Willow's Birth Saga--Part Five

The doctor came in to talk to me and Kevin about the situation. It had now been a few hours of heart rate dips, and they didn’t want it to continue without some evidence of progress in the labor. They gave me the option of getting an epidural to see if it would help me relax enough to allow dilation. I did not want an epidural. I was managing the pain, and I really did not feel tense, physically. I felt like if I could get up, it would help. I really felt like the most helpful thing would be to get up. No one would tell me what the bad thing that would happen was if I got up. No one would tell me what “the baby doesn’t like it” meant when I moved. I was never allowed to shift positions, because when I started moving, they said “the baby doesn’t like it” and I had to move back to the position I had been in instead of coming to a stop where I had moved to. We specifically asked to try the Jacuzzi, which had been the salvation of my sister’s labor a month earlier (they were on the verge of giving up on their natural childbirth choice until they were allowed to use the Jacuzzi. Once she got in, she dilated so quickly that she was surprised out of her relaxation by the urge to push). We were refused without any explanation of what the danger would be.
Typically options mean there are at least two alternatives you can choose between, but this option was actually the only one presented. The unspoken option was mostly unspoken because it was viewed as more of an eventuality than an option—Caesarean Section. The epidural was implicitly presented as “We are preparing you for a C-section. The first step in that is an epidural. However, we will allow you to wait for a while after getting the epidural before we decide that the C-section is necessary, because maybe it will help you and it won’t hurt us because we are efficiently moving you toward a C-section anyway and won’t need to backtrack.” And I do mean that sincerely—I don’t think that the “trial of epidural first” was just eye wash and they were going to steamroller me into a C-section all along, but rather that they would be just as happy as I would be if an epidural only actually worked and surgery wasn’t used, but they wanted me on that path toward a C-section and weren’t going to present me with or agree to anything that deviated from it. Faced with this, and grasping at the last hope of a birth in the natural route, if not a “natural birth,” we consented to the epidural.
Having the epidural put in was the most excruciating event of the entire experience. I had to lie and curl over in a ball through intensely hard contractions and hold still so someone could find space in my spine to insert a needle. While they did this, I could not have anyone push on my back, which had been my sole means of ameliorating the pain up until this point. Finally, though, that was over, and I settled in to wait and see if it really was secret tenseness I didn’t even know about that was preventing my progress. After an hour, or maybe only half an hour of trial with an epidural, I hadn’t progressed any further. I know at some point I went from 4 cm to 4.5 cm, but that wasn’t considered enough progress to let it keep going. So after a few minutes alone with my husband, we consented to a Caesarean.