Labor Vignettes

Yes, it was the 6th. Oh dear. I wasn't very awake when I typed the last entry, and I'm probably less so now.

And thank you for all the complements on the blog version of Tabby's name: the real thing is, well, perhaps a bit more outrageous (I promise we didn't make it up, or change the standard spelling, though), but I'll have faith that you'd all love it, too, were I willing to risk the Google-a-bility.

We had our third (third!) post-hospital weight check this morning. After bottoming out at 7 lb 2.5 oz on Saturday, she was at 7 lb 6.5 oz Monday (good job peeing after they clicked "lock" on the scale, girl!) and 7 lb 8oz today. No more pediatricians for us until the one-month check.

The whole breast-feeding thing is, well, difficult, but not for the reasons everyone told me it well be. I need less advice, not more. I may make it through the day today without talking with a lactation consultant. Boy, do I hope so. But that rant is for later, when I can laugh about it. (I hope.)

Capital letters are hard with one hand, eh? And I'm so scattered. But I'll try. Avoid what's under the jump if you're at all squeamish.

---Okay, so I had no drugs. So? I will so totally respect your choices about what you want your labor to be like. If you don't want it to be like mine was, good for you. Oh my goodness, good for you.

---The labor and delivery, and recovery floors, were the most strongly, well, caste-ed places I've been for a while. White women were nurses, or lactation consultants. Black women were "patent care assistants." Asian women were residents. And the only man I saw the whole time was the attending pediatrician, who, when he finally came in to talk, got to hear a lot about our class identity and how pissed we were that we were being treated like idiots who'd forget to feed the baby.

---When the doula suggests a little Pitocin to the (somehat horrified) midwife, it's a long slow labor. (Of course, our doula also suggested I try to rest when I really needed to, and made it possible for Beaker to be a helpful presence at all. When I was pushing, dangling from the squat bar, Beaker held me up on one side and she on the other. I can't imagine what it would have been like without her there. If you're thinking of having a doula at your delivery, just do it. Just do it.)

---Some of the slowness was my fault. The tub slowed down the contractions. But I spent hours in it. Standing and walking would speed the contractions. So I did some, but not too much or too long. The rhythm associated with each position never changed: that meant an awful lot of 4 to 7 minute gaps between contractions, all the way through. Which made it all longer, of course.

---Ever wonder what they do about uck in the tub? A nice long-handled fishnet, home-aquarium-style, can handle that, dear.

---As it turns out, Rust City Research Hospital requires monitoring during labor for IVF pregnancies. Even when the attending is a midwife. A ten-minute strip, every ninety minutes. Which wouldn't be so bad if the damn thing just worked. My heart rate was generally high enough to get confused with a baby decceleration, which didn't help.

---However, we were lucky. They did read carefully, so no alarms came off the strip, thank god, and the labor wwas allowed to proceed along its long slow path.

---My midwife did internals rarely enough that there was progress, real progress, at each one. It would have been very bad psychologically if there hadn't been.

---Once she declared me to be fully dilated and ruptured the membranes, boy, did it go fast. Well, I was still pushing for like an hour and a half, and, if I never hear the phrase "push through the burn!" again... but still. I never had an unbearable urge to push. But we got her out, damnit. We got her out. My luck with respect to minor nasty pregnancy symptoms continued to hold: no tears worth stitching up, no hemorrhoids.

---One of the snottier extreme parenting types around here dismissed my midwife as "Oh, we talked with her before Laurie was born. But she really seemed like more of a medwife, if you know what I mean." I do, and that's what I wanted. I wanted to be at the big hospital if anything went wrong, and I wanted to work with someone who would avoid dumb interventions. I went postdates, I had a slow, slow labor, and she saw that everything was fine and she let me go through the whole thing, and I'm so, so glad of that.

---I didn't find out until afterwards that the monitoring was because of the IVF, or that the baby had been occiput posterior until about 15 minutes before the membrane rupture (the point at which the contractions went from being biphasic—every one having an "echo"—to just, well, contractions). I was probably happier not knowing either.

Comments

[Karen F]

Yeah! Everything is going OK.Yes, I too found the whole breastfeeding thing to be waay more challenging than I had expected. It sounds like you don't need/want a lot of advice, so I'll just share that it took me a good few weeks to get things going and established. And every time it seemed like I hit an equilibrium point, things would get challenging again. But, it did work out for me, and I have very special memories of nursing my daughter. Give yourself some time. I didn't even feel like a real person again until my sweet pea was at least a month old.

[Emma also Jane]

Great to see you have recovered well, and that the baby is now growing. I'm sure you'll persevere with breastfeeding and in a few short weeks it will seem easy. Best wishes to all three of you. Give yourself a kiss for the amazing (and ordinary) thing you have just done. Myself, I found that birthing a baby gave me all kinds of strength in the years afterwards -- in a hard spot or a dark place I could remember that I *did* it, and could probably do this too, whatever it was.
Be well.

[Mommyprof]

You WILL get the hang of it. You'll be glad you did. Warm thoughts your way.

[Leslie]

Like Emma also Jane posted -both of my labors with my daughters were over 30 hours and afterwards I knew I could get through just about anything. The nursing will get easier and the lack of complications is just wonderful! So glad for you!

[Ann Bartow]

If you can get through the first couple of weeks, nursing gets better, basically because it has nowhere to go but up. That "hot poker being applied to flesh" feeling subsides over time, I swear.

[Moxie]

Sounds beautiful, and just perfect, like many first births are. Too long, too painful, too slow, but just perfect.

I hope the nursing "catches" for you soon.

[jen]

just popping in to say congrats, mama!

[liz]

Big hugs!!!

[April]

Just wanted to say congratulations.

I hope that being a mother is everything you looked forward to for so long.

[Gillian]

My breastfeeding recommendation is to watch tv. When my then itty was in a NICU for several weeks one of the nurses asked me to help out a new mom who was having trouble nursing. The baby had no sucking troubles but she was very engorged and he was furiously hungry and screaming. My kid was 3 months old. They called me when she was coming down and I went down and started nursing mine. When she came in and started nursing I just chatted as if we were at a party asking her where she was from etc. I was sure that she probably knew more about nursing at that point than I did and assvice would just make her more uncomfortable. Since she was distracted the baby did the work himself and started eating. After a while my very glutted baby fell asleep but I kept up the small talk. The new mom and baby did fine after that. Every few minutes mine would wake up and realize there was a nipple in her face and nurse a bit more. By the time I carried her to her isolette she was limp as a rag doll with a tiny smile on her face. I think she thought she was in baby heaven.