Why I wish I hadn’t bought special pyjamas to wear while in labour

When I was pregnant, even near the end, when catching a side glance of myself in a shop window as I walked by was like watching a cruise ship pulling into port, the fact that I would produce an actual baby in the near future seemed on some level unbelievable. I knew that other people’s pregnancies ended in babies. I just couldn’t picture it for myself. At an antenatal class, while the instructor demonstrated with a doll and a plastic pelvis how the infant would first arrange itself head down, and then turn this way and that inside the birth canal during labour, I nodded along politely like I understood, but in my head I was thinking Yeh, alright mate!

Well, let me tell you, pregnancies end in babies. All of em. Even mine. I had said that I wouldn’t have a birth plan, because if I didn’t have any preconceptions about how things would go, then nothing could go wrong. A sensible move, you might agree. ‘You darned rational person,’ I congratulated myself, while making not making my plan. ‘You’re probably, like, the most level-headed pregnant woman of the modern era. You should write a book, or give motivational talks, or something.’ Except of course, I did have a plan. Maybe I hadn’t written it down, and maybe I hadn’t, like some mothers-to-be, consulted my conscience in exacting detail on which kinds of medical intervention were acceptable, and which somehow unnatural and therefore forbidden. But all the same, the plan was there, in the little film studio I keep in my head for making up the future. For example, I’d pictured myself in the final stage of labour. You know, the bit with the pushing. How can I conjure up this scene for you? If Rembrandt had painted a birth at the Whittington Hospital, it would look something like this. The lighting is exquisite. I kneel, artfully ruffled and shiny with exertion, but still gorgeous, at one end of the bed, while Baby Daddy holds my hand and looks at me with a mixture of wonder, admiration and love. At my business end, midwives await the arrival of the Bundle in rapt near silence. I’m wearing the brand new nightgown I’d bought for the occasion. The colour brings out my eyes. The light catches in my hair and creates a kind of halo effect. Are you seeing it?

Cut to scene two. The Bundle is arrived. She’s placed on my chest, wrapped in a blanket. She stops crying and we look at each other, aglow with love and wonder. She makes her way across to my boob and starts serenely feeding, creating a bond that will last for the rest of our lives. Baby Daddy gazes at us both with a mixture of wonder, admiration and… Well, you get the idea.

Here’s what actually happened. I got pre-eclampsia, a condition that makes your hands and feet swell up and your blood pressure skyrocket. If left untreated, you start having fits, then maybe a stroke, then maybe you die. About 6% of pregnant women get it, about 1% get it as bad as I did. I also got HELLP Syndrome, a related illness that reduces the platelet count in your bloodstream. I’d never heard of platelets before all this, but it turns out they’re quite important.

“Your platelets are very, very low,” the midwife told me, as she rushed me to the labour ward in a wheelchair.

“Is that bad?” I asked, in my smallest voice. What did I want to hear? It’s no biggie! We’ve got a big sack of platelets downstairs. Overrun with the darned things, to be honest. We’ll brew you a nice cup of them, and then you can be on your way. You’ll be doing us a favour.

“It’s not good,” was her actual reply. Shit sticks. Luckily I didn’t have a chance to Google any of this stuff in the moment, or I might have discovered that the mortality rate for HELLP Syndrome could be as high as 30%. Shit sticks with a big old dollop of shit sauce.

But no, there was no time to Google anything, there was no time to change into my new nightgown, there was no time for ruffling, artful or otherwise. The only looks of wonder were directed from me and Baby Daddy towards the all-female medical team who cheerfully and efficiently got on with saving my life. The cure for pre-eclampsia is to get the baby and, crucially, the placenta out. An epidural, explained an unflappable blonde doctor whose face I won’t forget for a long time, was too dangerous, since my regrettable lack of platelets could cause me to bleed into my spine. Smashing. I could have a c-section, she said, or have my waters broken and my labour induced, fast, with no pain relief at all.

“Have the caesarean,” she advised. Are there women who, in the same circumstances, would take a moment to consult their birth plans, or their own emotional compass, before responding? If there are, I’m not one of them.

“Slice me open babes,” I told her. “And let’s see if we can all be home in time for breakfast.” Or something along those lines anyway. About 35 seconds later, Baby Daddy was in scrubs (if you’re going to faint, someone told him, please do it over there, so you’re not in our way), my lower half was completely numb, a curtain was erected between us and the grisly event that was about to happen near my abdomen, and someone had chucked a bit of Queen on the operating theatre speakers. Was I brave and strong and stoic through these proceedings? Was I bollocks. I was as helpless and terrified as a premature baby mouse. Luckily my bravery wasn’t particularly required. I was basically a bystander.

What of the moment when Bundle, mama and papa were introduced for the first time? Well yes, of course it was amazing. The baby was as perfect and new as a spring shoot; miraculous; beautiful. I felt like I was looking into a mirror that showed a part of me reflected back, along with a part of someone completely other and separate. There truly is no experience in my life up to now that compares. But no retelling of the story would be completely honest unless I also said that at this point the morphine kicked in, and I had the sudden and powerful desire to peel myself out of my own skin. Did the transcendent emotional weight of the moment override the physical sensation that I had an entire colony of angry red ants crawling all over my body? Well, no. Morphine is morphine people. My lips itched. The skin inside my nose. My hands fought over which one should scratch the other. If I could have taken my eyeballs out, scratched them, and put them back, I would have done. Why people take that stuff for fun is beyond me. Holding the baby on my chest and trying to satisfy all the simultaneous itches proved untenable, and anyway we were still in the operating theatre and now had to be moved out to make space for the next miracle of the night shift to happen in our place, so the Bundle was whisked away, weighed and dressed, and I was wheeled into the recovery room. Just like that, we were parents. The whole thing had lasted three hours and eighteen minutes. I had never gone into labour. I still don’t know what a contraction feels like. Even in a world with no plan at all, I couldn’t have imagined it like that. Nevertheless, because that’s the way it happened, and because this sequence of events brought us our daughter, the whole thing, in memory, takes on a happy, nostalgic tint, like a favourite film where you know everything turns out ok. Of course if someone had told me at 9pm — when my blood pressure was at 180 and even the unshakeable doctors were looking at each other like they’d just been told the ship was taking on water and there weren’t enough lifeboats — that this very moment, when looked back on from the future, would seem harmless and safe, I would have slapped them. I guess this psychological sleight-of-hand is there for a reason, otherwise no sane woman would ever get pregnant for a second time.

So, almost nothing that I had pictured actually happened, but here we were all the same: mum, dad, and Bundle. What about my vision of the baby making her way serenely to the boob, using instinct alone, and feeding for the first time? I didn’t make this up for myself, actually, but was shown it happening for real, in an instructional video at a breastfeeding class a few weeks before. It seemed straightforward enough. My boobs had certainly been doing their bit for the cause, growing by about a cup size a week since early pregnancy. Now they waited anxiously side of stage for their big moment like two enormous, wobbly contestants on Britain’s Got Talent.

But alas, things weren’t as simple as that. We had our first go shortly after the operation. Baby Daddy, midwife and Bundle gathered in the foothills of my boobs like climbers about to attempt Everest. I held the baby, midwife held the tit, and I desperately hoped the little one’s kicking feet wouldn’t make contact with the place where, just a few hours before, she had been unceremoniously yanked out through several layers of tissue and muscle (they did). The poor Bundle became increasingly distressed and confused as we conspired to shove the aforementioned into her little mouth from various angles. I tried to do 100 things at once: keep her nose clear, support her shoulders, let her head tilt back, stroke her cheek to trigger the ‘rooting’ reflex. Forget the peaceful scene of mother-and-baby harmony I had envisioned. We looked like the world’s most unfair wrestling match. Eventually my daughter wisely used the only weapon at her disposal and sank into a deep sleep. Thus concluded Breastfeeding Attempt One.

Later, I tried again on my own with much the same results. The Bundle, not yet intelligent enough to connect her increasing hunger with this bizarre charade, cried for a bit and then face planted into my breast in despair. It didn’t feel, look, or sound right, but her mouth was approximately over my nipple, so I convinced myself that maybe this was it, and left her there.

“What’s she doing?” my midwife asked, as she swung by our cubicle to check we hadn’t accidentally killed the helpless creature with our incompetence, and then quickly answered her own question. “Oh. Nothing.” Illusion shattered. Since I was now riddled with strong painkillers and knackered from my near death experience, Baby Daddy and I reverted to Plan B and sucked up some liquid from my boobs with plastic syringes, which was about as romantic as it sounds, and squirted that into our child’s mouth. That was the end of Attempt Two.

And so it went, several times a day for the next week. The Bundle would cry with hunger. I would present her with the boob. Sometimes she would scream like she was being tortured. Sometimes she would take my nipple between her gums and shake it viciously from side-to-side like a cat with a mouse. Yes, it hurt. They don’t put that in the instructional videos. Sometimes, when I had tricked her by one method or another into taking a mouthful of nip, she would sigh with disdain and give me a look that quite clearly said ‘What the hell do you think you’re doing, you weirdo? Kindly remove your tit from my mouth.’ We tried every breastfeeding position possible. I watched hundreds of YouTube tutorials. Evening after evening, Baby Daddy bottle fed our child while I sat next to him milking myself with an electric breast pump. Wonder, admiration and love were in short supply.

Maybe some babies really do learn to breastfeed by instinct alone. Perhaps some mothers will lie in bed for days on end, letting the infamous skin-to-skin contact and growing mother-baby bond eventually bring the child naturally to their boob, like they did (I assume) in biblical times. But for everyone else, as the saying sort-of goes, there’s Mastercard. For the price of an overpriced dinner, a lovely woman with the incredible job title of Lactation Consultant came to our house and spent three hours showing us how to do it, with the aid of an unbelievable number of pillows and cushions, and quite a bit of what would in any other circumstances be inappropriate physical contact. Had I ever pictured this scene: me — topless, covered in tiny scratches from the baby’s overgrown fingernails and stretch marks from the horror show that was pregnancy; the lactation lady — tit (mine) in hand (hers), cooing at the infant to calm her down; Baby Daddy — craning his head in to make a note of the exact angle of baby to boob; Bundle — suddenly, incredibly, gaping her wee mouth wide open in enthusiastic invitation to the descending breast? Of course not. You couldn’t make this shit up.

Originally published at http://millennialmothers.guide on June 3, 2019.