Birthday approaches

So, we're down to 20 days until the baby's due date. I'm excited -- truly -- and looking forward to meeting him.

I'm also scared shitless in a way I wasn't before Z was born. Before she was born, labor and delivery was something that, although it looked painful, was normal and ended, generally, with perfectly healthy results. My mom's story of birthing me, which is the story I know better than any other, is a story of having me so fast the hospital wasn't really ready for me.

But as you may know, the story of birthing Zadie was somewhat different. It took several twists and turns, involved a pretty serious mistake, and although it ended up with a healthy girl, there were moments of a blue and non-breathing one. Which is the SCARIEST SHIT EVER. And because of the interventions we had, labor was much, much more painful than I expected.

And as I look forward to the birth, I'm also looking backward at what happened then. Because although when we tell the story, we tell it that a sleepy midwife's mistake caused the whole scary ball to get rolling, there were two other problems that contributed, and both were mine alone.

First, to recap what happened briefly, my water broke on a Saturday night. We went to the hospital early Sunday morning, where a midwife assured us that if my water had actually broken, it was fine, and there was still plenty of fluid. She sent us home. The implication was that I was mistaken, and that perhaps I had peed myself. She was wrong, and it did ultimately cause a lot of the problems we faced. But I was wrong, too -- I should have advocated more strongly for myself, perhaps asked for a second opinion. I knew for sure I hadn't peed myself, and I am still not certain why I allowed myself to be turned away. I am not a shrinking violet, but in the face of a medical professional, I just went "Oh, okay, I guess" and went home.

The good news is, I wouldn't repeat that mistake.

But the other mistake was my body's. See, usually when a woman's water breaks, she's in labor already, having contractions. Or if not, they follow pretty quickly. Mine didn't react that way. I had a backache, my water broke, and then I walked around for two days with no other symptoms of labor. Which meant that by the time I was told to go to the hospital by my doctor, I was about 42 hours past when I should have originally gone in, and at that point, it was an emergency. I needed Pitocin to start contractions, I needed extra fluids to replace what I'd lost, etc. I was IVed and cathetered and stuck to the bed. And a lot of that was sleepy CNM's fault -- but some of it was my body's.

Which is why, going into this next labor and delivery scenario, I'm a little nervous. I need to be able to rely on my body to do what it's supposed to, and it let me down last time.

Since I can't control that, I'm working hardest on controlling this fear, which I know can't be good for me and won't help anything. I'm listening to a hypnosis MP3, and I imagine that will help somewhat, although since I am the queen of half-assedness*, I've never actually sat in a quiet place and listened to the whole thing. I multi-task, listening to it while gardening or baking, and when the soft voice instructs, "close your eyes," I think, "yeah, yeah, I can do that," and then I deadhead a couple more roses.

Que sera, sera, I guess.

*I'd love to see the Mary Engelbreit illustration of that.