Good Advice

Stay away from the hospital for as long as you can.

My friend Kim told me this early in my pregnancy. I was in a group of my hippie mom friends, some of whom had given birth in their homes. I had taken a childbirth class, so I knew more or less what to expect, but of course it's different for each person. I've known women who went to a hospital at the first contraction and were told to turn around and go home until the contractions got closer together. I've known women who were admitted to the hospital and strapped to the bed with a drip in their arm for hours before anything really got going. I wanted to avoid that last, if I could. I was all gung ho to have a natural childbirth. I ended up with 16 hours of unmedicated labor and a C-Section anyway. It wasn't horrible though. I didn't feel violated like some of those women in the book did by their C-Sections. The first four or five hours were at home, in my comfy rocking chair in my own favorite raunchy giant t-shirt. That made me a lot less panicky than being at the hospital, on the world's most uncomfortable beds in one of those paper gowns that snap together. We went to the hospital right about when we should have, if we'd waited much longer, we'd might have had to call an ambulance.