Better Off_ Flipping the Switch on Technology - Eric Brende [87]
Mary had an intractably sunny disposition and, with the exception of that first bout of morning sickness, had never been given to major mood swings. The due date was now about four weeks away, and she continued to sew, cook, and help in the garden as if all were the same.
I, though, felt a few nervous flutters. Well-meaning friends and family members had shared their own natal experiences. In Boston over Christmas, a close male confidante of Mary’s had urged her in my presence to make use of every medical screening device and procedure—and every other service on up to hospitalized delivery by an obstetrician. His own wife was due in several months, and their health insurance would pay the full cost in excess of four thousand dollars, including cesarean section if need be. In Boston, one out of three births occurred by cesarean. He couldn’t believe we had let Mary’s insurance lapse. The policy, though, would have cost us several hundred dollars a month and prevented our expedition. I thought the friend was a little alarmist until I learned that his brother’s child had suffered permanent brain damage at birth because of a slight mishandling of the delivery.
My own father, a doctor, had asked if we were getting an ultra-sound. “Why do we need one?” I replied. He explained there were some rare complications it could detect in advance, like placenta previa, the condition in which the placenta emerges before the baby. Placenta previa could well be fatal for baby and mother. He knew this because his second wife had nearly died from it, escaping only because emergency surgery was performed immediately in the hospital. Both she and the baby at one point had been pronounced dead from massive blood loss.
Finally, we learned from the Minimite midwife herself that the previous year one of her deliveries had been stillborn. Because of a prolapsed cord—the cord coming out first—the baby’s air supply had been cut off. She didn’t find out until too late or she would have called the doctor.
At the time I heard these admonitions, I brushed them aside. The vast majority of births went off without a hitch. I did some checking and learned that healthy mothers were as likely to develop complications from the hospital as they were by not using the hospital. Freakish conditions like placenta previa were far likelier to happen when the mother was in poor health or not taking adequate prenatal measures.
We were doing our relaxation and breathing exercises almost daily now, and I had also begun perineal massage on Mary’s inner tissues to reduce the likelihood of tearing. The Lamaze book was especially reassuring. The author, Elizabeth Bing, portrayed labor as a gently, gradually intensifying series of somatic swells, possibly mild enough in the first several hours to permit a visit to the mall or the movie theater. Maternal labor sounded positively recreational. Bing also said the woman should suck lollipops rather than drink liquids as the contractions grew more intense, so we bought a bag in Mary’s favorite flavor, orange. There seemed little cause to worry, but I remained slightly apprehensive.
The due date got nearer and nearer. Mary experienced the advance tremors called Braxton-Hicks contractions. But no baby. Finally the date arrived. And it passed. Two more days went by. Psychologically it was as if we had missed having a baby altogether, and we were both oddly relieved. It seemed the time would come in some distant unreal future, if ever. I no longer felt so apprehensive.
As we whiled away the days casually, rehearsing the breathing exercises, I actually was beginning to look forward to the onset of labor as a chance to break up our routine and put into practice the Lamaze methodology. I even left many last-minute details undone,