The story of my baby’s birth starts many years before his conception. My husband Brian and I had met each other seven years before our marriage. In that time we had both graduated from college, and Brian had gotten married while I worked various jobs and studied linguistics in preparation for mission work in Russia. During my training time, I got word that Brian’s wife had died from an undiagnosed brain tumor. They had been married only 11 months and had been eagerly awaiting the birth of their unborn son. God used this terrible tragedy to forge a wonderful man out of the charming boy I had known in college. I got to know him all over again, and at the end of my year in Russia, Brian came to see me and to propose in Red Square. By the time we finally married, we both felt very ready to start a family. So, a month and a half after our wedding, the pregnancy test was positive. Hooray!
The next 4 months were pretty miserable for me. I inherited my mother’s terrible all day and all night morning sickness. Twice it got so bad that not even water would stay in my stomach. I had to go to the hospital for IV fluids and anti-nausea meds. On both visits I was treated by the same very kind and sympathetic nurse named Alisa. When the time came for an ultrasound, we were both ready to find out the sex of our baby. My sickness and Brian’s loss of his first son made us both anxious to feel as close to this baby as possible. We wanted to talk to and think about our little one as a real person. So at 20 weeks our cooperative little person gave us a great ultrasound view – a boy!!!
The rest of my pregnancy went great. The only things I could find to complain about were tiredness, heartburn, and multiplying stretch marks. I read every book I could find on pregnancy, nursing, and childbirth, along with every on-line birth story. All of this helped calm my fears about being a "primapara" and having no experience at this birth stuff. Brian and I attended two sets of birthing classes. One of them was a run-of-the-mill session sponsored by a hospital and paid for by our insurance. It was some combo of Lamaze and the personal opinions of the instructor and taught us how to be good little hospital patients. The other class was taught by a certified Bradley ® instructor. These were WONDERFUL, and I highly recommend them to EVERYBODY. This method is also known as the American Academy of Husband-Coached Childbirth. It taught Brian and me how to work together through the whole pregnancy and birth. The method emphasizes proper preparation with nutrition and exercise and lets you know everything that might happen during the birth. That way, you become an educated consumer, so that you can decide in advance what YOU want. We practiced lots of relaxation techniques which help the mom to work WITH and REDUCE the pain of contractions rather than trying to ignore them (FAT CHANCE!). As my due date approached, we wrote up a birth plan which basically said, let us do things naturally unless we’re doing something really wrong or disaster strikes. When we dropped off our birth plan at the hospital, Alisa was there again, though she only worked 2 days a week. Our hospital, Legacy Meridian Park in Tualatin, OR, was SO wonderful that almost everything on our birth plan was their standard policy. Many hospitals could take lessons from them. They provided assistance but not interference.
On the very morning of my due date, I woke up at 3:54 am for one of my usual nocturnal trips to the bathroom. I felt a "pop" that was either a very strong kick or my water breaking. I rushed into the bathroom, where I had fairly mild contractions about 3 min. apart for the next half hour. My husband, who usually sleeps like a log, happened to wake up and came in to see what was going on. I told him, "I think we’re going to have a baby today." I decided to get into the tub for a while to ease the contractions, thinking that this would be the beginning of a long day of work. This definitely did NOT work for me as my contractions intensified. Brian decided it was time to call the hospital. He explained what was going on, but when they asked to talk to me, I couldn’t talk through the contraction I was having. The nurse said, "We’ll see you as soon as you can get here." Okay, here we go. We had pretty much everything packed already, so we called my sister and Brian’s sister, got dressed and off we went. Someone had rear-ended us just one week before, totaling our beautiful Taurus and leaving us with a miniature Nissan rent-a-Speck for this momentous and uncomfortable ride. But the sun was just rising, and somehow I was able to enjoy the pink-edged clouds and the mist rising in the fields near the hospital.
We arrived at the hospital around 5:15, and I walked down to a beautiful birthing room. Once again, Alisa was there to greet us, a great thrill and comfort, though she did not get to be our nurse. Here we had our only conflict with the staff when I tried to put on the nightgown I had purchased especially for the birth. It was a roomy, blue-and-green plaid nightshirt with pretty puffed sleeves and lace-edged collar to make me feel more like me during labor. The nurse couldn’t imagine my having a baby without putting on the ugly hospital gown and STRONGLY advised against my nighty. But my wonderful husband backed me up and helped me slip into it as soon as she left. Fortunately, we never saw her again, and the nurse who actually attended me came in soon to hook up the external fetal monitor. I really didn’t want this, since it is uncomfortable, restricts movement, and often causes doctors to take extreme measures for babies who show stress on the monitor but aren’t really in danger. I had agreed to wear it only intermittently after a 15-min. start-up strip, but as soon as it was on, I completely forgot about it. My contractions continued about 2 minutes apart and got more and more intense. My last pelvic exam at the doctor’s office had shown me at 3-4 cm dilated and 80% effaced. The first exam at the hospital put me at 7 cm and 100%. What a relief! My contractions were intense enough that I never even considered walking around as I had planned, but I figured I could handle it since I was already so far along.
Brian was my constant help and comfort, reminding me to relax and let my body work. Somewhere around 6 am I hit transition and began to have back labor. As I had learned in Bradley ® class, I got over onto my hands and knees to relieve the intense pressure on my back. This helped. Some. I had been vocalizing through my contractions, and up to this point, it had really helped to relieve the intensity. But after transition, it didn’t really help enough. A few times when I felt the pain was getting out of control, I let my low vocal sounds rise up to higher-pitched sounds. A big mistake. We had been warned that screams and high-pitched sounds only increased tension and made everything worse. This is definitely true. I didn’t quite know what else to do to handle the pain, but screaming definitely was not it! We weren’t paying much attention to the monitor, but I knew I was having double contractions. This is where it peaks in intensity and instead of giving you a break, the pressure backs off for a few seconds and then drives right back up to another peak. Sigh. The thoughts in my head at this point were not entirely rational and definitely contradictory. On the one hand I was thinking to myself that if this was as bad as it gets, the pain wasn’t really so bad. But at the exact same time I was shaking my head and moaning, "No, no, no," because I didn’t know how to handle the pain and it just kept getting worse. This thought didn’t win out, though. I knew I had to handle it somehow and that pretty soon it would stop. So, on I went until I started to feel the urge to push. I had decided that I would do everything possible to avoid using pain medications during labor. Even during the worst pain, it never occurred to me to ask for pain killers. Somehow, knowing that this pain was doing something so important and that it was progressing somewhere made it bearable. I am so thankful that we didn’t use medications, so both Alek and I were alert and awake to greet each other.
Somewhere around 6:15-6:30 am I felt an urge to push, strong but not overwhelming. Brian tells me they did a pelvic exam to see if I was fully dilated, but I had no idea. They told me to turn over to get into a good pushing position. This had been in our birth plan too, but somehow when they were trying to tell me this, I had a hard time understanding what in the world they wanted me to do or how to do it. It took me a couple contractions worth to get turned over as they broke down the bed into the squatting position, with support for your back and a place for your feet. After a few contractions on my side with Brian supporting my top leg, I got turned over and started to push in earnest. Some people say that this feels good, but I am NOT one of those people. It was tough to switch over mentally. All along I had been concentrating on RELEASING pressure, and now I needed to apply as much pressure as possible. The good part about pushing was that I couldn’t feel the contraction as long as I pushed. But I traded the pain of the contraction for an intense pain in my perineum as it stretched. The doctor I’d had for my entire pregnancy had chosen that weekend to take a vacation, so another doctor from her office was there, stretching my perineum as gently as possible. I could vaguely hear the nurse making comments that my pushes were strong and effective. The pain in my bottom was pretty intense, but I just concentrated on the fact that the stronger I pushed, the sooner it would be over and I could see my baby!
Finally the incredible moment came when the doctor told me I could reach down and feel my son’s head. I reached and could see his head in a mirror positioned there. Oh, he was so soft and sweet and grey, a wonderful contrast to my near-bursting, hot, red bottom. All I could say was, "Oh baby, …oh, oh, baby," over and over. I couldn’t think of anything more specific to express the intense joy of meeting at least a little part of my son. Now I was really excited to see him and gave three or four more good pushes to get his head out. But then they told me to STOP pushing. What?!?!! My foggy brain couldn’t figure out why they would say that, but I guess his head was now coming out. A few more light pushes and his head and body just slipped out. They immediately placed our Aleksandr Gene on my tummy, where he made little soft coos but didn’t cry at all. His little head was bruised and his nose a little crooked, but his head was nice and round and adorable. Brian got to cut the umbilical cord. They told me then that Alek had been "occiput posterior", meaning he was born face up, with his back to my back, which explained all the back pain. It was 7:08 am, only 3 hrs. 14min. after my first contraction. Praise God!
The placenta seemed to take a while, about half an hour, as the doctor massaged my uterus a few times and waited patiently. Once it was delivered, he started an extensive sewing project on my tears. I didn’t have an episiotomy but I had many tears in a star shape. At first the doctor thought they were pretty bad, but as he sewed, and sewed, and sewed, he decided that they looked bad but were really fairly superficial. I think his first thought was closer, since I hurt quite a bit for the next two weeks and ended up healing together a little crookedly. In the next couple hours my sister came with her husband and two girls (2 yrs. old and 3 mos. old). Brian’s sister and my best friend also came with their husbands, so the men chatted while the women passed around the babies and grinned and glowed. Looking back at the pictures, I am again thankful for my own nightgown, since it made me feel and look like myself and not like some ill hospital patient.
Alek never left our room, except for a brief trip to the nursery the next morning for his heel sticks. He nursed well and slept well in the bassinet next to my bed. Our room had a couch for Brian, so we spent the day and night together, basking in our "familyhood." Alek is now a charming 5-month-old, nursed on demand and held whenever he cries, plus a lot of the time when he’s not crying. He is smiley and healthy with chubby cheeks and bright eyes, and he brings joy to his parents, grandparents, and just about anyone else who sees him. His birth was a brief, intense bit of work, and we hope he will soon have little brothers and sisters to add to our joy.
Copyright 1997, 1998 by author
Used by permission
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