A Healer’s Geste

epidural musings

Nothing tearful or emotional, have no fear. My friends and family have received the blog-like post with the tearful full story, now is the time for sharing what everyone wants to know:

Did you like the epidural?

No, no, and no. Do not misunderstand, if I had to do this over again, I would still go for it. For this situation it was the right thing to do. I felt nothing…..nothing….not even my legs….not even the doctor coaxing out the placenta….nothing for six hours after they removed the epidural catheter. But I did not like the anesthesiologist drawing a picture of my spine and trying to communicate to my drug-addled mind (I had already received stadol) what he both wanted and did not want to do with his needle. The first drugs made me a bit shaky, but as soon as I had to position myself for receiving the epidural, I began shaking like I had the ague. It could have been tension, although I was practically asleep as soon as they laid me back on the bed, as a result of the drugs they’d already given me. It was probably partly the tension and also the effect of the drugs themself. I hear that some shaking is normal, but I heard the nurse and doctor consulting about my uncontrollable shivering after receiving the epidural. Matt said he’d rather help me through contractions and pushing that witness shaking like that again.

I don’t always feel like it, but in natural childbirth I am strong. I have something to do. I have something to focus on, control, and bring forth. Last week I was a shivering mass of nothing with lead for legs. My first two deliveries, I’ve gotten up, used the bathroom and taken a shower within an hour of giving birth. This time I could still feel tingles in my leg 12 hours later, and all morning and early afternoon I just wanted to go home, but I couldn’t. My bleeding was under control and the only thing that kept me in the hospital for hours upon boring hours was the minor fact that I couldn’t move. I am just not a hospital person. Both times I had excellent nurses, and the doctor I had was also wonderful, but I just don’t like being in a hospital. When you’re home, you can relax. When you’re in a strange place, you just feel strange. Hospital beds are uncomfortable, especially when you have to be in them for 17 hours straight. Sleep is fitful. Even the best nurses come in at the wrong moment and seem to never show up when you do want them to come. And in the end, it takes way too long with too much paperwork to get out. When someone tells me I can go home, I want to go, not wait another hour and a half.

But, the main reason I will not get an epidural again, whether or not I go back to the hospital, is that I hate tubes and wires being attached to me. I had an IV (I’ve never had one before) in my hand, an epidural in my back, a catheter down below, and a heart-rate thing on my right arm that squeezed my bones to dust every few minutes (it squeezes harder if you move once it starts, informed the nurse, but how you cannot jump when something begins squeezing your arm just as you were falling asleep, I don’t know). If it had been a full-term delivery, I would have had monitors on my stomach, too, and I just don’t think I can handle that. I just can’t abide being hooked up to things, especially not in four or five different ways and places. I want people and machines to leave me alone when I need to be left alone, not dictate where or how I can or cannot move.

Let me again say, any feeling I have about the hospital setting is entirely my own issues and has nothing to do with the experience I had with the people there, because I cannot say enough good things about the nurses I have had at both my hospital deliveries, and the doctor I had last week, whom I had never laid eyes on before, was also excellent. My reactions are all my own weirdness, and ones that I know most women do not share. Most would rather have tubes and wires and no pain, but I say, give me the pain any day rather than being hooked up to a machine. I’m not going to explode, I’m not going to die, so get this stuff off of me as soon as possible or before: that’s my feeling on the matter.

I will deal with the pain in order to keep my body my own. Although, I do think a little stadol after the baby and before the placenta is delivered would be a decent improvement…..