The Naked Truth: My Pregnancy and Birth Story

PART 1

Disclaimer: I will not be researching stats or doing any background reading for this blog, this is simply my own experience 

(Part of this blog was created during my pregnancy two years ago- but I’m just now completing the post).

Now that I have told all my clients I’m pregnant. I got some stuff to say. Particularly because this isn’t shared as openly as the niceties of pregnancy.

“No one really talks about this part of pregnancy & birth.”

The Pregnancy.

Pregnancy can suck. My pregnancy sucked. And I feel no absolute guilt for saying this. Your body has a mind of its own. Your emotions are all over the place. I take great pride (pre-pregnancy) in identifying my emotions and communicating them. During my first four months of pregnancy, I didn’t even know the difference between being hungry, happy, angry, or sleepy. They were all intertwined. It was all so messy!

During the first four months of pregnancy, I wanted to quit my job almost every day- and I was working from home! And felt immense sadness and empathy for pregnant women who are front-line workers and essential workers on their feet all day. It took me months to realize I wanted to quit my job long before I was pregnant (my part-time community college therapist job), I just didn’t have what I felt was a legitimate reason to, until I gave birth.

My pregnancy was rough, and I didn’t know and wasn’t prepared for how hard it would be. The only reason I found out I was pregnant early on was because I cried during a commercial. Legitimate tears streaming down my cheeks. Commercials sometimes get to me, I’m an emotional being- I feel things, but not to this point.I’m just very fortunate I was working from home (while other hypothetical pregnant people were working on their feet) because of COVID- something I felt super guilty and cried over a lot of times. I puked my guts out in between clients, napped, had some pretty bad migraines (I have history of them and they typically are triggered by dehydration), and peed a lot because of the gallon+ water I had to drink to avoid migraines. It was a rough pregnancy to say the least. I finally felt like I was able to “enjoy” my pregnancy by the third trimester, but by then, I was already getting achy and uncomfortable- it felt like if someone was about to break open/ rip through my vagina at any second- at least that’s what it felt like. 

One thing that was annoying about being pregnant was the inconvenience of having to attend appointments. You think scheduling and going to your yearly physical exam is hard, try an appointment a month— and then later, weekly appointments. Lots of waiting, lots of peeing in a cup, lots of waddling. And during COVID, you’re doing all of this on your own. Your husband/partner cannot attend appointments with you. LAAAAME.

Giving Birth. 

This was a shit show. My husband woke up around 3am on a Saturday yelling “Calambre! Calambre!” (Cramp! Cramp!). So I immediately went to go get him water and a banana. He is such a sweet guy (sometimes lol) and always took care of me when I was pregnant, so I jumped at the opportunity to return the favor. So there I am, waddling to the kitchen at 38 weeks pregnant. Then he comes to me half asleep asking “what are you doing?” (Turns out he was having a vivid dream and was sleep talking lol). Anywho, I explained what happened, then out of nowhere, I peed the floor. “Oh shit!! It’s my water! I think my water just broke?” So we calmed down and waited, no contractions.. we used what we learned in our birthing classes and realized, it’s not time yet. So we went to sleep. We waited 24-36 hours and I still didn’t have any contractions. So we decided to go to the hospital where they confirmed my water broke and here come all the drugs I didn’t want. I literally probably tried every drug in that hospital. I held off for a good 24-36 hours before I asked for pain meds but they had already induced me and wowww that was painful! Anywho, I felt like I was going through an exorcist. Weeks later, I still had bruising all along my thighs and hips from me asking my husband to use his body weight to press onto my hips for pressure. The weight worked until it didn’t. We definitely tried so many things to avoid pain meds- but I was defeated, my body was defeated. It had to go that way- that’s okay. To this day, my husband still says that this part was traumatizing for him for sure- seeing me in pain for an entire week, being stuck in a room, and not sleeping (we weren’t allowed to wander the halls due to COVID).

The entire week was a blur! Yes, week! It was Wednesday when the doctors realized that I apparently had “a second bag of waters”. So the first one that ruptured didn’t have the baby. So all those meds didn’t even matter. That’s when I realized I still had a long way to go- and we both cried. We felt defeat- I’ve never felt so defeated and tired in my life. By Thursday evening, I had already been in the hospital since Monday morning. I had already been induced when neither me nor the baby were  ready for showtime. I had gone through so much pain and mental effort that I knew I didn’t have the strength to push even if I waited. So we tearfully decided on a Thursday night that on Friday afternoon I’d have a c-section. I still wished and wished the baby would come before then, but I was so exhausted and the baby had tasted all the hospital skittles (drugs) by then, I didn’t want him to have more —so we made the final decision. Our kid was born at 2pm Friday afternoon via c-section. What a fucken day. He was a giant! A beautiful chunky 8lbs 14oz sticky alien giant. Yup! He was huge!

If you ask me now, I will tell you how difficult my pregnancy was. But the bizarre thing is that hormones and seeing your kid (and their little personalities flourish), makes you forget some (if not most) of the terrible parts. Maybe that’s why people don’t talk about it. I almost forgot about how I felt until I came across this draft.