Pregnancy
Why I’ll Never Have Another Hospital Birth
On the night before my baby’s birth, we arrived at a popular Baltimore hospital around 10:30. Since my water had broken at home, I was instructed by the on-call doctor to come right into the hospital. I wasn’t in any pain and though I was told I was having contractions, I couldn’t feel them yet. At that moment, I was actually excited for them to begin. I could handle it. I was ready.
Suddenly, everything changed. I stood up to go to the bathroom and the nurse asked what I was doing. I have to pee, I told her. The nurse politely asked me, no, told me, that I needed to get in the bed and if I had to pee, it would be in the bedpan.
“Even number two?†I joked.
“Bedpan.† Whoa, slow down. We just met.
I was confused. Though my gynecologist had chuckled a bit when I asked about making a birth plan (oh, silly me for wanting to have some choice in the matter), she failed to mention that I would be bound to the bed after my water broke, or that I would only be allowed to um, poop, in a bedpan.
I was stunned. Laying back down, I knew this was not the best position for pain management and often slows labor down immensely. So why was I being told to do this, after everything I’d read warning against staying put? The only answer I received was that it was “hospital policy.†It seemed a rather important hospital policy to neglect mentioning through eight months of prenatal visits and in-depth discussions with one’s doctor, but even more confusing was that no one could tell me why.