When Birth Is Scary Instead of Joyous

By Jeremy G. Schneider, MFT 

My wife recently told me a story about the home birth of one of her friends. While the labor was difficult and demanding, in the end the birth was exactly what they had hoped and dreamed it would be; a powerful, intimate experience. For my wife and myself, it was bittersweet. We were so happy for them and their little girl, but we were also reminded of how the birth of our children was nothing at all like the way we wanted it to be and nothing can ever change that.

I  can remember sitting in our birthing class, listening to our instructor talk about the beauty of the kind of birth our friends experienced, the process of natural delivery, holding your babies right after they were born, taking them home with you. No one talked about fear, of emergency cesarean sections at 5:00am in the morning and of leaving the hospital with our arms empty.
Everything with my wife's pregnancy was going pretty well until the Friday night that marked 30 weeks. While we were eating dinner, some really crappy take-out salad, she started feeling contractions. When the second contraction happened 15 minutes later, we still didn't think much of it. After the fourth one we called the doctor's answering service and left a message.

"There's no way this can mean anything," I said as much for her as for myself, while we waited for the doctor to call us back. My wife was sitting on our bed with her hand on her belly. She only looked at me; clearly, I was not convincing.

My wife snatched the phone when it rang and I watched her while she explained what was going on and listened to the doctor's response. My wife wasn't saying anything that would let me think this was a false alarm and I was beginning to think this was real. But it can't be. They're not ready. I'm not ready.

"Okay, so if there is another one in the next twenty minutes, I have to go to the hospital. Will they contact you if that happens?" I looked at the clock; it read 8:00pm.

When she got off the phone, she tried to give me an overview of what the doctor was saying, but all I could do was look from my wife to the clock and back to my wife.
At 8:19pm I took a deep breath and let it all out. She was going to be okay.

At 8:21pm and at 8:25pm she had more contractions and we rushed out of our apartment to grab a cab. By the time she saw a doctor they were 2 minutes apart!

When we first arrived, they put us in the triage room. Little did we know, she wouldn't go home again for another week. They immediately placed fetal heart monitors on Gem's belly along with a monitor to track her contractions. We were mesmerized by our little babies' heart beats for some time. They then admitted Gem into the hospital at around 1:30am and began giving her magnesium for 12 hours.

Magnesium is an anti-muscle contractor which can prevent the uterus from contracting. However, it is indiscriminate and also prevents the rest of Gem’s muscles from contracting including her heart and lungs. So they had to monitor her blood pressure every hour throughout the night.  

They also began injecting her with a series of steroid shots. The primary reason for this was just in case our babies were delivered soon, the steroids would accelerate their lung and respiratory development. They were simultaneously trying to prevent and prepare for an early birth. The full steroid treatment required four injections, once every 12 hours.

This was one of the most upsetting moments, watching them inject her with all of this medication and knowing there was nothing either of us could do. This was the first time I began to feel the conflict between being a husband and father. As a father, I wanted them to do everything humanly possible to ensure our children remained in the womb in order to fully develop. But on the other hand, I hated to watch my wife suffer with the contractions, the injections, and wires.

On Saturday, the next day, the contractions subsided and they took her off the magnesium. When we talked with our doctor, he started making plans for when we could go home - maybe another day or two - and began the process for transferring her to another room where she wouldn't need so much attention.

Everything remained fine until Sunday morning around 4:00am when the contractions started again. She very quickly got 4 contractions in 35 minutes and they rushed to give her more magnesium - only this time they doubled the dose and maintained it for 24 hours instead of 12. My wife was almost completely paralyzed. She was groggy, out of it and had difficulty even moving from side-to-side in her bed. It was so hard to see her like that and when my wife's parents came to visit her, they sent me home to get some rest.

When I got back to our little apartment, I looked around and saw the salad container from the dinner she didn't get to finish Friday night. I couldn't even bring myself to clean it up. I took a shower listening to Will Smith’s beautiful song, “Just the Two of Us” about being a Daddy. I cried during the whole song, letting my tears and the water try to cleanse me of my fears before I returned to the hospital.

The contractions had stopped and by Monday afternoon she was transferred to another room and we were really beginning to think about how we would live our life for the next few weeks with Gem on complete bed rest at home. The doctor even said his goal was still to get our little babies to 36 weeks of development.

Then the contractions started yet again.

We were told to wait it out; maybe they'll go away, these things happen. Within a couple of hours, however, they were less than 10 minutes apart again and she was rushed back to her old room. They reattached the fetal monitors to her belly and the room was once again filled with the sound of our babies' heartbeats. They also injected her with another double dose of magnesium. The contractions were already down to every 7 or 8 minutes. The magnesium wasn't working and they tried a high dose of another anti-contracting drug. They had given her the last steroid treatment the day before so there was nothing else we could do to prepare our babies if they were really coming out.

The contractions were bad enough that for the first time Gem started using the breathing techniques we learned in our birthing class. Her breathing joined with their heartbeats, building the tension in our room.

"Thoom, thoom," said their heartbeats.

"Whoo, whoo," she replied in breath.

"Thoom, thoom."

My wife was holding my hand, squeezing it during the contractions, while I stood by the side of the bed trying to help her focus on breathing, feeling completely useless while she suffered.

It was now around 1:00am or 2:00am in the morning on Tuesday and we were exhausted. We hadn't had a full night's sleep or more than a total of 5 or 6 hours of sleep since we had arrived at the hospital Friday night. She had been forced to sleep with all of the monitors still attached and was unable to turn over. I had to sleep in a broken chair by her bed.

The pain was getting worse, we were getting more scared and the medications were the only things not doing anything at all. At 3:30am, as we were finally drifting off to sleep from utter exhaustion, they woke us up. They wanted to conduct an internal exam.

Our doctor hadn't wanted to do anything that could bring on delivery, so there had been no internal exams – not when he examined her, not even for the ultrasound. Out of concern based on the rate of the contractions, they did decide to examine Gem and found she was 5 centimeters dilated. They said if they didn't perform the C-section quickly there was risk of her water breaking and the umbilical cord or the feet of our babies (because they were breech) descending through her cervix which could be dangerous for everyone involved. At our most exhausted point, we found ourselves dealing with our worst fears. Before I knew it, I was kissing Gem goodbye as they wheeled her to the operating room and I was left alone.

I went outside to call my Dad at 4:30 on a bitterly cold December morning.

"Do you want us to come up?” my Dad asked me. The cold felt like it was passing right through my jacket. I felt numb from everything and the cold only magnified it.

"I...I...don't know," I tried to reply while my teeth were chattering. It would be a two-and-half hour trip from Philadelphia.

"Do you want us to come up, Jeremy? We will if you want," he replied trying to ease my concern over being a burden.

I started to realize just how scared I was. Tears began to roll down my cheeks and the wind used them to make me feel even colder, more depleted.

"Yes...please."

I closed my cell phone, looked down the dark, empty street and felt utterly isolated. My whole family was in danger in this building and I was standing out here so cold and alone. I didn’t even bother to wipe the tears off my face before I returned to Gem’s room.

The few minutes in her room by myself actually made a difference. I paced around it, eating a king-sized Snickers bar. The concentration required to eat a Snickers bar without spilling crumbs all over the floor really helped me to regain some focus. By the time the nurses came for me, the chocolate had begun to get into my system and I was able to get myself geared up for what I was about to face.

My first image was of a large room with Gem lying in the middle of it. Despite the fetal monitors and other wires, she had never really looked sick. But seeing her lying there, her arms splayed out and pinned down, made me want to just hold her in my arms. I started talking to her to make sure she was okay. I watched as they cut her open and was thankful she couldn’t see or feel anything. Within about 10 minutes, at 5:30am, our little boy, Elijah, was born at 3 pounds and 10 ounces and one moment later, our little girl, Jordyn, was born at just over 3 pounds. We were parents. They were pretty ashen, covered in amniotic fluid and blood, and were gorgeous. Each baby had a pediatric team and I had to stand on my tiptoes to look over their shoulders to see our new babies. They were briefly shown to us before being hurried out of the room; we didn't even get to hold our children for the first time until the next day.

Gem was able to go home three days later, eight days after being admitted. But we had to walk out of the hospital without our children that day, and every single day after for four weeks. One month after their birth, we once again walked out of the hospital, but this time we were bringing our children where they belonged; home. Finally.