Toby's Birth Story: How I Learned the Hard Way to Expect the Unexpected

I've read a ton of birth stories. Some of them horrific, and others, so beautiful they bring me to tears. A couple of months ago, I was with a wonderful group of ladies from ICAN, telling my birth stories once again, and it occurred to me that I have never actually written down the stories of the days my boys were born. So I figured I should do that.

I should preface this by saying that the following is my experience of Toby's birth as I remember it. I was in and out of it for a little while, and it has been three and a half years since Toby was born. I know a few of the details are a little off, but my husband has assured me I do remember everything that matters.

I got pregnant with Toby the week after I dropped out of college. Yes, you read that right. I didn’t drop out because I was pregnant. I got pregnant because I dropped out. Something about feeling so free and relieved, I guess. We just weren’t being very careful.

While we were clearly not prepared to have a child financially or in any other way, we got pretty excited. We always knew we wanted a family, we were just starting younger than we hoped. So I started researching. I researched everything. I joined a forum site for moms, and asked all the questions. I read books, looked up gestation pictures, talked to my one friend who had a child (coincidentally, right before I got pregnant). I watched videos, ate right, and made a birth plan.

My birth plan was pretty simple: Don’t touch me, just let me have the baby. I didn’t really think any further than that. After all, natural birth was supposed to be pretty simple, right? No further explanation needed. I even skipped over the parts of the books that talked about pain meds, c-sections, inductions, and every other scenario. There was only one scenario I wanted to think about: naturally birthing my healthy child. I read one book that talked about the scary things, Pushed: The Painful Truth About Childbirth and Modern Maternity Care by Jennifer Block. I couldn’t believe those women were so stupid and gullible to just believe everything the doctor had told them, and go along with it. Where was their willpower? I would never be such a pushover.

We bought a house and moved in when I was seven months pregnant. It so happened that we moved about an hour and a half drive from the OB practice I was going to. And we learned after moving in that our cell phone carrier didn’t cover our neighborhood. We had to go up the street to make or receive calls. And my husband worked second shift (3pm-11pm), also an hour and a half away. Not exactly the best situation for a woman who was about to give birth, but it was the choice we made.

My water broke two weeks early, the day after Thanksgiving. This was the first of many things I was not expecting. I rolled over to my husband, who had just fallen asleep, and told him. His reply, “No it didn’t, go back to sleep.” But it really had. I had the wet pajama pants to prove it. We got in the car to go call the doctor on call, who told us to come in to the hospital at about six a.m. unless the contractions got pretty close and regular. We called our moms, as well, and went back home. At this point, I wasn’t really having contractions. I thought I was, but it was mostly a lot of pressure in my lower back. If I hadn’t skipped over those parts of the book, I would have known that I was probably having back labor, and needed to get in a good position to get the baby to turn face up. But I didn’t know that.

We went to the hospital around six or seven the next morning, to be greeted by a nurse who promptly told me to lie down in the bed, and strapped a fetal monitor on me. I knew this wasn’t an optimal position to labor in, but I was so tired, so I lay down. It didn’t take very long for the nursing staff to inform me that the monitor wasn’t picking up the baby’s heart rate very well, so I would need an internal fetal monitor. I knew I didn’t want that, but again, I was tired. So I agreed.

For the next several hours, the nurse and OB on call (not my OB, by the way) took turns fiddling with the monitor, telling me to lie down during contractions so they could read the monitor, and checking my cervix. And by checking, I mean the OB rammed her hand up my vagina with very little warning or anything. My husband even cringed just watching her do it. At one point, I grimaced, and she said, “If you can’t handle this, there’s no way you’re going to be able to push a baby out of there.” I overheard “c-section” once or twice during this torture session, but I didn’t really get it until that moment. She didn’t really think I was going to push him out.

This was the moment I wanted to run for the hills. Everything in me was screaming to get the heck out of there. But what was I going to do? I had a sleep-deprived husband who hadn’t read any of the books, who didn’t know what was going on in my head. I was uncomfortable. Not just because I was in labor, but because I was scared.

Throughout the process, they had been telling me what I was feeling weren’t contractions. They were just “irritability” of the uterus. And to be honest, I didn’t really think they were contractions, either. I knew labor wasn’t supposed to be this easy, but I was hanging on with all I had to those peaks and valleys on the chart. I knew if I wasn’t in labor, then I would be in trouble soon. So I tried to relax (yeah, right!) I found a little step stool and did stair climbs on it for forty five minutes. I walked around. I sat on the toilet. I kept feeling a lot of pressure in my back, but no real contractions. And the “irratibility” was very irregular. Two minutes apart, then five, then eight, then constant for a few minutes, then another five minutes till the next one. I was all over the place.

They decided to give me Pitocin to augment my labor. Almost as soon as it went into my IV, I puked. The nurse rushed out, saying something about getting me something for the nausea. When she came back in, she put something in my IV, and told me it would ease my stomach. Then she told me what it was. Phenargen. If I had known before she gave it to me, I would never have let her. I knew that stuff made me really sleepy. I passed out, and woke up only for the occasional “irritability” for a few hours.

At about seven p.m., the OB came in and told me we needed to talk about me having a c-section. She told me a myriad of things, including my pelvis was too narrow to birth such a big baby, and he was at least eight pounds (she said this without ever seeing any sort of ultrasound. His birthweight was seven pounds, two ounces). She said my water had been broken for eighteen hours, and they really don’t like to wait longer than thirteen hours. She said all kinds of things, but she said one thing that made my husband’s face go white, “The baby’s heart rate is getting dangerously low.” She left us alone to talk about it for a few minutes, but I knew already what was going to happen. When she came back in, I looked at her and said, “I can basically choose to do this now or wait a couple of hours and be forced to do it, is that about right?” She said yes. So I gave up the fight.

They gave me a spinal block, and prepped me for surgery. My husband went to get all bunny suited up, and we met back in the O.R. I started shaking uncontrollably (a side effect of the spinal block), and they put heavy blankets on my arms. When the O.B. lifted my gown and saw my abdomen, her comment was, “Wow, this kid really did a number on you, huh?” The anesthesiologist must have known I needed to be distracted from what was happening, so he and my husband told Chuck Norris jokes while I was being cut open. When they brought him out, I could barely think straight. A combination of exhaustion, the drugs, and the emotions inside of me. All I remember is seeing him and thinking, that’s not my baby, this isn’t my experience. It doesn’t feel real enough. My husband took him and they whisked them out while I was being put back together. During the last half of the procedure, I started feeling everything they were doing. I panicked, and they had to put me out. Obviously, I don’t remember much of anything from that point on.

I do know I got to hold him and nurse him later, in my room. I decided to play superhero and refuse pain meds because I truly didn’t feel much pain. I just felt numb. My postpartum nurse was amazing, and almost made up for the horrible bedside manner of the Labor and Delivery department. But I lay there in my hospital bed, and I felt like a gutted fish. Like no one cared that I had been violated. It didn’t matter how I felt, because of course I got a beautiful baby out of it. That’s what they kept telling me. “All that matters is that you’re both healthy.”

Now, I found out later that the O.B. on call that day was new to the practice I was a patient with, and her specialty was Juvenile Gynocology. That explained why she treated my husband and me as if we were children. That’s who she was used to treating. I got a letter several months later saying she was no longer with the practice. I’ve always wondered if I wasn’t the only one she treated that way. I sure hope no one else had to go through what I did.

It took me over a year to really deal with my feelings about Toby’s birth. I was in a dark place for a very long time, and I didn’t even really know it. That's not to say I didn't (or don't) love Toby with everything inside of me. It took me a few weeks to really know that I did, but I love him to pieces. But for a while, I couldn't look at him without reliving that experience. It was really only after I started going to ICAN meetings, talked through it with one of my dear friends, and was able to VBAC my second child that I was able to deal with those feelings and felt like I was back to normal.

The lessons here? Read all of the books, even the scary parts. When you make your birth plan, make a contingency plan for everything. Research the doctor or midwife practice and hospital before you choose them. And if you find yourself in a dark place after giving birth, get help. It is out there, and you don’t have to suffer alone.

When it comes to birth, we really do have to plan for every "what if," and expect every unexpected.