13

NATURAL OR MEDICATED

You are lying in the bedroom of your new one-bedroom apartment—just you and the dynamic watermelon in your belly. When you told Silas that you didn’t want to marry him just because you’re pregnant and that you weren’t sure you loved him in that way, he got really upset and hasn’t returned any of your calls and texts since. You deduce that this means he is out of the picture. Although it’s mildly terrifying to step into single motherhood with your eyes wide open (and your resume quite short), the fact that you haven’t felt overly sad about Silas’s absence has been a good validation of your decision.

You’ve moved into your own apartment since your roommate wasn’t exactly looking for a loud and stinky third tenant. It’s actually really nice having your own place for the first time in your life. That’s not to say that you don’t end up lying in bed crying at least twice a week out of a combination of fear for the future, lack of control over the present, and throbbing hips. But you have a cute bassinet set up next to your full-sized bed, a couch that your dad was getting rid of that reminds you of your own childhood, and the same Ikea desk you had in college, which provides you with a familiar spot to study. It’s home.

You are thirty-nine weeks and two days pregnant, and as you lie there feeling your baby kick, you are filled with both a calm contentment and an insatiable urge to meet this little creature. You didn’t find out the gender, so you just keep referring to the baby as whatever fruit or vegetable your pregnancy book tells you it is this week.

You have been going to baby classes, accompanied by your good friend Anna, and feel a little sad and self-conscious among all the happy couples, but not overly so. As Anna holds you in your squatting positions and practices funny breathing patterns with you, you feel an intimacy of friendship that you don’t remember ever having in your romantic relationships. In these classes, you learn how to swaddle the baby, how to breastfeed, what kinds of poop to look out for, and what positions might be helpful during labor. You also get some help with writing out your birth plan: the ideal course of events that you hope your birth will follow.

In your birth plan, you have stated that you hope to have a natural childbirth, without any pain medications. This plan scares you a bit—in addition to the scary birth narrative you learned from Hollywood, a couple of friends who already have children have recounted their stories, and your aunt Ashley, who has two kids, swears by the epidural. But you’ve also heard that it’s better for the baby not to have those drugs in your system and that your own recovery will be faster without them. You’ve even heard that women who have labor induced with an epidural are six times more likely to end up with a C-section.¹ So you brave ahead with your plan, visualizing flowers opening and waves undulating and reciting mantras about trusting your body.

As you’re lying in bed this particular evening, the familiar discomfort is replaced with some pretty painful cramping. Then even more painful cramping. It takes you a few cycles to realize that these are the early-stage contractions that you’ve been thinking about for months! You call your doctor, who tells you to come down when they are four minutes apart, and then you phone Anna to take you to the hospital. She’s offered to be your on-call buddy until your mom is able to make the drive there, which will take a couple of hours.

As your labor progresses, and your consciousness of your surroundings is replaced with a singular awareness of your own body, you learn quickly what this labor pain is all about. After about seven hours, you are sitting on a yoga ball in a shower—where did this ball or this shower even come from?—and you realize that somehow someone must have let a cage of lions into the hospital and they are now eating through your abdomen by way of your asshole. Which is to say, you might be ready to consider that epidural.

Although you feel like the last person in the world who should be making a conscious decision right now, you are, in fact, the one who needs to make it. Do you want to keep going through this excruciating, exhausting, mind-bending pain—as you had planned—and risk being too late to get an epidural later? Or do you want to scrap your natural birth plan—like 30 percent of women who end up getting an epidural do—and get some immediate relief?²

If you choose to stick out the pain and hope the lions don’t eat you alive, go to Chapter 17.

If you choose to get an epidural and risk the regret of not being able to see your plan through, along with a cascade of potential complications, go to Chapter 19.