694 True Fact #1 - Holding Breath

Monday, May 14, 2006

(This entry and the previous two refer to an earlier entry where journalers were to report three "facts" about themselves, two true and one false.)

I was pregnant with Daughter in 1975, in St. Louis, Missouri. I was 30 years old. I'd had three prior miscarriages and one late term stillbirth, and when I got into the seventh month with this pregnancy and realized this one might really go all the way, I decided I wanted an absolutely natural birth. No meds. No "lines". No monitors. No strapping down. No artificially breaking the waters. No episiotomy. No nothing!

Lamaze was big on the coasts, but in the middle states, it hadn't caught on yet. We had the best obstetrical team in the county, but when they shrugged and patted me on the head and said, "Well, you can try if you want, but...", I went doctor shopping. One after another discouraged me. Most male doctors acted like it was THEIR baby, and they were going to "deliver" it, and if there was some way they could figure out how to do it without me there, they'd prefer that. I really think they frightened women to the point where the women tensed so much they needed the drugs, then they drugged them to "get rid of the women" during the birth.

I finally found Dr. M., an Indian woman (complete with sari) who, when I described what I wanted and asked if it was possible, shrugged and said "Of course. I had my own four that way."

I went to the Lamaze classes, but all that silly panting and hooting turned me off. I had learned self hypnosis during the year of the double tic doloreaux, and decided that was the way to go - to find a bright light as a focus point, and pour myself out of my body and into that point. I also learned and practiced relaxing every part of my body, every muscle except across the top of the stomach. I got very good at it. I also practiced hyperventilating and then holding my breath while totally relaxed and "out of body", and tightening and relaxing that one pushing muscle. Ex#2 timed me several times, and he says I often went 6 minutes without breathing.

When the time came, I didn't know I was in labor at first, because the contractions never settled into any rhythm. They were all over the place, a cluster, then nothing for a while, and I thought it was just cramps. From the time that they got insistent enough that I decided it must be labor and went to the hospital, until Daughter was born, was only two hours.

Everything went exactly as I had wanted. Dr. M. did a perineal massage, but other than that, nobody touched me. Daughter got a 10 Apgar, even though we later discovered that she had a hole in her heart, between the ventricles. (It closed on its own when she was 9 months old.)

During and between the two big delivery pushes, the doctor told me that I had held my breath for over five minutes, and both my heart rate and blood pressure (the only monitors allowed) had dropped during delivery. I credit the total relaxation and self hypnosis ... and that everyone kept their hands off me and let me do my job.

(That guy who recently tried to break the record for breath holding was under enormous stress while doing it. He was burning oxygen and making carbon dioxide at a high rate. I wasn't. Total relaxation makes all the difference.)