The tussle between suggestions and following them- Part 3

I am hardly halfway through my pregnancy and I have started getting suggestions about the delivery: two opposing suggestions:


Suggestion: You could go for a painless delivery (with an epidural - an injection that numbs the lower part of the body and helps in a painless delivery - i think a wonderful invention of science))
Opposing Suggestion: You should let the delivery take its normal course and experience labour pains..we were never created for painless deliveries!!


Real Life
I am confused....and also think that the delivery is still a long time away....


So, I asked some of my experienced friends (who are already moms; have given birth; are doctors etc) for some practical advice. It was a silly move on my part - I stand even more confused now!! But I'll share the stories/suggestions here for mitigating my confusion. Let's name these friends A, B, C, D and E and here are their experiences:


'A' (a friend from college) had 28 hours of excruciating labour pain and her screams could be heard outside the hospital!...She refused to go for an epidural as she wanted to have the most natural delivery possible (why???) ...and this very same friend was scared of not only cockroaches but the most harmless creatures in God's world i.e.earthworms!! (sometimes you think you know your friends and then you realize how wrong you were) She told me that she read somewhere (another suggestion) that she wouldn't feel like a real mother if she doesn't go through the labour pain..(I wanted to tell her that it was a bunch of crap but seeing the glow of pride on her face, I stopped myself just in time) Still her story added to my confusion nevertheless as I did not want to feel like an 'unreal' mother!!


'B' described her delivery with such gory details that I was forced to wonder why she was such a dud in writing essays in school. But she was very truthful in admitting that after a couple of hours of pain, when the doc suggested an epidural, she readily agreed...not finding it useful to kill herself before her baby was born (what common sense!). But she told me that taking an epidural makes the mother so numb waist-down that she is not able to push properly and hence the baby has to be assisted at birth using forceps or vaccum pump. Her baby was born with the help of a vaccum pump (and she proudly compares it to Kareena Kapoor's elder sister's delivery in the movie Three Idiots...to give me a better picture). So that still left the lingering question of whether or not to get an epidural as these forceps or vaccum things could create a problem!


'C' was most experienced - two children - first normal delivery, second C-Section. Her first baby was born in the US where she told me that giving an epidural is part of the procedure unless you have an allergy to it. She said 'everybody over there has painless deliveries' (thus erasing all sense of guilt from my mind for having called the epidural a great invention)...The next baby was born in India and was a C-Section and for that, an epidural or other kind of anesthesia is mandatory to be administered. But before I could heave a sigh of relief, she went ahead and told me what went wrong! Well somehow, they had jabbed the epidural at a wrong location or something so its effect was milder than normal and she could feel the doc cutting open her abdomen!!!! (feel it - now what kind of a feeling is that!!!!) but she informed me that there was no major pain, just some sensation of being ripped apart!!! Yes...Right....Thank you very much!! 


'D' turned out to be a big supporter of epidurals, anesthetics, pain killers in general and asked me why were they made if not to be used at the right time (probably she is right). She has two children - the elder one, her daughter, was born with an epidural and she said that she felt quite good about the delivery as her daughter had taken 14 hours to pop out after the labour pains started...so imagine that without an epidural! But she went ahead and explained to me that getting an epidural does not mean 'no labour pain' - it just means no pain during delivery - what an eye-opener (and I was comparing a painless delivery to a walk in the garden). Then, I inquired about her son's birth...She gave me  a dazzling smile and said...'Oh! I got an epidural at his time also but he was born in 12 minutes and the epidural takes at least half an hour to take effect'!!!! Beautiful! 


'E' is a very good friend and a no- nonsense doctor...When I inquired about epidurals very nonchalantly as if it were for an acquaintance, she immediately saw through me. She told me to shut my trap (literally) and stop reading shit on the internet (she is herself a grade 1 luddite (a person who fears or loathes technology)). She scolded me like a grandmother and said that 'Every pregnancy is different and you never know what will happen when you are about to deliver' (as if after hearing 1000 stories- all of them different, I didn't know that much). Basically, she conveyed to me that when the push comes to shove (pun unintended), then we'll see!!!
Of course she couldn't stop herself from narrating a story about a breech baby (everybody has this urge of topping all the stories that I have already heard).......
Unwittingly, she has made me navigate from epidurals to breech babies on the world wide web to enhance my knowledge!!!! (my resolve is even stronger after I saw that my latest scan said - 'baby is extended breech!!')




Note: Pleeeeease do not google any images of epidural needles or injections or procedure of administration if you ever want to get one!!!