Provided by ICPA.
Hold on, Don’t Push!
Imagine you are pregnant, you’ve been in labor for 10 hours, and finally, you are dilated to 10cm. “Hold on,” says the nurse, “Don’t push yet, we have to wait until the doctor arrives, just hang on.” But you feel the baby there, and your body feels like pushing; how can you hold back?
What if the opposite happens? You are checked and told that since you are now at 10cm, your body is ready to give birth. So, you start pushing. And you keep pushing. And three hours later, you are still trying to push out a baby with no results.
Both are very common scenarios in a laboring patient, with the mom listening to the doctors and nurses telling them what to do instead of listening to their own body. How often have you heard this story? While this is not a normal birth scenario, it is certainly common.
In either scenario, the woman is doing what someone is telling her to do instead of listening to her own body. This was the scenario of Gretchen, who, 17 years ago, while pregnant with her first child, labored at home, and by the time she got to the hospital and was checked, she was 9 cm dilated. She wanted a natural birth and stayed at home as long as she could to facilitate that process. After 30 minutes of being in the hospital, she was told she was 10 cm dilated and was told to start to push the baby out. So, she tried. She got on all fours, hung from a birth bar, bent over the bed, labored in the water, and tried every position possible to help the baby come out, yet nothing was happening. She never asked for an epidural or Pitocin. She wanted the baby to come out on his own.