no pain no gain

 no pain no gain, ie: why i am planning on a natural birth

the plan right now is to have an unmedicated birth with a midwife at GW hospital. i have a slew of reasons for wanting to do this, but one of them is because of the philosophy approaching birth before it even begins, which basically involves "training" for the birth as if it were some kind of athletic performance. 

for one, my triathlon i planned to do pre-pregnancy got cancelled due to covid so now i need to replace the training i did for the triathlon with giving birth. j/k...

but really, i like that this approach emphasizes staying healthy and in good shape during the pregnancy, especially since i am going to need to do that anyways to manage my back issue. so now i have double motivation to at least gently exercise even when i have 0 desire to (which is a lot these days), so think it will help a lot with my mindset.

my biggest concern moving into my second trimester is my back and the cracked lower lumbar that i have (spondylolisthesis) and how that will feel as the pregnancy progresses and things start shifting around, as well as the additional weight my lower back will need to support. according to an orthopedic surgeon 7 years ago, "pregnancy will be painful."  i've had that in the back of my head since then. i am preemptively seeing a physical therapist to make sure i'm on track to manage it but have no idea what to expect. recently, it hasn't caused me any issues at all. that doctor also said that carrying a heavy pack for an extended hiking trip would be painful and it wasn't really that bad. however, when i decided to be an 'old dog' and play D2 lacrosse at UDC, my back was pretty well destroyed by the end of the season, so i know it's there. 

obviously the major downside to this kind of birth is the pain, so hopefully i am swapping 6 months worth of pain for hours worth of pain. i also think my wrist dislocation last year was good training for techniques in pain management. after the doctor forced my wrist back in the joint, i could only move my wrist a few degrees in either direction, and couldn't really move it up and down, so i started physical therapy. my PT would twist and move my wrist in ways that were so painful for such long durations i can't even describe it. while she was doing it sometimes it was so painful i couldn't talk so i would try to focus my attention on my breathing and just block everything else out. on a few occasions i actually almost passed out from the pain and had to lie down. but i knew that if i didn't bring that kind of mental fortitude to those sessions i was going to be in a situation where i would only regain a fraction of my pre-injury mobility in my wrist, which was presented to me as a real possibility by my doctor, especially since my wrist was out of the joint for a month before resetting it. he did not sugar coat that at all. it would have meant that even easy things like clothing myself, putting up my hair, typing on a keyboard, and using utensils in my left hand were going to be problematic. i couldn't even get my wrist in position to ride my bike, or swim. all in all, it was a scary thought for me and i basically told my PT i wasn't going to accept anything less than 95% mobility, which i'm not sure even she thought i was going to be able to achieve. so i majorly suffered through about 9 months of PT, met my goal, and the wrist can do everything i need it to do now, albeit with a bit of cracking sometimes. basically right now i am trying to make myself feel better about the wrist episode and find a silver lining in that i gained some techniques and experience for how to manage excruciating pain, lol. hopefully it provides useful. 

the other not great thing is that it sounds like it is highly recommended that i hire a doula for the birth to help me through labor and to help zach help me. i have nothing against doulas, their role makes a lot of sense to me, it's just another person in the room when i'm probably going to want some space and it's expensive. i've also read that you need to shop around a lot for doulas to find the right one. i already know that if i go that route i'm going to want someone who is like a 50 year old drill sergeant who's all business and has done this 1000 times, or a super zen hippie. i don't really think i'll want like a cheerleading squad in there. it seems hard to find the right person for you on such a crazy day after talking to someone just a few times though. i imagine back when the world was smaller the person who served in this kind of role was someone you actually knew. 

despite this, i still think the pros i've read of doing a natural birth for prenatal, during labor, and post-natal outweigh the cons, so i'm sticking with the plan for now.