MiTHology (4.0)

As you may have noticed, I haven’t posted on this blog in over a month – not because I’m done with blogging, but because I was busy having a baby. My fourth kid was born earlier this month. Now, I don’t typically like to share a lot about physical stuff. But I thought I’d share my birth story on here, because for the first time I feel like I got it right, and am actually proud of how it went, and feel like it could potentially be useful to someone.

In the third trimester I spent a lot of time reading birth stories as I tried to mentally prepare myself; so, I figure I’ll pay it forward or whatever and go ahead and share mine for any mom out there who might happen to be reading this as she prepares for her own birth.

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Four days before my son was born, I went to confession, which I try to do every two-to-three weeks regularly. This time, the priest was one that I’d never been to confession with before. And for penance, he assigned me a prayer I’d never been assigned before, in my ten years of being Catholic: the Anima Christi prayer.

Of course I was familiar with the prayer, but it wasn’t one that I had memorized or anything. So as soon as Mass was over, I looked it up and prayed it and studied it. I was 39 weeks pregnant, and really nervous about labor for some reason, even though this was my fourth baby. I thought to myself: maybe this prayer will be a good tool to bring into labor. I repeated the first three lines over and over in my mind on the drive home, and over the coming days.

Why was I so nervous about birth? If you’ve read my post on epidurals, you already know a little about my previous three birth experiences. I’d never had a purely unmedicated, all-natural birth. My first was an induction, and even though I didn’t get an epidural, I did get IV pain meds to help me cope (fentanyl, and it didn’t even help much anyway, lol). My second was surgical. My third, my VBAC¹, I had intended to go all-natural, but got discouraged and gave up, and ended up getting an epidural right at transition. So I was haunted by feelings of failure and inferiority, like I was not a real mom somehow.

Was I going to be able to do it this time? Doubt. Maybe I shouldn’t even bother trying. I’d been reading “Made For This” by Mary Haseltine, as well as re-reading Ina May’s guide, and feeling called out and accused by every word on the pages, feeling like a failure as a woman and a Catholic; I was sure that I would end up tapping out again. I couldn’t do it; I already knew that. But, Mary Haseltine suggests embracing that: accepting and admitting that we can’t do it on our own, and totally surrendering to God. I didn’t know if I could do that or not.

The same author also suggested offering up your labor for a specific intention. I figured I could do that, in any case. I read a lot of advice and tried to internalize it all. Basically, I lost a lot of sleep, and said a lot of prayers. I tried to focus on preparing myself mentally. Because I knew that having an all-natural birth would be more of a psychological than physical feat.

I had certain expectations. I expected that I would go into labor on or around my due date, which was the coming Saturday. I expected that it would be very similar to my labor with my third, which began slowly, with very mild contractions that gradually intensified. I expected that it would be slow and grueling. For personal reasons, I did not want to have a baby on Wednesday; that was incredibly important to me, and I’d lost sleep over this too. Any day but Wednesday! (Don’t ask me why.) I’d do anything to avoid having a baby on Wednesday!

Then, Tuesday night, out of nowhere, my water broke.

Well, I say “out of nowhere,” but it wasn’t really. I guess I hadn’t recognized the signs. I’ll describe some of those signs just in case you’re curious.

I had gestational diabetes in this pregnancy, which was easily diet-controlled, and I’d noticed for the past week that my glucose numbers had suddenly dropped a lot. Things that typically spiked my blood sugar no longer did. It was like I could suddenly throw caution to the winds, with food, if I wanted to; I was actually afraid my monitor was broken or something. Apparently, this is a sign that labor is about to start. But I didn’t want to believe it.

Also, I’d been queasy for days, with a very low appetite, experiencing waves of nausea that got a little worse on Tuesday. I thought nothing of this, because I’d had a stomach bug at 38 weeks, which had me incapacitated for two or three days, and after it passed, I simply didn’t fully recover. The nausea stuck around. It was like I was back in the first trimester. I assumed I was just having a hard time shaking the stomach bug.

And I was in an absolutely shitty mood, that Tuesday. I had no patience, snapped at the slightest provocation, was irritable with my kids, and generally a crappy mom. It was like PMS. But, I assumed that it was just fatigue, and the damned stomach bug getting to me.

Despite feeling like crap, I also had this mad wave of productivity on Tuesday afternoon. I had to clean the upstairs. There was going to be a baby sleeping there soon, I needed to clean it! So I went into a cleaning frenzy for a few hours, and got the whole upstairs relatively sparkling (for a house with two toddlers and a kindergartener, that is). I assumed this was just normal third trimester nesting.

So those were the warning signs that I was ignoring. I assumed I had more time. I hadn’t even finished packing my hospital bag! Like I said, I was expecting to have plenty of warning before time to head to the hospital; with my third, I was in early labor for about a day and a half before I even felt uncomfortable. I was waiting to pack stuff until the actual signs of labor showed up.

Well, but then, like I said, at about a quarter to nine, my water broke.

What the hell? What the helly?! This had never happened to me before. With my first, my water didn’t break until I was already having painful contractions, and then it was only a cautious trickle; my third, the OB manually broke my water at seven centimeters, to move things along. I had never before experienced this Hollywood-esque moment of being surprised by a sudden gush of water out of nowhere. And on Tuesday night, of all nights?!

There went my plans! So much for not having a baby on Wednesday. I was GBS positive², so I knew that I had to get to the hospital ASAP, and that there was no way this baby would be arriving any later than a day from now, but also no way they’d be arriving before midnight tonight.

I’d also been hoping that labor might, for once, not happen overnight; I was really hoping it’d start during the day this time, when I was awake and alert, so that I wouldn’t be going into it with zero energy; but alas, here we were again.

It did not bode well. Furthermore, I wasn’t even having painful contractions yet. I knew from reading zillions of birth stories that it was almost never good when water broke without contractions. That generally meant that Pitocin³ would be needed to move things along; providers don’t like to wait too long to deliver a baby once water has broken, because of the risk of infection. I’d never had Pitocin in labor before (my previous induction was with Cytotec ⁴), and I wanted to keep it that way. We’ve all heard the horror stories about how painful Pitocin contractions are. I knew that, if I had to suffer through those, I’d probably end up getting an epidural, which would probably slow things down, and the cascade of interventions would begin, and I could very well end up in the OR. (I hated my c-section, and did not want to go through that again.)

So I chucked a few things in my hospital bag (not enough, lol I forgot quite a few things) and we were off, in a mild panic. But my anxiety and dread were balanced out by an even greater excitement. For better or for worse, it was happening; I’d get to meet this baby soon.

But at the hospital, it was kind of a cluster. The nurses couldn’t find their equipment. They accidentally clicked “discharge” on their computer and checked me out of the hospital and had to re-check me in. Then they couldn’t find my vein to start the IV (that’s always fun). Nothing seemed to be going right. It was almost ten, and I still wasn’t having painful contractions. I really had no idea how this was going to go.

So I said a little prayer of surrender, trying to let go of all my personal wants and desires for how the birth would proceed. Then, between interruptions, I prayed the sorrowful mysteries of the Rosary.

Here’s a cool thing. The midwife didn’t check for dilation at this point, and I’m so grateful she did not. What’s the point of all these cervical exams that women are always given during pregnancy? They don’t tell you anything about when baby will come. I wasn’t having painful contractions, so the midwife said she didn’t expect to see dilation yet, and she’d just wait to check me later. Cool! Fine with me! I didn’t need that kind of stress in my life! I was so happy to be working with midwives this time instead of OBs. Nothing against the OBs who’d helped me with my other babies, but I will always recommend midwives over OBs to any low-risk pregnant mom. It’s a world of difference, a whole different philosophy. I only had to endure two cervical exams this entire pregnancy, both of them in active labor (more on that later).

Well, they got me sorted out with the IV block, then moved me from triage to a delivery room. There, they hooked me up to a fetal monitor (this was, after all, a 2VBAC¹), gave me my first dose of penicillin, and then let me be. Still no pain. I remembered the advice of the doula who’d helped me with my third birth: sometimes relaxing actually gets things moving along. So, I took a shower, got in my fuzzy bathrobe and sleep hat, grabbed my teddy bear, and laid down for a rest. The braxton-hicks⁵ were starting to feel a little bit more intense, but nothing serious or uncomfortable. I figured I’d rest while I still could. There was a long night ahead of me.

It worked. I probably only rested for thirty, forty minutes or so, before the contractions picked up. This was around midnight. So I got up and started walking around, moving through them. I wanted to to make progress, and plus, in the early part of active labor, walking or rocking or swaying through the contractions seriously helps.

But I could feel things were moving quickly. At one point my teeth started chattering uncontrollably, which meant the hormones were doing crazy things. Each contraction was a bit more intense than the last. I was feeling lots of nausea, so was pretty much just hanging out in the bathroom, at this point, and I started having to really focus to get through the pain. This was the point at which time becomes weird and you go into this strange primal otherworldly place, mentally. If you’ve ever been in labor you know what I mean.

I will share some things that helped me cope with the pain, in case you’re a pregnant mom reading this and mentally preparing for your own labor like I was.

I kept on praying. I brought out from my little toolbox the Anima Christi prayer, which I’d been dwelling on over the past few days. With each contraction I’d think about one of the first three lines:

“Soul of Christ, sanctify me.

Body of Christ, save me.

Blood of Christ, embolden me.“

It wasn’t even an intentional thing, where I set out to meditate on one of these lines. It just kind of happened. I’d be praying and as the pain picked up my brain would slow to a stop and just kind of linger over one of these lines while I thought about the Passion or remembered my last Holy Communion just four days prior.

And – this bit sounds super uncharacteristic of me, because I’m a very negative and pessimistic person, lol – I guess the other thing that helped was staying positive about it. This was a mind game, I knew. I had to make myself like the pain. I had to be really intentional. Yes, I’d say to myself, yes, this is good. I’m coping with this so well. At one point, I could sense myself starting to get frustrated and mad at the pain, wanting to say to it, “fucking hell!, just leave me alone, stop doing this to my body!” Which created a sensation of fear. So I caught myself, and changed the narrative real quick, because that was the very path that led me to the epidural with my last baby: feeling like a victim of the pain, like the pain was something bad happening to me. This time, I intentionally took ownership of it. It wasn’t happening to me, as they say; it was me. And that actually helped. It’s seriously psychological warfare, in labor.

(A few other little sensory tricks that really help, if you’re curious: movement, vocalization, and squeezing the shit out of wide-toothed wooden combs in each hand. Randomly, I also took a weird comfort in running my hands under the faucet in the bathroom sink.)

Well, by now I was in the zone, and it was about two AM. The midwife came in to check me. She’d said she was going to wait to check me until it was time for the second dose of antibiotics, which wasn’t supposed to be for another hour; but I guess she could see that I had progressed pretty far, and she was probably afraid I’d have the baby on the bathroom floor, lol. I was pretty uncomfortable by now, so I was really hoping that she’d tell me I was at like a six, at least a five.

Imagine my relief when she told me I was at a nine! Thank God! That far already? So I was coping with this pretty well, after all?! That gave me a fresh burst of motivation: it would be over soon. She stayed with me, and directed me into this-that-and-the-other position through the contractions (which, btw, an OB would not have done), and when she checked me again at about 2:30 (all of these time estimates are very approximate, because like I said I was in that zone where everything is spacey and time doesn’t really exist), I was at a ten.

I’ll spare you the details of the next half-hour, not because anything went wrong, but just because this phase is particularly bodily. Suffice it to say that baby was born about thirty minutes later, just before 3 AM, with no interventions or pain meds of any kind.

But then came the biggest surprise of all. We were team green, in this pregnancy, waiting to find out the baby’s gender until birth. I was completely certain, the entire nine months, that it was a girl. I called the baby “she” the whole time, thinking of her as my daughter and calling her by our chosen girl name. I barely ever even considered that it might be a boy; that felt so unlikely as to not even be a real possibility. My intuition had been correct for my other three kids, so I knew, I simply knew, that this was going to be a girl.

But: he was a boy!

A boy, born all natural, only six hours from the time my water broke, only three hours from the onset of actual discomfort. What the helly!

Later that day, recovering in our room in the mother-baby ward, I was lying there watching EWTN on my TV. Daily Mass was on. It was the Novus Ordo Mass, which I generally avoid, but it was a solemn and reverent one – EWTN is great; Mother Angelica, ora pro nobis! – so I watched it anyway. If you’ve ever watched Mass on TV, you know that, when it comes time for Communion, they cut to an Act of Spiritual Communion for the viewers at home who can’t receive physically. On EWTN, they don’t always use the same prayer every single time; it changes day by day, as there are many prayers one can say for this intention.

Guess which prayer they broadcast that day, my son’s birthday, for the Spiritual Communion?

It felt like a small reassurance that Wednesday was the right day for him to be born, after all.

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Footnotes for those who might not be familiar with pregnancy terminology:

1. VBAC: vaginal birth after cesarean. Whenever you give birth the normal way after a prior c-section, there’s a risk (extremely minute) of uterine rupture at the incision site, which is terrifying and life-threatening if it happens. So when you’re in labor after a prior C, they make you wear a fetal monitor the whole time to make sure baby is doing okay. It’s not too bad, because you can still walk around and even get in the water if you want to; you just have a device strapped around your belly. 2VBAC: second VBAC, still treated the same way during labor, even if you’ve already done it once successfully before.

2. Group B strep is a bacteria that we sometimes carry and sometimes don’t. It comes and goes, and isn’t at all harmful to mom (or her husband; it’s not an STI); you can actually test positive for it one week and negative the next. But, if it gets passed to a baby during birth, it can sometimes cause them to get sick, and if that happens it’s deathly serious. So, if you test positive in late pregnancy, they just give you antibiotics during labor: two doses, four hours apart. Normally if your water breaks you don’t necessarily need to rush to the hospital unless you’re having 5-1-1 contractions^A , but, if you are GBS+, they tell you to come to the hospital immediately if your water breaks, because risk of infection goes up.

A. that is, contractions five minutes apart, lasting one minute, for one straight hour.

3. Pitocin is synthetic oxytocin, given through an IV, to induce labor or help it progress when contractions aren’t happening or aren’t strong enough.

4. Cytotec is a different kind of medication, not an IV med, but a tablet that they actually insert into your body to soften the cervix to encourage labor. When I had Cytotec I was already 40 and a half weeks along and only needed one dose, so it barely even felt like an induction, honestly.

5. Braxton-hicks contractions are these random, painless but weird contractions that most moms experience a few times a day in later pregnancy; they’re called “practice contractions,” because they’re how your uterus practices to get ready for labor. Your whole stomach gets really tight and sometimes you can feel a bit breathless, almost like you’re doing a crunch, but they don’t hurt.