I think the biggest thing that soon-to-be moms consider about the prospect of giving birth is how much pain medication/intervention they are going to want during the process. Ironically enough, prior to being pregnant I was in the "Why on earth would you NOT get an epidural" camp, but throughout this experience I have been leaning more and more away from that. We watched a few videos of birth experiences in our birth prep class at the hospital, and while the natural childbirth ones (no interventions given) definitely looked very uncomfortable and painful, there was something about the fact that it was all natural pain and discomfort that was oddly comforting to me. Those moms were able to move around and get into different positions to help the baby along. Our bodies were meant to perform this amazing act, and when you give birth naturally you are simply allowing for that process to happen as it "should". It just felt right to me.
When we watched the experiences of moms that had epidurals it scared the crap out of me. Health issues are a big anxiety trigger for me and I found that the clinical and medical nature of the administration of the epidural made me very uncomfortable to watch. The moms became immediately restricted and had this foreign object connected to their spine and it just was not appealing to me. I have discovered yoga and deep stretching over the last couple of years and to me it feels good to be able to move your body in order to be able to find relief. The prospect of not being able to do that is frightening.
With all that said however - I do still feel that in the back of my mind I will end up begging for and receiving an epidural. Does that mean that I perceive myself as being a weak person? Maybe a little bit. I just know that I am going to want to do anything to make the pain go away and and an epdiural in many ways will be kind of an easy out - even if it slows my progress.
I had a rather painful natural miscarriage last year that landed me in the ER with severe pain one night. While I can't exactly recall how strong that pain felt I know that it was the most painful thing I had felt in my life at that point. After all, my uterus was contracting just as it would if I were birthing a baby. My ER doc told me that she had experienced both miscarriage and childbirth and in her experience her miscarriage was more painful than her childbirth. Of course everyone is different but that was an empowering thing for me to hear - to know that if I'd managed to go through the miscarriage maybe I could manage to get through a birth as well. [In full disclosure - they did eventually give me vicodin for the pain, but I definitely suffered for quite a while before that :)].
We are less than 12 weeks away from our due date - it is coming up SO SOON! And I was hoping to have this more definitively figured out in my mind by this point but I don't know that I ever will. We are going to interview a potential birth doula this weekend so it will be interesting to hear her philosophy and how it meshes with ours. Doulas are known for decreasing the need for medical interventions by supporting the mother with natural pain coping mechanisms. That is one reason we are interested in hiring a doula, but I would not say it's the main one. I will do a separate post on doulas later after we have chosen ours and I've had some more time to reflect on that relationship.
Meanwhile, here is a photo of me last week at 27 weeks, 2 days:
And here's a photo of baby at 27 weeks. I think she looks like Aaron!
