#epidural

“Can you feel that?” asked Dr. Ritter.

“Feel what?”

“Good.”

Hi!

That’s so exciting - you’re almost there! :D

I know many moms who got their epidural and loved it, and I know others who didn’t have such a great experience or had side effects/complications. There’s no easy answer here!

Epidural doesn’t lower your risk of tearing (in fact, sometimes it raises it if you aren’t feeling the urge to push and have to do directed pushing). There are a lot of things you can do with the help of your nurses/midwife to avoid or minimize tearing, like using warm compresses and doing perineal massage (the latter you can start doing now before you go into labor!). It’s becoming much less common for doctors to do episiotomies except in extreme emergency situations, but definitely ask your OB their policy. The research shows that episiotomies do not prevent tearing (in fact, they may increase the risk), so there’s no real reason to do them routinely.

There are a lot of ways to cope with labor pain without an epidural, such as using movement, different labor positions, massage, counter pressure, aromatherapy, breathing techniques, a warm bath/shower, and so on.

If possible, consider getting a doula for your birth. DoulaMatch.net is a good place to start. If you can’t get a doula (or even if you can), it’s a good idea to let the nurses at your birth location know that you are trying to avoid pain medication and need their support with comfort measures. At a recent birth I attended, because the mom came with a birth plan focused on a natural childbirth, they assigned the nurse who is really passionate about natural childbirth to her, and that nurse was awesome, almost like having a second doula!

The two biggest things to remember:

1. Don’t go to the hospital too early! With your first, labor tends to last longer, and without the context of prior births many moms think they are closer to delivery time than they are. When you get into early labor (sporadic contractions that don’t stop you from talking/focusing on other things), try to take your mind off the contractions by taking a nap, eating a good meal (definitely eat a good meal before going to the hospital!), watching TV, taking a walk, or some other activity. Don’t go until it’s really time, or you’ll spend more time than you need to getting poked and prodded by nurses.

2. When you do go to the hospital, remember that women are not designed to labor laying on their backs! Gravity is your friend, as is movement. The two together will help your baby descend and engage in the pelvis. Walking, sitting on a birth ball, slow dancing with baby’s dad, and getting on hands and knees can all help baby move while also reducing the tension in your body. I recommend changing positions every 30 minutes or so (but if a position isn’t working for you, don’t wait!)

Medical procedure gone wrong / Traumatic birth / Chronic illness

I’ve been incredibly vocal about my experience with getting an epidural injection during my labor & delivery in 2018 if you know me on my personal social media. It’s been three in a half years and I’ve decided to try to go a little more public with my story. Why? Because I have felt so hopeless, exhausted, sometimes crazy, and incredibly alone over these years and if telling my story helps just one other women who might be experiencing the same things as me, that’s enough of a reason for me. I’ll be splitting it all up into chapters to help make it easier to read! 

*LONG DISCLAIMER*

Please keep in mind, my story is mine and it is still ongoing. I’m being seen by medical doctors and still trying to find a diagnosis after 3.5 years. I do share my opinions but I also share factual evidence. I am not a doctor and I cannot diagnose anyone, I can only share my personal experiences. Please seek out professional help and always do your research from reputable sources.

Secondly, I am not anti-medicine. I am pro do your research and make sure you know what you’re letting people put into your body. I am pro advocate for yourself and your health. I am pro listening to women and mothers and taking them seriously. As a woman and a mother, I’m an advocate on recognizing medical gaslighting and knowing your medical rights, things I didn’t know about before going on this journey. I’m honestly not against epidurals even though I had a horrible experience with one. I won’t tell you not to get one, but I will tell you my experience with getting one, how my life changed after getting one, my pain I live with every day after getting one and all of the risks, no matter how rare they may be that are possible with these procedures.

Mothers are being handed a consent form while they are having contractions every minute, bent over in pain, about to give birth to a whole human being and expected to understand what they’re reading, to care about what they’re signing and to fully understand the risks involved. Doctors are failing to verbally inform of all the risks as well and not all of the risks are listed on the consent form. 3.5 years ago, I didn’t question it either. I had no reason to. Now living with the pain I’ve had to go through, I see how much that needs to change. I am not anti-medicine, I am not “ban all epidural injections during childbirth” at all. I want to make that clear. Even if at times I seem hostile or against it, please understand how much that needle has affected my life so I do get emotional when discussing it, however I still recognize how rare of an occurrence this is and most of the time epidurals work just fine.  

Chapter 1 - Stabbed in the back

It was finally induction day! I was 39+1 weeks and so ready to not be pregnant and get control of my body back. I spent most of my time pregnant bending over a trash can vomiting multiple times a day, I also had gestational diabetes so I was pricking myself 4 times a day and dieting, so boy was I over it! I just wanted to meet our precious baby.

I went into my induction with one goal and one goal only: have a healthy baby. That’s all that mattered to me. I didn’t have any type of birth plan other than get the baby out. I did however knew that I wanted to try to go as long as possible without any pain meds. I wanted to give birth naturally, I wanted to see if I could do it. After all, that's what us women were made to do! I won’t go into details about my labor so let’s fast forward a bit. I was 6 cm dilated and my water had just broke. I was doing pretty good up until then but the contractions started to come on so strong and they weren’t giving me any breaks. I remember my husband telling me, “You don’t have to deal with this, you can get an epidural. It’s okay to get one if you are tired.” I was so tired, but I pushed on for another hour or so until I just couldn’t handle it anymore, or so I thought. 

The anesthesiologist comes in and asks everyone to leave, except for my husband and nurses. We go over the consent form and how the procedure will go, at least I’m assuming we did. This whole time in my labor is a huge blur. I’m having contractions every 45 secs to a minute and I didn’t really care in that moment. I just wanted some relief.

I sit on the side of the bed, curled up against a pillow, trying to not hold my breath at every contraction. My lovely spine is exposed as the doctor gets ready to jab a needle the size of my hand into it. He starts the procedure. After about 5 minutes I could tell something wasn’t going as planned. There was a lot of maneuvering about, there was a lot of pulling sensations that I thought were odd. The doctor told me he was having a hard time getting it placed, he told me my ligaments were super thick. He tried at one spot, couldn’t get it in. He told me he was going to have to try a different spot. Each time he tried a spot, sudden electrical zaps would shoot through my lower back and buttocks, making me jump. It was frightening, that’s the only word I can use for the feeling.

Here I am trying to stay as still as possible while going through contractions because there is a huge needle in my back and something is happening to my body that I can’t control. I screamed out each time and started to cry, trying to explain what I was feeling to the anesthesiologist. He was still struggling behind my back but now he was perplexed as to why I was uncontrollably jerking every time he poked me. “Let’s try another spot,” he said. At least 30 minutes has past now. My mom and my sister are waiting in the hallway, trying to figure out what’s taking so long. I remember reading that epidurals usually take about 10 minutes to complete so I knew something wasn’t going as planned. 

Onto another spot he goes, poking me another time in another spot on my spine. Het gets it in, I feel some relief mentally very briefly because I know this should mean my contractions will fade soon. Suddenly, as he starts to inject the epidural medicine into my back, I start to feel this intense pressure going up my back, my neck and all the way to my head. I heard liquid sounds in my ears as this pressure was going up my back. It felt like liquid was being injected into my spinal cord and that pressure was traveling up my back, into my neck and into my head eventually building up so much pressure that so I legitimately thought that my head was going to explode. I screamed out in pain. What the hell is happening?! My back was on fire, my head was throbbing, the light in the hospital room blinded me. Everything is blurry. The doctor asked me what's wrong, what hurts. I try explaining to the best of my ability but all I can get out is “my head, my head!” My head feels like it’s going to explode at any second. He keeps telling me over and over he doesn’t know what happened. Neither did I. All I knew was that this man had stabbed me in my back and I was in the worst pain I’ve ever experienced in my life all while trying to make sure I have a healthy baby. 

My head is still spinning, my tears stained my cheeks. Contractions are still coming on strong but the epidural is in correctly now, at least we think it is. I lay back down and try to rest before it’s time to push. I keep getting told that everything is fine. I keep getting told that nothing wrong happened. But my head is killing me. I still have that same pressure that I experienced during the epidural administration. I try to stop thinking about it but the pain in my head was so bad it was hard to ignore it. I had a job to do though. I had to birth a baby!

An hour after the pain explosion during the epidural, the epidural started to wear off. I knew that wasn’t normal but again, I was just trying to focus on having my baby. It’s finally time to push, the pressure is unlike anything I’ve experienced before. My head is still throbbing, making it hard to push a whole baby out from my body. I remember pushing so hard because I couldn’t stand the pain any longer, I just needed the baby out. So I kept pushing, pushing, pushing, hurry up and just get out! I was getting lightheaded from pushing and the pain, I was worried I wasn’t going to be able to finish pushing. But 5 minutes later, a beautiful baby girl was born. Adeline Mae, 6lbs 8oz, 19 1/4 inches long. She was so tiny...and so so perfect. For the first hour I forgot about the pain I was in. I forgot about the horrible epidural experience. I forgot about how scared I was. I was just so in love with the tiny human we created, nothing else mattered. But the head pain never went away. It’s still there to this day as I’m typing this, 3 in a half years later.

Stay tuned for chapter 2.

*DISCLAIMER*

Epidural Use At Birth Not Linked to Autism Risk

Expecting Miracles- Finding Meaning and Spirituality in Pregnancy Through Judaism

I recently read an article about epidurals and the desire to have a painless birth and delivery (thank you @rakellenoble for the link)

As a mother, and someone who had difficult as well as relatively “easy” deliveries this article particularly hit home for me.

As a child of immigrants, I was raised by strong people. Wars, hunger, forced relocation, all these terrible experiences hardened my family and my concept of certain life events. My mother prided herself on never using painkillers for the birth of any of her children. This was a point of feminine pride (“I’m strong enough to do this on my own”), as well as maternal instinct (“how will I know if something is wrong, if I can’t feel anything”)

We, as humans, are sensitive. We have nerve endings that feel both pleasure and pain. While it is overwhelming for most expectant mothers to imagine the child-birthing experience, it is important to remember that these sensations, pain, pressure, etc, are our body’s way of communicating with us.

It is a harrowing experience. The birthing room stands on the precipice of life and death, of pleasure and pain, of sadness and joy. These are all two sides of the same coin. I can only speak of my own experiences, and they varied. In retrospect, I might have done certain things differently, but you can’t change the past, we can only learn from it and move forward, towards a wiser future.

It is easy to preach and to tell others, “you should do this,” or “don’t be afraid to feel this,” but the reality is that everyone walks their own path and must live their own life. I understand the desire to run away from the terror of labor (it’s called LABOR after all), but it is also important to remember ourselves in this process. Our SELF. Our body, our connection to that body, the mind, as well as our connection to the child we are bringing into the world.

Everything has a price and oftentimes we forget this. Growing up in a capitalist Disney-ed culture, we expect happy endings, we are treated passive-aggressively and we are told there’s a pill for every ailment, and in case of any unpleasant side-effects, we have a pill for that, too! Constantly being bombarded by watered-down, perfectly manicured ideas of reality, we tend to lose sight of what reality is. It is both light and dark, death and life, pain and pleasure. My favorite analogy, that I continue to go back to, is what I refer to as the “love and light” phenomenon.

There is no such thing as “good vibes only,” and wishing “love and light” on everyone. It is a childish fallacy at best, and detrimental at worst. We are sensitive and complex beings. By only hoping for the best, we are setting ourselves up for imminent disaster. Life is not the Sun card, it is more  often the Tower, and even when those walls are crumbing down around us, it is important to remember that once the dust settles, we are still on solid ground, and can see the path ahead more clearly. There is always another side, and it’s important to realize that one isn’t “better” than the other.