Baby Got Backbone
Think you’re tough? Try spending 83 1/2 hours in unmedicated labor.
This essay originally appeared in the December 1996 issue of Men’s Fitness magazine.
Fourth quarter, time running out. You, the tailback, have just completed your 83rd dive into the line. You’re averaging less than one yard per carry. Every square inch of your body aches from getting tackled those 83 times. Your coach points 90 years downfield and says, “You need to go all the way on the next carry.”
Or how about this one: Friday evening, Wrigley Field. You’re pitching in a scoreless game that started Tuesday morning. You’ve been throwing for 83 straight hours. You keep looking to the bullpen, but the relief staff went home days ago. It’s just you. And now the bases are loaded, nobody out, and you have to strike out the side or lose.
Well, that doesn’t quite work either. I’m struggling for a sports metaphor that helps illuminate what my wife, Kimberly, went through when she gave birth to our son last February. But, you know, there really aren’t any that work. We guys like to think we’re tough, that we can take our hits and come back and win in OT. But in reality, when the chips are down, we either come out of the game or take a loss and say we’ll get the mofos next time. We’re a generation of men raised on relief pitchers and the designated hitter.
When it came to crunch time, Kimberly didn’t have a left-hander warming up in the bullpen. It was her game, and she wasn’t going to leave the delivery room without a W.
Pass the granola
I can safely say this about my wife without facing a divorce summons: The woman is stubborn. She’ll compromise, but she won’t quit. And sometimes, in the most important areas of life, she won’t even compromise.
Childbirth is one of those areas. She knew that our mothers were so doped up during labor that we and our siblings came out in a narcotic haze; doctors had to slap us on the butts to remind us to start breathing. And she knew that many women of our generation underwent Caesarean sections when there was no medical need to do so. She made this clear to me from the moment we stepped onto the baby track: If it’s life or death, she’d do whatever was necessary to save our baby and herself. But no doctor was going to cut our child out of her so he could make his tee time.
We took natural-childbirth classes to learn how to get a baby out without drugs or surgery. By the end of the class, even I, the token skeptic in the room, found myself swept up in the fervor. A doctor’s just there to catch the baby, I told myself, repeating what I’d learned in the class. I listened to tales of two-hour labors, of slam-dunk deliveries, of infants popping out grinning and practically toilet-trained.
What we couldn’t possibly know at the time is that our baby had an entirely different plan.
Renegotiating contractions
Kimberly felt her first labor pain early Tuesday morning. She had been intensely uncomfortable the previous night and hadn’t fallen asleep yet. We clocked her contractions all day, and for a full hour late Tuesday evening they were consistently five minutes apart. We went to the hospital, ready for this natural-birthing process to take hold. Um, no, they told us, Kimberly’s cervix hadn’t started dilating yet. Come back when the baby’s really ready to come out.
Twenty-four hours later, we returned. Kimberly had been without sleep for two-and-a-half days. When told she still hadn’t started dilating (her cervix was at one centimeter; 10 is the magic number), Kimberly looked to the bench. She’d done tough; now she wanted drugs. Could they please just give her some painkillers and something to speed up the labor? No, they said. The labor hadn’t advanced far enough for that to be an option.
We went home and suffered through another 24 sleepless hours. Kimberly was beyond miserable. Her lower back throbbed with each contraction, which arrived every five to 12 minutes. What, we wondered, could possibly be going wrong? On Thursday evening, her water broke. We loaded up the car again and went to the hospital, this time to stay until our baby arrived.
As Kimberly lay in bed sucking ice chips and having regular contractions, a nurse finally gave us the bad news: The baby had turned himself the wrong way. The back of his head was pressed against Kimberly’s backbone, where his face was supposed to be. Had the back of his head been against her cervix, it would’ve caused her to dilate, and then the contractions would’ve pushed him down the birth canal. Instead, the contractions drove his skull against her spine, doubling the intensity of the pain and doing nothing to speed the birth process along.
Finally, on Friday afternoon (his actual due date, trivia buffs), the nurses took action, giving Kimberly a labor-inducing drug that would make her contractions strong enough to push the baby beyond his stalemated position.
The downside to the drug is that it makes contractions much more painful. We forgot to ask for a pain-deadening epidural, and the nurses forgot to offer. The mild muscle relaxant she’d been given earlier had worn off, and each contraction pushed her into new depths of misery.
Running on fumes
But all that was just a prelude to the real horror show. At that point, a nurse began trying to manually turn the baby around as Kimberly pushed. No dice. Blood and a few other things came out, but even after two hours of this, the baby stayed put.
Remember the torture scene in Braveheart? That was easy to watch compared to what happened when the doctor arrived. Kimberly had two choices: Push as the doctor turned the child’s head and pulled with a suction device, or have a C-section.
As a sportswriter might record it, she reached back and found something else. I don’t know what it was, and I’m pretty sure I don’t have it. I stood at the south end, watching our baby turn his birth canal into Carlsbad Caverns, but he finally found the exit and his head, slick with fluids and white as a light bulb, popped out. It looked simply enormous, at least two hat sizes larger than a newborn’s head is supposed to be. Even if he hadn’t been facing the wrong way, he still might not have gotten out without help.
Tough talk
It took something like 30 stitches to repair the damage Harrison had inflicted on Kimberly by the end of the 83½-hour ordeal. We’ll never know how many exactly, because the doctor said he could either count or concentrate, and we voted for concentration. For the first time in the process, she got an actual painkiller.
Kimberly and I have spent many hours since then reviewing what happened and when we should’ve insisted on which drug. Next time, we tell ourselves, we’ll know how to play whatever lie we’re given. But the one lesson we learned, however unintentionally, is that Kimberly can take a hit. She may be small (5’4”, 115 pounds soaking wet), but she has a jaw like a skillet. When the other horrors of parenting arise — the trips to the emergency room, the loud music and bad haircuts and inappropriate girlfriends — we’ll know she can take it.
And if I can somehow manage to become half as tough as my wife, maybe we’ll get through it all.