THE PARIS LETTER: The Whole Story

5 weeks old yeah!

Well, I’m back, and there’s a whole new person living in my house now. Her name is Sophia and I love her to pieces even though she’s been known to projectile poop on me. She is almost six weeks old, and while Matt and I are tired, we are pretty much thinking this whole parenting thing is one of the best ideas we’ve had.

I had a really tough labor and delivery, the subtitle of which could be “expect the unexpected”. The word I’ve used the most often to describe it is “insane” – this might be hyperbole (not something I’m a stranger to), but despite my best efforts at preparation the whole thing really threw me for a loop. I’m going to tell all here, because I need to both for my memory and for myself.  If you’re not into details you may want to skip this post, it is up to you. I will give you the short version now: Sophia is here and she is healthy and gorgeous. I had a difficult labor with a few complications but am on the mend, and both Matt and I are crazy in love with our little girl.

Okay, now all you people not into oversharing can go do the Sunday crossword or something –

For the rest of you, here is what happened, after the jump:

So we’ll start on Sunday November 20^th, the day before my French due date of 41 weeks. I was ;  sick of being pregnant, so exhausted with carrying all the extra weight around and just ready for it all to be over. That afternoon, we went to the maternite (French birthing center) for fetal monitoring and a check up, and my midwife Muriel told me that my cervix was closed still and that the baby’s head hadn’t dropped all the way down yet. Basically, I wasn’t ready to go into labor, and though of course this could change, Muriel also told me to prepare to be induced on Thursday (Thanksgiving Day!).

I was surprisingly bummed about this. I really had tried to keep an open mind about everything and was super-sick of being pregnant, but I found that I still really wanted to go into labor naturally. Plus, induction would most likely require me to have an epidural, and even though I was open to this possibility, I still wanted to try to do the whole thing naturally. But as we left the maternite and Matt and I went in search of brunch, we were excited that we would definitely meet the baby that week.

That evening, Matt and I decided to have sex, for the hell of it – just to see if it would start things going. There are LOTS of things rumored to jump start labor – eating pineapple, taking long walks, drinking castor oil, eating spicy foods, etc – but there’s medical evidence for only two: acupuncture and sex. I had had an acupuncture treatment that week that had done ….something…but not enough to start labor, so we thought we’d try the other proven method. Besides the hilarious awkwardness of having sex when you’re 9 months pregnant, nothing seemed to really happen, and we went to sleep happy but still prepared to wait for our daughter to arrive.

Sophia First Day

Around 3AM, I woke up to a weird feeling of something dripping between my legs. I got up to go to the bathroom and had about a cup or two of water pour out of me – not a huge amount, but enough that it couldn’t be ignored. Yes, this was my water breaking, but in a totally different way than I’d expected –  it just sort of leaked in small amounts over the next several hours. There was no giant waterfall and “Honey – it’s TIME” moment like you see in the movies. Instead, I got a towel from the bathroom and laid it out on the living room floor, woke Matt up, and told him I thought my water was breaking but wasn’t sure. He lobbied for more sleeping. I was a little worried because I didn’t know what it meant to have this slow leakage combined with no contractions, but after a furious internet search I decided just to wait to see if contractions started up soon. Matt was maybe already back asleep. I slept on the towel on top of a rubber yoga mat on the floor to preserve our mattress.

About thirty minutes later, mild contractions started, and started timing them, but they were maybe 15 minutes apart. We waiting until 6AM to call my midwife, who didn’t seem concerned that my water had broken and told me we could wait, and to call back when the contractions were stronger and closer together. This took me to around 10:30AM, when the contractions felt like seriously intense menstrual cramps. I was still handling the pain okay, but I had a pretty bad backache and I’d thrown up some oatmeal we’d made for breakfast. But I’d heard some vomiting was normal, so I wasn’t too worried.

My midwife and I agreed to wait until around 2PM to see how things had progressed, but between 10:30 and 12:30, everything went to hell quickly. I could no longer move from a fetal position on the bed without vomiting – at one point Matt tried to get me up to walk around and I took one step and keeled over, shuffled to the bathroom and threw up on the floor – for the second time that morning. I started to go into what Matt has called my “pain cave”, where I was no longer able to talk or respond to Matt’s questions about what he could do to help.

Matt called my midwife to tell her we were coming in, and then called my mom and a cab. I threw up one more time and managed to get down the five flights of stairs from our apartment to the ground floor, though its all kind of haze to me now. The cab ride was horrible. I finally stumbled into the maternite around 1:30PM and collapsed in the stairwell. As soon as I got to the delivery floor, I asked for an epidural – I was beyond feeling like a wimp even though I was apparently only three centimeters dialated at the time. Apparently, the baby’s spine was pressing on my spine, hence the backache/back labor/ vomiting, and I was also having slightly accelerated and more painful contractions because of my water breaking before labor started. Not having an epidural was suddenly no longer an option. In fact, I remember thinking “If they can’t give me some kind of pain relief RIGHT NOW they are going to have to knock me out and remove this baby because I cannot take it ANY MORE!” I was desperate (incidentally my friend Nicole, who had back labor with her first child, told me she had the exact same thought).

Sophia 2 days old

Once the epidural took effect, everything was totally different – very calm. Without the pain, I became myself again, much to the relief of Matt and my mom. We hung out in the delivery room for about five hours chatting with my midwife while I gradually dialated and had contractions that I couldn’t feel. In fact I couldn’t feel ANYTHING below the waist. Which was frankly fine by me. It wasn’t what I expected in my labor – I thought I would be able to move around, listen to music, work through my contractions with Matt, etc. But since I couldn’t really move much with the back labor at home, it seemed to me I might as well have the epidural and at least be immobile and pain –free.

So the epidural part was actually kind of fun. The only unfortunate part was that it didn’t wear off in time for the pushing, so I had to deliver in stirrups with the midwife telling me when a contraction was coming. I could still push, but had to be told when – But at that point, I was really just in the “whatever gets her here safely” frame of mind, so it didn’t bother me. In retrospect, I wish I’d been able to feel more of her birth – it makes me a little sad that I couldn’t, and in future I would probably want to get a lighter epidural, if that were even possible. But at the time I wasn’t in any position to make any requests, so what can you do, really? Still, I was a little blue about it over the next few days.

So at the very end they even had to do a forceps assist! Crazy, right? Yes, out came the big metal salad tongs and up they went inside me – It’s a little crazy when you see that happen, but again, when you’ve had an epidural, you barely feel it. My thoughts were sort of a bemused “Hmmm those are really big!”  Apparently the assist was less about my not being able to feel things and more about needing to help her shoulders through, but that’s when I knew we must be close.

Then all of a sudden, there she was! A warm, red, alert and SMILING baby! Its so amazing to finally meet this person that’s been inside of you for 9 months. They put her on my chest and she had a ton of hair and I just thought Where did you COME from? I knew you were inside me but I didn’t know you were Sophia until this moment. And then in so many ways it was like I DID know her, she was just as I imagined her – not crying but curious, looking around and taking everything in as if the world were only interesting and not scary at all.  My daughter.

And it seemed like it was all over. Sophia lay slickly on my chest with her brown hair plastered to her skull, warm and wriggly and searching both me and Matt out. The placenta delivery took a little bit of time, but we weren’t paying much attention since we had a brand new person right there in front of us.

 It wasn’t until everyone started to relax and break up that things went a little downhill. They’d taken Sophia to clean her up, and I realized I was starting to feel a little sick. I had been drinking water and realized I needed to throw up again – so I did, and then I felt like I needed to sleep. Matt and my mom both looked a little scared when I said this, and later they told me that I’d turned grey and looked like I was going into shock.  My mom ran to get my midwife, who took one look at me and said “You’re really not doing well!”. Suddenly, it was all hands on deck – the midwife called the doctor back, and all the nurses  came rushing back in.

I was bleeding internally because the placenta hadn’t fully delivered – this is a fairly common post-partum complication, but a serious one, and it took them three attempts to finally clear the placenta and begin to stop the bleeding. During this time, I bled a lot, including some larger clots, which I of course couldn’t see but Matt unfortunately could- I think the experience was harder for him than it was for me in some ways. The birth had already been so eventful and so different from my expectations that by the time the hemhorrage happened, I was able to go away to some place inside myself that was dedicated to just getting through each moment. I was never afraid and never panicked, though I could tell what was happening was serious. I was pumped with another dose of epidural, and they broke my stitches and the doctor reached his hand up into my uterus to clear the clots – absolutely crazy, but I was feeling nothing at that point, both physically and emotionally.

When it was all over, I was hooked up to about six or seven different lines – one in my back for the epidural, two in each arm for an IV, an iron drip, an antibiotic, and a medication to contract the uterus. And finally, a catheter – the least fun. Because of the complications, I had to stay in the labor and delivery room overnight, rather than going to recovery. So there I was, flat on my back, still numb from the waist down, in the same clothes I’d delivered in – all I really wanted was to take a shower and sleep.

After the scary hemorrhage, Matt went out for a walk to clear his head. We sent Sophia to the nursery for the night, because she was really the one doing the best out of our entire three person family – I was a wreck, Matt was a wreck, but Sophia was healthy and happy, thank God. Matt slept next to me on an army cot, and I tried to sleep but ended up listening to This American Life on my iPod while the feeling gradually returned to my legs and drunken Parisians passed by on the street below.

At around 6AM, I was doing well enough that they were able to unhook me from the lines and take me in a wheelchair up to my room. Because of the blood loss, I was very weak and wasn’t able to stand up without getting dizzy and out of breath. I was right on the borderline for needing a transfusion, but we opted to go with an iron treatment – this meant I would be anemic for the next month, and take regular doses of iron.  One of the high points of that first day was Matt helping me walk to the bathroom and shower; that was the beginning of my feeling like myself again.

Did I mention that everything was happening in French? Thankfully my midwife is bilingual, and did her training in the UK, so when things got really challenging she could translate for me. But once I was on the maternity floor and in recovery, everyone spoke French exclusively to us.

Sleeping in our hospital room - Baby TV

Sophia came back from the nursery and stayed in our room from that first day on. They put her in a clear plastic bassinet at the foot of my bed – Matt and I spent hours watching “baby tv”.   For the first couple of days, I was so weak that I didn’t leave my hospital room, but gradually I started to regain my strength. We stayed in the maternite for five days, until I was well enough to climb the five flights of stairs up to our apartment again.

Though everything turned out fine, the birth was much more scary and chaotic than I thought it would be, and a few days afterwards the shock of it started to hit me. I was depressed and anxious, and I didn’t understand how something I’d planned carefully for could have gone so off the rails. It was a concrete reminder that we only have the illusion of control. Yes, Sophia was healthy and we’d all made it through, and I knew this was the most important thing – but I still felt freaked out by the experience, and worried it would make me afraid to have another child. THEN I started to worry that the complications might have actually made it more difficult for me to get pregnant again. It turns out neither of these things are true, and I bounced back within a week or so, but it was overwhelming.

And being a parent was also emotionally overwhelming in ways I didn’t expect. I didn’t know what I would feel about Sophia when I met her, whether I’d immediately feel strongly about her or whether this would grow over time – I’ve heard women say both of these things. For me, the feelings came on pretty quickly, but what surprised me was their FEROCITY and how this left me feeling incredibly vulnerable. The love you feel for your child isn’t a gentle feeling – it felt like it could crush me. I would look at Sophia and think “That’s my daughter”, and start weeping – not out of sadness, but just out of shear emotion. The thought of anything happening to her destroyed me. Being a parent takes incredible strength – it’s a paradox, how this little being can make you feel so vulnerable, but at the same time you know that you need to be a rock for them, that your own fears and your own deep love can’t wash you away, you have to move through your own feelings, to exist with the more overwhelming parts of them, in order to take care of your child.

Its funny, even though it was only a month or so ago, this experience already feels so far away. It’s hard to imagine my life without Sophia in it. At the beginning of this year she didn’t even exist as cells, and now she’s my daughter. Incredible. 

Happy New Year, everyone!