The Miracle of Epidural

The baby finally arrived. I gave birth! Here I am minutes after little Nicolás arrived. Numb from the waist down. Yay for epidural. OK so technically epidural may not be a miracle but I am quite prepared to worship the person who invented it.

Mum and the new arrival

My heightened reverence for the wonder drug comes from experiencing a fraction of the pain of childbirth, due, not to any silly ideas about a natural birth (with total respect, no really TOTAL respect to those who do make it through child birth without epidural) , but the tardiness of the anaesthetist who arrived about 3 hours after I was admitted.  Something about an emergency to attend. Life and death etc. Yeah like WHATEVER.  I didn’t get anything, that’s NOTHING, until I was 5 cm dilated.  That’s 5 cm dilation more than I wanted to feel. Or ever want to feel again.
When the anaesthetist arrived and my husband calmly enquired, “where the f*ck were you” (given that I had been yelling at my husband, “where the f*ck is the anaesthetist” for a good while), the response was “oh relax she’s only 5 centimetres dilated¨. Which of course implies that I am a complete girl. which, hands in the air, I could well be.  And speaks loudly of my complete incapacity to make it to the required 10 cm dilation.
Actually when I arrived at the hospital in the morning – that’s like, the very beginning of the whole process – they said I was borderline for being sent home/staying in hospital but they would keep me in the hospital given my contractions were so close together.  And I’d just like to let the staff there know that was a GOOD DECISION because even at that point any attempt to send me home would have required tearing me off the closest fixed object I could grasp on to.  And no one wants finger nail scrapes on their brand new defribula-wotsit.
I don´t want to be a big wuss, it’s just that. well. the contractions REALLY hurt. They were coming very close together  – it felt like every two minutes but there is a good chance it was less, given my questionable perspective. I was in a WORLD OF PAIN so maybe it was every 15 minutes. How much pain? I was already having thoughts along the lines of asking to be put out of my misery.  Death over more pain. Seriously.  Sure, I heard child birth hurt but I figured I would only have a bit of pain before the epidural was administered and that would be like, oh I don´t know, a visit to the dentist.  One of the best parts, and there are oh so many highlights to the child birth pain, is that the contraction starts off slowly so you can feel it coming.  So you KNOW you’re about to go through it again. And you already know what that’s going to feel like. And there is nothing you can do to stop it coming. It’s like lying down on train tracks and watching the train coming.

The other unexpected part of this was that I screamed JUST LIKE IN THE MOVIES.   So many times I had seen those child birth scenes in films and thought, “surely not everyone does that, it seems so unnecessary and, well, not very helpful”. Well it turns out that screaming is the ONLY thing you can do. You can’t breath, so shouting, or whatever you call that animal sound variation, is the only option. Except for the points where the pain gets so intense not even sound can come out.  And true to the cliche I shouted and made other indescribable but very loud noises and occasionally used my husband as a punching bag.
But then arrived wonderful, wonderful epidural. (yes the wonderful baby arrived too but that’s later).  Oh how we laughed and chatted once the drug kicked in and we watched the little machine tell us that I was going through contractions 50% stronger than the ones that had driven me to thoughts of suicide half an hour earlier.  I would have taken tea and cake if they’d let me, so immune was I to the feeling of being in the midst of labour. Ahhh, bliss.
I realised I was even luckier when I saw how deep the hand of the midwife went during the examinations. I don’t doubt they would had to have strapped me down if they had tried to do that whilst I was going through the contractions pre-epidural.  And the actual birth, the small matter of baby passing through birth canal -  didn’t feel a thing. Which was again, excellent, as there was some cutting and suction and stuff which certainly would not have gone well with tea and cake.
And then there he was, covered in icky stuff being passed to me, and I was relaxed and happy and relieved that I had finished and there was not going to be any more pain or screaming or needles or operating rooms, not to mention waddling around in 35 degree heat and being asked was the baby ever going to arrive.  And so begins being a mother.
So weird to have this little human suddenly passed to you and told it has come from inside you. Weird and wonderful.  And so begins a new and unknown territory for me, and my husband, and we are now, the three of us, a family.

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