Carol J Forrester

You will not react to the pain meds like your father, and sister do. It will be fine. They’ll let you sleep, for all of six hours, across three days, during a labour that refuses to comply with any actions taken. You will hear the words two centimetres from every midwife in the hospital. When they increase the oxytocin, it will drop your daughter’s heart rate, and you’ll be told not to worry. They will attempt to break your waters. Twice. Neither time will they need to change the sheets, except for when you throw up so hard you wet yourself. Speaking of which, a nurse will tell you only a few cases of labour result in the mother retaining urine. Lucky you, you get to be special. The nurse will doubt it until you have spent the last twenty-four hours weeing into bowls every twenty minutes, only for the catheter to drain a litre and half from your bladder. For the first time in your life, you actually feel every muscle loosen in your body. For a moment, you are utterly relaxed. They will bring your supper while your feet are still in stirrups. The third, or fourth time the heartbeat on the monitor falters, you will meet the consultant, who seems to think you’ll fight her on a C-section. By that time you won’t even know what she looks like, because your eyelids will not open. The anaesthetist comments when you doze on the surgical table. Your daughter shits herself on the way out. You can’t move your arms for an hour. The epidural goes higher than expected, and it makes you shiver until you rattle the bed. When you can’t lift them to cradle her, they have your husband feed the baby your colostrum with a syringe. Spend another three days fighting with your breasts to find a hold that fits her latch, and end up soaking in your own milk, her skin the colour of a tangerine. No one mentions how much blood you lost until seven days later when a panic attack drags you back to the hospital because you cannot administer the blood thinners yourself. Indigestion dogs you until your mother gives you bicarb dissolved in water, and you burp fizzy. Pain is a firework that keeps relighting month, after month, at all sorts of inconvenient hours. Then somewhere down the road, you pick up a book that tells you there was a study on bicarb being administered to pregnant persons an hour before inductions around 2016. That the number of vaginal births was higher by 17% but researchers were denied further funding because weak contractions were not a high enough priority. Funny that. Maybe I could have kept that litre of blood. Maybe there was more I could have done. Maybe the answer was sitting in my kitchen cupboard, in the garden, or in another space too domestic to be considered. How much power is overlooked among the thorns?