Leif Alexander: Part Two

Part Two: Labor and Delivery

It was shortly before midnight on February 10th, and my contractions were strong and consistently 6 minutes apart. I listened to hypnobabies tracks and tried to sleep, but I could not find a position that was comfortable for more than 10 minutes so I turned the light on and started to work on some logic problems from a magazine my mother had purchased for me earlier in the week. I had been working on a particularly challenging logic problem while waiting for my BPP earlier that evening, but the contractions were too intense even at that time and I had been making a lot of mistakes. So I chose an easy one – I needed a win.

Eric was lying next me, with his contraction timer Droid application in hand. We had gotten a pretty good system down where I would say “button” and he would respond “button on” while he turned it on, then I would say “button” again and he would respond “button off” while he turned it off.

My husband loves sleep. He could probably sleep through a plane landing on our house. So as the night progressed, he began to dose off a bit. Yet even in his half-sleep, he was hitting the button on and off, in between snores. I had already taken a hot shower with him supporting me earlier in the evening for pain management, and felt the need to take one again around 4am. He mumbled his agreement to go start the shower and then fell into a deep sleep. I had been hitting the button myself the last ½ hour or so, so I let it go and took my own shower. When I returned 40 minutes later and tried to slide into bed, he rolled taking up the entire bed and flailed his arm at me to stop bothering him – still completely asleep and probably having completely forgotten his wife was having a baby. That was the last straw.

“Eric! That’s it, go sleep in the guest room. I need to get some rest without you,” I yelled at him. He bolted up in bed with a start and asked me if I was ready for that shower. “Uh, I just took it myself, you were asleep.” “No I wasn’t.” “Check your phone, I was gone for 40 minutes.” He looked at the 40 minute break in recording on his phone and hung his head in shame. He moved to the guest room, and I got about 2 hours of snore-free sleep. I was actually awoken in the early morning by my mother’s snores from the sofa downstairs.

During the morning, Mom brought me water and cheese toast – but I could only take little bites. I had always been so excited that homebirth midwives encourage you to eat meals while in labor to keep your energy up. It’s important that your blood sugar doesn’t drop because you have starved yourself because your muscles – especially your uterine muscle – needs those calories to perform. But I found once I was in the heat of labor, I just wasn’t interested in food.

I passed the day mostly in bed, listening to hypnobabies, working on logic problems, or reading a magazine. The contractions were 4 ½ to 5 minutes apart, and we called Evelyn again around 5pm when I started to feel exhausted from 24 hours of labor. She came to the house to check my progress – I was 100% effaced and 3 cm dilated, and Leif had continued to descend. She was thrilled that I had gone from a mostly unfavorable cervix to fully favorable in 24 hours – but I was devastated. She had planned to leave and go to an evening event with a friend since I was not far enough along, but seeing how disappointed I was, she asked me to walk around the house for an hour. If I showed signs of progression, she would stay.

Our house is pretty tiny – with the first floor being a living room and kitchen only that open to each other at either end. So I walked around in a circle for an hour like a NASCAR racer with Eric supporting me through contractions. When she checked me again – I had dilated to almost 6 cm – the point in which I could get into the giant birth tub we had rented; and also the point when the birth assistant was usually called in.

Lori was the birth assistant on call that evening, and Evelyn’s niece Diane is training to become a birth assistant, so they asked if she could come and observe. I agreed, and they were called in while Eric and my mother began filling the birth tub – or spraying water all over the master bathroom and themselves until my mother could figure out how to properly attach the hose. When the 50 gallon hot water heater ran out, Evelyn had my mother boiling water on the stove and Eric brought it up pot by pot. But this made the water so hot that I could no longer get into it – so they had to cool it down by dumping more cold water from the bathroom hose in it. It was pretty funny to watch.

By 9pm everyone had arrived and I was in the tub – the first truly pain relieving activity. For the first 30 minutes, I could feel the pressure of a contraction, but no pain. After that, though the pain returned with increasing intensity, and I had to change positions often in the tub.

I had a lot of hot, searing pain in my pelvis, similar to round ligament pain but much worse. It did not seem like the descriptions of contractions I had heard, and it was so intense it made standing or sitting straight next to impossible. So I leaned forward on the edge of the tub yelling “Ouw, Ouw, Ouw” and tightening my shoulders up towards my ears. Lori, who had taken over coaching me when she arrived, suggested I say the word “Open, open, open” instead of “Ouw”. I knew it was a hypnobabies cue – but the searing pain was too intense for me to comply with a two syllable word such as this, so instead I changed to a long “O” moan like the chanting I’ve heard done at yoga. I don’t think it was exactly what she was hoping for, but it was better than before so she said, “Okay, good.”

I had been in the tub for several hours, and the water was getting cold. In addition, I was having double contractions – one right on top of each other, and an urge to push. Lori suggested that I might be in transition, so I got out for Evelyn to check. I was at 7cm – I hadn’t even begun transition. At that point I started crying. My mother had told me stories of how fast and easy both of her med-free labors had been, and I looked at her desperately for answers, “Why is this taking so long? What’s wrong with me?” I could tell from the look on her face how badly she felt for me, and she simply said back, “I don’t know, Trace. I’m really sorry.”

My mother had brought me some cake pops a few hours earlier. Everyone wanted me to eat, but I had no desire. I suddenly felt like I needed to throw up. I have always had a horrendous phobia of throwing up and will avoid vomiting at all costs. Lori encouraged me to try, as she and Evelyn were saying that the retching action actually helps to dilate the cervix. So I figured, what the hell, to Eric’s surprise since he knows how much I hate it. I did feel better after vomiting, but I was sorry that my last meal was mashed potatoes, cole slaw and cake pops.

Lori had been offering to do water papules on my back for pain control, and I continued to decline. I knew that these were very, very painful to receive and were not always effective. I felt like the searing pain may be due to constipation. I had had a bowel movement the day prior that had relieved similar pain, but Lori just kept assuring me that the urge push was a normal sensation. Finally I convinced her that this wasn’t an urge but rather a ripping sensation across my abdomen up my hip bones. Evelyn had given me a sheet of necessary home birth items a few weeks prior that recommended that I purchase an “optional” enema for this exact reason – but the thought of receiving an enema was terrifying to me so I had not purchased one. It was 3am, and I was ready to put aside my pride and try it. My mother found the only CVS in a 10 mile radius that was open all night and drove to get one.

While she was gone, Lori told me that up until this point, I had been avoiding pain and the guarding I was doing was stopping me from progression. “We’re going to embrace the pain now, and it’s going to get things moving,” she said. We were to walk up and down the staircase, two at a time, and each time I had a contraction I would stop with my legs straddled between stairs while Eric and she supported me. I had to do it for 30 minutes, she said. Eric was pressing hard into my sacrum each contraction to counter the pain, and Lori was pressing down on my iliac crest which seared with red, hot pain at each contraction. She suggested I listen to hypnobabies while we walked, but I was so agitated I couldn’t handle the outside stimulation. Just hearing people talking was agitating me.

Secretly I was bargaining with myself to do it for only 10 minutes, then 15, then 20. I had no intention of doing it for the full 30 minutes. But when my mother returned from the store about 40 minutes later, I had gotten into a groove and kept going. My phenomenally wonderful husband prepped the enema and administered it to me. I was embarrassed, but it instantly relieved all of the searing pain, and I was giving birth to his child, so I didn’t really care what he thought of me at the moment. Luckily, he felt the same way – he was willing to do anything to support me through the night. It worked so well, that my next several contractions were mostly just pressure in my back – no pain at all. I was at 8cm, and I got back into the tub for another hour. I was so hot and sweaty that everyone was bringing me ice cold, wet towels. I mostly kept my eyes closed for the entire hour I was in the tub to block out stimulation.

By this time, the back pain had become extremely intense again, and I was saying “I don’t think I can do this.” What I really meant was, “Take me to the hospital and get this baby out of me any way you can.” Everyone knew this was what I meant, but everyone also knew I didn’t really want that. I knew it too. Part of me was secretly hoping that if I kept saying it, there would be some medical reason – some need – to take me to the hospital to bring this all to an end. But the larger part of me knew that nothing was wrong; that my life lesson has always been one of perseverance, endurance, and patience (I hiked up Kilimanjaro – a 19,330 foot mountain – on an ankle that I previously broke and dislocated so severely that the original surgeon told me I’d be lucky to walk again). This larger part knew that if I really wanted to go to the hospital, I would be saying that – and I wasn’t. Every time I said, “I don’t think I can do this” Lori would say to me encouragingly, “You are doing it.” Or if she thought my mood was decent enough to handle a joke, she’d tease me and say, “Well, you really don’t have a choice ‘cause it’s happening – there’s a baby that can’t stay in there forever.” Lori played the role of my doula for the evening, and her perfectly timed words, thoughts and suggestions made the entire labor possible.

I got out of the tub around 4:30am. Everyone but Lori, Eric and I had taken a nap. Finally, I agreed to the water papules. The enema that I was so vehemently opposed to had worked so well, maybe this would too. Plus – having some water injected just under the skin on my sacrum couldn’t possibly be as painful as a needle and catheter put directly into my spine –and that was the alternative if I went to the hospital.

Evelyn started to prep while Lori, who had had water papules before, explained the procedure to me. There would be six papules placed in specific locations to confuse the nerve receptors. They would hurt, bad, like a bee sting. By the time Evelyn got to the third one, I’d beg her to stop – but I had to let her keep going because they are only effective if all 6 are in place. They’d continue to sting for another 2 minutes, and then for the next 2 – 3 hours I’d feel no pain.

And everything Lori told me was 100% true – except they only continued to sting for about 30 seconds, not the whole 2 minutes. I yelled, loudly, and squeezed Eric’s hand while Evelyn injected them. I counted down from 6. I never asked her to stop. I had a goal, and by golly I was gonna make it. I felt like I yelled too loudly, but Diane said the other women she had seen get this screamed so loud it hurt her ears. They would hit Evelyn or curse at her. Everyone felt I had been the best behaved recipient of water papules they had seen.

The pain was gone – zip, zilch, none. I felt strong contractions, but I felt no pain. I laid on the bed, on my side, turned on hypnobabies, and Eric and I slept between contractions for the next hour. It was the rest I needed before I began pushing. Upon waking, I got back into the tub to finish transition. The papules slowly wore off just as I was getting the urge to push again. I was beginning to get hysterical again – shaking and feeling faint. Lori, a trained homeopath, had been giving me various single remedies all evening for whatever was going on. I had been amazed how previously when I was shaking uncontrollably she had given me a particular homeopathic that instantly stopped the shaking. Now Diane ran down into the kitchen to get me some honey for energy. I had a spoonful – then another – and one more (I love honey).

I had wanted to deliver in the tub, but when Evelyn checked me again, I was at 10cm but had a cervical lip. Rather than making me wait and discouraging me further, she held it back while I lay on the bed and pushed. Diane began monitoring Leif’s heart rate every other contraction. Only once did it drop lower then they would have liked, and they slipped the oxygen over my face and into my nose, but his heart rate came back up and they never needed to turn it on.

I pushed for the next 2 ½ hours – but the time seemed to fly by for me. Pushing was not painful – it was strenuous and required me to really pay attention in order to engage the correct muscles (it’s not at all like bearing down for a bowel movement like I thought and until I figured this out, my pushing was ineffective) – but I liked that, it gave me something active to do. I shouted or growled with each push as hard as I could.

Prior to figuring out how to push effectively, I was getting frustrated and, for the first time during the entire labor, I snarled at Lori, “Get this fucking baby out of me.” She just laughed and said, “Okay, well yes, now we know how you feel.”

At some point while lying down and pushing, my water finally broke. I kept my eyes closed during most of the pushing in order to concentrate, so I didn’t even look down to see what had happened. I felt a gush of fluid and just knew, but didn’t care and kept going.

My calves were getting Charlie horses, so we moved to a squatting position on the bed, but that was even more difficult on my bad ankle. Lori had brought a strange looking stool that was built for pushing, and I sat on that for awhile. The sun was starting to come up, and they positioned the chair just in front of my windows with the curtains fully pulled back so I could get some sunlight. If my neighbors across the street weren’t such slackers who stay up all night drinking and smoking, they’d have gotten a really interesting show.

Evelyn could watch me and just get this sense when it was time to change positions. Finally, she said back to the bed. A few more strong, hard pushes and Leif was crowning. To inspire and motivate me, Lori grabbed my hand that was holding up my legs and said, “Feel your baby’s head.” But I was so exhausted that I feared if I let go of my leg, I wouldn’t be able to pull myself back into the position and I would “lose ground”, so frantically yelled, “No no no, I don’t want to!” This is perhaps the only regret I have for my entire birth. I did want to, but I was so afraid that I couldn’t stop now, and I didn’t know how to articulate that in a way that might have allowed someone to help me.

As he was crowning, the urge to push was stronger, but Evelyn wanted me to push more gently. I remember reading that, in order to avoid tearing while crowning, you can push in between contractions so this is what I did. And it worked, too – only once was the urge so intense during a contraction that I pushed really hard and got a very slight tear. It was so small it did not require stitches and was fully healed a week later.

Eric had been behind me, holding my head and shoulders up at each push. Evelyn told him that if he wanted to catch his baby he better come down here now – and in his excitement he just dropped me back onto the bed. But I didn’t care, I was as excited as he was to have him catch the baby. A few more pushes, and Leif’s shoulders and torso were out. I remember being surprised by the tension I felt with these two pushes. I think other women call it the ring of fire, but it wasn’t painful to me because Evelyn had been doing perineal massage the entire time I pushed. It did surprise me that the head wasn’t the only large body part, and I remember thinking this to myself. On TV, it always seems that once the head is delivered, the job is over and the baby just slips out. Silly TV.

As Eric caught Leif, an amazing thing happened. I suddenly remembered that I was having a baby. I know that sounds funny – but up until the moment I heard him crying and opened my eyes to see Eric lifting him towards me, the whole thing was just this “event” I needed to persevere through – like hiking to the top of Kili. I had felt alone – like no one who was going through what I was going through – and I had forgotten that there was a little person who had been going through it too, the entire time right there with me.

This realization instantly wiped clear the entire previous 40 hours of pain, frustration and discouragement. I reached out my arms as Eric lifted him to my chest and I said, “Hi baby!” with total delight. I wanted to welcome this little guy into the world and let him know that life was so wonderful.

Because it is – in that moment, I knew life was inherently good as my spiritual teacher says. Leif passed meconium all over me, and I didn’t care. I was bleeding heavily, and I didn’t care. Everything was wonderful and perfect.

Evelyn had given us a sheet a few weeks earlier entitled, “What to do if the baby comes before the midwife” in the case your labor is so fast you need to deliver unassisted. On the sheet, in capital letters, it says “BABIES ARE SLIPPERY. DON’T DROP THEM!” It was something Eric and I had joked about several times. And as I held Leif, I couldn’t help but laugh as I caught myself thinking, wow, he really is quite slippery. Eric later told me he thought the same thing to himself when he caught Leif.

Once the cord had stopped pulsing, Evelyn allowed Eric to cut it while I held Leif. A few moments later I delivered the placenta. They took Leif to the bottom of the bed, just below my feet and weighed him in a neat looking sling they referred to as a fish scale. Evelyn checked his breathing, heart rate, and APGARs. He was a perfect baby. My step-father had arrived just after I gave birth, and my mother dressed Leif in an outfit they had warmed in tin foil in the oven, then took him downstairs to meet Grandpop Chris. I called my father in New Jersey, who knowing I had gone into labor on Thursday evening but hadn’t heard from me since, had thought up all these terrible horrible stories of what might have happened to me. He was relieved to hear my voice, and to hear his first born grandson crying in the background.

The birth team packed everything up, and my mother served them lunch before they left. Leif slept in a family heirloom cradle in the bedroom, while Eric and I napped for a few hours nearby. And that evening, Leif was visited by his Uncle Jason, and Eric’s best friend Dave and his wife Alli. I called my brother, who also lives in New Jersey, and spoke to my sister-in-law Megan whom was due with their first child in another month and a half. I told her the story of our late, lazy Leif, who after 43 weeks and 1 day, and 40 hours of labor, was finally here.

My mother asked me, afterwards, if having been a homebirth, would I do it again. I knew instantly that I would. For all the whining and complaining I did, the moments when I thought my labor would never end, I knew that my birth experience was the best I could have ever dreamed up. There was never a moment that Leif or I were in any danger. I had the most wonderful support team – all five of them – whom were there through it all with me. I was in the comfort of my own home, on my own schedule, in my own bed (I love, love, love my bedroom - it is a relaxing, lush Moroccan suite). I knew that none of this would have been possible for me in the hospital. First off, I would have been forced to induce at 41 weeks, and with a completely unfavorable cervix at that point, I am sure it would have failed. Secondly, I don’t know any woman who has labored for 40 hours in a hospital, or pushed for 2 ½, without being told that the baby is just too big to come out and therefore a c-section is necessary. I knew that, for me, the homebirth allowed me to take my time and let my body do its work, and I felt fully recovered by the end of the week (except for some exhaustion from the blood loss that my phenomenal acupuncturist addressed with a Blood and Qi tonic formula).

Looking back, the hardest part wasn’t the pain -- the pain was more draining than it was actually painful, if that makes any sense. The hardest part was not knowing. When Lori told me flat out how much the water papules would suck, I could brace myself and just suck it up until all six were in. I explained to my mother that I think I would have done much better if someone had said to me prior to labor, “Look, this is going to take 40 hours. You’re going to have searing pain in your hips, and your body is just going to be very slow to progress” I would have thought to myself how much that sucks, but it would have made it easier to get through. So this is another reason I will homebirth my next baby – even if it does take just as long (which is not likely), I will already be prepared for a long, drawn out process, and knowing that will help me to stay focused.

Lastly, I will remember that I am not doing this alone. It is not just some “procedure” or “event” that no one in the room is sharing with me. It's not just a goal that I must reach. There is another little human being working just as hard as I am, and working with me, and knowing this makes all the difference in the world.