This is the second version of this story. The first version, written by our dear friend Isabel on our behalf, reflects the bare bones and the "everybody's happy" version that most cesarean patients have in the days right after the birth.
This, however, is the raw version; the version written after most of the pain had bubbled up.
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| This birth started out problematic from the beginning. For about 8 years, I'd been seeing a CNP (I'll call her KC) for my general care, yearly paps, etc. It had never mattered that her specialty was infertility, because fertility had never been my issue. Then, the big change came, we decided to have a baby. I went in to get my IUD removed, and sit and chat with KC about the birth process. I sat there in shock as this woman who I'd been trusting for 8 years spewed information about infertility, about my age (I was 32) being a factor, about how if it took me more than three months to conceive, I obviously had a problem and needed to come back for treatment. Condemned before I even tried! |
| Four months later, I missed a period. Started feeling weak and nauseous. Breasts started swelling. Started being ravenously hungry all the time. Tried a home pregnancy test, which was negative. Missed another period. Called KC, and went in for a blood test. It also came back negative. KC mentioned psychosomatic pregnancy. I went home and raged. Finally, right before what would have been the third missed period, I went in for an ultrasound. And lo and behold, there was the baby. "Wow!" said KC "that baby's HUGE! Are you sure you have your dates right?" She then estimated a due date of July 7th, but joked that knowing me, I'd hang on until July 14th. This was in total disregard for the date of my LMP. And I fought that date through the rest of my pregnancy. Immediately, what I knew about my body, that I was pregnant, was *nothing* in the face of a negative blood test and a hurried ultrasound. My own calculated due date was June 15. |
| DH and I agreed that KC was not going to be a good provider for me. So, we started shopping midwives. We plowed through three separate sets of providers, for various reasons (insisting on separating me from my baby, insisting that DH couldn't be in the room, insisting on an IV, "just in case"). We read and read, we educated ourselves. I have always been athletic, and I continued working out, even though I got told by more than one idiot that I was endangering my baby and my pregnancy by doing so. |
| Finally, I found not only a fairly cool doula, but a freestanding birth center. Looking back now, I realize I was scared, and desperate, and willing to overlook things. The birth center and their staff definitely talked the talk. They were welcoming, positive, and concerned. They said everything I wanted to hear. I was sold. |
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| There were three midwives there, AW, VR, and RG. RG was the matriarch, the founder of the center, and an intensely political woman. AW and VR were fresh out of midwife school, and while I liked VR well enough, something about AW bothered me from the beginning. "Oh well", I told myself, "only one chance in three I'll get stuck with her when the time comes." |
| Things started to go downhill. For some gut-feeling, I had resisted doing a glucose-tolerance test. At my appointment with VR, she begged, she pleaded. She ranted. She insisted. And since all I had against it was a gut feeling, I finally caved and did it. Sure enough, my results came out a little high, requiring the next level test (which came back negative. All was, as I suspected, just fine). When my next appointment was with RG, and I complained about this testing, she looked at me like I was an idiot, and said "well, if you'd refused, it wouldn't be a problem, but once you allow tests, we're legally required to follow through." Classic blame-the-victim stuff, and if I had known then what I know now, I'd have run for it. But I stuck it out. |
| Eventually, my (internal) due date came. And sure enough, I started having regular, pretty intense contractions. Because I am an athlete, and a freediver, I am very good at breath control, and very good at telling my body what to do. I breathed through the contractions by "breathing inside", pretty standard freedive stuff. I also have a very high pain tolerance. We called my doula, and she came over and we went for a walk. Actually, we went for a three-mile hike, and by the time we were done, the contractions were solid and felt pretty good. I called the midwife-on-call, who much to my chagrin, was AW. I explained my situation to her and she snapped back with "You can't possibly be in labor, you don't sound like you're in enough pain. Get some sleep, and come to the Center in the morning to get checked." I hung up, in shock...and sure enough, the contractions stopped. I had been successfully shut down. |
| The next morning, DH and I went to the center, where AW was the midwife doing checks. I climbed painfully up onto the exam table, and without warning, discussion, anything, AW rammed her finger into my cervix. I screamed, and dug my arms into DH's arms. Totally ignoring this, AW calmly said "you're not dilated, nothing's going on, you're not in labor. I climbed down in shock, went home in shock, wasn't terribly surprised to find blood in my underwear for a few days. |
| For the next three weeks, I went into labor every morning, and by the evening, the contractions trickled off into nothing. I was miserable, I was uncomfortable. And I was gaining weight...Had another checkup with RG, who discovered that my fundal height was now 42, up two cm in two days. She panicked, and sent DH and I for an emergency ultrasound, sending us out the door with the injunction that "if they find that you have too much fluid, you can't birth here." BAM! Just like that, my hopes for a non-hospital birth were gone, and I choked back tears of panic and frustration the whole way to the hospital. |
| Once there, we waited. And waited. We were escorted to a room. And waited some more. Hooked up to a monitor, and then, we waited. Finally got sent down to the ultrasound department, where a very pleasant tech explained that they would divide my belly into quadrants, estimate the amount of fluid, and then decide my fate. They tested, I stressed. I called the Birth Center to have them explain my results to me, and VR explained that excess fluid "could mean nothing, or could mean that your baby has life-threatening birth defects. We don't know." I was left to think about that... |
| This dance went on for weeks. My fluid got tested every few days, and eventually, went back down to a "normal" level. I was reassured that this was just a freak thing, and that I could go ahead and have my baby there at the Center. I was leaking clear fluid, and had asked for it to be tested, but no one was willing. I was told it was just discharge. I knew better, but lacked the energy to insist. People on the street were asking me when I was going to deliver, because I was huge huge huge. And I wondered that myself. Through this all, my doula was telling me that AW was the midwife on call, and would be for the next two weeks, so I should try to stall. |
| I don't really remember when my labor really finally started. I'd been having "false" contractions for nearly a month. And they just got steadily stronger. I got checked. I got checked again. "You're not progressing" they said. I demanded that the fluid trickling out of me be tested, and sure enough, it was amniotic fluid. "Oh!" VR said "I guess you must have ruptured up high, and that's probably what all the extra fluid was about." Finally, VR said "let's break your waters and see what happens, if we can get this moving or not." I didn't know any better, so I let her. And the pain became excruciating. "Go Walk" they said, so we did. And finally, I just couldn't any more. And they grudgingly allowed me to stay at the center. |
| My contractions just continued. They weren't rhythmic, like I'd been led to believe, they were constant. Huge pain, followed by slighter pain, followed by huge pain again. I crawled into the birth tub the split second I could...and then the real horror began. I screamed. I bellowed. I couldn't have a contraction in any position but standing, rocking my hips. Any other position, and I felt the muscles were going to snap me in half. And the pain subsided when DH pressed on my hips... |
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The midwives (VR and RG) basically left DH and I alone, to tough it out. My doula flitted in and out, but was for all purposes useless. I was never positioned. I was never assisted. They jammed an IV into my wrist, because I was taking too long. Dilation took forever...from 6PM until 2AM, I progressed from 4 cm to 9 cm. I was in howling pain, and exhausted from neither eating nor sleeping for the previous three days, and from all their assnine "take a walk" advice. It got so bad that I was falling asleep between contractions, DH holding my head up so I didn't drown (I did slide under the water, unconscious, twice. I remember wanting to die). I tried climbing out of the tub, and the next contraction had me sobbing in agony, so back into the tub. |
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| This whole time, RG is sitting out in the waiting room, completing paperwork for another birth that had just happened at the center, and chatting with my mother and sister. Just after one particularly brutal and piercing yell of mine, RG looked up and commented "I hate working with these athletic women, they always have rotten births. Give me a big, doughy relaxed woman any day." |
| At 3 AM, VR came back into the room, from her nap (yes, her nap!!!). Yawning, she said "you've had enough, we're going to the hospital. You aren't progressing, and this has to stop." Crying, I got out of the tub, we got me dried off and put together, and DH drove me to the hospital. |
| We arrived before the midwife or the doula. The hospital staff was kind. They were fast. They got me set up and settled in in record time. They got the anesthesiologist to my room, and got an epidural into me. |
| The plan, once VR finally showed up, was to let me sleep for four hours (from 3:30AM until 7:30 AM), and start a pitocin drip at 7, while I was still numb and sleeping, so that I could wake up, refreshed, and take over pushing again. That sounded fabulous to DH and I, so we both fell asleep... |
| ...to be awakened by a flurry of activity by my bedside. The pit was having no effect. None. No contractions at all. Everyone was crowded around the monitors, talking, but not to me. They increased the pit rate. Nothing continued to happen. The nurses started to worry. I looked blearily at the tangle of IV tubing and pointed to one of the lines. "Is that supposed to be dripping onto the floor?" |
| Everything stopped. They all stared at me...and at the tube of medication, and at the sizeable puddle on the floor. One of the nurses looked at the puddle, winked at me, and said "well, I guess that hunk of floor is going to be about two inches smaller...". They moved the parade out the door, and I fell back asleep... but woke up to find the nurses unplugging, unlocking, and unhooking everything. |
| "Are we going somewhere?" I said. |
| "We're taking you for your emergency cesarean," they said. |
| "WHAT????" |
| No one had been consulted. My midwife, asleep down the hall someplace, was not involved, and I asked them to go wake her up and talk to her. Once updated, she agreed that an emergency c-section was in order. I asked her how strongly she felt about it. "Well, they've bumped two people to get you in. Either you have it now, or you wait two hours, risk your baby, and have the section then." |
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| I was in surgery a few minutes later. There had been no time to call my mother, my sister, or my (useless) doula, who had all left to get some sleep. The obstetrician, an elderly gent who had delivered an awful lot of babies (I later found out he had a 40% cesarean rate in his own practice), reached into my incision, felt the size of the baby's head, and said, "Oh my God!" He joked with me over the drape, he asked me how I was doing. He was kind, he was solicitious, and he was apologetic. He involved me in the process, while VR stood there, mute, an observer. He muttered, quickly "this should never have happened" as he lifted my baby up for me to see. At 8:38 AM, Wednesday July 17th, my 10 pound baby boy was brought out of me. |
| Everyone was giving me a running commentary. As they pulled out, fussed over, exclaimed upon, and cleaned off my baby, they told me all about it. I finally snarled, "if you'd hand me my f-ing child, you wouldn't have to f-ing tell me about it, would you!" So finally, my son and I were properly introduced. I was crying as he looked me straight in the eye, and moved to my breast. He latched on in a split second, and DH stopped them from unlatching him. He nursed while the doctors stitched me back together behind the drape. The nurses then intervened, and whisked my baby off to the nursery, "so you can recover." The convulsions so common after an epidural had started in, and I couldn't hold my baby anyway. DH, with one panicked glance at me, said "What do I do? Are you OK?" "You stick with him!" I yelled, and then they were off down the hall with my baby, and I was rolled into a recovery room. |
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I begged VR to tell my mother and sister that I was OK, and that I wanted them in recovery with me. She said she couldn't argue with the nurse, who insisted that I be left alone (apparently, my blood pressure dropped very low. But it can't have been that bad, because I never lost consciousness). So there I was, alone, for a solid hour, in shock, in grief. To this day, I have never seen any of the midwives again. |
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| Meanwhile, in the ICN, my baby's blood sugar was abnormally low -- not surprising, after such a long workout. The ICN nurses asked DH if he wanted them to feed the baby intravenously or with formula. After seeing what they had done to me, he didn't want them to start an IV on our baby, but he felt he was out of his depth. So the nurses fed my baby formula and took frequent blood samples to test his blood sugar. My doula didn't even bother advocating for them to allow me to feed my baby, or for them to bring him to me to be warmed. His blood sugar improved but he was completely nipple-confused and his heels were peppered with lancet wounds. |
| Finally, three hours later, he was brought to me.
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| I asked the nurses about breast-feeding support. They said there was a lactation consultant down the hall. The lactation consultant refused to see me, because I was a clinic patient not a hospital patient, and RG had been quite hostile to them before about similar territorial squabbles. The politics were so bad that they were willing to let me sit there with a squalling, starving little baby, and just let it happen. Thus, I had to call RG, who showed up in 30 minutes, and within an hour had helped to correct the damage so that my baby could finally nurse. |
| A second patient was assigned to the room the second day, so DH couldn't stay the night (hospital policy, for privacy, HA!). And because I was "in recovery", I was not going to be allowed to have my baby room with me. Finally recovering my anger, if not my total strength, I snarled at enough people that I was released from the hospital a mere 42 hours from being admitted. And went home, finally able to concentrate on my baby. |
| Looking back on it, and on some quick and quiet conversations that happened after I was in my room again and at some subsequent checkup visits, I am pretty sure that the nurse didn't connect the pitocin on purpose. I have discovered that that birth center is pretty notorious amongst the local medical community, for letting things get as bad as they were with me, and that I was not the first woman they'd seen admitted in similar straits. Nearly every member of the hospital staff that had worked with me came by to visit, to say hello, to tell me what a gorgeous baby I had. To this day, I have not heard a peep from the midwives. At my followup visit, I grilled the surgeon about what had happened. He said, straight out, that it was a small town and he couldn't say much, but that in his opinion, "this doesn't have to happen next time." |
| So how has this changed me? I am much less trusting than I ever was. I have a better understanding of my limits, and a raging hatred for those who sought to impose limits upon me when I was weak, who told me I wasn't progressing...but what is 9 centimeters dilation, if not progress? I have a face to put to those who place their own political standing above the health and well-being of those in their care. And above all else, I have more faith in myself than I ever had before, because now I have a clear picture of what happens when you place your faith in someone else when it truly rests with you.
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