Ricki Lake on giving birth without meds

Actress and former talk show host Ricki Lake shares her birth experiences in the new book, "Your Best Birth." Written along with Abby Epstein, the book is a guide packed with advice from medical professionals about the different options expecting mothers have. An excerpt.

Ricki
My pregnancies were miraculous times in my life. I felt special and very beautiful. I was also completely open to other people’s suggestions. There isn’t any other way to explain how a pharmacist’s daughter was attracted to natural childbirth. Honestly, I’m a wimp. I like pain medication. I like my Tylenol with codeine for a headache. I like a sleeping pill once in a while too.

Yet when I was pregnant with my first child, I talked to a friend of mine, a woman who never had so much as an aspirin during labor, and what she said sounded good to me. Being pregnant isn’t being sick. So it made sense that, as a healthy twenty-seven-year old woman, I wouldn’t need to be medicated to bring my baby into the world. The point was, as she described it, to feel everything. Feel everything? Most of us expend a lot of energy trying not to feel. No, she said, in this the goal was complete surrender. I’m a Virgo, and we grip on to things pretty tight. In labor, supposedly, the best part comes when you give yourself over completely to these uncontrollable sensations. My friend Ana Paula Markel, who is a doula (personal labor assistant), describes labor as a struggle to find a balance between control and surrender. That’s not just labor, that’s most women’s lives. Surrendering to this with my child would bond us forever, no matter what troubles we faced up the road.

My friend referred me to a midwifery practice that worked in partnership with a hospital birth center. I loved all the attention they lavished on me. When I went for my prenatal visits, we talked about everything: nutrition, fears, exercise, my feelings about my body, my relationships with my mom and with my husband. Part prenatal care, part therapy. Midwives say that with an obstetrician you spend an hour in the waiting room and five minutes with the doctor. With a midwife you spend five minutes waiting and an hour with her. After nine months of this, I really trusted my midwife. The birth center took up part of a floor of St. Luke’s–Roosevelt Hospital in New York City. When Abby saw it later, she thought the big birthing tub and the blocky, impersonal furniture made it feel like a cheesy hot tub suite in a slightly run-down Las Vegas hotel. The sheets on my bed at home had a much higher thread count.

At the time, I thought it was beautiful. Right then, though, I thought everything was beautiful. Even my 210-pound ass was beautiful to me. Besides, it didn’t appear that having the baby there would in any way be a gamble. The labor and delivery department was on the next floor if anything went wrong. Since this was my first baby, I wasn’t sure how much pain this wimp could handle. They assured my husband and me that at the birth center all the choices would be ours. As my due date approached, I was probably the happiest and most serene I’d ever been, joyful about welcoming our little boy into the world, confident that my husband and I had made all the right choices. He also wanted this baby when I wanted it. I had three weeks off from work and I anticipated his arrival that first weekend. Fortunately he agreed. My water broke early on the morning of my due date. My contractions were far apart, not very powerful, and not escalating. I thought the baby was just taking his time, coming when he needed to come.

When we got to twenty-four hours without much happening, Sandy, my midwife, said it was time for us to come to the birth center. When we got there, Sandy told us we had only four hours to get my labor going or they would have to start me on drugs. Twenty-four hours after a woman’s membranes rupture, the hospital requires the staff to speed up labor because they fear she will get an infection. The hospital has a timetable (called protocols) that the doctors and midwives follow strictly. If they don’t, there may be legal consequences. My husband, Rob, and I walked the halls, but not much changed. After a few hours of that, we decided we needed to take more drastic action. He held my hand as we climbed up and down the stairs, feeling the pressure of time mounting as the minutes ticked by. I was getting more and more upset. I could see a C-section looming on the horizon. That was the last thing I wanted.

By the twenty-eight-hour mark my midwife said that we needed to get this labor going. I wanted to resist, but I didn’t want to be selfish. The most important thing was to have a healthy baby. The rules had to be written with that in mind. Still I was sobbing as Rob held my hand and we took the stairs from the birth center to the labor and delivery floor. They started me on Pitocin, a drug that stimulates contractions. Once the Pitocin was in, I couldn’t move about as freely because I was dragging the IV pole. They also put an internal fetal monitor in my baby’s scalp so they could see how he reacted to the contractions. Powered by Pitocin, the contractions were really slamming me. They call these contractions “camelback” because they are two-humped, one right after the other. They gave me Stadol, a drug that was supposed to take the edge off my feelings of despair, but it affected me horribly.

I panicked. I kept saying to Rob, “Is something wrong? I feel like something is going wrong.” The pain was unbearable. I needed an epidural, a steady drip of painkillers that block the transmission of pain up the spine, so I could get some rest between contractions. The pharmacist’s daughter welcomed that. The anesthesiologist got the dosage just right, thank God. He blocked the pain, but I could still feel my feet, which allowed me to squat when I pushed. Still I couldn’t escape my panic no matter how much reassurance I got. I didn’t want anyone from the hospital staff to touch me then. I didn’t trust anyone but Rob. Every decision made to get me on the hospital’s schedule took away a bit of what we wanted for this birth. In the end, though, I pushed for two and a half hours and out came Milo, beautiful and healthy.

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Most women don’t really want to dwell on their birth experiences. You get this amazing gift of the baby. You’re on a high and whatever happened in the hospital just seems to fade away. Even if it didn’t go as planned, it was a pretty amazing experience. I feel blessed that, considering it all, I had a vaginal birth for my first child. And although Rob and I are now divorced, the memory of how he was on that day is one of the things I can draw on when I need a little encouragement to get over one of our postmarital spats. When the mommy- bonding hormones stopped coursing through my veins, I started to think about the birth, not just the baby. How quickly everything had changed direction. At the hospital, I felt like a problem. I wasn’t progressing fast enough, they said, even though my baby was never in distress. I remembered how when my mom came to see us at the hospital, I introduced her to my midwife saying, “Mom, here’s the woman who delivered my baby!” Sandy corrected me, “Ricki, you’re the one who delivered that baby.” Why couldn’t I shake this feeling that my body had betrayed me? Hadn’t this crazy system betrayed me? Keeping my prenatal appointments, eating my green, leafy vegetables, the vitamins, the yoga, the visualizations — all of it built a sense that this would be a birth of my own creation.

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