The fear. The helplessness. The crying. The feeling of being so out of control that the only way to cope is shut down completely. Which is what I did. I shut down. And only now: 1 year, two months, and two weeks later, can I say - "Well, no wonder I didn't have my baby naturally!"
It all started months before Little T's EDD. I'd had some contraction-type scares before 26 wks; ones that seriously had us thinking that we were loosing our baby. The only thing that kept me hopeful was that fact that no matter what was going on with my body, there was no bleeding, and whenever they checked me it seemed that my cervix was well and truly clamped shut!
That was scary, and it was nerve-racking. But then we hit 26 weeks, and things really went crazy. At first I would have an "episode" of contractions only once or twice a week, and I would just ride them out until they stopped. But then the episodes started happening more often, they would last longer, and they got a lot more intense and difficult to deal with. This cycle of stop-start just kept going until the episodes were happening every second night for more than four hours. We reached the 41 week +5 mark riding in on these episodes, when everyone had been sure that I wouldn't even reach my due date!
I was exhausted. My husband was exhausted, and we had no idea what was going on, except that I had an "Irritable Uterus", which meant that no one else had a clue what was going on either!
Looking back now, I can see the signs of prodromal labor -
- Real contractions - ones that didn't go away, would get stronger, would time anywhere between 30 seconds and a minute long, and definitely didn't fit the Braxton Hicks standards
- 'Episodes' of contractions that would last any where over 1 1/2 to 3 hours long
- The contraction episodes pretty much always happened at night - either just as I was trying to sleep, or would wake me up in the wee hours of the morning
- I'd fool myself, my husband, and even my midwife! It was only the internal exams that 'proved' nothing was 'happening'
However, I knew nothing about prodromal labor back then. All I knew was that I was so incredibly tired, that my confidence in my body's ability to give birth was just about shot, and that I had started to shut down because I just couldn't cope any more.
And then my lovely midwife laid it on the line - the hospital attached to the birth centre I was with was starting to think about induction, and I had two options - to be induced or to come in every day (with an 30 minute drive each way, not to mention parking problems due to major renovations!) for monitoring.
I felt helpless. Induction was the very thing I hadn't wanted. I had done the research - I knew that inductions can cause problems, and at the very least, usually end up with some level of further intervention. It was a slippery slope I had determined I wasn't going to go down right from the very beginning.
Now it was staring me in the face....
I was 3 days away from hitting the 42 week mark, (EDD was that Saturday) and my midwife was going away on holidays that weekend. I couldn't believe that this baby was ever going to come, and my rock, my darling husband, wasn't there with me to help me face this (in my mind) devastating news.
I burst into tears walking to the car, and called my Mum. She was lovely, but she didn't really get it. She said that she knew it wasn't what I wanted, but if they had to do an induction, then there wasn't really any choice.
That was the last straw that broke the horse's back. I think that's when I was defeated.
I dried my tears and drove home. My husband and I tossed the issue back and forth, but I guess in my heart I'd already given up. I just couldn't trust my body, I couldn't trust my judgement, and all I wanted was for my baby to be safe. We scheduled the induction for Thursday morning, 7am.
..... ..... .....
My husband didn't really know how very upset and scared I was over the whole induction process. I felt like there was pressure from the hospital, from my midwife who was going away, and inadvertently pressure from him as he utterly exhausted by this stage and I didn't want to put him through any more stress. Because I'd started to shut down, I couldn't express all this to him - in fact, I didn't even recognise any of this myself.
But because of that, we ended up making a choice that we'd both regret.
Mistake #2: The fear and the worry
I didn't work through any of these emotions. Like I said, I shut down. I just stopped functioning on a emotional level, and somewhat on the mental level. These emotions and thoughts would then continue to haunt me well after Little T was born, and I haven't even yet fully worked through them all.
..... ..... .....
xxx,
b.
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