And she's here!!! Ellis Juliette was born on 5/22/15 at 12:57PM. I was telling my best friend about the birth when she came to visit at the hospital, and she said I should write it down quickly because she has already forgotten so many of those details of her 14-month-old daughter's birth. So I will try to do that, even though I'm blinded by exhaustion and my little one may wake and realize she pooped herself any minute. (Edited to add: This actually ended up taking me over two months to finish writing...)
Thursday (5/21) I spent the day getting the house ready. I'm told now that might have been my nesting that should have warned me of what was to come that evening, but even in retrospect it doesn't feel like the stories of crazed, manic cleaning that I've heard so much about from my doula and peers and the books I've read. I just felt like I had the day to do things and the clock was ticking so I might as well get to some of it. For instance, in the days since my due date, we had gone through all our fresh veggies, so I thought we should go grocery shopping to make sure we didn't come home to an empty fridge after delivery. I had just done laundry a few days prior, but again, since I hadn't yet had the baby, it was adding up again and I didn't want us to come home from the hospital to a full basket of dirty clothes. So I did that load, and also one of towels and sheets so I could make the bed up fresh.
It was a very productive day, and by the end, I was looking forward to Talmud study at temple. My rabbi does a three-part course every year around this time as we lead up to Shavuot, my favorite Jewish holiday. I love, love, love Talmud study so I figured I'd make the best of the situation (being "overdue") by taking advantage of going to this class that I would have missed if the baby had been born by the due date. About halfway through, around 8:00PM, I felt some severe back pain, like I would get before my period except worse. It eased up after a bit, and then came back a little later. Having it come and go immediately made me wonder, and I checked the time on my phone. It had been 13 minutes. I waited to see if it happened again, and it did, around 11 minutes. Then it happened twice more ten minutes apart. The last time was so uncomfortable that I was shifting around in my seat and had to get up to walk around. Sitting down didn't help, walking didn't help, nothing. And I realized I was definitely in labor.
After that fourth contraction passed, I went back to the room where class was finishing up. As we ended, a woman asked me how I was feeling, and I said, "I think I'm in labor." Everyone looked at me and she said, "Right now??" I said, "For the past 40 minutes or so..." Someone commented on how calm I seemed, that they were in a panic with their first baby while I sat there silently laboring in class. Rabbi offered to call Nicole to come get me, but I was so uncomfortable and didn't want to have to wait for her and figure out what to do with two cars at that point. I said I lived only ten minutes away and could always pull over if it became unmanageable or unsafe while I had one on the way. Another woman offered to follow me home to make sure I was okay, which I gratefully accepted.
I came home around 9:30PM, and my mother, who had arrived in town the previous week, was watching TV and my wife was upstairs getting ready for bed. I said, "Um, I think I'm in labor," and she got so excited. I then went up and told my wife, who yelled at me for driving home and then instructed me to call the doula. I didn't want to disturb her because some part of me was skeptical as to whether this was really labor since I felt it so much in my back. I knew it was supposed to start there and move around, but it was unbearably there. I would have to lean over my exercise ball or furniture just to get through each contraction, even though they had just started and the abdominal discomfort itself was minimal (a bit of a gassy, bloating feeling). I decided to call the doula because it was early enough to give her a heads up now rather than having to surprise her in the middle of the night. She said she was glad I let her know and that it was probably still early so to take it easy and relax since I would need to conserve my energy for the morning.
I told my mother and wife to go to bed because it was probably still early and I would need my support team as rested as possible when this started to really get underway. But it started moving fast! I tried to take a bath, I tried to lay on the couch and distract myself with light TV programming, but nothing could help me rest when my back was being ripped apart every eight, six, four minutes. By 12:30AM, the contractions were three and a half minutes apart. I knew my doctor wanted to be notified at three minutes, and that my wife needed to pack a bag and my mother was hoping for a shower if she had time. So I called the doctor, who told me to go ahead in, and then I woke my wife and mother and told them to get ready. They couldn't believe I had labored down to contractions three and a half minutes apart without waking them for support. But some primal part of me was just focused and trying to get through them, and I didn't realize how quickly everything was progressing. I'd had such a different picture of early labor - that I would just feel discomfort every twenty minutes or so for a while and bake or watch TV to distract myself, maybe even sleep for a while, before ultimately having the doula meet us at our house and help with pain management as I worked my way down to three minutes. I didn't think I'd just be alone in pain over an exercise ball and then suddenly leaving for the hospital!
Contractions hit me on the way to the car and in the car that had me doubled over and unable to speak or move. I had one on the way through the front doors of the hospital and almost collapsed on the sidewalk because there was nothing to lean over as it ripped through my back. I finally got registered and taken to triage, where our doula soon met us. I was anxious and scared by this point. I had always taken such a peaceful, almost hippie-like view of labor and childbirth and did not expect to feel as scared as I did. I had not expected the pain to feel this excruciating, and it completely threw me off. We had learned so many pain management techniques with our doula, and now I could barely move to even do any of them! I was in too much pain to even change position IN bed, let alone get out of bed and into any other position.
My blood pressure, which was slightly elevated pre-pregnancy but had maintained a steady 110/70 my entire pregnancy, was now starting to rise. I was attached to a fetal monitor and a sonogram was done. My doula asked about the baby's position, and that's when we learned that she had turned facing forward. She had been in the proper position for months, at least since the 32 week sonogram and as recently as the 40 week sonogram, so I'd had no reason to suspect that I was having the dreaded back labor! The back labor was so intense that I wasn't getting a break between contractions as nature intends. My back felt like it was splitting in half, and that pain was continuous between and during contractions. My doula applied counterpressure on my lower back to try to help me get through the contractions; sometimes it helped, and sometimes it almost felt worse.
When I was finally checked and told I was at 4.5cm and the baby was still high, I burst into tears. The contractions were so close together and so painful that I felt sure I had progressed more than that, considering I was already over 2cm before I even went into labor. I began wailing in pain and desperation, just crying into my wife's chest and shutting my eyes to try to escape it all. Someone came to gently talk about the option of an epidural, "even though your birth plan says not to." They also said that they would admit me if I took one, and otherwise I would not yet be admitted and could just walk around the hospital floor until I was farther along. I couldn't even imagine getting out of bed. My doula was encouraging me to get on my side and I felt like I couldn't even move. I wailed into my wife's shirt and looked up at the doula and said something like, "I'm only 4.5, how can I keep doing this to 10!"
The doula reminded me of what I'd said I wanted and said she would support me through whatever it was I wanted now. She asked what I was afraid of, what was getting in my way of feeling I could do this, and I said, "It hurts so much in my back, without a break, even between contractions, that I feel like I can't survive it, and I still have so far to go." Then I just cried and wailed and couldn't speak, and she said gently, "Remember we talked about the difference between pain and suffering. You seem to be suffering. What do you want to do?" I closed my eyes and cried against my wife and said, "I want the epidural." It was the hardest thing to say, even with her passive permission and non-judgment. I felt like I'd wasted her time and mine by spending all these prenatal sessions learning alternative pain management techniques, reading books and watching documentaries that I felt empowered me to choose an unmedicated birth. I felt like I'd given up so fast. Tears spike my eyes even as I write this now (two weeks to the day, since it's taken me a long time to write up this entire post that I started shortly after birth). I felt like I'd failed, like I wasn't anywhere nearly as strong as I'd thought I could be, and like women in many places in the world and throughout history have had to be.
But I also knew that I had crossed that line. No part of me questioned the decision - I knew I needed it, I didn't feel physically or emotionally capable of going through the rest of labor this way, and I knew without a doubt that I would not regret it. I just had to push through the shame and disappointment to say the words out loud. Once I had, every contraction while we waited for the anesthesiologist felt even more unbearable; the idea of relief was so alluring and I needed it NOW once I'd made the decision to ask for it. The anesthesiologist was very sweet and professional, and that bedside manner went a long way in helping me relax about it and accept my decision. I leaned forward and tried not to picture what he was doing in my back.
Once a delivery room opened up for me and I was being wheeled away, someone asked if I still needed my birth plan. Uh, yeah, please don't assume everything just got thrown out the window because I got an epidural! The anesthesiologist heard and, smiling sweetly, asked, "Was I in your birth plan?" He said it so gently that I knew he was really asking whether I felt like I'd betrayed myself already or whether I was accepting of my decision. No way would I have made him feel sorry for me by saying, "No, and I feel disappointed and ashamed at how NOT strong I am!" so I said, "Yes, you were there as 'if I ask for it,'" and I realized as I said it that it was true.
Finally being moved into a delivery room was anticlimactic now. I was restricted to the bed and my doula and wife were much more passively involved now because there just really wasn't much to do when I wasn't in agony. Seeing my doula almost kind of check out broke my heart, because it reminded me of how involved she would have been if I'd been able to have an unmedicated birth. We would have been walking around together, she would have been urging me into the shower or different positions, she would have helped my wife help me. She would have turned on soothing music. She would have snuck me a snack from my bag as I leaned over the bed on my own blanket that I'd brought from home. But instead, she sat there chatting with me and my wife and fighting sleep, waiting until she was needed and seeing me through. That singlehandedly made it sink in that my birth experience was now completely different than what I had expected and wanted.
At some point, the nurse on duty came in and said she would be starting Pitocin as per the doctor because my contractions had stopped. I felt panic, envisioning the "cascade of interventions" that would now follow. I knew it! This was part of why I hadn't wanted an epidural! Now it had stalled my labor and they would use Pitocin to get it going again and then baby would probably end up in distress and there I would go into a C-section, and couldn't I have just suffered through the back labor to avoid all this?? I was also confused because I was
feeling the contractions! I choked back my fear and said, "How can she tell you to start Pitocin without even consulting with me first? I need to speak with her before you do anything." Then I sent my wife out to get our doula because I was afraid the doctor would steamroll me with jargon and I would end up consenting to something unnecessarily. But the doctor never came, and instead the nurse came back in and said she was to double check about the contractions. She adjusted the monitor and the contractions were once again registered on the screen. I was proud of myself for speaking up, but also pretty horrified that I would have been started on Pitocin that casually because of a slip of the monitor!
The next time that a wave of sadness hit me about the epidural was when someone told me I was in transition. I could feel each contraction, but very mildly, and no different from the contractions before. I had braced myself since our childbirth class for transition being the most painful part, and how I would push through knowing that it was also the shortest and that it meant I was almost there. I felt like I should be feeling something, enough to acknowledge transition. It felt wrong that I was coasting through it without feeling it.
Once I was fully dilated, I was told to push when my body told me to, but not before. They didn't want me to start pushing too soon because the baby was still high and I could use up all my energy pushing for so long. The pressure was intense, and when it was time to push, I couldn't imagine what this would feel like
without an epidural! It was the most painful thing I'd ever felt. It felt like I had to poop out a bowling ball, and the bowling ball just stayed there even between contractions, miserably uncomfortable as I waited for the next wave. At a certain point, I felt like I had done so much pushing that the baby HAD to be in the birth canal. I just assumed the head was at least starting to come through my cervix. And then the doctor or someone told me, "You're doing great, the baby's coming a little lower!" A little lower??? You mean the baby isn't even close to my cervix yet and I still have to push it out? I felt so drained and exhausted and in pain, and I felt my pushing weaken after that with the prospect of still having so far to go. I felt so discouraged. I remember someone pointing out the sporadic cries of newborns down the hallway and attempting to use that to encourage me, and all I felt was bitterness that those women were done with this and I wasn't! I was too miserable to be able to think all those happy, peaceful thoughts about being closer to meeting my baby. I felt disconnected from my baby and just drowned in the bodily experience.
Soon I started feeling searing pain in my lower left side, so severe that I couldn't even focus on my pushing (which my body did with or without my help, as involuntarily as throwing up). I was crying out and saying, "I can't do this anymore!" and all kinds of other things that, even in the moment, made me think, "Wow, I sound so weak and whiny, I can't believe I'm that person." An anesthesiologist came in to adjust my epidural and I realized that the pain was in the location where I'd had my surgery just over a year ago to remove a 7cm ovarian cyst. The pain was in the exact spot, deep inside, just where I'd felt the pain from the cyst itself before its removal. All the pushing or something was making that spot flare up, which I found interesting and horrifying all at the same time, because what would I have done if I'd gone unmedicated and that had flared up during pushing? I guess I just would've had to get through it, but it was absolutely paralyzing! I couldn't even focus on the pushing and that pain and pressure because this pain was so sharp and severe. They turned me on my side so that they could direct the epidural medication toward that spot. I was told to take a break in that position while I let the medication take effect, and to let them know when I was ready for coached pushing again.
The period of spontaneous bearing down was very different from the coached pushing, and I'm honestly not sure which I prefer. I had put in my birth plan that I did not want to be coached and they did it anyway, but it felt helpful in the moment so I hadn't argued it. They went with my contractions, so it's when I had the urge to push anyway (I had pictured coached pushing being at arbitrary intervals when my body may not have felt the need to push), and it helped me get the most out of each one by doing it the way they encouraged me to. (Although my asthmatic lungs could only handle two rounds of breath-holding and they wanted three, so the third was almost always let go halfway through.) During the spontaneous pushing, I felt more alone and afraid. It was like something just took over my body and I was just trying to get through it, waiting for it to pass, like hanging over a toilet waiting for the next heave during a bad stomach bug. I didn't have the same support that I got in the coached pushing, and it felt more like something happening
to me rather than a process I was participating in, and I felt really alone and shaken up. I certainly didn't expect that!
I'm not sure of the chronology of all this, but at some point toward the end of labor, my blood pressure skyrocketed to something like 257/190. My wife recalls feeling utterly panicked as staff flooded in chatting a mile a minute and hooking me up to magnesium, which brought it down. I barely registered any of this, and just whispered hopefully to my wife, "Maybe they'll do a C-section now because of my blood pressure. Maybe they'll just cut it out of me and this will all be over!" My wife says that's when she got really scared, because she knew I had to be in a bad place if I was asking for a C-section, which had been the number one outcome I'd been so determined to avoid if I safely could. She says the doula reassured her with words and the doctor with a wink and a smile.
I later learned that the baby turned the right way about an hour before she was born. So 16 out of my 17 hours of labor were back labor, but at least she wasn't born that way which would have been even more painful and drawn out.
I knew when she was getting close because a nurse started setting up tools down by my feet. I had a "holy shit!!" moment of realizing I was really about to have a baby, that this was really it.
I don't remember exactly what happened (and wasn't clear at the time, being in the state that I was) but somehow when it was actually time for her to be born and her head started moving down the birth canal, that happened faster than expected. I remember a nurse telling me to hold on and not push. Apparently that was so they could get the doctor rushed in because she was about to be born. At the time, I thought it was because she was moving too fast and they thought I would tear really badly or otherwise be more injured if I didn't slow down, so I listened and tried not to actively push. A nurse came over to unbutton my gown for skin-to-skin contact, and I felt a rush of intense excitement that this meant my baby would be on my chest within minutes! I remember my doula saying she could see the head and the baby had a lot of hair. My wife got excited then and went to look, which she had previously sworn she wouldn't do because she thought she would get sick! I heard my wife say excitedly, "I see the baby's head, Rach! It's right there!" I felt so encouraged knowing she was that close that I pushed harder than ever to move her the rest of the way down. They didn't even have time to push the table down under my feet so that the doctor could more easily deliver her, and she was born right on the table.
My wife announced the sex, checking several times because she had been so convinced we were having a boy. She said, "Rachel, guess what! We got our little girl!" I started crying and said, "Ellis, I knew it was you. I knew it was you!" I had started getting a gut feeling the last month or two that we were having a girl, and when a song came on the radio that made me feel my grandmother's presence so strongly that I cried on the way to a final OB appointment (her Hebrew name will honor my grandmother), I felt certain. I could hear my baby crying but couldn't see her past my legs. It felt like forever before they put her on my chest, and I just snuggled her and repeated over and over, "Hi, baby! Hi, baby girl, I knew it was you! Oh Ellis, I love you so much! You're here, you're here!" She calmed down pretty quickly, comforted by our voices and my smell and the warmth of my skin, and she reached a hand out and grasped my nipple tightly. Soon I started nudging her over to it, and she immediately latched on as soon as she felt it, less than an hour after being born. All my fears of breastfeeding obstacles went out the window, and I knew we could do this together.
Because this took me two months to finish and is so long already, I'll write a separate post about the rest of our hospital stay and our early days at home.
