Birth Survey

So Sara wanted to know what I said in the Birth Survey. The question boils down to: seeing as how your birth experience was Absolutely Horrible, did you tell the truth about that in the survey.

I agree that it would be better for everyone if women could get accurate information about what actually happens to other women during labor and birth. So I filled out the survey. But the answer to Sara's question is, essentially: no.

The Birth Survey didn't really allow me to tell my story fully. It asked a lot of questions (a lot - took me 30 minutes to finish it), but they focused quite carefully on what happened, to the exclusion of how it felt or how I reacted. They provided places to indicate that something was against my "wishes," but not to indicate that it didn't work.

And the real problem was that some of what they did to/for me didn't work. I was fine with the epidural. I asked for it. But when it stopped working, I didn't much like waiting for the anesthesiologist to come give me a little "bump" in the tube. The second time, when she was stuck in an emergency C-section and I got no pain remediation for a while (45 minutes? An hour and a half? Can't remember, thank God.) - I didn't like that one bit. The Birth Survey doesn't have any obvious place where you can say, "I elected to have an epidural, but I found that it was inconsistent and my hospital had only one anesthesiologist on duty and thus I fluctuated between periods of calm and total freakout which was definitely against my wishes."

The other thing that didn't work for me was the whole Push Out the Baby thing. Iain's head was 37 centimeters. Nurses came down the hall when he was born to see his feet (so big they overlapped the text on the card when the staff took his footprints) and his huge, Sputnik-like head.

That noggin caused me serious trouble. After 2 hours of trying to get him out, I ended up with a C-section. If you're counting, that's more than 30 hours after we came to the hospital, and a bit more than 21 hours after labor began. Joy. Did I mention that the epidural failed for a third time just before the C-section? So while waiting for them to take me there, I was also waiting for the anesthesiologist (again). By the time I reached the operating room, I was in pretty bad shape, and I don't remember much about the section. I certainly didn't have the experience you see on A Baby Story, where the mother kisses her baby and ten minutes later she's smiling at her husband while they bliss out.

Instead, I had the shakes. So bad, in fact, that after the nurses refused to help ("it's normal!"), I prevailed on Charles to lean against my legs and then my shoulders to physically restrain me so I could stop shaking. Then he fed me a cup of ice chips, since I hadn't eaten or drunk anything in a day.

Then he badgered the nurse until she realized that she'd hooked up the pain medication delivery machine incorrectly. It was delivering nothing. Zero. It took 15 minutes of patient questions for Charles to convince her that something was wrong. Since she wasn't a recovery-room nurse, the machine was new to her. She had to call upstairs to find someone to walk her through setting it up. Oops.

None of this really fit into any of the questions in the Birth Survey. I don't think that's what it's for. The way the survey is constructed suggests to me that its authors want to know the incidence of things like epidural, c-section, opiate use (not me, the one thing I avoided until after Iain was born), etc. Although they ask you whether you had good care from your OB, the nurses, the hospital, etc., there isn't a way to provide a nuanced answer.

And, in the end, I'm not sure what to say about any of it. This is not a huge city, and I knew there would be one anesthesiologist on duty. Did I begrudge the other mother her services during an emergency c-section? No way. Is it the doctors' fault that Iain was el-huge-o and got stuck? No.

So I'm not sure whether I ought to complain or whether this is just the kind of thing that happens. Except that thing with the pain machine. That was ridiculous. Thank God for Charles and his cross-examination skills.