Insomia-Driven Blogging Saturday, Jun 21 2008

The perils of blogging when you can’t sleep are great.  They are orders of magnitude greater when you can’t sleep because something is bothering you.

One friend mentioned that she didn’t really understand what I was getting at in my earlier post.  And while I look back at it, and know what I’m getting at, you have to get inside my head a little to understand it.  Coherence is in low supply at 1am.

The root of the problem, I suppose, is I don’t like my childbirth instructor.  The Husband and I are taking a Bradley Method class, taught by a very well qualified certified nurse midwife, and literally, the only one we could find in our area.  There’s not a lot of interest in or support for drug-free childbirth.  But really, all she does is scare me and stress me out.  Not of the pain implicit in childbirth, but of the nurses, the doctors, the experience of giving birth in a hospital.

I’ve been in academics long enough to know that everyone has an axe to grind, and this is obviously hers.  Rationally, I can grasp that between The Husband and myself, the nurses are not likely to shoot painkillers into my IV while I’m in the middle of a contraction because I’m scaring the rest of the patients, or have The Husband escorted out by security because he stands up for my preferences with which they happen to disagree.  I trust my OB will support me in what I’m doing, and he knows that in return I won’t fight him on something he believes is really medically necessary.

But I’m still pregnant, which doesn’t always translate into rational.  And so I’m scared.  And I try to understand myself better, to understand why I’m being ‘difficult’ about this.  It comes down, ultimately, to the fact that I do not like the feeling of being out of control.  I drink (when unpregnant, please no hate mail!), but I’m rarely worse than tipsy.  My emotions are continually frustrating because they occasionally get the better of me.  But the moments in my life where I feel I willingly relinquished control, when I hurt that badly, stand out vividly in my memory.  And I don’t want to experience that again.

Medically necessary is one thing.  Just because someone else thinks I should is something else altogether.

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Come As You Are Wednesday, Jun 18 2008

Occasionally, I come across these challenges issued by other blogs.  For this particular one:  take a picture of yourself right now – no cheating, no stopping to put on make-up or comb hair or wipe random bits of cookie from around mouth – and post it to your blog.

They puzzle me a bit, after all, I hate wearing makeup, my hair is snarled 30 seconds after I’ve combed it – 15 if I go outside, and I am generally neat and clean but any attempt to look ‘put together’ fails miserably, and fails moreso the more pregnant I get.  Really, it’s not something that ends up meaning much to me, which is why I never really join in the fun.

Why I decided to join in this one, I’ll never know.  All I know is that The Husband just handed me a slab of watermelon, and as I took a bite, a piece fell right smack dab on my cleavage as PhotoBooth went off.

So here I am, 36 weeks pregnant, watermelon, amusement, and all.

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…That Doesn’t Mean It Will Hurt Monday, Jun 16 2008

I’ve decided to have this baby without pain medication.  And every time, every single time the concept comes up, I get a universally negative response.  The exchanged looks and facial expressions from the kind.  The confident pronouncements of “oh, you’ll change your mind” or “when those contractions hit, you’ll be begging for the epidural” from the unkind.  And that doesn’t even cover projecting remarks along the lines of “oh, I could never do that, it would hurt too badly.”

Well, I happen to know something about hurting.

One year and eight months before this baby is currently scheduled to make his appearance, I was in the ER.  Earlier that day, I’d been to the doctor.  I’d seen the ultrasound with a dead baby 4 weeks too small in my uterus.  I was scheduled for surgery the next morning, but started to bleed heavily around 1 am.  I did everything my OB wanted in this circumstance.  I saved the tissue and clots that I passed at home and brought them with me.  I went straight to the nearest ER.  I gave the triage person a concise rundown on exactly what was happening – that I was in the middle of a missed miscarriage, that I was scheduled for surgery in 6 hours, that about 15 minutes ago I felt a pop and began bleeding so heavily that I soaked a sanitary napkin in under a minute, and had bled steadily since.

And as I lay in a bed in that ER, the doctor on call walked in and said “So I hear you’ve gotten your period today.”

God help me, but had I been my normal self, I might have assaulted him.  On top of everything else, that doctor made me feel like an idiot, that I had no idea what was happening to me.  But these were not normal circumstances.  I just hurt too badly to do anything but lie there and cry.  I didn’t argue when they gave me 4 mg of morphine.  It wasn’t the physical pain.  Everything that was me hurt.  I’d just had the one thing I knew for certain I wanted in life turned into a source of agony.  I hurt so badly I couldn’t stand being myself at that moment.  I wanted to go away.  I wasn’t sure I wanted to come back.  

“Wow, I can see why people get addicted to this.”

I said that.  Once they’d determined I wasn’t going to have an allergic reaction to the stuff, they left me there.  No one told me how to call for a nurse if something happened.  Roughly every thirty minutes, The Husband would help me change my thoroughly soaked sanitary napkin, I went through at least six of them while I was there.  I didn’t care about anything anymore by that point, I just lay there in some half-asleep stupor.  Morphine is powerful stuff.

So yeah, I know something about hurt.

Of course labor will be painful.  You don’t get something that big out of an opening that small without pain. I’m not afraid of the pain.  I am confident in my ability to cope with the pain.  Just because labor is painful doesn’t mean it will hurt.  Not as bad as I know it can.

But on dark nights, like tonight, when I’m lying awake in bed, there is a little voice whispering “…but that doesn’t mean it won’t.”

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