Fuck this shit, I thought. Bring on the cascading interventions. And they came.
Soon the epidural crew wheeled on in with their cartoon shower caps and sneakers and fancy watches and black-framed glasses, their well-toned physiques—anesthesiologists, it turns out, are the only doctors who look like TV doctors. The energy in the room immediately shifted. Before they came in, I was a decrepit sea log being beaten upon by the waves, my mother, fiancé, and nurse waving from the shore, feeling helpless and horrified, bearing witness. After the team came in, my body was a thing to be beaten, a war to be won.
The very word epidural filled me—and still fills me—with panic. Obviously, the epidural is a routine thing, but it’s also, as they were legally required to remind me, a surgical procedure. Hence the shower caps. I was given one, too, in all my pain. No one made sure I tucked my hair in perfectly, which I thought about a lot as they started in on me. Would a hair fall into my spinal column? They talked quickly, all of them drunk on power, slightly manic. I felt like I was being inducted into something (I was), like maybe I was brave for choosing this, for choosing relief, for doing what I wanted despite being afraid of it. Like: Here we go.
The nurse has you squeeze a pillow to your very pregnant belly and hunch your back so that your upper body forms a C. She has your birth partner sit on a little chair in front of you, at eye level. You focus on him. Never have I hunched and focused so hard. I could have hunched that baby right out. The doctors paint that sterilizing iodine all over you and feel for your spine, and I worried that I was too fat for them to find my vertebrae and fought the urge to ask them if they were absolutely sure they had put the target in the right place. They used permanent ink to mark where to stab me—I saw the spot a few days later, when I was up and walking. There was also a bruise. A bruise on your spine! There is something viscerally disturbing about all of this, isn’t there? Can you feel the twinge in your spine? Are you about to pass out? (Yeah, me too.)
So they stick a big needle into your back and you jump and are sure you have just paralyzed yourself. The first needle is to numb your skin, and then a bigger hollow needle goes in; this one has a tiny tube that gets threaded into the space next to your spinal cord. It seems like you shouldn’t feel it, but you totally feel it. You feel like someone is stapling your back, but deep inside you. Stay still, though, or you’ll be paralyzed.
I bored my eyes into Dustin and broke into a fear sweat. I was in some kind of war. Wasn’t I? This was my moment, my big test, and I was rising to the occasion. I would save the world. Except I wasn’t saving the world. I was doing the most banal thing in the world. I was giving fucking birth.
The doctor spoke to me over my shoulder. “Okay, I am going to put in the medicine now. You might feel a shock go through your legs, almost like you put your finger in the electric socket.”
What? “Okay.” I nodded. Then my legs, hanging off the side of the hospital bed, shot up into the air on either side of Dustin. And, yes, an electric shock shot through me. It was horrible. “Wow, you weren’t kidding.” They taped me up and told me to lie down on my back. Like, just lie down right on top of the tube that is snaking up next to your spine and don’t even think about it. This was really hard at first, as anything spine-related, in my book, should be.
My legs, by this point, were just big meat sticks attached to my body. It’s as if your foot has fallen asleep, but it’s the entire lower region of your body. Your subconscious is screaming out that something is terribly wrong: I can’t feel my legs!
I tried to move them to make sure I still could, to shake them back into being. It didn’t work. I dragged my huge, lumpen legs across the crinkly paper of the hospital bed, and they fell into place. I looked at the monitor. I was having wild contractions, apparently. The little squiggly line on the machine ratcheted up and up and up and I didn’t feel a thing. Disembodiment complete, I asked for my iPhone.
Dustin dug it out of the bag we’d packed and off I went, texting friends in a big group I’d assembled for the occasion. Everyone sent strings of manic emojis when I first wrote to say I was in labor, but when I checked in again, Halle wrote back to say she was so scared I hadn’t updated them since the day before. I told them it was hell, then asked my mom to take a picture of the urine bag that was hanging off the side of my hospital bed so I could text it to them. Proof of life. Proof I had maintained my sense of humor and was therefore going to be okay.
Soon my OB came in to break my water. The hook! I spread my legs, or let them be spread, for what felt like the millionth time that day, in the way they preferred—bottoms of your feet touching, knees flopped open, legs in a diamond shape.
I don’t remember any great amniotic balloon pop, but I remember the warmth spreading all over and under me. Like sitting in a bowl of chicken soup. It was beyond pee. And it kept happening, too, for hours. I’d shift, and more soup. It did make me feel plentiful. I contained multitudes. Of amniotic fluid. And then the contractions really started going, up off the charts. The line on the monitor formed a series of waves with valleys and peaks of varying steepness. Now they would peak and then plateau, staying high up, resting there in the pain that I knew was happening but didn’t feel.
Until I did. Until I did.
Here was the soul-crushing pain again, like a monster who had mercifully passed me by only to catch my scent and come thrashing back down the hallway to find me hiding in some closet. I gripped the bars of my hospital bed as if I could pull myself away from it. I was still numb everywhere—except, inconveniently, the right side of my uterus—so I couldn’t move. I had gone through the personal nightmare of getting the epidural, I had mentally exited the battle of contractions, and yet here they were, chasing me down. It was like going through the pain of breaking up with someone and just when you thought you were free, he shows up at your house and, I don’t know, throws knives at your uterus?
I screamed in the hospital bed, writhing as much as my numb-meat body would writhe. The winning anesthesiologists came back—an Asian woman I wanted to be friends with entered the room clapping her hands and declaring that they would get me the pain coverage I deserved. I perked up at this. Finally someone was concerned with justice. I nodded yes and yes and yes. It was a feminist act, the pursuit of my pain coverage. Top me off, y’all. And they did. They topped me off. Then again. And again. And again. I was afloat on a pool of medication, nerve-blocking lidocaine and Tylenol and Sudafed and saline.
And still the pain “broke through.” The rest of me just got number. Numb except for about five square inches, where it felt like some demon (male, surely) was chopping at me from the inside with a pickax. My standard writhing and moaning escalated into actual screams. Something about being stuck in the bed, unable to move, and assaulted by terrible pain after I thought pain was behind me made me want to die, sincerely. I peered through my hair and the handles of the hospital bed to see my various attendants standing there, staring at me impassively. My heart rate was sky-high; psychologically, I was in extremis. “I want to die!” I yelled to them repeatedly, but no one did anything. It was like some sort of nightmare, where you scream but no one hears you.
“This is normal, baby,” Dustin said, bending over the bed. He was trying to soothe me, to reassure me I would be okay. I gripped his hand desperately.
“No, it isn’t,” I said, looking at him, pleading with him to hear what I was saying.
“Yes, it is,” he said, his face next to mine. Traitor.
“It’s not okay,” I hissed. “I want to die. I want to die.” I rolled around in the bed feeling like a child. His brave face only made me feel crazier. I felt trapped in the subjective experience of my body, wishing I could wave a magic wand and give them my pain, just for a second, so they would take me seriously. I felt like I was drowning and everyone was watching from a few feet away, doing nothing. Just waiting for me to calm down.
Then my OB came in and announced that she wanted to “check” me. My obstetrician was a fi
ve-foot-tall black woman who wore her hair parted down the middle and pulled back in a ponytail. She was no-nonsense, cerebral, had a nervous, matter-of-fact patter that always made things like breast exams less awkward.
When another contraction started she gave me a little talk about how sometimes people just had a “blind spot” when it came to pain relief and no amount of epidural would cover it, and her professionalism began to feel like cruel apathy. I interrupted her multiple times to scream, but she just kept talking over me, not missing a beat. She was used to the likes of me, inured to the screaming. She started to check me, and when she instructed me, midcontraction, to “relax or I can’t do it,” I thought about her wedding announcement, which I’d found upon Googling her back in the day. It said she’d found love for the first time at forty-three. I was always charmed by this, always half tempted to ask her about it, but now I just considered it confirmation that she had never been in labor and therefore had no idea what was happening to my body and my mind. I shrank back into myself. I was being pummeled. I felt like a madwoman, existentially alone, climbing the walls. Then came a strange, unwelcome solidarity with all women. The certainty that we were damned.
“Just knock me out!” I cried to the doctor as my latest contraction tapered off. I was joking, but the joke was that I said it out loud. I had never asked for something more sincerely.
“We’re not going to do that.” The doctor chuckled, exchanging glances with the nurse. I peered out at her from behind my pain, through a crack in the bed rails. The alarm on my heart-rate monitor started going off, making the room sound like the inside of my head, and a new troop of shower-capped people came running in, all very concerned about my heart when they should have been concerned about my pain.
Wanting to try to go without the epidural was one thing; getting it and having it fail was quite another. It was unjust. It was traumatic. My stupid body, I thought. My awful gender. The limitations of medicine. Of sex. Of humanity. Fuck it all. I don’t deserve this. And I meant that. I still mean it. Of course, outwardly I just nodded, scrunched up my entire being, and felt a little glimmer of hope. Then fear. Then hope. Then pain, pain, pain.
My family still sat beside me but I was alone, inescapably tethered to my body.
I did not want to experience another epidural, but in the deranged game show of this childbirth, that was the prize behind the curtain. The left side of my body was heavy and barely there. All of the extra epidural was definitely pooling in that area. We rocked my body back and forth—I say “we” because there is no way I could have turned myself—hoping that the epidural would drip, would run over to the right. This did not feel very scientific. And it did not work.
Soon another doctor came in and tried to put me at ease. An old pro, I had been pulled into a seated position and was hunched over my hospital pillow, staring at Dustin again. Once again, getting the epidural filled me with visceral horror, but within minutes my pain was gone.
My OB came back in so she could check me properly. She groped and prodded and shoved unnamed objects around inside of me, trying to find the baby’s head.
Oh yes, the baby. He was in there through all of this. The thought of that now seems bizarre. At the time it was so much about me, my body, my pain. Part of me—most of me—didn’t believe I’d ever see him. Certainly not alive.
Soon, Dr. R. stood up from her perch beside my (at this point ironically named) birth canal and folded her hands together on top of her clipboard. (Did she have a clipboard? Everyone seemed to. Everyone seemed to have the answers to the problem of me written on their clipboards, just out of my reach.) She told me, in a tone I imagined she usually reserved for informing family members that their loved one was dying, that my cervix hadn’t moved. I was still a three or a four or a five, I don’t remember. It didn’t matter. Whatever I was, it wasn’t enough. Worse yet, the baby’s head was “floating.” This was not good. My child was bobbing within me, treading water. He did not want to make the trip. Could I blame him?
“He could be stuck,” she said. “There’s no way to know for sure, but if his head is lodged in your pelvis, it could be pulling on your ligaments and causing breakthrough pain.” As she spoke, I felt it again, the pain sneaking up, the way you hear keys in the door before someone walks in.
“Epidurals cover pain, not pressure,” she told me, explaining that the baby’s head was possibly—just a conjecture, of course—slamming into the right wall of my uterus and tugging at my ligaments, yanking the entire side of my body up and down with the contractions. There was nothing they could do about that, really. What I felt, though, was pain, unmistakably. The worst pain I’d ever felt. Possibly the pain of my ligaments being torn from the bones of my pelvis? Sure.
Dr. R. had raised the possibility of this happening at one of my last prenatal checkups as she’d eyed Dustin, who at six two is more than a foot taller than me. “Your genes might be mismatched,” she’d said matter-of-factly, meaning that it might be a case of a Dustin-size baby trying to get through a me-size pelvis. “What size shoe do you wear?” she asked me, then clucked and shook her head when I said five. “Supposedly the size of your pelvis correlates with your feet,” she said. “It’s an old midwives’ thing.” I’d been charmed by this information that afternoon, but thinking of it now made me furious. They can measure the thickness of my baby’s neural tube eleven weeks after he was conceived, but they can’t tell me if his head will fit through my pelvis? What is science even for?
This was when they all started looking at the clock, tapping their watches. It was just like all the natural-birth advocates warned it would be: Other people were impatient with my suffering. Except now that I was in it, I felt like tapping my watch too. My normally fast-talking OB crossed her arms and began dragging out her syllables. “Wellllll, at a cerrrrtain point we have to take a step back and aaask ourselves…”
She gave me two options. One was starting Pitocin, a medication that induces labor but also strengthens contractions. If my contractions were stronger, hey, maybe my baby, who had been squeezed for days now, would get squeezed on down through my vagina. The other option was that I could get, you know, the thing. The thing women in labor are supposed to avoid at all costs. The failure. The intervention to end all interventions: the C-section. It was totally up to me.
At this point, I desperately wanted someone to strap me down and put me out of my misery, but I am also a stubborn bitch who did not want to fail at birth. I did not want to fail to give birth. “So, what if you induce me,” I said from behind a wall of pain, “and it doesn’t work? Which it probably won’t, if his head is stuck?”
“Well, I wouldn’t say probably. My guess is he is stuck, but there is no way to know. But yes, you could still end up with a C-section. I can’t really say either way.”
“Okay,” I said. “So we should do the Pitocin. Right?”
“I can’t tell you what to do,” she said. “It’s not my body.” If only it were. “If we do the Pitocin, though…” And she continued moving her mouth and uttering sounds as I felt my contractions breaking through the second epidural.
“…and that would mean possibly hours more of contractions, then the whole pushing stage…”
The thought of staying awake twelve more hours and then actively pushing was unfathomable. I looked at Dustin. “What do you think?” I asked him, begged him to tell me. He was at a loss too.
“Whatever you want to do. It’s your body.” I hated this. Stop reminding me. I had to endure the physical agony; at the very least, someone else should have to do the mental arithmetic.
I wanted the C-section so badly. I wanted it like you want a glass of water at a stranger’s house but feel like you should demur for some reason. I wanted it the way you want someone to stick a finger in your butt during sex but would never ask for it. I was thinking like a woman. I was in the most essentially oppressed, essentially female situation I’ve ever been in and I was mentally oppressing myself on top of it.
> “I should do the Pitocin, right?” I looked around at everyone in a panic. I wanted to know everyone’s honest opinion. I wanted to know what they would think of me either way. Would I make a decision and would they all judge me internally? Would they all think, Well, that was definitely the wrong call, but okay!
“We can’t tell you,” they kept saying. My doctor shrugged behind her clipboard, clearly growing impatient. I stared at her and said nothing. She didn’t offer to give me time. She just kept saying it wasn’t an emergency. And yet. And yet the clock was ticking anyway. It was an emergency of capitalism, of everyone being sick of my shit. Lucky for them I was sick of my shit too. Utterly. I wanted the C-section. “But the recovery!” I said out loud. I knew you were supposed to think about this, be haunted by this; it was supposed to keep you from “giving in,” but damn if I could think beyond the pain of the now.
Another chorus of “It’s up to you.” I had a diaper full of ice on my head to combat a mild fever that had come on a few hours earlier and wouldn’t go away, and it kept slipping off. Everyone stared at me, waiting. I stared at the ceiling and tried to concentrate, thinking, If only I didn’t have to make this life-or-death decision with a diaper on my face.
I imagined dying during the surgery. Bleeding out or something similarly horrible. What if they went to cut me open and accidentally sliced the baby? This happens. Or has happened, which for the purposes of my monkey mind were one and the same.
It would be my responsibility. She died during her C-section. Well, she chose it, so… I would become an argument for not going into the hospital before 3-1-1. A case discussed in birth classes everywhere. Ina May Gaskin would write about me in the updated editions of all her books.
But then part of me shifted. I’m not sure which part; some You don’t have time for this shit part. Some Do what you fucking need and fuck everyone else, fuck what anyone thinks part. This part of me woke up, and I looked around the room feeling, for what might have been the first time, a near-religious conviction: it was time for this part to be over.
And Now We Have Everything: On Motherhood Before I Was Ready Page 7