Negotiating Childbirth
Written By Paul Keegan
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Sometimes Breathing Alone Isn't Enough
I'd called ahead, so I imagined that when we reached the hospital, an army of nurses would be waiting to sweep Tatiana in and shoot her up with painkillers. But the halls were empty, and we waited at the desk until we were brought into our room—and told to wait some more. Finally, the nurses got Tatiana into her gown and hooked her up to an IV and fetal monitor.
There would be no sitting on the exercise ball, no strolling around the corridors. Tatiana just wanted the pain to stop. If we try Demerol first, Maureen said, she might feel more of the actual birth, and if that wasn't strong enough, we could try the epidural.
Watching the Demerol drip from the plastic bag into her IV tube, one tiny drop, then another, was like water torture. Every three minutes, another contraction would send Tatiana into convulsions. "This is the last one—just get through this," I said before each contraction. But 10 minutes went by, then 20.
When Tatiana was a child, Soviet dentists performed a root canal on her without anesthetic. A gymnastics coach once stretched her legs so far that she ruptured her hamstrings. This pain was beyond any of that. "I want to die," she whispered. "Please, just let me die."
The Demerol was declared a failure, and a team of doctors and nurses came in to prop Tatiana up and insert the epidural needle. The first dose wasn't enough, so they gave her more.
Finally, 16 hours after her labor began, Tatiana was free of pain. She lay there for nearly two hours, drifting between sleep and wakefulness. At 1:10 a.m., our nurse Jen came in and checked the baby's heart rate. She ran to get Maureen, who examined Tatiana. "Fully dilated!" she cried. Somehow, our child had twisted its head into the correct position. "Let's have a baby!"
Let's Have a Baby
Tatiana looked shocked, as if she had forgotten why she was here. Her water hadn't broken, so Maureen punctured the membrane. She told Tatiana to bend her knees. "The moment you feel a contraction coming on," she said, "start pushing as hard as you can."
I held one of Tatiana's thighs, and Jen held the other. "Push!" we all yelled. Tatiana pushed. Nothing. I wondered why Maureen was putting us through this charade. Nothing bigger than a nickel could possibly fit through that opening.
"PUSH!" we yelled. I saw a tiny patch of black hair. A few pushes later, I started to believe. By now, Tatiana was high. Later she told me she'd been thinking about those grueling dance competitions. The hardest part was always near the end of the fifth and final round: the jive, with its endless high kicks. If she got through 25 dances in a night, she could get through this.
When it finally happened, it was like the earth opening up. But the head that popped out wasn't a baby's head. It was a plastic doll, eyes shut, face scrunched, dull, lifeless. In the next instant, though, the doll's mouth opened, its head turned pink.
Maureen placed the baby on Tatiana's chest. She looked down at the baby, up at me, then back to the baby. I could see it in her eyes: Even after nine months of pregnancy and 19 hours of labor, she'd never truly believed it would end like this.
Anastasia Concordia Keegan was born at 2:08 a.m. on Saturday, June 23, 2007. She weighed 6 pounds 4 ounces, and was 19 1/2 inches long. Somehow, Tatiana felt great after sleeping only a few hours. She said she forgot about the pain immediately.
At first, we thought HypnoBirthing had failed us, and felt naive. But Kathryn said there was nothing we could have done. We just happened to have a "special circumstance."
We kept coming back to that HypnoBirthing theory: that 95 percent of birthing women can avoid labor pains by circumventing fear and tension. Maureen had told us that 30 percent of her clients suffer back labor, as Tatiana did, which nearly mirrors national figures. And of course, that's only one of many possible complications. We know eight couples who had major issues—inductions, caesareans, premature births—which we'd explained away by accepting the HypnoBirthing line that they were probably caused by stress or doctors trying to push things along too fast. Now we know that the truth is not nearly so simple.
Later, though, we realized HypnoBirthing had done something for us. We were relaxed and happy during the final trimester. Besides the occasional fawn epithet hurled in my direction, Tatiana was calm through most of her painful labor. If we have another child, we'll use HypnoBirthing again—partly because we're curious, but mostly because we have nothing to lose. "But as soon as it really starts to hurt," Tatiana says, "I'm getting an epidural."
In retrospect, our daily hypnosis training seems closer to superstition than science, as if we thought strong belief alone would save us. But if we were naive, maybe there was a certain wisdom in our innocence. We handled the grim realities of birth no differently than most of us treat death—as something we'd rather not think too much about.
Now we're ready to do it all over again. Maybe we're crazy. Or maybe that tiny miracle who flaps her arms like a bird each morning makes us still believe in impossible things.
