I demanded to be taken off the fetal monitor. I paced the empty main lobby of the hospital in the pre-dawn hours, collapsing in a writhing mess on the floor or furniture with every miserable contraction. Through it all, I could not escape the enormous lobby painting of Mrs. Ross Perot. It made me a little (more) crazy.
After 10 hours of labor, I went back to the labor wing and threw myself onto a bed, sobbing from the pain. My husband fell asleep, and I finally gave up and started begging for a touch of Demerol. The nurses sat out at their desk, ignoring me, clearly enjoying my change of heart, my failure. One nurse, who my husband finally dragged into the room with us, refused to get me the drugs. "You wanted to go natural--go natural," she said.
My husband made a scene. I got a good snort of Demerol through an intravenous drip. I passed out. I woke up. The Demerol had worn off. I pushed. I was confused--I thought someone was attacking me with a machete (I'm kidding here, though I want to give you a clear picture of the pain). My doctor cut me up to Oklahoma. I realized I was not the valedictorian of my Bradley class.
With my second kid, I was smarter. I took a short Bradley refresher course and skipped the pet tricks. I decided to hire my own independent midwife and bring her with me to the Presbyterian jailhouse to hold my hand and engage in hand-to-hand combat with the Sid Vicious nurses. My doctor, sensing territorial trouble in the cat den, recommended that I introduce myself to a Presbyterian nurse named Marie Rabinowitz, who worked for years as a bona fide English midwife before moving to our fair city, the epidural capital of the world. I met Rabinowitz for coffee. She was sympathetic. She agreed to wear a beeper so that she could be contacted no matter what time I went into labor.
Miraculously, I went into labor while she was on duty. Recalling the dreaded fetal monitor, I stayed home and walked off my contractions until I was eight centimeters and wailing. My doctor, Clark Griffith, was amazingly cool about leaving Rabinowitz, my husband, and me alone to do the natural childbirth thing. The pain was horrendous. When it was time to push, I was back thinking about the machete again. The baby's head popped out. Rabinowitz put my hands on the baby as it began to emerge. I pulled it out. My husband and I were grossly happy and moved--especially me, since I was fairly confident that I'd never have to go through this again.
Two years later, when I decided to do it one last time, I figured I could repeat my second childbirth experience but with much less pain. With two births under my belt, I could get in primo physical condition and just knock it out. Though by this time my doctor--in a rare move in this town--had put a wonderful, full-time midwife on his staff, I called Rabinowitz. She was game. She told me it would be painful again. I didn't believe her.
On the evening of August 20, I sat uncomfortably on a hard, plastic bench in a Presbyterian hospital shower. I had a bag of ice on my forehead and a hot shower nozzle fixed on my stomach. Rabinowitz looked at me through tired eyes that had just spent eight hours staring at the highway stripes between here and Lubbock. (She was out of town when I went into labor but, as luck would have it, able and willing to rush to the hospital as soon as she got home.) My husband stood helplessly beside me--soaking wet from the waist down--tired of receiving conflicting, high-volume demands from his hysterical wife: "Rub my shoulders!...Don't touch me!"
Then, without any warning whatsoever, I suddenly explode brackish-looking amniotic fluid all over the plastic bench.
Though my biceps are spectacular, in a flash, an unbearable sensation comes over me--as though a tractor-trailer is backing up into my inner organs to dump a load of Chrysler minivans on my liver. The baby is coming, I start screaming with enormous agony in my voice--and there's no way I can make it to the bed in the other room.
Suffice it to say that I made it to the bed (which was not pretty). And I did give birth to a wonderfully calm, sweet, lovely baby boy--though I was far too miserable to watch his entrance this time, let alone be the one to pull him out. (His cheerful disposition is a mystery--I can't help but think he's just so happy not to be jogging anymore.)
No, those last 20 minutes in labor have convinced me, beyond a shadow of a doubt or a place in the Natural Childbirth Hall of Fame, that drugs have their rightful place in this world. It just took me a little longer than most to figure it out.
