It dawned on me the other day that once next week rolls around, I will technically be half-way done with my pregnancy. Honestly, up until now this whole experience has pretty much been about waiting for things to happen. Waiting for my tummy to show, waiting for the baby to move, waiting for the day we’d find out whether we had a Liam or a Callan, so now that all that stuff is happening, my mind is starting to become a lot more focused on that inevitable day when I arrive at the hospital, woddling with pain in full bitch mode ready to burst this baby into the world. But it’s kind of hard to prepare for something like this and it doesn’t help when the books I have on childbirth provide very little description of what labor pain actually feels like. The closest personal experience I have for comparison would be the time I got stung by a sting ray while Mike and I were on vacation in South Carolina. In an attempt to try and calm my hysterics, the life guard told me that other beach goers she had attended to that summer who were also stung had either compared the pain to being in labor or being shot.
However, I did find a few things on the internet that helped put things in perspective a little. For instance, I didn’t realize that when you have a contraction, your muscles actually do contract. Duh, I guess that’s why it’s called a contraction. Another website actually described a contraction to be like “an orgasm or an ocean wave”. Well, damn, that actually sounds pleasant. Almost makes me wish I could be in labor all the time. A lot of other descriptions I read were from women who had had epidurals or had taken other kinds of pain relief. I’m planning to not take any pain medication, not because I think I’m some sort of Amazon woman or something, but because I just want to be fully aware of what’s going on and not be all dopey. I’m sort of hoping I’ll take after my mom when it comes to labor. It only took her about five hours total to pop my brother out and even less with me (like two or three hours).
But, I’m definitely not relying on the “orgasm”, “ocean wave” comparison. I’m thinking “body on fire, burning, throbbing, menstrual cramps intensified by 100″ and “A LOT of pressure” to be a more accurate description. I hope I’m ready for this.
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