This is what so many BirthingBetter women taught me about childbirth and I used all of this when I gave birth to my son …. written to an expectant family.
- Labor pain really, really, really hurts in the last few hours.
- Labor pain is never connected to any medical problem. In other words, you do not have pain if you bleed. The only one medical condition that has increased pain is when the placenta separates before birth and the blood stays inside. The symptoms of this: your uterus never relaxes and there is pain all the time and your belly seems to get bigger and bigger. This is serious and should be acted on immediately.
- If pain is natural and not a ‘problem’ then you have to learn to manage the pain and not give up. This is all about a ‘bottom line.’ You can say ‘Fuck this hurts’ or ‘I hate it’ or ‘you’ll never get near me again’ or anything you want that expresses how hard it is. If you say: ‘I want pain relief’ or ‘I want this over with’ then the medical profession will accommodate … even if you just were using those phrases to express … ‘it hurts’. So make certain you and Nick know what you can say and what you won’t say unless you really, really, really want that to happen. I’ve heard many midwives at home births say: ‘Lots of women ask to go to hospital but we convince them not to.’ That’s just not ok. You need for Nick to know what is ‘must do’ or just blabbing.
- Each contraction/rest period has 5 Phases. They do and don’t blend into each other. A rest phase is obvious, the beginning of a contraction is obvious, the increased pain is obvious, the peak isn’t always but the pain easing is obvious and the contraction ending is obvious. So use one or more skills to help you get through each phase.
- Every moment you have a choice: how to inhale and how to exhale. During intense contractions every inhalation can act as a focus and you can open up the inside of your pelvis and soften around the cervix. You can use every exhalation to soften inside specific places in your pelvis and around your cervix.
- At the end of every intense contraction remember to use 3 deep Cleansing Breaths (New Focus)
- Always keep in mind that giving birth (no matter what type of birth) is an activity you’ll be doing. So you fill your time with doing things … skills are great for that. Also birth is an activity your baby is doing. If you labor then all the contractions are coming from your baby’s stimulation of your body so he can work his way down, through and out.
- Every moment you can check to make certain that map stays open and adjust.
- Every moment you can check in to make certain your sacrum has the potential to be mobile (Companion Guide .. Kate’s Cat).
- Use the Letting Down Relaxation (Companion Guide) to keep the base of your sacrum which is the top of Morgan’s birth canal open so that when your cervix is fully dilated he can move easily into this final passage.
- Every moment you can mentally encourage your body to ‘open’ up to let your baby come down, through and out of each part of your body.
- Labor changes. It’s usually not painful at first as the uterus just stretches the cervix. As the cervix starts to open and gets to about 3-5 cms the pain increases and continues to increase until full dilation and then it changes.
- The contractions get longer, stronger and closer together and when they notch up then there’s more change inside. It’s this constant change to increased pain that makes women feel ‘this is hell’ and will ‘never end’. If we knew it would last another 3 hours then we’d knuckle down but expect it to be finished in 3 hours. There’s no way of knowing, excepting checking inside. If the staff does ‘internals’ then you can check inside. When you’re fully dilated, the cervix pulls back inside your pubic bone.
- Through labor you need to keep those Minnie mouse muscles (the ones you liked massaged) soften. They control the bottom of your sacrum and the top of your vagina. When they are tight (tighten your rectum) or when you’re lying on your sacrum then the baby has trouble coming down out of your bony pelvis and into the top of it’s birth canal. This is vital.
- Not only do the contractions get longer, stronger and more intense you’ll also get more tired. This is natural. Your baby needs you to let go of any internal tension that would stop the cervix from dilating or tension inside your pelvis or vagina. The baby reduces the tension by putting the mother to sleep between contractions. This gets hard because you wake up in a contraction. This is another place nick can help you get centered and then back to sleep.
- As labor has progressed we are much less able to verbally express ourselves and no one can read our mind. Learn to use non-verbal instructions with Nick so he knows how to help and when and also when to leave you alone to concentrate on applying your skills.
- When you are fully dilated, that type of cervical pain stops. Instead your baby starts to propel itself out of your body and your uterus starts to bear down and eject the baby. This usually feels pretty good. If your vaginal opening is tight you feel stinging locally as the vaginal ring opens.
- You also feel like you’ll poo in public but that’s the head.
- You might have had hip pain which is the biggest part of the head moving through the narrowest part of your pelvis. Hip Lift is great.
- A Big baby is 9pounds 8 ounces +. A 8 ½ pound baby is NOT considered to be BIG or unusual in size. And as we discussed, it’s the size of the head relative to the hole in your pelvis that matters.
- So the bottom line of what we came to understand is this: keep going. Do not use pain relief instead of skills. Use this opportunity to hate it and keep going. Pain is natural and nothing to fear but that doesn’t mean you have to like it. The harder and more painful it is and the more tired you are the closer you are to waking up and pushing your baby out. Don’t give in and give up just because others are around you and there is pain relief at hand. Childbirth is not suffering no matter how long it takes or hurts. Childbirth is an activity you do with your baby that teaches us how to work through other activities with our baby and not give in and give up. Keep going. Tell Nick how to help you at the moment.