Sharing Labor Pains

This week, I've taken in two interesting stories about men trying to understand labor pain.  These men will clearly never experience labor for themselves, but they're curious, and they put in quite the convoluted effort to try to get a handle on it.

The first story on this topic was reported on radiolab in the short podcast, Ouch!  At time 11:17-18:00, they relate a story about a bunch of doctors trying to quantify a pain scale for labor.  The doctors somehow convince a bunch of pregnant volunteers to allow themselves to be burned with a heat gun between labor contractions.  After each contraction, the doctors shoot a heat gun (the extremely hot hairdryer of science) on the back of the women's hands and ask them to compare that pain to the pain they just experienced.  One women's contractions were so challenging that she left with the backs of her hands and arms covered in second degree burns.  From their data, the doctors made the dubious assertion that they could now tell, on a numeric scale that was based on the timing between contractions, exactly how much pain a woman was feeling during labor.

Yeah. Right.

The experiment has dozens and dozens of holes in it.  Burn pain is really not even close to the same as contraction pain.  Importantly, the pain scale could never be reproduced in subsequent experiments.  More importantly, somehow more doctors convinced several rounds worth of experiment subjects to allow themselves to be burned during their labor.  Nice one, doctors!

In any case, I had just come off of listening to that strange story when I stumbled upon this video:

In it, a male doctor makes himself the subject of a better experiment in which his abs are forced to contract painfully.  As the experiment progresses, the contractions come on longer, stronger, and closer together. 

This experiment is silly and funny.  It is also a decent simulation of labor pain and labor effort because it is muscular contraction.  At one point, maybe two hours into the ordeal, he laments how exhausted he is and how much he just wants to take a nap.  THAT sounds familiar! 

Watch the video if you want a bit of light entertainment and food for thought.  If you're expecting you're first child, though, beware.  They really play up the pain and the length of the labor in a way that might be unnecessarily scary.

One very important component of labor that they did not simulate in this jovial test subject was the incredible other-worldy experience of being completely awash with hormones.  The transcendence of the hormones made my labor a very different type of experience than straight up pain. 

By far the best explanation of labor that I have heard this week comes from a string of women in the Radiolab episode.  If you start listening at about 18:00 minutes, you'll hear the accounts of transition.

"I remember making these noises that were just unearthly." 

"I just... oh.  Wow."

"It felt like there was a freight train bearing down on my vagina from inside my body, and that I could almost hear it building.  Duh dunk duh dunk duh dunk."

"I felt like I was being dragged out to sea." 

"Waves.  Waves of pain." 

"I turned very much inward in a way that made time feel like it stopped.  I was drowning, drowning in this lake of pain, and there was a horizon, and when the contractions were intense, I would swim to the horizon." 

Both of the (male) reporters listening to these accounts seem dissatisfied with them, as though they make no sense and are not reliable accounts.

I feel differently.  I feel that these accounts are exactly right. 

I feel the waves and I feel the train and I feel the separation from my conscious self.  The episode was talking about pain, and so was the video, but for me, it's not just pain, it's power.  Incredible power.  The purpose of labor, biologically speaking, is to get the baby out.  The purpose of my labor, spiritually speaking, was to give myself over to this mysterious and overwhelming power.

If you can do that, it won't stop hurting, but it might just become a transformative experience.

Can't simulate that with electrodes!

***

I feel it necessary to note that I don't think natural labor is the only true labor.  It's all true labor.  If a woman can't have that transformative emotional experience -- or if she just doesn't want to do it -- then that's fine too.  There are many, many good reasons that not every mother gets to this strange other world: back labor, exhaustion, illness, fear, emergency, c-section, or the very pragmatic choice for pain relief.  I have the utmost respect for all mothers, whatever their birth journey. 

I feel lucky to have experienced my own recent labor the way I did.  This probably seems like a very strange topic for me to be writing on right now, but I think about my most recent birth a lot.  Many people have asked me, "How could you do it? How did you face your labor knowing that your baby had died?"  The simple answer is that delivering my baby gave me a purpose when everything else in my world had come crashing down around me.  I couldn't do anything to make Laural right, but I could deliver her.  Experiencing the birth so fully and dramatically gave me something positive to hold onto.  I desperately needed that birth.

Never tell me, "The only things that matter are a healthy mom and a healthy baby."  It is well-intended nonsense.  Of course I wish I had a healthy Laurel, but she wasn't healthy, and my birth still mattered.  At around the same time, a friend of mine had a beautiful healthy baby with a terrifying and dangerous birth experience.  We are all relieved that she and the baby survived -- and her birth mattered.  All births matter.

But they sure are hard to explain to someone who has never had one!