SmartassDad.com: Natural Childbirth - Part 3

You may have noticed that I haven't posted anything in 6 months.

But, see, it turns out that these damned little babies burn through your free time in a big way. You're awakened at 4:00 AM by a series of high pitched shrieks from down the hall, you're sucked into a whirlwind of screaming, poop, and hair pulling, and just when you've finally picked the last chunks of curdled breast milk from your chest hair, it's 1 AM, time for bed! I don't know if there's anything in the world that has such a devastating effect on your social life, free time, and finances.

Now that we've finally found a way to get our baby to sleep through the night, I've got the creativity and energy I need to share my accumulated six months of shit stories with my adoring readers.

But my last blog entry leaves some nagging loose ends. So let's tie this shit up and move on with our lives...

When I last left off, Heather was in hour 40 of labor, but only dilated to 4 centimeters. At the time, we were exhausted and dismayed that Heather had labored so long but had made so little apparent progress. Of course, now we know that Heather was almost done! Just 16 hours later Heather and I were saying hello to little Logan.

Now, when I wrote the previous two blog entries, just after Logan was born, I was full of trauma and anger. My plan was to intersperse what we were told at our birthing classes with a narrative of the birth to illustrate how our hopes and expectations were utterly, ironically disappointed from the moment we entered the hospital.

It's 6 months later now, and my outrage has lost its edge (plus, sleep-deprivation related psychosis has destroyed most of my ability to form new memories). So I'm abandoning my subtly self-pitying literary structure for an overtly self-pitying bullet point recap of the birth:

1) During our Bradley class, our instructor dedicated an entire class to the drug Cytotec. Specifically, how the drug will kill you and your baby. This was a stunning revelation; after all, why would the FDA approve a drug that was consistently fatal? But our Bradley instructor had proof, perhaps the only proof that could be offered for an accusation of this gravity: an uncomfirmable anecdote featuring no names, sources, or verifiable facts of any kind. According to this shocking story, a lady who doing just fine in labor was given Cytotec to speed up labor, and she and her baby were dead within minutes. Perhaps even more damning, the instructor revealed that Cytotec had never been proven 100% safe!

As you probably guessed, Heather and I, liberal egghead faggots that we are, proceeded to spoil things for everyone by making a lot of stupid arguments that nobody cared about. Like how a sourceless, context-free anecdote about one person doesn't constitute proof of any kind. Like how it's impossible to prove that anything is 100% safe, and that it's not even clear what that would mean ("Dear God! Vicks brand cough drops can be fatal when hammered directly into the skull! They're not 100% safe!"). Heather and I went home very, very annoyed that our instructor would pointlessly alarm pregnant women with illogical, unscientific nonsense.

Ironic twist: Guess what drug Heather was given to control postpartum hemmorhaging? <ding!> You guessed it: Cytotec!

2) Heather's labor took so long that the doctors became concerned that maybe the baby was turned in a funny way. A parade of nurses, midwives and OBs were brought in to determine the baby's position. These experienced professionals grew increasingly worried that the baby might be in a dangerous feet-down position that would require an immediate C-section. Heather sat through an agonizing emergency ultrasound during which two nurses could not locate the baby's head or feet. Things were starting to move in inexorably towards C-section when the lady who actually knew how to operate the ultrasound machine showed up.

Heather and I watched the screen as she instantly found the baby's feet (exactly where they were supposed to be, facing up), and ran the ultrasound down the length of the baby's body, showing us cross sections of the baby's feet, shins, knees, thighs, cock-and-balls - D'oh! So much for not finding out the baby's gender ahead of time.

Ironic twist: The labor took so long because the baby was in a weird position. He was face-up instead of face down. Not one of the nearly dozen people who had checked the baby's position had noticed.

3) The pushing part of Heather's labor took 4 hours, which is just about as long as pushing can possibly go before they cut you open. Heather was screaming like a wild animal, and sweating like a professional wrestler. Every muscle in her body was shaking from the constant effort she was making to push the baby out. Our midwife, Hagatha, repeatedly told Heather that pushing was taking so long because Heather just wasn't really trying.

Ironic twist: Of course she was fucking trying!

4) Heather ultimately ended up having a vacuum assisted delivery. Now, in Bradley class, we'd talked a lot about how to push slowly when the baby begins to crown, to slowly stretch the vaginal walls and prevent tearing. When the O.B. finally got the vacuum attached and did one good tug, the baby shot out like a cannonball. Heather experienced fourth degree tearing, which means that suddenly the only separation between her vagina and rectum was the biological equivalent of a strand of hastily hung police-line tape.

Ironic twist: Before she got pregnant, Heather would often loudly remark, "Boy, I sure am glad my vagina and rectum are topologically distinct spaces!"

There's a million bullet points like this. Nothing went the way we expected. We thought we would have a drug free delivery - Heather ended up getting pitocin to increase contractions and an epidural for pain (but Hagatha helpfully turned off Heather's epidural and turned up her pitocin once pushing began, so that Heather could experience the maximum possible agony). We thought it would be sublime and magical - it was traumatic and brutal. We thought that if we read enough books, if we did the right exercises, if we ate the right foods, if we followed the rules, we'd get the birth we wanted. We'd started to believe what our lefty hippy birthing books said: that birth was a beautiful, natural process that rarely (if ever) required the intervention of the greedy, power-mad medical establishment.

We were really fucking stupid.

Childbirth is a natural human process, but that doesn't mean it's beautiful. There are plenty of perfectly natural processes that result in bleeding eyeballs; the fact that mother nature is calling the shots doesn't make it pretty. Childbirth can be terrifying, and painful, and boring, and until very recently was a leading cause of death. And we knew that.

But we didn't want to believe that. Heather and I have lived our entire lives believing that if we worked hard enough, we could control the things in our lives that felt dangerous and out of control. And what's more dangerous and out of control than having a miniature Houdini attempt a daring escape from your high-security twat.

And once Heather and I had decided what we wanted to believe, it was easy to find a buttload of books to support it. And if we'd wanted to believe that bad feelings were caused by the disembodied souls of aliens killed in nuclear volcanoes, we could have found books to support that too.

So Heather and I were cruelly reminded of a fact we'd known for a long time, but had almost forgotten: many things, maybe most things, just can't be controlled. Sometimes, you can do everything right, and things still get fucked up.

<sigh>

The good news:

Our son, Logan Isaac, was born on August 22nd. He weighed 9 and a half pounds, and was 22 inches tall. We love that little guy with all our hearts.

But man was he a pain in the ass for the first four months.

Postscript: When Heather read through this post, she pointed out that some readers may be left with the impression that her vajayjay is now permanently wrecked. I just want to set the record straight: Heather's vagina is fucking awesome. I would go so far as to give it the Congressional Medal of Honor, or at least a prominent place in the Pussy Hall of Fame. In fact, it might be even better than it was before. Back in the day, Heather's vagina was happy, but it had never really had to work for anything. Now it's more than just a pretty face.

Comments

Kudos to all of you. And I'm so glad you're blogging again. You're harrowing anecdotes provide immense pleasure throughout my workday. Love you all so much. ~j

Posted by: Janelle Christie | March 07, 2007 at 10:25 AM