Hospitals & headaches: a dad’s take on childbirth

Posted in CULTURE by Paul Higgins on Monday, January 11, 2010 at 6:59 am

As a first time father of a new baby boy, the twenty-six and a half years of my life that preceded my wife’s pregnancy and the subsequent birth of our son can be accurately described as callim infantulus, which is to say, lacking in knowledge of babies.  My years spent learning to write in cursive, studying for standardized tests, and testing the hop strengths of local microbrews most certainly did not prepare me for this one.  Pregnancy and childbirth were recondite topics — I had little interest in them and even less understanding.  Despite my initial naiveté about pregnancy and childbirth, the previous nine months have been a wonderful bonding experience for me and my wife, which has finally culminated with the birth of our son, Reid.

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The digital readout on the pregnancy test was the one that really put the nail in the coffin, so to speak. Fed up with addition and subtraction symbols, two lines or one, my wife and I decided to take things to the 21st Century with (yes) a digital pregnancy test that sells at CVS for approximately twenty dollars U.S. The day after we were certain she was pregnant, my wife began taking pre-natal vitamins and within a week we had gone to the library and gotten all the requisite literature on pregnancy and childbirth.

These two actions were the first in a long series of steps we took to ensure that we had the type of pregnancy and childbirth that we truly wanted. Along the way I was able to learn with, but mostly from, my wife about her perceptions, intentions and expectations regarding her childbirth experience. I read pregnancy books, went to birthing classes, but most importantly I listened to and supported my wife in her decision to have a natural childbirth and a bonding post-partum environment with our son. Unfortunately, our experience with hospital staff and regulations was often frustrating, as we dealt with counter-intuitive policies and the odd realization that one of life’s most beautiful experiences was being treated as nothing more than another medical procedure.

My wife decided relatively early in her pregnancy that natural childbirth and breast-feeding without supplementation was the way she wanted to handle her birthing experience. Let me preface this by noting that my wife and I are not devout naturalists or overzealous hippies that are committed to a strictly “natural” way of life. We simply researched, or more appropriately my wife researched, and I completely agreed with her intuition that a natural child-birth completely free of painkillers and complicated epidurals was the route we preferred.

As we explained our intention to our primary obstetrician, we quickly realized there was somewhat of a rift between the literature we were reading and our doctor’s perspective on the impact of epidurals during childbirth. With this being said, the basic gist of the drugs they put in epidurals is that they do not cross the placenta-barrier, which, according to WebMD means that they are not directly transmitted to the fetus through the bloodstream. However, being strapped to IV’s that administer unnecessary “fluids” or painkillers is not analogous to the way nature intended childbirth to occur.

Beyond the fact that epidurals can cause a blood-pressure to drop in the mother to be, which can in turn can lower the baby’s heart-rate, women during childbirth need options to move around in order to relax the cervix, which allows them to get to the final stages of childbirth. Unfortunately,  women who receive epidurals often find their progress to be unnaturally slow, and so Pitocin is given to help speed the process up. In many cases what may seem like a simple epidural snowballs into an effort to help counteract the negative side-effects of the drug, creating a wholly unnatural and artificial childbirth. It’s unfortunate, but the hospital staff seems totally at ease with this program of action, and are more than willing to administer drugs, even if the mother has expressed her intention for a natural childbirth.

In our case, the hospital staff – though clinically knowledgeable with regards to the procedures and medications involved in the birthing process – had little experience with women who want a natural childbirth. This was disconcerting to me and my wife from the moment we set foot in a hospital.

Friday November the 13th, 2009.

I am not a particularly superstitious person, but for some reason I do seem to attach some sort of tertiary meaning to dates and numbers — so when my wife started going into labor around 2 p.m. on Friday the 13th, somewhere deep in my head I was a little worried. Questions of whether there would be any complications, how would my wife handle the pain, and more importantly, how would I handle my wife in pain, ran through my head as she became more and more sure that this was “it.“

My wife on the other hand was completely calm as she slowly realized that this was the real thing. Despite the fact that she began to feel contractions at three o’clock that afternoon, we didn’t leave for the hospital until 4 a.m. the next day. I know its cliché, but my wife really is the strongest person I know, and after her birthing experience, she’s my personal hero. Throughout the time we were at home she saved her strength, relaxed and bounced on her birthing ball. Surprisingly, she never described the contractions as being painful, per se. They were uncomfortable and during the later stages she was less able to talk or move during them, but it was not a visceral type of pain that one often ascribes to labor contractions.

The psychological shift that occurred for me and my wife when we finally got to the hospital in the early morning was palpable. We didn’t know exactly what we were in store for as we entered the “paranoid zone of liability” that is otherwise known as the maternity floor of Carle Hospital. However, I should have noticed a little foreshadowing of things to come as I filled out the disease pre-screen form, unabashedly lying that I had not experienced nor been in the vicinity of anyone who had recently experienced “tiredness.“ Despite the silly red-tape, up until this point most of the staff had been cordial and helpful. It wasn’t until we got to our room that we experienced how jaded much of the staff actually was.

“You don’t have to be a Nazi about it.“

This was the response that my wife and I received after telling our nurse that we did not want our child to be supplemented with formula milk or any other type of supplementation that did not come out of her boobs. It’s unfortunate that our initial conversation with our nurse had to be so tense. It was kind of shocking at the time to both me and my wife that the woman who was about to help deliver our child could be so abrasive, but this soon became the norm as we continued to deal with an inept nursing staff for the next 48 hours.

Such language is better suited to the floor of the U.S. Senate than the room in which we were about to have a child. Nonetheless, we tried our best to get comfortable and prepare ourselves for the critical hours leading up to the birth of our child. It took about forty-five minutes for the nurse to set up the EKG and the birthing monitor that fit uncomfortably around my wife’s soon to be unpregnant stomach, but when she finally got around to checking my wife’s cervix we were told that she was already at 7 cm. For those who aren’t familiar with birthing terms or measurements, 10 cm is a fully dilated cervix, so to come in at 7 cm is very good. It was at this point that our nurse, who must have passed my wife off as just another floozy claiming to want a natural childbirth, became a believer.

It’s unfortunate that our time spent at the hospital ended up being such a negative experience for us, but we realized soon after our arrival to the hospital that my wife was an exception to the rule rather than the status quo. In all fairness to the nursing staff on the labor and delivery floor of the hospital where we delivered, there is a pragmatic and systematic way in which hospitals approach childbirth which runs counter to everything nature intended. There were two major points of contention that my wife and I encountered with our nursing staff which we found quite disturbing.

The first was an attitude of indifference and professional ineptitude which seemed to stick to our nurses like the smell of a dirty diaper. I can’t even remember how many times both of our nurses mentioned how many breaks they had skipped, how many lunches they had missed or how many epidurals they had administered throughout their tenure at the hospital. Although I agreed with many of the gripes that our nurses had with the bureaucratic bullshit they have to deal with on a daily basis, this was our child, and as my wife’s delivery process progressed, it was time for them to set these grievances aside and act like professionals.

Unfortunately for us, they did not.

The second and even more frustrating element of my wife’s delivery was coming to terms with the fact that the nursing staff was completely unaccustomed – and at odds with – a woman who wanted a natural childbirth. It was almost offensive to our nurses that my wife had chosen to have our child without the use of painkillers. Our nurses were like heroin dealers standing outside a detox clinic — they just loved to offer us stuff to make us feel better, even when they knew we didn’t want it. I remember one nurse saying, “We just want to make sure you know what you’re options are.“ Umm, ya, we just spent nine months studying and going to classes, but why don’t you tell us what are options are one more time as my wife has another contraction.

There is a predictable and regimented process to which our nurses had become accustomed in the delivery room, so to have my wife completely relaxed and couth throughout the whole process was somewhat frightening to them. As humans we fear the unknown, so it’s understandable that my wife’s birthing process – in which she had been administered no drugs and had given no signs of being under intense pain – could seem unnatural to them.

The initial moments after we left the hospital, and the subsequent one or two hours afterwards would turn out to be the least stressful moments of our hospital stay. As per our request, we were left alone with our child, as my wife used a skin-to-skin contact method in order to develop a strong nursing bond. This was an extremely bonding moment for my wife, son and I, and we were very grateful that the hospital staff allowed us this important time with our son. Although our initial post birth experience was quite pleasant, I honestly feel like we were the exception to the rule rather than the standard birthing experience. Had my wife not been so unusually, sometimes freakishly strong, I’m  convinced that they would have given our son to us for but a few brief minutes before whisking him away for the standard hospital protocol and perhaps even taking him to the nursery.

I am convinced that it was my wife’s preternatural strength which prevented the unnecessary yet procedural manhandling of our child.

Editor’s note: Click here for more of the setbacks and triumphs associated with giving birth in the 21st century.