I have watched way too many sit-coms and Hollywood movies in my lifetime to have seen the “going into labour and giving birth” scene quite a number of times. In FRIENDS itself, I have watched this scene four times as part of the main plot, plus a bonus, additional one that takes place alongside Phoebe’s delivery. And maybe because I have seen this so many times, starting from the time I was a young teenager, this stayed in my mind, not as a scary nightmare despite all the screaming that these women enacted perfectly, but as a beautiful moment that cannot be missed.
While I wasn’t too good with kids when I was younger (I had a low tolerance level towards any kid older than one and a half years :-P), I always knew that I wanted kids when I was grown up. And being the weirdly super-planned person with a graphic description of how each event in my life would pan out, I had, in my mind, an almost picture-perfect, and rather cinematic, moving image of giving birth, for most part of my life, and an even clearer one once Hari and I got married.
I had dreamt of the process of labour, the absolute horror of the increasing contractions, clutching Hari’s hands tight and being comforted by him, and the overwhelming wave of relief and joy once the baby was out. I had dreamt of Hari being handed the baby and the smile on his face and the tears in his eyes. I had dreamt of forgetting all the pain till then and just being thankful for our bundle of joy despite still looking close to passing out or puking, thanks to the unimaginable trauma of the experience.
You see? I was crazy that way – still am, with a lot of things I dream about or live out in my head. Anyway, when I got pregnant with Vedu back in 2016, this to-the-T dream became all the more constant in my mind. Considering that it was the biggest pain in my life that I was so excitedly looking forward to, I must have been crazy at a whole different level back then. But you know what I mean. My due date was supposed to be 22 January 2017. And by the end of December, I was feverish with excitement.
But then, on the evening of 2 January 2017, sharp at 4.32pm, Vedu, who was a teenie weenie, decided that 38 weeks inside was enough and that she couldn’t miss out on all the excitement of the outside world anymore. And thus started my contractions. We went to the MICU, where the junior doctor hooked me up to some machine and confirmed that yes, I was indeed in labour. I was elated, to put it mildly. “Here was my moment of glory!” And then I waited… and I waited… and I waited… and I waited some more… Nope, no baby!
My doctor, who, by the way, was the coolest and most perfect OB a woman could have, was in two minds whether to keep me there or ask me to go home and come back when the contractions were stronger. But for some reason, every time they ran the heart rate monitoring thingie on me, my contractions became stronger. Couple that to another growth scan that showed that Vedu was adamantly sticking to her weight of the previous week, the doctor decided that we would wait till the next day and then induce labour to speed things up if it hadn’t sped up till then, a wise decision, considering Vedu’s weight and my early labour.
Anyway, by the next morning, I was still walking around, and Hari, tired after a night-out on the chair beside my bed, was now asleep on my bed, much to the shock of the nurse who came to check in on the fully pregnant woman she had left there. By 11:30am on 3 January 2017, my doctor had already done – very graphic details ahead – a manual shaking up of my uterus using his bare hands, rupturing my placenta using a goddamn needle, and inducing labour when all else failed.
But shattering my dreams of a lifetime, I started off at 1cm of dilatation at 4.32pm on 2 January 2017 and was still stuck at that effing 1cm at around 9pm on 3 January 2017. By then, close to 30 hours into labour, even with the dilatation not progressing, I was exhausted because of the continuous contractions and all the manual efforts to get the labour to progress. And I had started vomiting by this point, and every time I vomited, Vedu’s heart rate would suddenly go down, giving a scare to the nurse or the doctor nearby.
My doctor, who knew how much a normal delivery meant to me, tried telling me that they could wait another 12 hours at the most if I was at least at 3cm or so, but that with the consistent 1cm, he wasn’t too hopeful of waiting anymore, given the random heart rate dips in the baby. And whether you believe it or not, I really could feel the struggle of the baby inside, almost as if she was kicking around and trying to get out desperately. I knew right then that my baby’s health was more important than my dream and told him to go ahead with an emergency C-section if he thought that was a safer choice.
And that is how, after 30 hours of labour, I was moved from the delivery room to the operation theatre, in a total upset of all the plans and visions I had cradled in my mind. I remember that moment, when reality struck me, suddenly wanting to just run home and take a nap in my bed, and not go through any of this. And the helplessness knowing that I had no option other than to finish what I had started, as I sat hunched for the painful injection in the spine for the local anaesthesia.
The doctor and Hari, to their credit, kept talking to me, cracking jokes, and making me laugh throughout the procedure that it felt just like a coffee shop meetup rather than a surgery – something I will always be thankful for. And at 9.56pm, after an eventful fight, my baby came out, with two loops of the umbilical cord around her neck, thus proving the doctor right in his decision to go for an emergency C-section.
While I thought that that was the end of it, my depression, which was already bad before, hit with a heightened magnitude postpartum, and one of the reasons that I cried the most for, for the next 8 or 9 months, was not getting my dream labour and delivery. The rational me knew that I was stupid. But the planner in me who was influenced by the societal consensus that a normal delivery was the only “good” way of delivering a baby was devastated that I had failed as a woman. My mother certainly didn’t help, by trying to figure out the “reasons” why I couldn’t have a normal delivery. On the second day after giving birth, when I was already exhausted, I could hear her try to evaluate my choices during pregnancy that might have been a factor in why this happened. So you can imagine my plight.
It was only after a year or so of that misery, when I sought help for my depression and anxiety and got better, that I started going easy on myself and telling myself that how I gave birth was not what mattered, it was that I got to experience that, when so many women hope and pray for a baby and do not get their wish fulfilled. And I asked myself, what about the mothers who adopt babies or have surrogates? Are they in any way inferior to me just because I could carry a baby inside? If I didn’t believe that, why did I have to believe that I was inferior to another woman only because she got to have a normal delivery and I didn’t, owing to my body being different from hers? That kind of put things in perspective for me.
In fact, it did more than that. When I was pregnant with Taaru, the hope that I might have a normal delivery the second time around was kindled in me, of course. And my doctor was not one to blindly say that a first C-section should definitely mean a second C-section too. He was more than ready to try for a normal delivery if all went well and there was no risk in sight for the baby or me. Up until three days before I went into labour, he kept going with the clinical examinations to see if there was any hope.
But by the end of the 40th week, when my water broke and I was still at the same old 1cm, he and I knew that I could just forget about a normal delivery. And you know what? I was okay with it and ended up laughing. In fact, I was so okay with it that the entire time that I was on the surgery table, this time without Hari by my side as it was the peak COVID time, I kept thinking of the ghee rice I had made and the mutton curry that my father had made right before my water broke, and how my father had not let me have those as I might end up needing a surgery soon and shouldn’t eat before it. How I hated him for being right!
I am not overexaggerating when I say that my disappointment at not getting to taste those eclipsed my joy of having a second baby. To the extent that, the next morning, when the doctor came for a review, the very first question I asked him was “Is it okay if I have ghee rice and mutton curry when I get home?” and then explained the context seeing the bewilderment on his face. He laughed out and told me, “You eat whatever you want Radhika. You deserve it after all this.” And I did!
I was one of the lucky ones who didn’t have any real trouble after the C-section, except for a premature blood clot that kept me up for 4 days and felt like a burning cigarette butt pushed into my surgery scar the first time around. But thankfully, with a couple of days of clot-dissolving medicine, that was done with. I never faced any issues with healing and never had any permanent, lingering pain or other difficulties. But there are many who have faced that, from what I have heard.
So if anyone tells you that a C-section always comes up with inevitable long-term issues, please don’t believe that. It seriously varies from woman to woman. Although I wouldn’t suggest opting for a C-section if you can do it the normal way, only because it is a major surgery, and why would you want to put your body through one if there is another way? But if that’s what you really want, who am I to judge? However, if it is because someone tells you that a C-section is “the easy way out,” don’t believe that either. It is in no way easy, not physically, and definitely not emotionally, in a society that judges you for the way you give birth.
And if there are ignoramuses, you know the likes of Suniel Shetty, who try to put you down for the “comfort of having a Caesarean baby” or praise you for “being brave in not wanting one,” shut them up right away and remind them that normal or C-section, giving birth is giving birth, and it is in every way equal. Just as a mother who gave birth biologically is equal to every other amazing mother in the world.
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Also published on Medium.
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