"The only thing to fear . . . . "

[eema.gray]

Ever since I found out I was pregnant last spring, I've been battling a nauseating fear of hospitals. I did a lot of work on my fear earlier this year and was starting to feel pretty good. But we've had a sudden burst of very hot weather this past week to ten days and I don't sleep well when the weather is really hot at night. I don't know if it's the heat or my impeding birth but I've suddenly started having very bad dreams - the sort of dreams that combine every horror story I've ever read or seen about women being bullied and assaulted while trying to give birth to their babies.

I've heard many times that home birth is always an option, if you have the will and means to make it happen. *I* have the will. My husband does not. He hates hospitals and doctors but ardently believes that hospitals are the only safe places to give birth. I've used all the arguments on him: I'm the one giving birth, pregnancy is not a disease, interventions cause emergencies, not giving birth, etc. They don't work. He insists that we will go to the hospital. He believes that if I stay home as long as I can and if he remains with me in the hospital room at all times, nothing "bad" will happen. He doesn't live with the fear though.

I know rationally that part of the fear simply comes from pregnancy hormones. But I really am afraid to go to the hospital. I'm going to a different one this time. I have a different care provider. But I know myself and I know that as soon as I get there, strong words now to the contrary, I'll become the meek little submissive doormat everybody is afraid I am to Ranger Daddy when that particular reality is anything but. Hospitals do some weird thing to my brain though. Even though I know better, the entire institutional mindset makes want to become a compliant little girl who doesn't want to offend anybody or cause anybody problems. The problem I have with hospitals, apart from the expectation that every laboring woman will do what the nurses want her to do, is that I don't know for sure who will attend my birth. It could be my midwife or the second one on staff. It could be one of the two OB's in the practice. Or if I'm really, truly unlucky, I could go into labor on the one weekend a month when an entirely different practice in town covers patients from the practice I go to. Given my luck, not only will I go into labor on that one particular weekend but the OB on call will be the one OB at Women's Associates who is not natural birth friendly. Yes, that's a rather unlikely turn of events but stranger things have happened.

You also can't control who is on the nursing staff during the shift you arrive on. Your birth plan can request natural birth minded nurses but when you arrive, you get whoever is available. Next shift change, if someone has bothered to read your records and birth plan and you speak up, you might get that natural birth friendly nurse, if there's one coming on shift. In the meantime, you're stuck. Since nurses do most of the real work in L&D, what kind of an attitude they have makes a huge difference. A nurse who doesn't know how to support a non medicated woman, as happened with my son's birth, is completely useless and can become quite the bully (fortunately, mine didn't but she did aid and abet the OB on call in making sure I wouldn't get to nurse my son immediately after birth).

I can labor effectively quite well on my own, thank you very much. I don't need a medical birth attendant, except to possibly catch the baby though I could do that myself quite well also thank you. All I really need is someone to make sure I didn't tear excessively and to stitch up any big tears that might happen, to make sure the placenta delivers properly, and to ensure I don't hemmorhage after birth. Oh, and to cut the baby's cord. I've done this before. I know my body, I know what I need to do.


The biggest fear I have right now is that my labor will be going along swimmingly, I'll get to the hospital at a point where instinct tells me I'm very nearly ready to push, and my labor will stall out of sheer subconscious terror. Since every woman is on a clock the moment she walks into that maternity wing, a stalled labor, and all the pharmacutical attempts to restart it (most of which lead to more and more interventions with c-section at the end of a long unhappy road), is the one thing I fear most this time. Last time, a c section was my big fear. This time, it's the things that could start us down that road. I very much want to meet this baby in three to four months time. I'm very much afraid of what sort of circumstances I will eventually meet him/her under.

[divinity80921]

Jul. 13, 2009 at 11:15 PM

Not to jump in on Ranger Daddy's side, but I will say I am damned glad I had a hospital birth for my daughter (first child) because even though I delivered her when "natural childbirth" was IN STYLE - no begging for shots was to be even listened to in those days - things went awry immediately after the birth and thank God almighty for those L&D nurses because the doctor stepped back and said, "Oh, my." He flatly didn't know what the hell to do for me, but the nurses stepped up to the plate and started ordering the dingbat doctor around.

I give the nurses credit for saving my life. Not Dr. Quacker.

Second birth, I would never have considered doing it outside a hospital. The chance for a repeat of the same complication was undocumented - no one could predict. But one thing that was predictable is that if it happened again, I'd still have had seven percent survival odds.

I didn't even know they draw up "birth plans" nowadays. In those days, it was simply, plan on making good use of self-hypnosis - aka "Lamaze."