Every birth story is unique. In our series, “My Birth Story,” we’ve asked moms from all over the world to share their experiences of how they welcomed their little ones into the world. Here, you'll find a range of stories, from moms who delivered vaginally or via C-section, alone or surrounded by family, even some moms who gave birth in under an hour. Their perspectives may all be different — but each one powerfully illustrates the emotion and beauty of giving birth.
I was breathing heavily, my exhales laced with tears as the waves of pain washed over me.
“Okay, I think I’m ready to get that epidural now,” I said to my OB nurse, who was standing next to my husband. “I know I said I probably wouldn’t do it, but I’m changing my mind now.”
Our nurse looked down quickly as she tucked in a fresh sheet on my bed before she responded. My stomach grew tight with another contraction and a feeling of dread at the look on her face. Why wasn’t she saying anything? Was there a problem with my labor or our baby?
I didn’t have much time to think about it before another contraction hit me. When it was over, I looked up at our nurse, completely exhausted, and waited for an answer.
“I’m sorry, Chaunie, but Lisa* doesn’t do epidurals because she is a midwife,” she replied, briskly but not unkindly, keeping busy in the room.
My in-labor brain had trouble processing what she was saying at first, but when it finally dawned on me that she was saying that I literally could not get an epidural, I was shocked and then, horrified. How had I missed this crucial piece of information when choosing who would deliver my baby? Was I hearing her wrong?
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Turns out, I wasn’t hearing her wrong: my provider, a midwife, did not offer her clients epidurals, even while delivering in the hospital, and I somehow did not realize this until I was in the throes of agony and hoping for an epidural to relieve my pain.
If you’re wondering how on earth I could have been so dumb, let me just say, I’ve wondered the same thing. But in my defense, I had turned 22 only nine days before I went into labor, it was my first baby, and because I was in nursing school and working in the obstetrics department at the very hospital I was delivering in, I thought I knew it all. (Yes, I was a little cocky and yes, that came back to haunt me.) Essentially, I had learned enough to know that birth rarely went according to plan, so my only “birth plan” was to skip any sort of planning whatsoever.
I was right at least about one thing: nothing about my labor went right, starting when I woke up a week before my due date with some dampness in my underwear. As any 39-week-along pregnant woman would think, I wondered if I had possibly just peed my pants during the night, or if my water had broken. I let my midwife know what was going on and decided that I would try to get my contractions going on my own. I walked all day, racking up over six miles down the dirt road behind our farm house to no avail.
Finally, around 9 p.m., my midwife asked us to make the two-hour drive to the hospital, just in case. We arrived at midnight, to discover, much to my surprise, that my water had broken and I was already dilated. So, into a room we went, where I continued to labor all through the night and into the morning.
Unfortunately, after my initial progress, my labor completely stalled. I was hooked up to Pitocin to get things moving, and that’s when things took a turn for the worse.
Thanks to the medicine, the contractions hit me one after another and the combination of being exhausted from staying up all night and my ridiculous walking spree led me to feel like I couldn’t physically go on anymore. I just did not have the capacity or resources to cope with the pain and mentally, I started to break down too, which only made everything even worse. At one point during my hellish labor, my younger sister walked into our room to check on me and found me crying on my exercise ball. To this day, she talks about how traumatizing it was to see me.
Sometime after the exercise-ball incident, I decided to ask for the epidural, and that’s when I learned that getting an epidural was not an option for me. I can honestly say that I have never felt more physically and mentally defeated than I did in the moment, not to mention how downright foolish I felt for not doing my homework before delivery. It felt like my entire labor team was at a standstill; it was obvious I was stuck, my labor was stuck, and we needed a change to move forward.
Eventually, we decided that a dose of a pain medication — in this case, Nubain — might help me relax a little and thus, help my labor keep going. The relief of the medicine was blissful and I immediately fell asleep. That tiny reprieve from a nightmare labor gave me a break I desperately needed. But then when I finally started pushing — approximately 10,000 years later — my daughter’s head got stuck (and I mean, really freaking stuck). After I had pushed for a total of four hours, my midwife finally performed an episiotomy.
And honestly, by that point, it didn’t even surprise me that another thing would go wrong. I was too tired to care, and if I’m being honest, part of me believed that I only had myself to blame for being so unprepared. If I had taken the time to ask my midwife even the most basic question about managing my pain during birth before I went labor, none of this would have happened, right?
Well, maybe, and maybe not. Birth can be wildly unpredictable and often, us first-time moms really don’t know what to expect. It’s silly to think that you will know all the answers, but if you are expecting your first baby, at least let my story be a lesson to you to maybe, just maybe, triple-check that your doctor or midwife does offer epidurals.
You know, just in case.
*Name has been changed to protect privacy
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