Becky's hospital birth story
When I was 25 weeks pregnant with my first
son, we discovered that my cervix
was very soft and weak. It was about 85% effaced, and I was put on
strict bed rest. I was scared to death that I was going to lose my baby, and
as a
result I never read a word about labor and delivery.
Psychologically, I
thought that reading about labor could somehow make it start. I
avoided the
subject completely and just concentrated on holding onto my precious baby.
My waters started leaking at 34 weeks, and my doctor sent me to the
hospital,
ordering pitocin to get the whole process rolling. When I was
settled into
bed, I told my admitting nurse about my situation and told her I didn't
really know what to expect. She asked me, "Why didn't you read
a book?"
That was all she had to offer. So my husband and I began our wait to
see
what was going to happen. When I later asked the same nurse what to
look for
as I progressed, she told me just to wait until the pain got "really,
really
bad."
It only took a couple of hours for the pain to get really, really bad.
My
baby was posterior and I was lying flat on my back with Pitocin-induced
labor. I had horrendous back labor, but since the nurses never
really
checked in with me to see how I was doing, I was never offered any
assistance
or advice for how to deal with the pain. (Fortunately, the
anesthesiologist
never made an appearance, or I may have taken any kind of pain relief I
could
get.) The nurses would frequently bustle in to check my monitors,
but they
rarely even gave me a glance. My husband and I felt afraid and
helpless as
the pain of my labor grew increasingly worse.
Finally, I reached the stage where I knew that I HAD to push. My
husband ran
out to tell someone, but no one believed that it was time yet.
Several
nurses strolled in calmly, telling me that I probably had a while to
wait--until someone gave me a vaginal exam and felt the baby coming down.
Then everyone scrambled to get things ready, as they told me to breathe
through the horrible pushing contractions. The doctor was stuck in
traffic,
and they didn't want me to deliver before he got there. However, my
baby had
other ideas in mind and was coming anyway. As I was pushing, one
resident
was pushing down on my perineum--something that made me scream with pain
each
time she did it. When my husband finally asked her why she was
hurting me so
badly, she turned to him and told him to sit down and shut up. (That
is the
honest-to-goodness truth!)
A few minutes after that I gave birth to a healthy five pound boy.
They let
me see him for a minute and then he was whisked away to the special care
nursery, as he was 5 1/2 weeks early. My husband went with him, to
make sure
that he was safe, and after a nurse cleaned me up, I sat in the dimly lit
delivery room by myself for over an hour until my husband finally came to
see
me. I didn't get to see my little boy for almost three hours.
The nursery
was on another wing, and it took that long for anyone to come and take me
to
him.
There are even more details that made this one of the worst experiences of
our lives, but we look back now and are thankful for what we learned.
We are
now planning the birth of our third child and greatly look forward to
delivering at home.
Becky Ferguson
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