I Wanted To Feel It

Francesca Decker, MD, MPH

“Honey! She’s here! Look at her!” My husband was breathless, tears on his cheeks, as the tiny purple creature that was our daughter was placed on my chest.  She promptly lifted her head to look around, mewing like a lost kitten, as I placed my arms around her.  I was happy she was there, but I was distracted.

I was distracted, reveling in the incredible ecstasy that followed my unmedicated birth, like a double rainbow that followed a hurricane.  Every person has their own hopes for labor, and it’s never a guarantee that it will go as we hope, but I had decided early in my pregnancy that I would try to give birth without pain meds.  I wanted to feel what my body was capable of.  And oh, did I ever feel it.

When I had first started to have regular contractions around 2 AM that morning, I was thrilled.  Excited.  Nervous.  I dozed on and off until I couldn’t sleep anymore, then puttered around the apartment doing last-minute cleaning and bouncing on a yoga ball.  My husband and I watched several hours of Killing Eve while I rolled on the ball and breathed through the pains.  I had read about groaning cake and decided to make groaning cookies.  I mixed the batter and put it in the refrigerator, intending to cut and bake them after it chilled.  But around 5 PM, I noticed a shift.  I couldn’t pay attention to Sandra Oh when the contractions came.  I wasn’t laughing at my husband’s jokes.  The pain was getting more intense. 

I helped deliver forty babies during my family medicine training, so I did what any normal person would do at that point.  I checked my cervix.  It was open, though I couldn’t tell how far.  I might not bake those cookies after all.

“I think it’s time,” I told my husband.

“Are you sure?” he asked, “You’re still ten minutes apart.”

“Yeah, but it’s getting more painful.  I want to know if I’m making progress.  If I’m only two centimeters dilated, I would consider some pain meds.”

As we navigated the bumps and potholes of Los Angeles side roads, the contractions became more intense. I gripped the handle on my side of the car and put on a playlist I used for exercising. I’m a singer as well as a doctor, so I did my best to sing along through the contractions, to keep myself breathing. 

“You’re gonna hear me roooaoaarrrrrrrrrr!!!” 

Truer words were never spoken.

When we finally arrived at the hospital, we were informed that the labor triage was full.  They asked me to wait downstairs.  I was decidedly uncomfortable at this point, and the best position I could find was on my hands and knees, rocking back and forth on the couch in the waiting area and groaning through the pain, while my husband parked the car.  I felt like an animal.  Powerful.  A little scary.  Primitive. 

“You can do this!” A couple of older women cheered me on, smiling.

The 25-year-old security guard, however, was not as confident, or maybe just didn’t want to deliver the baby himself, and walked over as my husband came back in.

“Er, Ma’am, I’ve called up to the floor to let them know you need to be seen.”

A minute later, an aide with a wheelchair took me upstairs.  

The nurse looked at me, listened to my symptoms and nodded.

“Alright. We’ll take a look.  But a lot of first-time moms have to go home and come back, and if your contractions are ten minutes apart, it’s probably too early.” She wrote some notes down in the computer. “What do you want to do for pain meds?”

“I’m hoping to do it without meds.”

 “Uh-huh.  Okay.  Well, let’s see what we’ve got.”

She used her gloved hand to check my cervix and her eyebrows went up, “Oh! You’re actually about… six centimeters.  Okay.  You’re staying.”

I was relieved.  This was active labor.  That made the pain more bearable. 

After that, we were moved to a room, and I was grateful to be out of the bright light of the triage.  My husband attempted to set up the birthing kit he had packed – essential oils, fairy lights, and a playlist.

“No!” I barked whenever his hand left my back.  I grabbed it and held it in place.  The birthing kit went untouched.

I paced.  I bounced on a yoga ball.  I paced some more.  I swayed and groaned.

“I want to get in the shower.”

He held me as the hot water soothed my back and I continued to groan through the contractions with a vice grip on his shoulders and hands.  The nurse came in to check on me and I climbed onto the bed on my hands and knees.  After she left, I felt a gush of fluid.  She came back a few minutes later.

“I think my water just broke.”

“Yeah, a lot of times women think that when it’s just urine.  But I’ll check.”  While I worked through another contraction, she used a nitrazine swab to look for amniotic fluid.

“Oh, you’re right!  It broke.”  

I continued to breathe and labor on the bed, until the contractions started getting very strong and very low.

“I feel like I have to push,” I told my husband, then the nurse when she came in.

“Oh, okay.  Let’s see.  Yup, you are fully dilated, but it does take a while for the baby to come down far enough to push.”

“Okay… but can I try pushing? I really feel like I need to.” I was still able to maintain a shred of politeness between contractions.

“Sure,” her face was difficult to read.  The next contraction, I pushed while she felt for the baby’s head to come down.

“Oh! Wow, that was a good push!  I’ll call the doctor.”  I was relieved, excited, nervous, and in a lot of pain, but grateful it would end soon.

Suddenly, the lights came on, interrupting our intimate little birthing cave.  The doctor and nurse bustled in, gowned and masked.  A pediatric nurse I’d never met also came in and went over to the baby’s warming station.

“Hey there.  I need you to roll onto your back and get into the stirrups,” my doctor announced as another contraction moved through me.

“Wait.  I thought we agreed I could try delivering on my side…” I was scared and frustrated, while rolling onto my back as instructed.  The pain was decidedly worse in this position.  I squirmed as the nurse put my feet in the stirrups.

“If you do, I won’t be able to prevent tearing.”

At that moment, a huge contraction washed over me, and I lost what little civility I had left.

“You’re pissing me off, Doc!” I yelled.

The contraction passed.

There was silence.

“Oh my God, I’m so sorry,” I stammered, people pleasing through my pain. “My biggest fear about this labor was that you’d get mad at me.”

Her eyebrows shot up.

“That was your biggest fear?” I didn’t elaborate about how it was connected to a fear of not being able to advocate for myself, of being ignored or rushed into procedures or treatments I didn’t want.  She didn’t say anything else, but she moved my foot out of one of the stirrups so I could shift off my back.

I tried to push and got lightheaded.  

I tried again with the next contraction, and again, blackness seeped in around the edges of my vision.  I started to panic.

“I don’t know what to do, I don't know what to do! I don’t want to pass out!”  My eyes searched the room, looking for help.

“In all the deliveries I’ve done, I have never seen anyone pass out while pushing.” My doctor’s voice was even. “You need to change where you’re trying to push and focus the energy right down here.” I felt her hand press “down here.”

The next contraction, I took a breath and pushed, and felt the difference.  I felt the baby move down. I screamed.

“I can’t do this. It hurts so much! I can’t do it. I don’t want to. It hurts so bad.  Please!”

I searched again for someone to help, and my husband stepped in.

“You got this, Honey.  You can do this.”  He locked eyes with me, and I pushed again.  I felt the ripping searing burning shattering tearing apart as my daughter’s head pushed through.  I wanted to climb the walls to get away from the pain.

“You can do this.  You got this.”  His face was in front of mine, filling my vision with his eyes.  I took another breath.

I pushed again.

“Small pushes. You’re almost there,” directed the doctor.

My entire body was on fire, white-hot screeching pain that roared in my ears and made everything else fall away.

And then, suddenly, abruptly, sharply.  It stopped.

“She’s out!” declared the doctor.

My body began to buzz.  I heard my daughter cry.  I knew she was okay.  The absence of the worst pain of my life left the most incredible tingling, floating, glowing, ecstasy. 

“I did it!” A smile filled my mouth and my cheeks burst open. “I can’t believe I f***ing did it!”  I wanted to sing and dance. I wanted to leap.  I wanted to collapse. I was euphoric. I repeated myself and looked around the room at the strangers who had come in, “I did it! I can’t believe I f***ing did it!”

My husband was crying, rubbing my hand, as the doctor placed the baby on my chest.  She was warm and wrinkled with bottomless black eyes, and short, uncoordinated movements.  I draped my arms around her, elation filling my body at having achieved something that was both so ordinary and so profound.

After delivering the placenta and repairing a small tear, the doctor nodded, saying, “Congratulations!” and left.  A little while later, the nurse came in again.

“I can’t believe I did it!” I said to her again.  My cheeks hurt from smiling.  My body felt like warm rubber.

“Yeah.  You know most people who come in saying they don’t want meds end up asking for them.  I’m impressed.  I came in to check on you but you two seemed to have such a good handle on things, I didn’t think you really needed me.”

I considered this, then asked if I could get out of the bed.

“Uh, well, just wait.”  She checked my vitals and pushed on my stomach.  Everything was fine.  I could get up.  I was so happy to be able to walk and move comfortably.  Another nurse came in with a special postpartum wheelchair.

“I can walk,” I said.

“Oh, I guess we don’t see a lot of women who can walk right after… but better use the chair just to be safe.”  I sat in the chair while she rolled me to the postpartum floor.

I felt like I could do anything after this.  

Even be a parent.

That first night is a blur of attempts to breastfeed, sleep, and use the bathroom. The nurses came again and again to help with breastfeeding and pain.  Slowly, the numbness of the birth wore off and was replaced by the dull ache of muscles and tissues that had worked their hardest for an entire day.  I appreciated the frozen maxi pads and Dermoblast and those stretchy, cotton underwear.

The next morning, I went to the bathroom as the baby and my husband slept.  When I came out of the room, I looked at the two of them in the soft, grey light.  He was on the couch, curled up under a blanket, exhausted.  She was in the hospital bassinet a few feet in front of him, bundled up in a swaddle and hat, her tiny face peaceful.

I felt a wave of love wash over me, so powerful it made me gasp.  I looked at this new family I had just birthed and realized that I would do anything for these two people.  I had felt love for my baby while I was pregnant, having secret conversations, singing songs, communicating through kicks and pokes.  But this was the first time I felt that well of infinite love that is motherhood.  I would love her forever, no matter what, and I knew it all at once, with every cell, every atom of my body.

I began to cry, the kind of messy, snotty cry that other people should never witness.  I gazed at my daughter.  Her existence was right in the world.

A sharp knock on the door interrupted my adoration.

“I need to take blood,” came a loud voice.  A short, no-nonsense lab tech burst in and proceeded to tell me, as I wiped the boogers off my face, that no she could not come back later because she needed to stab my precious child with a needle to drain her of her bodily life force, and she needed to do it now.

I begged her to give us a few minutes, but she refused. The baby began to fuss, and my husband woke up.  

Where I had just been feeling my heart burst from the love that filled it, I now felt aching dread.  My baby!  She was going to stab my baby with a giant needle and make her bleed!  She wasn’t even a day old yet!  I considered stabbing the tech instead, but decided that was probably a poor choice.

I held my baby’s hand as the tech inserted a tiny needle into her heel.  My child let out a pitiful wail and I began to sob again.  It was all I could do to wait for the woman to collect the blood she needed.  She had barely put the top on the vial before I grabbed my daughter and pulled her close to me.

The tech left and I clutched my baby to my chest, shushing and swaying.  She settled quickly (the blessing of a short memory). My husband looked at us, smiling.

“You okay?”

“Yup.  Yeah.” I wiped my face and sniffled, letting out a half-hearted laugh.  Would I ever be okay again?

My husband, my daughter’s father, hugged us both close.  I realized something deep, mysterious, and unknowable had opened up in me.  I had felt the birth the day before with my body.  Now, I felt the love with my entire being.  

Francesca Decker is the mom of two amazing kids and a family doctor, M.P.H., writer, and former actor/singer currently based just outside of NYC. She enjoys exploring the human aspects of medicine, and the intersections of health with policy, education and entertainment. You can see more of her work at www.ahumandoctor.com.