Below is the original e-mail I sent to a small group of friends in January of 2020, lightly edited here for clarity.
I am finally beginning to put this whole thing into words during a 4:30am feeding some 8 or 9 days after the saga ends [2022 edit: lol ongoing] because no one else is awake to tell me to stop doing things. People boss you around a surprising amount when you’re in the most pain and confusion. They want to think for you, which comes from a place of kindness, but I really need some time to think for myself. So here I am, tits out, babe to breast, writing from my phone — my least favorite medium, but at least the new iOS update included a Swype-style keyboard so I can do this one-handed.
GENERAL ADVISORY RE: THIS BIRTH STORY AND MY POV
As few as 5% of all babies are born vaginally in the position Frankie came out (occiput posterior/OP, or face-up, which all labor and delivery professionals innocently call “sunny side up,” a disingenuously cutesy name that belies the pain it can cause). One thing I truly believe from our granola birthing class is that hearing negative birth stories can affect your own confidence in pregnancy and childbirth, so feel free to send me an unsubscribe request if you’re planning on getting pregnant soon/ever, or for whatever reason. That said, I have some advice throughout this retelling for anyone who is considering having a baby, "naturally" or otherwise. Please ask questions or even offer corrections — I have a few choice words about the hospital where I delivered, but that doesn’t mean I know what I’m talking about when it comes to medical care, and there are a lot of theories floating around our home right now about What Went Wrong and What Should Have Been Done, none of which are necessarily accurate. I would also like to note that I neither fear nor distrust medicine: I do still feel that most medical intervention is largely unnecessary when it comes to childbirth (see following section).
At the end of the day, this is really not the most traumatic of stories (and at the same time I'm trying to allow myself to admit that I have been traumatized). My discharge report lists a diagnosis of "labor without complications,” which is hilarious to me (and also kind of heartbreaking, as “complications” seems somewhat euphemistic if it is meant to encompass all the things that could happen during childbirth that are worse than my experience). [EDIT 1/14: curiously, I went to the OBGYN yesterday in a panic, about which more later, and both the triage nurse and the doctor asked if there had been “complications” with the labor, and seemed to agree that my situation constituted such.] And as you know, Frances is here, so you know there’s obviously a happy ending to this one.
Eating as I type this.
BIRTHING TIME AND HYPNOBABIES
I want to back up a little because the Hypnobabies program is such a huge part of this birth and while I know I’ve mentioned it to you all, it’s worth reviewing for how much I’ll refer to it. Dan and I opted not to take a hospital-affiliated birthing class (a mistake: we should have taken one in addition) because I'd read a book called Hypnobirthing by Marie Mongan. This is an offshoot of the Lamaze method, and is born from the idea that in many cultures, even in America at a certain time, women have given birth without anesthesia and without fear. This school of thought maintains that in the Global North we've been brewing up a perfect storm that specifically makes birthing convenient for [male] doctors, who have taken the process out of the hands of [female] midwives and medicalized it beyond recognition. I still adhere to this overall theory.
Hypnobabies is a ridiculously-named offshoot of that offshoot that is even more serious about removing the negativity from birthing in some ways that I was never going to bother with. The vocabulary, for example, that expectant practitioners of Hypnobabies use — and ask their doctors to use, if they are birthing in a hospital — is wild. One doesn't even say they "deliver" a baby. A few notable examples of vocabulary replacements include:
due date: guess date ("babies aren't born by numbers")
labor: birthing time
contraction: birthing waves or pressure waves
pain: level of comfort (i.e., a medical professional should not ask what your pain level is during your birthing time).
Mainly what attracted me to Hypnobabies is that it focuses on meditation for pain management. Daily for the last two months I have listened either to a recorded hypnosis track or to Dan reading a written script over a clean track of the music that is played behind all the spoken word recordings. These 30-minute sessions include "Fear Clearing," "Easy, Comfortable Pushing," "Deepening Your Hypnosis," etc., and are given to students in a prescribed order, all in an effort to make meditation (or, if you like, hypnosis) easily accessible for the day of. While one is laboring, one is breathing deeply and picturing "hypnoanesthesia" flowing where pain management is needed, listening to the music or appropriate "birthing time" track. I'm linking to one below for those of you who are curious. [2022 edit: since the time of writing I deleted all the Hypnobabies tracks on my Drive. The context you need here is that the speaker is constantly referring to the branded concept: “Begin to feel your hypnoanesthesia flowing…] It's all very silly in some ways; as I've said to some of you before, I can always hear the ® in “Hypnobabies,” which takes you out of it a little at first, but you get used to it.
When I told my main midwife, Cheryl, also the head of midwifery at IU Methodist, that I would be using Hypnobabies, she reacted pretty much in the way our Hypnobabies instructor, Melanie, had told us she would. "Oh! I love quiet birth!" and then, in a whisper, "I think that's how all babies should be born: into a calm environment. I'm so glad you're doing this." Hypnobabies even claims that children born in this system are calmer, quieter, and even better sleepers. Every time Frankie has a screaming session, I mourn over what I've done to her.
Hypnobabies espouses a number of very specific beliefs about the delivery room, and most of them made it to my birth plan: dim lights, no talking during contractions, delayed cord clamping, no eye ointment, retain the baby's vernix, immediate skin-to-skin contact, to name a few. I know birth plans are made to be thrown out a window, but both Cheryl and an OB*, Dr. Durfee, who saw me at one of my prenatal visits approved my list it with almost no comment except "yeah, we already do all of this, no problem." Indeed, I had chosen Methodist because it has a midwifery center, which was as close as I could get to the birthing center I wanted, but Dan couldn't or wouldn’t cotton to that idea, since in an emergency (perhaps like the one we encountered) we would have had to be ambulanced to a hospital anyway. Both of Dan's sisters have had emergency C-sections in the last five years, and I was not able to talk him out of the fear that it would happen to me, too.
I mean, my mom birthed four macrosomic babies anesthesia-free, so of course I would be fine. Dan agreed that if all went well maybe next time we could go to the birth center. [DRAMATIC REVERB]
*A NOTE ABOUT IU METHODIST/HOSPITALS
Like I said, we chose this hospital because of the midwifery program. I didn't want a doctor and everything a doctor wants if I could help it: my birth plan also included "no anesthesia" and "mother-directed pushing" — both Hypnobirthing and Hypnobabies agree that women can "breathe baby down," which is to say that one simply lets the contractions/waves do their work, with no pushing. Your uterus can — and does — expel a baby on its own: that's what contractions are. Pushing (especially "purple pushing," where you're holding your breath) carries a higher risk of tears than letting your body progress at its own pace.
Anyway, the midwifery clinic at IU's Health Center at the Tower ("the Tower", just across the street from the main hospital campus) assigns you a midwife but passes you around somewhat during your prenatal visits, since you can't be sure who will be on call when you are actually admitted. Makes sense. Patients are also required to meet with an OB at least once (not necessarily to go over their birth preferences, mine just happened that way) because there will always be an OB on staff, too: midwives can't perform C-sections, for example, so there's a chance you'll run into one on the day. I did not like Dr. Durfee. She kinda acted like I was dumb about a request on my birth preferences, which turned out to be the only thing on the list I got. Of course Dr. Durfee was the one familiar face on staff the day of, as we’ll cover later.
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That’s probably enough scene-setting, after two further weeks of editing this and prewriting upcoming entries. I’m sure I’ve got four more of these in me (at most), and they’ll probably all be of a similar length, though who knows when the the next issue will come together. I’m open to questions and comments or total silence, but I want you all to know that I’m just really grateful that you’re willing vessels for all this stress and grossness. It’s hard to talk about, and I think writing it all will help me be more clear-headed, and therefore help me heal.