How To Completely Foil Your Birth Plan

I'd like to preface this post with a short disclaimer:

 

• This isn't a tutorial for one of those cute, Etsy-worthy DIY modge-podge projects where you paper machè your intricately stenciled birth plan with a fancy aluminum foil border complete with flower appliquès and a felt background! This is how you effectively ruin your own predetermined plans to bring your new baby into the world despite all your best efforts to stick to your original policies and procedures.

I think every new parent-to-be constructs a birthing plan. Some probably even draft theirs while still in the preconception phase, but we didn't start ours until much later. It's serious business while it's happening, but retrospect and another birth soon thereafter has a way of making your first original birth plan seem a little ridiculous and far-fetched. I still encourage any new parents to draft one, revise one, re-write one, research options until your eyes feel like bleeding and then re-draft, revise, revise, revise ... and don't forget to make a plan B when the original one goes to hell in a hand-basket.

 
When I became pregnant with our son, we did our fair share of research via the internet and by viewing every.single.birthing.documentary available on Netflix and Google Video. I became obsessed watching babies slip out of stranger's vaginas and started idolizing those brave couples who had the guts to do it at home with a doula and/or midwife. For a guy who liked and appreciated blood, gore and screamfest flicks as much as I did (Halloween was our favorite holiday and we routinely went all-out each year), my husband got really sick of me sending him YouTube videos of natural childbirths. He was always kind enough to indulge me with a comment or two, but I think towards the end he just got completely grossed out and stopped watching altogether.

 
During the early planning phases, anything and everything was up for discussion. My husband and I have a shared tendency to besiege most collaborative projects with all the gusto we can manage, and our motto has always been that if it’s worth doing, it’s worth over doing. Our birth plan was no different. We were going to take our vision, put it down on paper, and make it happen. This was, after all – MY body, OUR baby, and THE most intimately important experience that we’d ever share.

 
I was hell bent on giving birth at home. I visualized my husband and I soaking together in a rubber tub, with lots of towels, candlelight, and only a few select people present to cheer me on. In my birth fantasy, my husband was rubbing my back during labor and there was soothing music playing in the background. The soundtrack was really the only thing we disagreed on – he was thinking soft, calming music, perhaps an instrumental of some sort. I had read enough and watched the grimaces on the faces of some of these women pushing out babies and was thinking more along the lines of something to grunt and gnash my teeth to -  perhaps Slayer, or some of System of a Down’s early stuff. We decided to leave the background music as one of the small details we’d hammer out once we had the rest of it figured out.

 
That whole plan fizzed out as soon as we presented it to my OB/GYN, who spoiled everything! She quickly and unceremoniously pissed on my Home Birth parade using “advanced maternal age” as her reasoning. They have a way of scaring the daylights out of you, those doctors do… They illustratively paint the “what could happen” grisly scenarios right there, in their office … in front of your husband! Where we’d previously agreed that NO doctor was going to dictate to US how to formulate OUR birth plan, all this went out the window when she started talking about cord strangulation, excess hemorrhaging, and oxygen depletion. I pouted for a full two weeks after that particular appointment.

 
Left with no other choice, we resigned to having our son in a hospital. I decided on no labor-inducing medicines, no epidurals, no pain I.V.’s, and nothing but fluids, if needed. I took a tour of the maternity ward at our hospital of choice, and was pleasantly pleased with their elaborate birthing suites. This was really the first time in my adult life that I really learned to appreciate the value of having exceptionally good insurance coverage. I had the pleasure of meeting and speaking with some of the maternity nurses, who completely put me at ease as far as convincing me that I would be in total, complete control of everything that happened. Ha.Ha. LOL. *wink, wink*

 
New mothers, be warned: They lie. In actuality, you don’t commandeer a damned thing. You aren’t in control. The baby is the ruler, the dictator, the author of your birth plan. You might choose the locale, and what you're wearing, and who the doctor is, but that's about the extent of it.  It’s the baby who decides when it’s time to make an appearance. The baby dictates how long you’re going to writhe in pain while bouncing and trying to balance your fat ass on that godforsaken purple birthing ball. And the baby calculates (coldly) exactly what moment to press down on your bladder so you pee all over your birthing gown right there in front of everybody. The idea of the mother at the control helm is a myth, ladies. You just kind of have to roll with whatever baby decides.

 
I really can’t complain (much) on how it went down with my son. I had looked forward to labor for so long that I kind of sadistically anticipated with glee each crest of pain, each pound of pressure, and each wave of nausea. We managed to stick to our au natural policy and I delivered a 7 lb 6 oz baby boy sans any narcotics or epidurals. However, a few bullet-pointed items on our birth plan went completely, awkwardly wrong.

 
First off, we were so excited to finally be ready to deliver that we screwed up and told everybody. I had spent several off-and-on hours literally jumping up and down in my driveway trying to induce myself. When my water broke (I expected a gush, it trickled like a leaky faucet), we grabbed our bags that had been packed and repacked for weeks and headed to the hospital. We called everyone we knew on the way, not just the three people we had on our master plan. My husband took a photo of  the “For Mother’s in Labor” pink stork parking sign in the parking garage, and we immediately uploaded it to Facebook. People showed up in droves. We had grandparents, sisters, brothers, cousins, besties - the whole lot. This was in the actual delivery room.

I remember at one point my nurse coming in to graph the severity of my contractions (as if the decibels of groaning and expletives weren't enough) and the near dozen people who were sitting around in a half-circle didn't even look up from the Styrofoam plates of half-eaten food on their laps to greet her. She admonished them for eating in front of me, which was pretty noble of her since I hadn't had anything to eat for hours on end. It was after I inhaled the king-sized Snickers bar that my best friend smuggled to me that I fully understood why they advise you to labor on an empty stomach.  I had just reached a new level of not giving a damn. I was irritable, starving and didn't care that I was uncontrollably farting in front of my husband's family. The soundtrack never played and no candles were lit (thank goodness, because of the amount of methane aerating out of my butt probably would have caused an explosion). The important thing is that the baby was born without any complications, unless you count the massive tearing that required multiple stitches. Overall, the experience was a beautiful one.

Exactly 10 months later, when the twins came early - my second birthing experience was not so beautiful. No crowds to cheer me on, no donning my preferable own birthing attire, no funny episodes that people talked about later. We had pretty much carbon-copied our first birth plan, although our expectations were more realistic this time around. We still wanted to do it naturally, with no drugs, in a birthing suite. Didn't happen. My two little Machiavellian dictators decided right at the very end to be difficult and problematic.

We'd been to the hospital so many times with premature labor that we stopped taking and posting pictures of that funky pink stork maternity parking sign. We'd cried wolf so many times that instead of shrieks of excitement on the other end, we'd get pensive "You sure, this time?" replies when we notified family and friends. The intake staff at the maternity desk stopped welcoming us with huge smiles and extended courtesies. We did the same. "S'up, y'all. We're back" became our standard greeting.

Unfortunately, drugs came into play this time. Steroid shots to help their lungs mature quickly should they present early. Tocolytic medications to slow down uterine contractions. The dreaded Brethine, a turbutaline that is supposed to stop labor, but makes it feels like you just mainlined a small country's entire underground supply of amphetamines. Other medications to help ease the side effects of the necessary medications. As a card-carrying member of the premature labor crowd, you forgo being wheeled into the lovely, spacious, lavender-accented birthing suite. You're stuffed into a small "holding area" with glass on three sides and a dark curtain shielding you from passersby. If your husband is on the big and tall side, this is a very uncomfortable place for him to lounge while waiting for the action to start. I was pretty irritable and tired of having gloved fingers inserted into my nether regions. My dilation wasn't happening, and for some odd reason, I felt absolutely no pain with the contractions. One thing was certain - this wasn't going to be an orchestrated affair that we could be ready for. Things weren't going according to plan, and I had already resigned myself to having to rely on a machine to tell me when it was time to start preparing to push.

It was after the third or fourth false alarm and a few days on non-complied bed rest orders that my water broke. This time, I heard a *pop*, like a rubberband, and I could have filled up a small bucket with the fluid. I remember grabbing one of my son's #4 diapers and stuffing it between my legs for the ride there. We'd been down that interstate to the hospital so many times, I think my husband barely even looked at the road while he was driving. This time my feet and legs were so grossly swollen that I had to be wheeled down the long skywalk to the elevators. Due to my water breaking already, we bypassed the tiny holding room and went straight to a birthing suite to have me hooked up immediately to monitors.

Folks, this is where my disdain for the medical staff starts to become glaringly obvious. All we were getting was bad news. My OB/GYN was out of the country and we had to use the back-up, on-call doctor. Twin B (we call her Samantha now) decided to turn breech at the very last second. Twin A compassionately stayed put, but with most of the fluid gone from my womb, their nesting quarters had become quite cramped. I refused more Brethine to slow down the labor. Surely if my heart felt as if it was going to jump out of my chest from the drug, there HAD to be some kind of effect on the babies. The on-call doctor was trying to convince us to wait until morning, a request that we both loudly answered with a big, fat, resounding HELL NO. The twins decided to come six weeks early, at 34 weeks and 1 day of gestation. There was just no turning back at this point.

I'm pretty confident that if my OB/GYN hadn't been out of country (the NERVE of her!) at the time, she would have attempted to turn Twin B while in utero so that I could have had the natural, narcotic-free birthing experience that I enjoyed with our son. It just wasn't in the cards this time. On-call Doc insisted that a C-section was the "safest" route, and my husband can attest to the absolute black mask of fear that covered my face the second I learned that they were going to have to slice my belly like a Virginia ham to be able to deliver my two girls.

It was, hands-down, the most miserable experience I can remember. I'm sure the women who elect to have cesareans do so for reasons that make sense to them personally, but I cannot imagine it being a first choice for me. The cold operating room, the spinal epidural insertion, the masks, the I.V. bags, all the stainless steel instruments in plain view ... it literally rendered me speechless. My body was tense, and I tried communicating my fear and discomfort to my husband with my eyes once the Nazi's - err, nurses - allowed my husband into the O.R. Mercifully, the whole procedure went by quickly and without major incident. Sadly, I seem to have missed the entire experience that was welcoming my two daughters into the world. I remember having a quick glimpse of them as they held them up over the curtain before they were whisked off  to NICU. The recovery room experience was uncomfortable and lonely, as I couldn't feel my lower half, had a catheter bag hanging from my bed, and there were no warm, moist babies laying on my chest, trying to suckle. Fortunately, the babies were healthy other than being pre-term (my husband hates the word "preemies"). For that, we were grateful.

As you can see, not all birth plans come to fruition. I wholeheartedly believe that if the end results produce healthy babies and a healthy mama, then to hell with the birth plan - anything and everything is subject to some tweaking, and some of the best plans out there are ones that are improved upon at the last minute. I still recommend writing one, 'cause research and planning is great fun, but be prepared to toss it out the window if everything doesn't start jiving with it. Spontaneity happens!