Day 57: Confronting Trauma
And listening to my body
TW: This post includes light mentions of pregnancy loss and trauma. If this is not the post for you today, please take care 🩵
As lighthearted and fun birth planning can be, one unexpected side effect is how much it brings certain trauma to the surface.
The modern pregnant person knows that “birth plans” are more like “birth preferences.”1 We lay out the wish list of how we’d like our labor and deliveries to go, knowing full well that these are not guarantees. And with that in mind, we detail out all the contingency plans. For my own — I have whole sections on “in case of cesarean” and “in case of induction,” among others.
In actually crafting this document, multiple copies of which will soon be neatly filed into my hospital bag, I found it to be more involved than expected. For each area of preference-making there are multiple sub-preferences. I’m challenged to be extremely discerning about:
Not just whether I’d get an epidural but how and when
How much monitoring of the baby while I labor, and what methods of monitoring I’m open to
If I am induced, which induction methods I’d prefer
Exactly if and how I’d like newborn care and procedures to be handled
How much I might try to push our labor team over the edge with a celebrity inspired rider of demands regarding our birth environment
As I go through each micro-decision, I’m learning to listen to how my body subconsciously reacts at the thought of each practice or intervention or proceeding. The logical part of my brain pushes to consent to certain things, like opting for mechanical induction methods over medical ones. But my heart and gut both scream when I start to write that out on paper.
Through this exercise of drafting my birth preferences, I’m realizing how many of these potential occurrences in the birth experience are reminiscent of procedures I went through on another significant day on the journey to create this baby. Just weeks before I got pregnant, I was hours away from home, in a brand new doctor’s office, surrendering myself to what would be the most painful and invasive testing I had ever received. I was desperate for answers on why it was so hard for us to keep a baby.
I thought I could power through. It was a day that almost broke me, but is also so intimately connected to the very existence of the son we will be welcoming in a matter of weeks now. It was the day that led to my endometritis diagnosis. It was the day that shed some light on why my uterus was not in a state to nurture a fetus. And because of this day I was able to access the prescription and care I needed to successfully conceive the very next cycle.
It was a day that is simultaneously haunting and magical in memory. And I want to leave it (and the physical invasions that it brought) well alone.
And so, I write my birth preferences accordingly.
I’ve also heard pros call them “birth maps,” which seems most fitting since one turn (decision, shift, occurrence) can have a re-routing effect on how everything else goes down.