My first birth at a hospital went terribly. Some parts of it are, in my opinion, funny. There might be a useful takeaway here and there. But really I can’t say this has much value for a reader other than entertainment. On the writing side I poured this out onto the page because I had to get it out. The whole hospital delivery and postpartum care experience was sitting in my system like an enormous shit.
Speaking of enormous shits, I am going to be blunt about mine, because the most terrible part of the hospital experience was having a panic attack on a hospital toilet because I was constipated1 but being too terrified to push because I had perineal sutures. The first nurse who came by to help tried to insert a laxative suppository up my anus with no lubrication, and gave me mildly incorrect instructions on what to do afterwards. I’ll be as explicit as an explanation seems to warrant.
day zero
My water broke at 5am. Plot-relevantly, I had gone to sleep only two hours prior.
Some medical person I talked to that day said I was one of the 10% of people to have the TV experience of having their water break as the first sign of labor. I called the labor and delivery number I’d been given, was told to come in (when? within a few hours).
I live with three partners; one of them was already awake. We joked around as I packed my bags. In high spirits. “I don’t want a baby,” I said. “I want a ham sandwich.” After I finally got one, later: “Fine, maybe I want a baby after all.” While I was on hold with the labor and delivery unit, he said, “Miss baby. Something horrifying is about to happen. Are you ready for a big surprise?”
I woke up my husband as the very last step – I went into his room and said “my beautiful love,” at 5:30am, which we both know full well is a crime. By nature, we keep similar hours.
He emitted a quarter-awake “you are inflicting horrible crimes on me and you are not forgiven” moan.
When I said, “I think my water broke,” he sort of flipped. Like a pancake but on its own.
“Oh!” he said.
“Nothing exciting is going to happen for a while. So I think you should get more sleep. Partners A and C are driving me to the hospital and getting me checked in.”
He agreed, and I went to the hospital. I was given the choice to induce – that is, take pitocin to dilate my cervix and bring on labor contractions immediately. I decided to wait, because I wanted to get some more sleep, and also believed the labor would be easier if I waited for it to happen naturally. It did start naturally around 11am. I had not gotten sleep at this point. I am terrible at sleeping in anything lower than 85% perfect conditions.
I also tried to eat, because I knew it was important. At the time I was thinking of it as one of many important things, not THE important thing. There was a hospital menu. Only breakfast items were available. I asked the nurse for a recommendation, and ordered a cheese and ham sandwich.
The sandwich was small, and took 90 minutes to arrive.
My husband arrived with some snacks at 1pm, which I ate soon before the contractions became too painful and I asked for an epidural. I actually asked to try ibuprofen or nitrous first, but every single thing in the delivery ward that people agreed to give me took around 30-60 minutes to arrive. I never got the nitrous; I forget if I even got ibuprofen.
I decided the pain trend line was not looking good against the pain management delivery trend line and went straight for the epidural.
I had pretty much a perfect experience with epidural. Practically no pain inserting. Went from howling 20 seconds every 4 minutes, to zero pain. For the rest of my childbirth experience there would be only small amounts of pain breaking through – and that was mostly bad because it kept me from getting desperately needed sleep.
This meant no solid food until labor was done. Only “clear liquids”. Apple juice was on the table, Soylent wasn’t.
Plot-relevantly, I have gestational diabetes. So actually, apple juice was on the table only in small amounts, as we checked my blood sugar over and over again. (Out of habit from months of managing the diabetes, I was very much on the same page as my doctors on this. It was only later that the PURE FUCKING IDIOCY OF PRIORITIZING BLOOD GLUCOSE MANAGEMENT OVER HAVING ENERGY struck me.)
My cervix dilated on a decent schedule, and then stalled. I swam in and out of sleep. At midnight, I started pitocin to hurry things along.
day one
birth
They woke me up every hour or so to make me shift positions and sling my leg in a new way across a large inflated peanut thing. I’d had pelvic pain in the final month of pregnancy and the pain that did break through the epidural were pelvic. The positions they were making me take were ones I knew I would be in screaming pain from if I’d done it without anesthesia one week prior. It made me anxious and cautious.
Around 4am, they told me I was ready to push. It had been 15 hours since I’d eaten half a bagel and some prunes, and 17 hours since the small breakfast sandwich.
I forget why I did something so stupid as to eat those things and not something heartier. (I’m actually tearing up typing this because of how unforgivably, self-destructively idiotic it was.)
- The minimal sleep was a factor, definitely.
- In the window where I should have eaten, the boyfriends who had brought me to the hospital had gone home to sleep, and my husband was on his way.
- I had the bagel because my husband was near a bagel place and mentioned he could pick some up. It sounded like a treat, so I said yes.
- The prunes because I was afraid of constipation during labor, maybe? I forget.
- At the time he and I were coordinating on what he should pick up, my contractions were very slow, or hadn’t started yet. I had no idea how close the epidural was. Once he started picking things up, I watched his map location, was surprised by how slow he was, and decided not to ask for more things.
I think the hospital had their hand in this as well, but I’m almost psychologically afraid to blame the hospital. If I start thinking it was their job to encourage me to eat a lot of food, or to provide it, it opens the door to a whole host of other things that it was their job to do. That they didn’t do. And it would be hard to live with that amount of bitterness and hate. I’m angry at them now – quite angry – but it’s not the anger of someone who’s been denied something they were owed.
I pushed the baby out incrementally. I asked for chicken broth. I asked for veggie broth. I asked for more apple juice. (Yes, but don’t have too much, because –) I asked for coffee, and they said no. I think the reasoning was that it would increase P(I defecate during labor). That sounded gross and undesirable, so I backed off. Later I asked again: still no. Sounded pretty firm. Decided not to argue. Lot going on. Tired.
The baby’s head was descending. Everyone around me was encouraging. Some fucking trainee came in and cooed at me that I was doing really well. Something about their mannerisms struck me particularly as simpering, phatic, and playact-y, and I barked at them to stop being reassuring. I was starting to lose it. I was projecting out towards how much work was left, and how much energy I had left, and they weren’t matching up. I did not say this exact observation clearly and articulately. I hadn’t even quite verbalized it to myself yet. All I did was ask, several times, for coffee. I brought up Ritalin once. It was in my backpack. No one took this idea very seriously.
I was starting to have serious anxiety. I thought out loud: “I’m panicking. I could take gabapentin for it. But that’ll send me to sleep, which… I’m already so sleepy.” No one really engaged with this. I decided not to take gabapentin.
I asked for a 20 minute break from pushing just to gather myself, because I was having anxiety. They told me my temperature had gone up slightly and they didn’t want me to stop. We wanted this over with as fast as possible, before infection risk rose.
Around 7am I was really panicked. I needed to course correct sharply to something else. I told my boyfriend to wake up my husband and explain to him what was going on. At this point I was a high priority patient and there were five doctors-nurses-whatever-they-were-all-useless-and-I-despise-them clustered around me. They seemed to be unable to coordinate which one would talk to me. They spoke over each other. I wanted them stripped of their human rights and their internal organs one by one. When I get that angry I get polite so that I don’t do something I seriously regret, which had been a huge handicap so far in labor: I had failed to scream at anyone, or break down crying.
Once I made it clear I could not keep going, they told me about the forceps. Assisting from their end by pulling the baby out with them, I mean. The baby was close to the entrance and it could all be over fast – all I had to do on my end was push really hard, just three or so times. I told them I was too tired and would need coffee or Soylent or something. They instantly agreed.
Actually, maybe they didn’t agree to the Soylent. I forget. I told my boyfriend to fetch a caffeinated Soylent and only one person asked what it was. When I explained, she said, “Oh, that’s smart.”
I’m unreasonably angry about that comment, considering it’s one of the more sensible things people said to me that day.
Looking into this post facto: the reason not to have non-clear liquids is that they leave the stomach more slowly. If things had gone south hard enough that I needed general anesthesia, there was a small chance I’d have vomited while unconscious, getting the Soylent in my lungs.
Forceps.
They told me the main downside is increased risk of severe tearing, to 8%.
I barked out, “What’s the base rate?”
3%.
I took them up on it. The baby in fact came out really fast. I suddenly thought of a metal refinery video I’d watched with my boyfriend C recently. I closed my eyes and saw a machine extruding a thick metal cylinder, glowing yellow-red with heat. That was me.
I saw the baby. It was a shock. “I’ve never seen her before in my life,” I told them. I was trying to make a joke (it didn’t work) but it was true, too. I’d been chatting occasionally to my baby and bapping her foot indignantly when she kicked me too hard in the ribs, but this was a stranger. This was some newborn that looked like the newborns that belonged to other people. She had a thick, complete cap of black hair, and she was hideous. She was covered in undesirable fluids. I didn’t not want her, exactly, but it was incredible how much this was just some guy who was tiny. This person had nothing to do with me.
Every time there was a shift change at this hospital, the new people would ask me the same questions over again about my birth preferences: who’s going to cut the cord? (I don’t care.) Do I want skin to skin contact asap? (No, newborns are gross, please wash her first.) Are you going to breastfeed immediately? (Open to it but might give up immediately.) As labor progressed it was increasingly unreal that they asked me all this shit anew each time without taking notes that the next people could read. You might be unsurprised to know that when the baby actually came out they, again, did not remember my answers and tried to put her on me after only a quick wipedown.
I was angry with them. I honestly didn’t object to her herself much – okay, gross goop, but whatever – but I was pissed that after all the shit they hadn’t cared about, the one they’d kept asking about over and over, they’d gotten wrong. I barked at them to not put her on me. I felt kind of guilty about this a few days later, once I’d gotten to like her. It wasn’t a snub to her, but it feels like one in retrospect.
It was over. I was not yet in pain. Things felt okay. I apologized for being a bitch (I now somewhat regret this). They told me I had third degree tearing, so they had to take me immediately to the operating room. I couldn’t remember from a burns context if third degree was the pretty bad kind or the relatively okay kind. (It’s the bad kind: perineal tear that extends to the anal sphincter.)
The suturing itself was really loud and boring. This sounds trivial, but at this stage, having so many cables running from my body to machines that were all beeping, while people I now hated talked (about what? I don’t recall, but some of it struck me as unbearably foolish) for an hour – this was fucking torturous. It helped that I asked for, and immediately got, some sort of anti anxiety medication through the IV – although I wasn’t anxious, just… killy.
When I came back, the lactation nurse immediately wanted me to breastfeed. Still overstimulated from the noisy operation, I said, “Yes, but I’m putting on earplugs now, I refuse to listen to a single further beep or human sentence”. I agreed to let her maneuver me physically while I ignored everyone. I tried to block out the world for ten minutes, after which I was willing to tune back in. The creature chomped me twice; I howled and spurned her in turn. I made them fetch the frozen colostrum I’d brought that I’d hand expressed over the past few weeks.
I’ve felt some resentment about the tearing, but I’m aware it might have happened anyway even in normal labor. The upside of the forceps birth was a very quick end-of-labor that was practically painless during the hardest part.
So far, I have no postpartum depression. I was expecting it because my family members had it, and I had a fair bit of normal depression earlier in life.
But I feel pretty good emotionally – slightly buzzed, even. I’m even getting 0.1% of the thing where you feel loving towards everyone because you realize they were once a baby someone took care of. Overall, I’ve been juggling [the baby, weird family stuff around the birth from both sides, being overly aware of my anus, and staying on top of with whatever the hell is happening with my breasts] with cheer and the enjoyable kind of stress.
But I cry uncontrollably when I think of how the actual moment my daughter came out of me feels like a bad drug trip. I have a blurry picture of that moment, only a few details crisp (like seeing the glowing rod coming out of a metal refinery). I remember being confused, misled, tricked into hurting myself, experiencing the birth of my daughter as a great alien rush of self betrayal, with no awareness of her, and full awareness of the people who had surrounded and outnumbered me, who did not seem to deal with me as an intelligent subject, who demanded my attention by shouting at me throughout the whole thing, barraged me with questions afterwards, questions I had already answered. I remembered the array of uniformed medical personnel around me a bluish blur of enemy forces who had worn me down and conquered me.
(Coming back 9 days after writing this: the amount this memory now upsets me is close to zero. Combo of memory being pushed out by a slew of other preoccupations and handwavey hormonal stuff making it less bad in retrospect?)
I’ve been working on remembering them as friendly, well-meaning, but not very bright aliens, aliens who gifted me with an intervention across a vast cultural gulf, neither of understanding each other very well. This works for me (because it’s basically true). I can edit this memory until it’s about well-meaning aliens. Because the way I originally remember it is too painful for me to accept it as a permanent mental record in the me-universe ledger.
If I could do it over, I would argue hard to take Ritalin (which would have bought me 3h of physical energy) and gabapentin (which would have halted the serious anxiety I was having, and would not have put me to sleep if I’d also had Ritalin). I had both in my backpack. I had been taking both about once every 7-10 days throughout pregnancy with my psychiatrist’s blessing. Throughout my whole stay the hospital people were quite resistant to my taking meds that I had brought rather than meds they provided, sometimes even though they were the same meds! Which they would then of course take an hour to get to me. But I think if I had gotten really angry and forceful I could have had my way.
And I would have argued to fuck the blood glucose numbers and have as much apple juice as I wanted. Maybe Soylent too, especially small amounts.
I’m disappointed in myself I fell prey to my most predictable failure mode, which is losing my shit because I didn’t feed myself. This happens all the time in normal life, I always think I can correct for it and then I fail to correct for it, and then it happened at the worst most high stakes time… arrrghhhh.
the postpartum ward
I was taken to a room in the postpartum ward. Being roomed with my baby was mandatory, even though I wasn’t capable of getting up to take care of her if she needed anything. I was in a bed. There was a sofa for my husband.
I’d had a particularly uncomfortable IV in me for 18 hours when I was done being operated on and they stopped using it. I asked to have it removed. Starting around 9am, I asked every person who came into my room when it could be removed. They all said it the decision had to go to a doctor, whom they would notify. I thought about pulling it out myself, but it was intimidatingly large, and it had throbbed a little most of the time I’d had it in. I did not want it to throb again. In case it’s not evident from this account so far, I’m a wuss about pain.
The doctor never appeared, across 5 or so hours. I admit I finally got used to the IV component around hour 3 of those 5 hours, but the fact that they kept punting to each other / some invisible figure who never appeared was really psychological affecting, and I ended up sobbing in bed about this (and other things).
This finally got someone to remove it. They had kept saying “well we might need it again” (they never did), and the person who finally removed it – without doctor approval, as far as I know – seemed satisfied after asking me whether I would agree to get another one put in if needed. Which I’d been saying from the beginning.
One of the people who were always coming by came by, this time to ultrasound my stomach. They said the scan showed I had a liter of water in my bladder, and unless I could pee it out, they would have to catheterize me because I was probably failing to pee due to swelling from the tears.
I failed to pee in a toilet with a large measuring cup hooked across it. They made more catheter noises. I said part of the reason I had trouble peeing was that it freaked me out to feel the tearing/pulling sensations of sitting down on the toilet, and I predicted I would have better luck peeing standing, in the shower stall.
(Sidenote: the following exchange was longer than this, took place while I was very tired, and at one point I thought “whatever, let them catheterize me, I’d rather put up with the physical pain of it than deal with this conversation”.)
They said I had to use the toilet because of the measuring cup. If I peed, they wanted to know how much I peed. So they didn’t want me trying in the shower.
I said, this is stupid, the priority is clearly that I pee, not that I pee in a measuring cup.
They FAILED TO UNDERSTAND THIS POINT.
I was so speechless with anger and frustration I had to wake up my husband (who was just as exhausted) so he could use English in my stead. They still did not understand him when he repeated my objection to them, but he was angry and tall and booming-voiced enough that they let me pee in the shower, at which point I peed practically the whole liter. The stupid fucks! I almost let them catheterize me just so I could avoid dealing with them!
As I started to pee, my husband noticed the urine measuring cup could simply be removed from the toilet and placed it on the shower stall floor to catch the stream.
The day wasn’t all bad. I finally could have tuna, so my husband brought me a tuna roll. He took a photo of me splayed out looking ecstatic next to a takeout box. My boyfriend visited for several hours and gifted me a cookie, which I could have now that the placenta was out and my glucose was normal. We bantered about the baby. It’s a happy memory.
Night fell, everyone went asleep. I managed to get 3-4 hours. People came in every two hours to feed the baby, check the baby’s vitals, or check my vitals. To give the baby shots. To give us lactation advice. To administer a hearing test to the baby. I felt bad – I was not getting rest, and I worried whether how it was impacting my physical recovery.
There was one moment I was alone in the dark. With a slightly twitchy but sleeping baby in a clear plastic bassinet right next to my bed. I realized I sort of, maybe, a little bit, wanted to touch her. I hadn’t really wanted that all day. I looked at her for a long time, knowing I wasn’t mobile enough to settle her on my chest, or do anything useful should she cry because I’d perturbed her too much. I started crying quietly.
I liked that moment because it made me realize I for sure wanted something to do with her. Not later in the abstract, but now. I wanted to cuddle her. I had gone through all this for her. On a rational level I was aware that, even though I only felt the slightest inkling of interesting or liking for her now, in the longer course of my life she was the thing that mattered, not the IV they refused to remove or the sleep torture or the peeing thing. It helped after each serious shock to glance at her and remember that. She seemed to exist on a subtly different dimension. Here the Kafkaesque nightmare. And there a bundle of… a sliver of… someone.
And it was also a sad moment. It’s the one other memory, in addition to the moment of childbirth, that makes me tear up to think about. I don’t even like babies. I was not having a “person who likes babies wanting to touch a baby and being denied” moment. I was having a “person who doesn’t like babies feeling the first shift – the first bit of curiosity and longing – and being unable to follow that mental thread to see how it feel to hold her child” moment.
day two
One good thing happened: one of the people who came by was a lactation consultant. She was kind and informative. Over half the people who came in seemed like nice and helpful people.
(I most disliked the nurse who cooed at my daughter the whole time while drawing blood that it would be over soon, when this was patently false. I despise people who tell children something will be over soon. If something would really be over soon they would say ‘five seconds’.)
I hadn’t slept. I was excruciatingly aware that I probably wasn’t healing effectively. I was dying to get out. We were given an estimate of 1pm for the discharge time. It came and went, as several people who blocked us failed to come by. But it was close! We were close to being free!
Then I had to take a dump.
This was dismaying – I was scared of pushing – but they’d been giving me stool softeners twice a day, so I figured it would be fine.
It was most definitely not fine. The moment I sat down on the toilet I could feel the injured flesh flexing, and more so when I pushed. This was going to be a shit I needed to push hard to get out, and I wasn’t willing to push hard. At thirty minutes my thighs were burning on the unusually tall toilet – my feet couldn’t fully sit on the floor, so I was all the balls of my feet, and my mid-thighs hurt where the edge of the toilet dug into them.
This was too much for me to cope with on four hours of sleep. I started sobbing uncontrollably. All plans for how to proceed evaporated. I was nailed permanently to the unbearable present moment and could not exit. There was a hard log of crap extruded half an inch out of my anus that wasn’t going to shift gear into reverse, but I couldn’t tense enough to finish the job without – I viscerally predicted – doing damage to my torn sphincter that I wasn’t willing to inflict.
We rang for a nurse. She was an even-headed and brave soul, but not a bright one, because she fetched a laxative suppository – which, for some reason, was pointed on one end, at about a 130 degree angle – and tried to insert it into my anus without lubrication.
I screamed and said, “lubrication?” She looked enlightened. What an interesting idea, lubrication! She came back soon with a packet and this time it went in with tolerable pain. “Keep it in for at least ten minutes, try not to immediately poop it out,” she said, and left me on the toilet. I followed instructions and passed enough to relieve the most terrible immediate dilemma.
I must have been backed up, because within an hour I was back on the toilet, in the same situation. I found myself having another anxiety attack on the toilet again (this time sans half extruded poop). We were done with our discharge paperwork by then and were now blocked on me.
(This would subsequently happen again at home, multiple times, in the coming days – but I never felt as viscerally unokay about existence as I did in the hospital, which is nominally better equipped to deal with it.)
A person came by – I think she was some sort of higher level nurse – who told me the previous nurse had given me incorrect instructions for the suppository. I was supposed to get up and lie down and wait for the suppository to work, not stay on the toilet and crap it out too soon. Would I like to try again.
No, I said. I’m leaving. (I had bought myself enough lucidity to make this decision by taking gabapentin.) This upcoming excretum has stayed in my rectum despite effort to pass it for over thirty minutes; it’s safe to assume it’s not going to exit my body when I’m actively holding it back. Which I will be, as I leave this building and get into the car that I’ve asked my partner to drive over here to pick me up.
Okay, she said uneasily.
I would prefer to have a wheelchair to get the car, I said.
You can have a wheelchair.
When can I have one?
We don’t know. The [wheelchair dispensing department, whatever its name was], is busy in some way and we don’t have an ETA.
Okay. If it’s not here in five – no, seven – seven minutes, I’m walking out.
She looked alarmed by this thought – I was visibly Not Ambulatorily Performant, and was getting around the room by staggering against a wheeled pole for hanging up IV bags – and went off to try to get a wheelchair.
- By the way, my husband is here all this time, yelling at people when I am unable to, but we’ve decided that I’m walking out early without him – he has to pack up all our stuff, get my meds from a pharmacy, and take the newborn home.
- By the way (2): the last thing I did before walking out was picking the creature’s Korean middle name and scribbling it on the discharge paperwork before walking out of the door. I’d kept thinking “I’ll make a better decision (weighing aesthetics, underlying Chinese character meaning, family politics) when I’m less frazzled –” and it never happened.
About seven minutes passed, and I walked out. Hilariously, there were two wheelchairs parked outside the unit several doors down from mine. I didn’t pay them mind until later, when I was in the car. At the time I saw them I assumed they were reserved for something – of course grabbing one for me would mess up some system.
But after I actually got out of the building (haphazardly, but still reasonably quickly), I realized someone who knew the building layout could have gotten me out to a driveway and brought the chair back in four minutes. It probably wouldn’t have messed anything up. It was just that they collectively can’t do that.
It felt good. The leaving. I was struggling already so I walked light – carrying just my phone and a slower acting laxative in my pocket. I was wearing pajama pants and was visibly injured. A few people looked confused by me, or tried to help, and I just kept asking in a reasonable voice to be pointed towards the nearest elevator, the nearest route to a pickup location, the nearest exit.
After taking a few wrong turns and meeting dead ends, I was outdoors, staring at a random road, ass clenched around a giant and hostile turd. Chilly, feeling horrid in some ways, but also cheerful. It’s good for the soul to make a break for freedom while trying not to shit your pants, in a way sobbing while waiting for someone to remove an IV isn’t.
Once home, I ascended the stairs on hands and feet, to the third floor bathroom that had a gentle bidet. Life ever since has been – uh, ridden with difficulty but not fundamentally hellish. The end! Chronologically.
blame?
My husband took several hours to return from the hospital with the newborn. A lot of that he spent picking up my meds. Some of he said he spent yelling at various people about accessibility.
“…accessibility?” I said.
“The toilet was too tall for you. It hurt you to sit on it for an extended period of time.”
“That’s pretty far down the list of problems I have with them.”
“Yes, but I was trying to hit them where it hurts – I don’t think they would have listened if I said they were dumb about xyz, or uncaring, but accessibility is something they’re obligated to pay attention to.”
I thought about this. It seemed like the wrong tack. Even if he got through to them, they’d just add some line to their bloated procedures.txt file and the problem would not change. I think an overly litigious, under-responsible patient population was the main pressure that made the hospital like that in the first place. But is that the problem? Would it still be so bad if the hospital weren’t an entity that had, like, tensed itself into the most lawsuit-proof shape possible?
After having dealt with the individuals, I’m not sure a good hospital could look that different comprised of a bunch of people who are cognitively incapable of processing that it’s wrong to make someone use the toilet just because it has the thing you can measure urine volume with, when your priority should be that they urinate at all. Or someone who knows what lube is and where it’s stocked, but simply doesn’t think to use some before sticking a obliquely pointed object up someone’s ass. Or someone who says no when someone in labor is struggling to continue asks to drink coffee, because they might defecate if they have some.
Maybe this is what even a top quartile hospital looks like in a world severely bottlenecked on the reasoning ability of individuals. Maybe there just aren’t enough smart, thoughtful people in the world for a normal hospital in a developed country to treat patients with flexibility and efficiency.
I do think they could take faster than an hour to get me a breakfast sandwich or nitrous oxide, though.
my daughter’s body
Within 48 hours I was pretty enraptured by her. I didn’t love her yet, but I felt like I was 70% there already. This was a promising trend line.
I wanted her around a lot. I was faintly charmed by her whuffing noises. While she was still vaguely hideous and weird looking, it wasn’t really hitting the normal emotional centers that react to seeing something hideous and weird. I felt very upset at the thought of her being in pain, or even just too cold. I loved making her comfortable and sleepy. And I loved holding her.
And once or twice per day, the first few days, I would hold her and feel and see the size of her and start sobbing because her body had come through me and out of me. People said “she’s so tiny!” – which she was – but she was, also, too big. She had hurt me. She had torn me. I would hold her, and 70% love her, and feel absolutely no blame towards her, and also be filled with horror and fear at the size of her. I have vehemently refused to know what the tear or the sutures look like even though partners tell me it looks mostly normal. I find it very very upsetting to have been split. That’s not supposed to happen to my body. But it had, and this creature – swaddled, sleepy, shock of black hair, had done it on her way out.
I find myself compulsively sizing her up this first week (when she hasn’t yet grown much), mentally laying her out in the compartment of my torso… and less often, laying out her exit route. God, the fucking width of her. That her body, which is so precious to me now, could have hurt me so.
the next one
It can’t have been that bad, because I’m already thinking: how am I going to handle the next one?
I go back and forth on whether vaginal birth was bad enough that I’m unwilling to ever do it again. I’ve always been open to elective C sections. Maybe I’ll do that. Recovery is also very bad there, but the psychological elements…
I don’t want to do a home birth. I liked my epidural a lot. I might get an epidural and induce fast and hard to minimize time between last meal (and good sleep) and pushing time.
It’s interesting that I’m thinking this now, when my love for the kid hasn’t even hit its stride and postpartum pain is at a peak. Classically people forget how bad childbirth is and it helps them be willing for the next one. I have not forgotten. I’m still in the thick of health problems. As of wrapping up this post and getting ready to hit publish run npm quartz build && rsync, I just had a setback in suture healing. I’ve canceled a lactation consultation tomorrow because I don’t think I can sit in a car. I took a benzodiazapine (and painkillers, and laxatives) to not panic on the toilet and then I panicked anyway. I had to dump the milk I pumped because it’s probably best not to give benzo milk to the baby (it’s arguably safe at the tiny dose I take, but we’re not sure).
I’m realizing to my embarrassment that I’m not a resilient person. I worry about what kind of soldier I’d have been in the Crusades or something. My comrades would have shunned and mocked me for making a big deal out of a nonlethal arrow wound. That stings. When I was younger it was important to me that I conduct myself with dignity during the Crusades.
My willingness even now to do this all over again (although not soon.) has a lot to do with the thing where my daughter is so real. My suffering right now is definitely real too, but it’s transient in a way she clearly isn’t. I guess this is what people have been saying all along when they talked with awe about “creating life”. That phrasing didn’t do anything for me, but it does work to think of her as having far more dynamism and… ordered complexity? structure?… in her, than in my health problems.
One way this feels real to me is thinking of how many blog posts I’ve written in my life, and how many my spouse has written (in his own domain), and realizing that in expectation she’s going to write just as many. Of course, blog posts are just a proxy metric – it’s really about cognition, experience, total sapient-hours in the history of the universe. And what a pleasure it’s going to be, to give a vessel for all that a lot of love, and tools to map our world.
Footnotes
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a postpartum hormonal thing, and maybe a post-epidural thing, although I didn’t Google long enough to determine this for sure ↩