I HAVE THE INFO

The boy is now 2 months old. Here are some things I’ve been meaning to tell you:

We went ‘natural’. That means a doula. That means a midwife. That means no pain medication. That’s probably the best place to start. From that decision, all kinds of other decisions kind of made themselves. Sort of. But lets take a step back.

Things didn’t start out on the path to a natural birth. Things started out ‘normal’. Mrs. H found an OB/GYN that was affiliated with the hospital that we thought we wanted. We visited them maybe 3 times, with the total doctor face time totaling something around 15 minutes, in aggregate.

We felt like a number. Mrs. H. decided she wanted a doula. I was fine with that. We met one. We met another. This one had been present for the birth of a child of a certain local cycling legend. So um…she was totally hired on the spot as far as I was concerned.

So then we had a doula. Then we started talking about 86ing the OB/GYNs all together and getting a midwife.

The thing that Mrs. H then needed to get over was the whole having a midwife and not being able to have an epidural thing.

funny thing that: You can have a midwife and get the epidural.

So we got a midwife, one affiliated with the Maternal Wellness center who Mrs. H immediately loved. I liked her fine too.

So how did things progress from here? Well, there were three things Mrs H wanted out of this pregnancy: a healthy baby, not to be stuck on her back like Kafka’s bug, and not a c-section. But she still wanted the option of an epidural.

We did research. We went to a birthing class. One of the things that became clear to us was that the more involved doctors became (sorry my M.D. readers, it’s totally not anything personal. You know I love you guys.), the more likely that Mrs. H would have an epidural. The more likely an epidural came into the picture, the more difficult it would be to focus, and push that baby out…and thusly she would need a C-section.

Once we got to seeing things that way, a natural birth seemed like the smart choice, especially if we wanted to avoid a c-section.

A few side notes on the c-section in general:

Do you know what percentage of women have c-sections now when birthing their babies in the U.S.? 23.8%…Think about that for a second: that means that slightly more than 1 in 5 women who give birth have major abdominal surgery with all the attendant risks for a process that is totally natural. How jacked is that?

Now now, I know. I know. you’re all ‘But a lot fewer women die in childbirth now than back in the day…’ Perhaps.

But that hardly means that 23.8% of all women in this country need to be cut open and their children extracted…or that that number is in any way acceptable.

Another thing: Pushing a baby definitely looked incredibly painful. I watched my wife suffer terribly. It sucked. I sat quietly for most of the night. I held her up while she was in the pool, gave her sips of sports drink, whispered compliments to her and tried to be there.

But it seemed to me that I was more tossing rocks down a well with no bottom for most of the night. She might hear an echo or two as they bounced off the walls, but they weren’t going to hit the bottom or make a splash. Not while she was going thru that.

But on the other hand, that was just one night (10 hours of suffering.) Recovering from a c-section can take weeks…weeks of searing, agonizing pain every time you sit or stand.

With that in mind, I encouraged her to take the 10 hour pain package, as opposed to the multi week tour de agony. She wanted the option, but in the end she may have wanted the pain to go away, but didn’t want the epidural.

And she totally came thru, and it was the most hardcore thing I have ever seen a person do.

Epilogue: Mrs. H has already written about the whole experience on her blog, so I’ll skip the particulars of the tub, how and when she had to push and the like. Her account is gonna be better then anything I could write.

We would find out later that part of the reason Mrs. H’s labor was difficult was due to the shape of her pelvis. The midwife claimed that had she done the epidural, she almost definitely would have not been able to push hard enough…and then had to have a c-section.