A Statue Turned its Head

Of course, if I just stayed home then I wouldn't have any of those worries. However, that's really not an option that I ever would have seriously considered even if we had been able to afford a midwife.

To have a homebirth, you first need to have a home. We have a place that we rent to live in. We can't paint the walls or anything so they remain an impersonal white, and we have to be careful about how many nail holes we leave. Any spill on the carpet results in "oh no, there goes our damage deposit" rather than "oh no, our carpet has a stain." We have neighbors living on the other side of very thin walls. Having the professionals who deal with this stuff every day at the hospital present during the birth is one thing; I really don't want to share my most private moments with our neighbors.

Secondly, the idea of a homebirth just plain scares me. In my head, I know that a homebirth is supposed to be just as safe as a hospital birth for low risk pregnancies, but I don't feel it. I worry that my worries and "but what if this happens"ing will cancel out the comforts of home and so the stress level will be comparable to having moved to a hospital. Also, one of the reasons that homebirths are so safe is because of the absence of unnecessary interventions like epidurals and drugs and other things which can lead to complications. But if I have the proper support in the hospital to avoid those things anyway…

I do support the right of women to choose a homebirth, and I do think that provincial insurance should cover them, it just doesn't feel right to me – at least not right now. Maybe for my next child when I have a better idea of what to expect.

There is another option – Stony Plain. When I said that provincial insurance didn't cover the services of a midwife in Alberta, that wasn't entirely true. There is one place that they do.

I'm not sure exactly what the program at the Stony Plain hospital is; I haven't looked into it closely enough. It might be some sort of pilot project, or it might be where midwives are trained, or it might be who knows what. All I do know is that there are midwives there who do hospital deliveries there and the hospital is set up like a birth center. There are two birthing suits there. One has just the normal shower, but the other has a big tub right in the room, and women are allowed in it even after membranes have ruptured.

Stony Plain has other things going for it as well. Among the advantages are the possibility of a walking epidural. I wrote before about how they don't do them in Edmonton, but they do do them in Stony Plain.

Stony Plain is really close to Edmonton. It doesn't take long to get there from the city. It's close enough that we briefly considered going over there, though not seriously enough to really look into it or talk to a midwife over there. The problem is that while it is close to Edmonton, it is close to the other side of Edmonton. It wouldn't take long to get to Stony Plain from Edmonton, but it would take a long time to get through Edmonton, especially if we were trying to go through during rush hour.

If the hospital tour had scared me, I might have taken another look into Stony Plain, but it reassured me that even though there are a few things I don't like, with the proper support my experience there should be about as good a one as I could have anywhere else. Spending upwards of an hour in a car in the middle of labor, on the other hand, sounds absolutely horrible.

I think that whether or not I do manage to make it without drugs really depends a lot on just how tired I am. I don't handle pain all that well, but I handle exhaustion even less well, and the two combined generally prove too much for me to take. If I wake up in the morning after a good night's sleep and go into labor, maybe I will be able to do it naturally. On the other hand, if I go to bed after a long day and suddenly contractions start and I can't get any sleep, I might find myself asking for the epidural just so that I can get some rest.

I sort of view it as a trade off – how hard things are during labor being inverse to how hard they are after. My first wish is for a healthy baby, of course, but my second is to feel as good as possible after the baby is born when I actually have to start taking care of him/her (oh how I long for a correct pronoun).

Labor is supposed to hurt a lot, but it seems that all of the medical ways to make it hurt less come with the strong possibility of making it longer or increased risk of tearing or increased risk of c-section or trouble breastfeeding afterwards. I'm scared enough of having to take care of a newborn and how hard things will be and how much work babies are without adding in trying to adjust to this new life and responsibility while recovering from major abdominal surgery or not being able to sit comfortably because I tore so badly.

If labor is really, really long and I'm absolutely exhausted, I won't feel bad about choosing medication just so that I can sleep and be better rested when the baby actually arrives. However, so long as it is just pain and a level of exhaustion something less than absolute, I really hope that I can find other ways of dealing with it so as to give myself the best chance of having the easiest time possible in the first days of actually being a mother.

I guess we'll just have to wait and see how strong I am.

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