8/9/2019 Birth - What They Don't Tell You!
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Birth what they dont tell you!
By Claire Hennessy
When I became pregnant with my first child, I was a front runner
amongst my family andmy friends. No-one had any children or
even looked as if they were about to in the near future. I have two
sisters, the eldest of whom had sworn off ever having children
and the youngest, being a Buddhist nun, was not likely to give me
any support in this direction either.
To make matters worse, two of my closest friends decided to up
and leave their husbands soon after I announced I was pregnant.
They were young, single and thin while I was married, up the duff
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and getting fatter by the day. I felt trapped and beyond the point
of no return.
Looking back now I realize I had an effortless pregnancy, but at
the time I was terrified about what was happening to my body
and what the future held and so was in denial for quite a while
until I went for my first scan.
There, on the screen in front of me, very clearly, was this wriggly,
maggot-like creature, which only looked sort of human. It felt like
I was watching a film and not the insides of my own body. There it
was squirming and moving around and I couldnt even feel it.
For the next few days all I could think about was that film Alien
and the scene where it burst out of the womans stomach. Yuck!
As the birth date grew closer and closer, I got so fed up with
lumbering around like a beached whale, not being able to bend
over to pick something up or put on my shoes, and taking five
minutes just to roll over in bed, that all I wanted was to get the
little monster out of me.
I went into labour while having lunch in my local pub, much to the
amusement of the landlady and the other customers. After
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hobbling home hunched up against the pain of ever increasing
contractions, I attempted to strap on my TENS machine. No, this
isnot
a marital aid but a particularly complicated pain relief
contraption recommended by my midwife.
Designed by sadistic, probably male, bondage freaks, a TENS
machine consists of numerous wires which attach to the base of
your spine and then dangle dangerously, allowing the lumbering
whale, already in agonizing pain, to then trip over the bloody
things every five minutes. The hand-held controls are basically
just a means by which you give yourself electric shocks to distract
yourself from the labour pains! And dont get me started on going
to the loo every 10 minutes without weeing on it and accidentally
electrocuting yourself!
Finally we made it into the hospital, gasping in pain and expecting
our baby to be born at any second, where a tall, severe doctor
stuffed what seemed like her entire arm up my vagina. I nearly hit
the ceiling it was so painful. Apparently, I wasnt even a single
centimeter dilated, she informed me in a voice that suggested
that I was a bit of a wimp to even be in hospital so early on in
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labour. I was left wondering what on earth I had been doing for
the past 10 hours. Obviously I wasnt very good at this giving
birth thing.
Another 24 hours went past before my daughter decided to
honour us with her presence, during which time my husband
managed to find a lovely comfortable bed nearby, snored through
the rest of my contractions and then complained of an achy back
when he eventually woke up - poor love!
As the night wore on, I ripped up my neatly written Birth Plan that
I had made on the advice of the teachers at the Natural Childbirth
Trust, which naively stated that I wanted to have as natural a
birth as possible, with little or no pain relief.
Give me the bloody epidural NOW I screamed, red-faced from
another prolonged cramping episode. An anesthetist eventually
showed up and promptly announced I was now too far along in
labour for me to have an epidural. My only option left was the
dreaded Pethidine, which was supposed to make you throw up.
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I dont care if I projectile vomit into next week, just give me
some damned pain relief, I shouted at the midwife, my polite
British reserve disappearing entirely.
When she finally decided to emerge into the outside world, my
daughter didnt hang about. I got the most tremendous urge to
push, gave three or four big squeezes and, slippery as an eel, she
shot out, the midwife almost having to catch her before she hit
the floor. Unfortunately, she also had to catch the bit of poo that I
very embarrassingly squeezed out at the same time!
As those of you who have given birth know, most of your memory
cells also get ejected with the afterbirth, otherwise I would NEVER
have gone through the whole awful process all over again with my
son!
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