the birth plan

Today I had a doctor's appointment, except this one was with Dr. Doeden's physician's assistant, Yolanda, as Dr. Doeden is in Canada on vacation. Who goes to Canada for vacation? Anyways, I got my results for the Strep B test, and they are negative. Yolanda couldn't figure out why I was there if I had already had the Strep B test, and I pointed out that I usually get seen on Mondays, but everyone was full on Monday so they threw me back to Friday. Yolanda checked my cervix while the hub and I held our breath and......no change. At all. Nada. My cervix is as hard as a rock, a brick, a lump of concrete. But on the bright side, I am now getting Braxton-Hicks contractions every day, and I have a low achy period-like cramping across the lower middle of my belly, which means my body is warming up.

So the hub and I keep on keepin' on, truckin' towards an eventual induction (August 12th) or labor, whichever comes first. We wrote up the birth plan last night, which I'm wondering if anyone will even look at, let alone defer to. See, back around June 22nd, when I went to go visit my mom, I was trying to get ahold of the movie "The Business of Being Born," to see what the whole process was like. I couldn't find it for sale in any retail shops in Oklahoma, so I figured I'd be left to order it from Amazon. Well, after my trip, my mom surprised me by ordering some books from Amazon for me, including the movie. Well, in fact she had ordered Ricki Lake's book, "Your Best Birth," and not the movie. I read it anyways*, since my other birth books are getting boring (do I really need a chapter on possibly dealing with loss? No). The book was amazing. And I so wanted to hate it. I'm not a granola gal - I don't eat health foods except when forced to by gestational diabetes, I don't hike, I don't follow Phish and DMB around the USA, I don't own Birkenstocks or bamboo socks. And I really don't want to give birth in a tub in the middle of my living room with candles lit and a doula chanting in the corner. But this book got me thinking about what I do want, and I hadn't gone there in my thinking up to that point. In all reality, my thoughts on birth had extended as far as "I think I'll probably get an epidural." End of story.

Well, after reading the book, I ordered the movie and the hub and I watched it together this week. Let me tell you people - don't watch this movie 36 weeks pregnant. Because at 36 weeks pregnant, you can't change doctors, you can't change hospitals, you are basically glued to the plan in place. And watching the movie was like cutting the tags off your wedding dress as you see the perfect dress in a store window across the street. Please don't misunderstand me. Nothing has changed to where I want to make any drastic changes, and with gestational diabetes, I am still at risk when it comes to birth. I still intend to labor at home with my iPod and a warm bath, and to be in a hospital to give birth. And I don't control if I get induced, because with the baby's large size I will end up with a c-section if I don't. But I no longer desire an induction and it's too long to get into here, but the methods just leave a bad taste in my mouth.

The hub and I have decided to labor as long as possible without intervention. I'm not going to say I will never get an epidural because I don't know what will happen with the birth or if I might need one. I am going to do everything possible to not rely on an epidural, and narcotics (stadol) are completely out of the question. I'm not being a martyr or a hero - I want to experience the birth process, pain and all, to really understand what it is.

So, the birth plan is complete, and ready to be turned in to my doctor at my next visit. I expect she will raise eyebrows since we have never discussed my birth plan in detail, beyond the facts that I don't want a c-section and I prefer to not get an episiotomy, and she has never uttered the words "birth plan" to me. We shall see next Thursday.

*Some of you, like me, may be fans of dooce.com. I just read her blog about her birth experience, and we have oddly ended up in the same place, after reading the same book, and it was creepy how alike our reactions were.