the birth experience I could have had feel like ingratitude? A (very loud) voice says that I should be thankful we both survived the experience with our good health intact. Move on. Chin up, there’s work to be done. For the last year, that’s been especially true - as a new Mom and working parent, I don’t have a ton of time for reflection. But the experience is still there, waiting to be acknowledged.
Our arrival at the hospital came after a weeklong whirlwind of uncertainty following a preeclampsia diagnosis at 36 weeks. Up to that point, I had received prenatal care at a local birth center, and my intention was to deliver there - attended by the same midwives who had cared for me throughout my pregnancy. Now, I was told I would need to be induced at a hospital at the earliest possible opportunity, for my health as well as the baby’s. I had tried not to have too rigid of expectations of my labor experience, as I knew that things could change rapidly and unpredictably during birth, but this was certainly not in my plans. Plus, I had been undeniably drawn to the potential experience cultivated at the birth center: access to a birthing tub, a real bed, and numerous tools for natural pain management. An environment of warmth, peace, and calm; A welcome change from the clinical environment necessitated by our conception experience.
My pregnancy could be characterized as pretty smooth sailing, until the very end when things took a sudden and dramatic turn. There were the typical discomforts, of course - nausea in the first trimester, rib pain in the third - but in general it was a remarkably unremarkable pregnancy. As someone with anxiety, I am often waiting for the proverbial other shoe to drop. After the relative ease of my pregnancy, the forced change in plans felt almost… natural. The voice in the back of my head wondered “Did I really think I would get away with it?" and "Was I really dumb enough to trust my body with this?”
Just like my pregnancy, everything about my induction was fine (easy, even) until suddenly it very much was not. We were warned in advance that an induction can take days, sometimes up to 24 hours before you even reach active labor. However, I arrived on the morning of my induction already 1cm dilated and 70% effaced. I was given my first dose of misoprostol at 1pm, followed shortly by a foley bulb insertion. My labor picked up rapidly, and I was ready to push after just 15 hours. I pushed… and pushed… and pushed, and after 3 hours, it was determined that Baby’s head was rotated about 45 degrees to sunny-side up. Basically, he wasn't in a good position to come out on his own, no matter how well I pushed. The on-call OB was paged, and she suggested a vacuum delivery. There would be 3 attempts with the vacuum before moving on to a Cesarean. The room, which had previously only held a nurse or 2 at a time, was suddenly very full.
At this point, my memory starts to get fuzzy, but I know there were only 2 attempts made before we were moved to the OR. I found out after the fact that I had begun to lose blood at an alarming rate, and the baby’s heart rate was decelerating. As I was being wheeled down the hallway to surgery, someone I couldn’t see was explaining the risks associated with a C-Section. I remember saying "okay" whenever there was a pause and it felt like I was supposed to respond. A part of me was aware that I was in shock and not taking anything in, and I just had to trust the people around me to do what needed to be done.
A very friendly anesthesiologist placed IVs and weighted my arms down to reduce the shaking. He was doing his best to keep me present and engaged by making jokes and asking about my tattoos. I remember feeling slightly guilty that I couldn’t answer him. Meanwhile, my spouse was left in the delivery suite with a pool of my blood, waiting for scrubs. I didn’t realize we had been separated until Sami seemingly materialized by my head right before the first incision. There were a few minutes of violent tugging (to date the strangest thing I’ve ever felt) as our sweet boy was pulled feet-first back through the birth canal and out through my belly. At 8:59am on February 18th, the tugging stopped. We heard one tiny, frail cry, followed by silence. After a short eternity, he was brought around the drape - just close enough for me to reach out and touch his face. A nurse snapped a photo so we could commemorate our first moment as a family. I couldn't touch my baby, and my body was shaking all over. But he was out. He was breathing, and beautiful. We were alive.
Within moments, our newborn was whisked away to the NICU for evaluation because his APGAR score was low. Sami went with the baby while I was stitched back up, but they were immediately separated again for testing. I spent an unclear amount of time (at least an hour) waiting in recovery before a sympathetic veteran NICU nurse brought them both down to see me, and our little family was together again. Every time I think about my son’s first few hours of life, I want to cry. I know he won’t remember it, but it hurts to think about him all alone. No skin-to-skin, no gentle lights or calming noises - just cold, sterile, and lonely. I spent my first moments of motherhood in and out of consciousness - frightened and similarly alone. My spouse was being pulled in two directions, and was ultimately prevented from being with either of us. For lack of a better word, it sucked. It sucked even though we ended up being okay. Even though it could have been worse - and for many parents, it is worse - It just sucked.
Throughout my pregnancy, we took a series of prenatal and newborn care classes at our birth center. At one such class in my third trimester, we did the following activity:
Take 6 post-it notes, and write out any potential outcomes you would like for your birth experience.
On the reverse of each post-it, write the ‘opposite’ of that outcome. For example, ‘water birth’ might become ‘hospital transfer,’ or ‘no stitches’ might become ‘significant tearing.’
At the facilitator’s direction, flip over each post-it, and discuss how each change would affect your experience.
The goal of the exercise is to figure out what is essential to your experience, and what you could potentially do without. At the end of the activity, there were 2 post-its I was unwilling to leave turned over. One read “Healthy Mom and Baby.” The other read “Sense of Safety and Control.” I knew that those were the only things I really needed in order to be okay. A year out from the experience, I’m still left with the question of what to do with the fact that it was not okay. I did not get to maintain my sense of safety or control. For a while, there was a very real risk that there would not be a healthy Mom or Baby.
Tonight, I'm making quesadillas while our almost-one-year-old sleeps peacefully in the next room. Things are good - honestly, we’re thriving. But a year ago, I had to confront our mortality (mine and my child's) in a terrifying way, and that trauma is not resolved. Maybe it’s a step for it to simply be acknowledged.
Comentarios