a short birth story.
By: Michelle Cyca
Tags: Baby, Pregnancy, Birth

Admitting this is insufferable, I know, but: I felt amazing at the end of my pregnancy. Week by week, I waited for the physical misery I had been promised — swollen ankles, sore joints, exhaustion. Instead I felt fantastic. I went for long walks and wore my bikini to the beach; the night before my due date I went to a birthday party, where my friends pointed at my belly and yelled over the music, “She’s due tomorrow!” as party guests looked on in horror, as if they might have to catch the baby later.

I wanted to give birth — I am always eager to accelerate as fast as possible through any current experience to reach a new one — but it was hard to imagine not carrying on like this forever. I was comfortable, the baby was too. We drifted past the due date. I had not really expected to still be pregnant by this point. At my 37-week appointment, I speculated to my OB that I thought I would probably have my baby early. “Everyone thinks that,” she said, serenely. Although I knew that about half of babies came after their due dates, I had a lifelong habit of racing to the finish line, and I assumed pregnancy would be no different.

Two more days passed. I went to my final prenatal appointment. My doctor, unsurprised, gave me a reassuring smile and offered me a cervical sweep (less unpleasant than a Pap test). She told me that I had not progressed since my last appointment: one centimetre dilated. “It could happen any time,” she said, encouragingly, and then suggested we book an induction for the end of the week.

The rest of the day passed pleasantly. I’d been on mat leave for a month already, and was treating it like a lazy vacation, which was fun at first but beginning to get old. Still, it was a beautiful July day, and I took myself for pancakes and then met a friend and her baby for a walk in Queen Elizabeth Park. Later, I felt guilty for suggesting it, as we tried to navigate her stroller through the inaccessible garden paths. We sat in the sun and I watched her baby play with a Glossier pouch that he’d pulled from my backpack, entranced by the soft pink exterior. It was surreal to think I would have a baby soon too — that there was actually a person in my body, waiting to emerge.

That evening Luke and I went for Thai food and watched Chernobyl. It was the episode where a woman gives birth and the baby dies, having absorbed the radiation from her body. It wasn’t a very auspicious choice of entertainment, but the show was very good. I got into bed, feeling disappointingly normal, and went to sleep.

Just before 4:00am, I woke up to pee. As I got back into bed, I felt a tightening wave travel up my abdomen. A contraction, definitely. I had spent weeks googling “How will I know I’m in labour?”, worried I might confuse it for gas or a stomach ache. In retrospect this was a dumb and unnecessary concern.

Our prenatal class instructor told us the first contractions are often very far apart — twenty minutes or more — and so I tried to close my eyes again, thinking I could sleep through them until morning. A few minutes later I had another contraction, and then another. I pulled out my phone and downloaded a contraction timing app to start tracking them. They were four minutes apart, sometimes three. Not too painful, but close together.

Despite having months to get ready, I had prepared very little for birth. Luke and I attended a weekend prenatal class, where we learned about the stages of labour and I held my hands in ice water to prepare for the pain of contractions. Our instructor was a maternity nurse with two children, and informed us that the first stage of labour was typically very long. With her second child, she said, it lasted three whole days, but for most people it was more like eight to twelve hours. During this time you would want to stay home, where things were more comfortable and you could watch Netflix. Besides, if you tried to go to the hospital too early, they would just send you home.

I was determined not to overreact. It was just after 4:30am. I might not even give birth that day, I thought. This was just the beginning. I got out of bed and wandered around in the dark, timing contractions. Luke woke up as I came back into the bedroom. “I think I’m in labour,” I said, as if anything else was a possibility. He got out of bed, calm and encouraging, and started organizing our things as I paced the house. I heard him turn the coffee machine on, brush his teeth. I realized I was in a lot of pain now, doubling over with each contraction. I looked at the contraction timing app: two minutes apart.

Our OB had told us to call the hospital when labour started, and they would assess us over the phone and advise when we should come in. I dialled the maternity ward, and told the nurse that my contractions were already two minutes apart but I’d only been in labour for an hour. “That’s not a very long time,” she said, soothingly, and added that often contractions feel close together at the beginning before slowing down. She suggested I take a shower or “try to relax.” As she was giving this advice, I was dry-heaving into the sink from pain. I could not fathom taking a shower.

At the risk of frightening anyone who wants to have children — I’m sorry — this was the worst pain of my life. I had tried once or twice to imagine the pain of labour, but I didn’t have a lot to draw on. I read descriptions in books and essays like, it feels like someone squeezing your organs with barbed wire, and thought, ha, okay! I couldn’t fathom it. I decided to just avoid thinking about it. I don’t regret this decision, since nothing could have adequately prepared me. Even now, I can’t describe it. It was like an enormous wave crashing over me. I would briefly lose my mind and howl, or pound on the floor, anything to try and redirect the pain, but nothing helped.

And yet in between contractions I felt completely fine. The pain would recede just as suddenly as it arrived and I would think, stupidly, maybe the next one won’t be so bad. This must be an evolutionary mechanism, the brain’s way of trying to protect you from the terrifying certainty of all the pain that still lies ahead.

I wanted to go to the hospital immediately, and hand over my bodily autonomy to anyone willing to offer me pain relief. But I was afraid of being told that I still had hours and hours to go, that it was too early, that I just needed to do some deep breathing. I was ashamed that one measly hour of labour had flattened me. Luke had organized our bags by the front door, and was calmly eating toast and coffee, which I could not even look at without wanting to scream.

Finally, I cracked, thinking that even if the doctors thought I was a wimp, at least they might take pity on me and give me drugs. Luke packed the car, as I pulled on my jacket and leaned over the porch railing. It was almost 5:30am, cool and rainy, and I tried to take deep breaths and grapple with the fact that I was going to have a baby soon.

It was about fifteen minutes to the hospital — seven or eight contractions, during which I would squeeze Luke’s hand and kick the dashboard and scream out the window. As we rolled into the parking lot, Luke signalled to take the first available space and I had the presence of mind to say, no, close to the elevator, because I knew I would not be able to go very far. We parked and I crawled out of the car and knelt on the concrete floor, in the midst of a contraction, pressing my forehead to the ground and moaning as other cars — probably filled with other women in labour, or medical professionals on their way to work — waited for me to move, without honking, which in retrospect was very polite.

A nurse appeared and offered to get a wheelchair, but the contraction ended and I could stand up again. She directed us to the elevator, pressed the buttons for us, and told us which way to turn when we got out. I counted in my head as the elevator ascended, clutching a pillow to my body, waiting for the next wave.

The next contraction body-slammed me as we walked through the doors of the maternity ward; I bent over the chair at reception and scream-moaned, as a receptionist held out admission paperwork to Luke. I worried the staff would roll their eyes at this display but I guess it was pretty compelling — their expert ears could distinguish between early and advanced screaming — and I was immediately swept into the assessment room, where my water broke dramatically all over the floor.

The OB who assessed me was young, and male. “Sorry,” he kept saying, “I know this hurts.” If I hadn’t been in so much pain I would have laughed at that. I was sweaty, trembling, embarrassed at my water breaking, as if I had peed on the floor. Someone noted that there was meconium in the fluid — a sign of fetal distress — and paged a pediatrician.

The young male doctor “checked” me by inserting his entire hand into my vagina. Even writing that is horrific, but I didn’t feel anything. “You’re at eight centimetres,” he announced, and despite everything I felt incredibly validated by this information. I wasn’t being a wuss! I was just rocketing through labour, sprinting up the pain scale. By this point it was almost 6:00am, two hours since my first contraction.

The clinical term for this is “precipitous labour.” I had never heard this term while pregnant, and though I heard a lot of stories about women whose labour lasted for days, I had never heard of anyone whose body fast-forwarded through the process the way mine seemed to be doing. Later, I would tell people how fast my birth was and they would say, “Lucky you!” But there are drawbacks.

The medical team conferred over my head about which delivery suite was set up and ready to go, then wheeled me down the hall and into the room, where I was rolled awkwardly from one bed to the other. There was a lot of activity; someone inserted an IV port into my arm. Other people arrived, the room filling up with reassuringly stoic professionals: two more OBs, a pediatrician, nurses. Luke was there too, of course. Everyone had told me how you want to scream at your partner during labour for doing this to you (even the pamphlets from the hospital say this) but I had never been so grateful to have him there, making a heroic effort to appear calm. “Do you want an epidural?” someone asked, and I screamed, yes!

I had imagined this part of labour to be long and boring. I had imagined pacing a hospital room, taking a bath, bouncing on a yoga ball. A competent nurse kneading my back during contractions, instructing me on how to breathe. I thought there would be snacks, ice water, discussions of how things might go. Doctors ducking in periodically, giving me progress updates as my cervix gradually dilated over the long hours.

This might be how labour goes for many women; it did not go that way for me.

I kept saying, please, I need to push, I need to push. The epidural had not arrived; it had been less than 20 minutes, the staff were still wheeling carts around and setting things up. “Don’t push,” the OB in charge said firmly, “It’s too soon.” But the male OB checked me again, quickly, and declared that I was fully dilated now. There was no time to pause, or ask questions. It dawned on me that I would not be getting my epidural.

I have seen approximately one million scenes in TV and movies where someone gives birth, always draped tastefully in a clean blue hospital sheet as doctors and nurses chant push! push! I can see the head! Pushing seems like something you should know how to do instinctively, but it’s not. Between contractions, I received detailed instructions: push for ten seconds at a time, three times per contraction. Curl over your abdomen; don’t arch your back away from the pain. Keep your legs bent, your knees pointed out. Don’t scream, because it wastes oxygen, you need that to push. It was a lot to absorb as my brain grappled with the fact that I was really going to push a baby out of my vagina now.

Luke braced one leg and a nurse braced the other, and they counted through the pushes: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5… The room was full of doctors, everyone doing their job to keep me and the baby alive through this process. The lead OB gave me stern and precise instructions, like a bootcamp instructor: push, that’s right, keep going, you can’t take a break yet, you can do this. I remember saying, I feel like I’m dying, but later Luke told me he didn’t hear me say that. So maybe I only thought it.

After all that pain, pushing was a relief: it felt productive, cathartic. I could feel the baby, moving down and out, finding space in my pelvis somehow. The bootcamp instructor kept asking me to change position between contractions, rolling from one side to the other, trying not to snag or pull the IV in my arm, then climbing up to all fours. At one point the male doctor told me they were going to give me a “quick catheter” to drain my bladder, giving the baby another few millimetres of room to maneuver. The idea of a catheter has always made me shudder, but he did it so quickly — one smooth motion, in and out — that I didn’t even feel it.

I pushed for about twenty minutes, feeling the baby inch lower in my pelvis, creating space for herself somehow. I felt that thing, the ring of fire, an incredible burning pressure as she crowned. I was holding back a little bit, wishing for a break. But the bootcamp instructor leaned in close to my face, a serious expression on her face. She was worried, she told us, because the baby’s heart rate was dropping during contractions (fine) and not recovering in between (not fine). They thought the cord was wrapped around her neck. “This is an emergency now,” she told us.“This is an emergency?” I repeated, stupidly. I couldn’t quite catch up with what was happening. I didn’t know where my jacket was. I had come into the hospital with a pillow — where was my pillow?

“You’re going to get her out on this next push,” she continued, “And I’m going to help you with this.” She held up the vacuum. I remembered holding one in my prenatal class, a little suction cup, looking harmless and ineffectual. I tried to focus on what was happening: one more contraction. I pushed as hard as I could, leaning into the searing pain like I was pressing my hand against a red-hot stove burner. The bootcamp instructor said, “I’m going to give you a little cut,” by which she meant an episiotomy, another thing that terrified me in theory but which I barely felt as it happened. A lot was going on.

There were no offers, no discussions. No one asked me what I wanted to happen, because there wasn’t time. I’m not upset about that. I trusted the decisions they were making, and that no one was going to let me die on the table because my stupid body couldn’t pace itself. But I didn’t get to make any decisions. I just had to push when I was told, and not quit when I was exhausted, and not panic.

In the end, we all did our jobs. I pushed, remembering all the instructions, and as I curled up and over my belly I watched my baby slide out of my body. She had a head of black hair, slick with blood, and she came out perfect: red and screaming, just like in the movies. She was definitely covered in her own shit, or mine, but no one cared. Someone put a little white cap on her and then placed her on my chest, where she squirmed, crying, wet and alive. Our daughter. It was the most surreal moment of my life. I felt the urge to lick her clean, like a newborn kitten. Luke cut the cord.

The nurses took her away briefly to take her measurements. The pediatrician took a quick look at her and then disappeared with a thumbs up, satisfied she hadn’t aspirated any meconium. Other than a bruise on her scalp from the vacuum, she was perfect: little arched eyebrows, smooth skin, tiny delicate fingers with surprisingly jagged fingernails. A nurse wrote her stats in dry-erase marker on the whiteboard across from my bed: weight, height, head circumference, time of birth. “Does the baby have a name?” she asked, and we told her: Maeve. Happy birthday, Maeve! she wrote on the board. The other nurse gave her back to me, warm and heavy, and I held her against my chest.

Luke got a photo of this moment — someone reminded him to take his phone out. Out of frame, the nurses and doctors were addressing the wreckage of my lower body. There was a lot of blood, a lot to do. It turns out that the long hours of labour serve a purpose. Your tissues relax and stretch, your placenta detaches gradually. Fast labour is more violent: more tearing, more bleeding. No time to adjust, mentally or physically.

I still had to deliver the placenta. “Push once more,” said the young male doctor, and as I did I felt something huge slide out of me painlessly. “There it is,” he said, passing it to the other OB. I asked to see it, and she held it up dutifully, showing us the membrane, the umbilical cord. “It’s so gross!” I yelled, satisfied, and then they threw it away.

The young male OB sewed me up, speaking softly to his resident as he worked, and she watched with a mildly horrified expression that would have offended me if I wasn’t so high on endorphins. Later, every doctor would take time to inform me that I had a “complicated third-degree tear,” but no one would elaborate on what this meant, even when I asked. Later, my regular OB would explain that the episiotomy — the “little cut” — had been lateral, so I had a sort of zigzagging stitch to repair the cut and the natural tearing.

Job over, the lead OB became warm and congratulatory. “How do you feel?” she asked. “I think I’m in shock,” I said, staring down at Maeve — my baby! “Well,” she said, gently “If you feel like you might have PTSD, we can refer you to a counsellor.” I thought she might be joking, so I laughed a little bit. I felt disoriented. My baby wriggled in my arms.

Meanwhile, my body was covered in blood, some of it already beginning to dry. My whole body was shaking from adrenaline, or shock. There were cuts and bruises on my thighs from where I’d dug in my fingernails during contractions. I realized that I hadn’t cried at all, not during labour, not when I saw my baby for the first time, despite being the kind of crybaby who sobs at Adele music videos and birthday cards. I still didn’t know what had happened to my jacket. I’d only been awake for three hours.

The shifts changed at 7:00am, so all of our doctors and nurses wished us well and then left, replaced by new, equally congratulatory doctors and nurses. We didn’t see much of them for the first hour after birth; they try to leave you alone, so you can bond with the baby. Our nurse brought me a breakfast tray, checked my blood pressure and left.

Luke fed me a bite of toast as I held Maeve against my chest, with IVs in both my arms, and before I even swallowed it I felt a swell of nausea rising up in my throat and realized that I was about to vomit on my one-hour-old baby. Fortunately Luke intervened just in time with the lid of the breakfast tray, sliding it between my chin and Maeve’s head, and I vomited onto that instead. The nurse came back to take my blood pressure and I told her I’d thrown up. “That’s perfectly normal,” she said, unfazed. “You’re probably still in shock.”

Luke offered to take away the breakfast tray but the nausea disappeared as quickly as it had arrived, and I was hungry. I ate the limp hospital toast and texted my parents to ask them to bring me a sausage-and-egg sandwich when they came to visit. “When should they come?” Luke asked, relaying instructions by phone. A nurse glanced at the clock. “Maybe in a few hours,” she suggested, eyeing me. “There might be more to do.”

This whole time, I was still bleeding. Whenever I shifted my weight, I felt blood gushing out of me, pooling into a plastic bag at the end of the bed. One of my IVs was delivering pitocin, to help my uterus contract and slow the bleeding, but it didn’t seem to be working. A new OB appeared, looking grim. She pressed down on my pillowy stomach painfully and frowned. “We need to stop this hemorrhaging,” she said, “I think there are some big clots of retained tissue in there that are preventing your uterus from contracting, so I need to go in there and remove them.”

I handed the baby to Luke, agreeably, not getting it. She explained the removal process: she was going to go in there and remove them. With her hand. She was going to put her hand back inside my freshly-stitched vagina, reach all the way up into my uterus, and pull out whatever had been left behind. With her hand.

So much of birth seems needlessly punishing. I can’t believe there haven’t been more medical advances in this area. You can get your eyesight painlessly corrected in two minutes with lasers, but having a baby is still mostly blood and blunt instruments, so much yanking and tearing. Is it just misogyny? The body is capable of miracles, sure, but jesus christ, can’t we help it out a little bit?

“Can I have an epidural now?” I asked, joking but also hopeful, and she shook her head. “I’ll be quick,” she promised. A nurse came to hold my legs. Luke took Maeve back to his chair in the corner.

A few hours earlier I had set a new benchmark for pain, and what happened next was so much worse. It hurt so much. I wasn’t allowed to scream during labour — a waste of energy that could be spent on pushing! — but I screamed now. The doctor withdrew her bloody hand and discarded something dark and clotted into a metal dish. “I almost got it all,” she said, apologetically. “I just need to do that one more time.” It was just as bad the second time, unimaginably bad, but she yanked her hand out triumphantly, presumably clutching some big bloody mass that I don’t remember seeing because I was trying not to pass out. She checked that she hadn’t torn any of my fresh and complicated stitches, and left.

When I imagined birth, lazily — combining scenes from various movies, passages of books, and stories from friends — I thought I had an idea of what might go wrong. Mostly, I imagined it would take too long, the baby would get stuck, and I would get a C-section. My mom had three of them; it felt like fate that I would get one too, and secretly I found the idea a relief. I had no idea the opposite could be true: that birth could be too fast. I still think it’s funny that my body’s approach to delivery — extremely efficient, but sloppy — was exactly like my work ethic. I wanted to call every previous employer who told me I should take more time with my work and tell them that I was fundamentally wired for speed.

The worst was finally over. Other than this fifteen minutes of complete and total horror, I felt weirdly great. When the local anesthetic wore off, I still felt good, just a little sore. A nurse removed my IV. I got out of bed to stretch and touch my toes. I kept waiting for the pain to arrive, but it didn’t. I poked at my newly flat stomach, which had the texture of barely-set jello. I marvelled at how long it had been since I last peed, after months of needing to pee hourly. Luke found my jacket and pillow, finally, somewhere down the hall. I held my baby and tried not to think about what my vagina looked like.

Pregnancy teaches you that any illusions of bodily control that you have are just that: illusions. There is so much stupid advice for pregnant people about diet and exercise and “avoiding stress”, but 99.9% of the process is completely out of your hands. There is no way to predict what will happen to you, or the fetus you’re carrying. The possible physical complications are endless: gestational diabetes, high blood pressure, but also weird ones — I was congested for nine months, which my doctor told me was common. “What causes it?” I asked, and she shrugged: no idea. The pregnant body is a black box.

But more than that, you don’t know who you will meet, on the other side; you are creating a person for whom you are responsible for the rest of their life. Trying to grasp the enormity of this fact can make you feel insane, so instead it’s easy to focus on the things that provide a locus of control: taking your prenatal vitamins, abstaining from wine and prosciutto, hoping that if you do everything right, you will be “successful” in the neverending project of parenting.

The truth is this: everything is up to chance. Getting pregnant is like riding in a car, blindfolded. You can only hope that you both arrive safely at your destination. I was very lucky, despite everything, and so was Maeve. I’m so glad we’re here together. I hope that if you embark on this wild journey, you arrive safely too.

In the end, I’m glad I didn’t waste any time preparing for childbirth, because it would have been pointless. The weeks I spent reading novels in a hammock, one palm flat against my undulating belly, was a better use of my time. In those minutes where I was captive to the irresistible physical instincts of labour, surrounded by competent professionals who maneuvered and sliced my body without hesitation, I thought: I can’t believe we tell pregnant people to make a birth plan. What a joke! This loss of control is good practice for the rest of your life.

If I have one piece of advice it’s this: don’t wait to go to the hospital. I still wish I’d gotten that epidural.