Diana's happy induction

I hail from a crunchy, liberal, overly educated neighborhood of Washington DC. When I got pregnant, I went to my gynecologist (now my OB) of several years. Every appointment I had was a dream. The doctors were very patient listening to my first-time jitters and concerns and paranoia and easing my anxiety (especially when it came to putting me on drugs for my severe morning sickness -- I had visions of Thalidomide in my head, but Zofran has been used safely for decades).

But no sooner did news of my pregnancy get out than suddenly neighbors and acquaintances began pressuring me to abandon the safe approach I had taken as a given for years in favor of homebirth or lay midwives or etc. Even women who had horrible experiences (one friend's baby nearly died after 48 hours of failed labor using "the Bradley method" with lay midwives in a "birthing center" in the middle of nowhere) tried to convince me to try it. They told me to "educate myself" -- but they never accepted that all my reading and talking to experts on both side of the line (a bit of a false dichotomy, since the scientific evidence is overwhelmingly in favor of hospital birth!) resulted in true "education." To them, "education" only counted if you came away agreeing with them.

Because of my husband's schedule, we were unable to attend the hospital's birthing class. I thought Lamaze was the same thing. It's not. We wound up in a class with a doula instructor who treated the entire thing as one long advertisement for her services-for-hire. It was overt and really left a bad taste in my mouth. To make it worse, there was a lot of bad advice. She showed us propaganda films about the evils of epidurals. I had to pull up statistics -- on the miniscule chances of any of the side effects the film put in blood red bold type actually happening -- in order to ease my husband's sudden fears. She actually recommended to a class full of first-time parents that they LIE to their doctors about their medical conditions. She wanted us all to drink castor oil milkshakes. I didn't learn a thing, except to be even more skeptical about the methods my friends were advocating.

I did end up watching the Ricki Lake documentary ["The Business of Being Born"], and then spoke to my doctor about it. She was more than helpful pointing the way to all kinds of literature showing how biased and ill-informed and just plain wrong the movie was. On one hand, my homebirth friends and my Lamaze instructor were pushing unproven methods and telling me to lie to medical professionals. On the other hand, my doctor and her staff were giving me facts and figures and informing me of the risks and safety precautions. I learned just how quickly your low-risk birth can turn into a high-risk one (seconds) and how a good hospital can save you and your baby through an emergency C-section in mere minutes.

I went overdue. No spicy foods, no hiking, no sex was helping things along. But induction was the best choice -- overdue babies have a much higher rate of stillbirth, and your placenta can crap out at any moment. I had been scared stiff by the Lamaze instructor and the movie about the "evil" pitocin, and my doctor didn't sugar coat my chances -- my induction might fail, and then I'd wind up with a section. I was a C-section baby, and my mother had successful VBACs after me. I wasn't thrilled about the possibility of abdominal surgery, but I also knew from my mother that it wasn't the end of the world. Also, one of my closest friends (who helped me laugh off a lot of the pressure I'd been getting) had 3 C-sections and loved them.

The night of the induction, my husband and I went out for a fancy dinner then checked into the hospital at 8 p.m. My L&D room was beautiful -- soft lighting, wireless internet access, a couch for my husband to sleep on. There was even a bathtub. I won't lie -- the bed was not the most comfortable I've ever been on, and the fetal monitor isn't exactly comfortable either, but when you're 9 months pregnant, it's hard to find a comfortable position to sleep in anyway.

The staff was wonderful. I changed, got my IV and fetal monitor set up, and then they inserted the Cervadil (to ripen my firm, thick cervix) and left my husband and I to watch DVDs on my laptop. The plan was to let the Cervadil work overnight, then start pitocin at 7 a.m. Around 1 a.m., I told my husband to go home and get some sleep, figuring I'd be in for the long haul. At 2 a.m., I was awoken by nurses rushing into the room. One checked the monitor, one put an oxygen mask on my face, and one reached inside me and yanked out the Cervadil. They explained that the baby was not responding well to that drug. I was scared and wished my husband was still there, but one of the nurses stayed with me and explained exactly what was going on and showed me what she was reading on the monitor. At first I thought for sure I was in for a section, since the Cervadil has been in for less than half the recommended time. But soon after, contractions started in earnest. They checked and I was completely effaced and 4 centimeters dilated!

The next few hours were kind of a blur, as I drifted in and out of consciousness in between increasingly painful and close together contractions. My Lamaze class had taught me that my contractions would be regular and only last for a minute (WRONG). Finally, they were so painful that I wasn't able to sleep in between. I called in the nurse, who told me I should go ahead and get my epidural. I don't know why I still believed the misinformation my Lamaze instructor had given me, but I do remember saying to the nurse that I was hoping not to get my epidural until they started the pitocin at 7 a.m., since I was afraid it would slow down labor. The nurse laughed at that and said, "Honey, you're going to have this baby by 7."

I called my husband and told him to get his butt back to the hospital. Then came the hard part -- waiting for the anesthesiologist to show up. He's my hero. He had that epidural placed in no time flat. I thought that since it was a needle, it would be instantaneous like an IV drug, but it's not. It takes a while to numb you, and it starts at your toes. Nevertheless, by the time my husband arrived, I was pain-free and excited to get word that I'd reached 10 centimeters and was ready to push. (Apparently, the epidural had relaxed me enough to give me those last few centimeters of dilation. Yay, epidurals!)

While we waited for the doctor, the nurse suggested we try a practice push. (My Lamaze instructor had warned us that the first 40 minutes of pushing for first timers are just for practice.) I don't know if it was the prenatal yoga I was doing or what, but she stopped me right away and said that I was not to push until the doctor showed up. Which she did a few minutes later.

I pushed for 25 minutes, and then my beautiful baby girl was born at 7:30 a.m. I'd been warned by my crunchy friends that the epidural would make it hard to push -- it wasn't. I'd been told they'd take the baby away from me. They didn't. I'd been told an epidural would damage my ability to bond with the baby, and breastfeeding. I started breastfeeding right away, with the nurse's assistance. We hung out in the delivery room for a while and then they moved us, together, into our mother and baby suite, which came equipped with a private bath, a pull-out bed for my husband, a TV and DVD player, warming lights for the baby if necessary, and a rocking chair.

I'd been told that hospitals were horrible, sterile places. This was cozy. We could even bring in our own food. I'd been told the staff would be mean -- they were fantastic. They sent around a lactation consultant and a pediatrician, and the nurses taught me how to bathe and swaddle my daughter. We didn't even have to move -- just got to sit for two days and hold my baby and nurse her.

A few months after my daughter's birth, once I got adjusted to taking care of a newborn, I began to question the disparity between the fears being put in my mind by natural childbirth advocates and the actual pleasant experience I had. Everything they told me had been wrong, and had seemed designed NOT to alleviate my fear about birth, but instead to create in me a fear of modern medicine that was wholly unfounded. Go take a tour of your hospital -- it's not a torture chamber. It was a lovely, safe, comforting space to have my baby.