Living states away from family, newly married, poor as dirt, and expecting your first child is overwhelming for a girl. Or a woman I should say. On top of the fears of giving birth and raising a baby, I was dealing with debilitating depression and anxiety. It was hard to get out of bed. I often wouldn’t until 2 or 3 in the afternoon. I wanted to find purpose in something. I felt lost, scared, overwhelmed, and stuck in a darkness I didn’t know how to get out of throughout my whole pregnancy.
I felt a sense of constant loneliness and fear going into my birth. I took a wonderful childbirth education course to prepare, which did more for me than I think I realized at the time. Many people blamed the pregnancy for how much I was struggling, and I wanted to believe them. But the fear that these feelings would carry into motherhood after my sweet baby girl arrived were often all consuming.
At my 38 week prenatal visit with my midwife, a CNM, she asked if I was wanting to schedule an induction. I was so caught off guard. Is that even allowed? I can just schedule a time to get this baby out of me? That sounded amazing. Although I had learned of the risks of elective induction, I just wanted this baby out. My midwife told me that an elective induction at 39 weeks had no greater risks than going into labor naturally at 40 weeks. I really had no reason not to believe her. Now I have learned what a lie that was.
We scheduled my induction for 1 week after the appointment. Before I left, she suggested to check me to see where I was at. We found I was already at a 3. I didn’t even know I had been laboring! So that was exciting. I hoped I’d go into labor before our induction, but it didn’t happen. I felt nervous about not having help when the baby came since all my family lived many hours away. I decided the induction would be best so I knew my parents would be here. She was also due at the end of December and I think my midwife was encouraging it out of convenience for her own schedule. Which I really didn’t mind at the time.
We arrived at 6:00 am the morning of our induction. Which really, was an augmentation of labor, because labor had already started on it’s own. I was dilated to a 4 when we got there. My midwife broke my water and soon after they started Pitocin. I was super worried about getting an IV. It sounded so yucky to me- I had never had one prior to this! I remember the nurses being so shocked by that. I felt I was coping okay at first, but I had a lot of fear in my head. A lot of people had told me to “just wait and decide if you want the epidural” and it felt like they were all suggesting I wouldn’t be able to do it without. I also was fearful because I knew labor would be more intense and harder to cope with because of the Pitocin and artificially breaking my water. So after a few hours, my husband was so involved doing hip squeezes and and other comfort measures, I decided to get the epidural. I didn’t try walking around or changing positions because it seemed to complicated with having my waters dripping everywhere and being connected to so many things!
After I got the epidural I just rested for awhile. I got very numb, very fast. After a few hours of waiting, the nurses checked me and I was dilated to a 10! The baby was still kind of high in my cervix though, and since I was so numb I really couldn’t feel any urges to push. I pushed for over an hour and made little progress. My midwife suggested I labor down for an hour (peanut ball between legs, laying on each side for 30 minutes). I was so worn out from pushing for so long. Looking back, this was so dumb. Literally so preventable. I could’ve changed positions, gotten rid of the epidural, or something to help my body- but I was doing everything to work against it!
Hi, this is a comment.
To get started with moderating, editing, and deleting comments, please visit the Comments screen in the dashboard.
Commenter avatars come from Gravatar.