I’m Vicki. I am a planner. It’s my work and my life, and without planning I would never get done all the things that I get done. I planned to write this blog post between feeding two ice cubes of pureed pumpkin to my little man and his nap time, knowing now (after much practice and observation) that he will play happily for the approximately thirty minutes I need for a first draft.
I plan a lot, but I did not make a birth plan. It came as a shock to me too. When the time came – I had finished work and had planned a five week stretch of ‘nothing planned’ until my due date – I sat down to think about this. Of course, I had planned this planning time in my first week of maternity leave, in addition to packing my hospital bag and reading all the books people had given me.
There were so many options and so many possibilities to plan for. To do it right would need some serious traffic light risk management strategies. I would need to incorporate the risks and likelihood of all potential scenarios. I needed a template. I needed more research.
The most confronting story I read was about a mum who wanted a fully natural birth. No drugs, out the normal way and, if her family hadn’t advised against it, she would have tried to have her baby at home. Luckily she went to the hospital because an emergency caesarean was called. She was so bitterly disappointed and it was all she could think about. It seemed to me she had missed the point – she had a beautiful healthy baby and she was still alive.
I’m often disappointed when my plans don’t work out perfectly, this mum’s story made me decide that if I didn’t plan I couldn’t be disappointed.
“You must have had some plan?”
Well, alright, I did. My plan involved telling my husband that when I called him to say “I’m in labour”, he had to rush home, put the bag in the car and drive me to the hospital as quickly as possible without crashing. The simplest plan of all.
So I idled along ticking the pre baby things off the to do list. I said I didn’t have a plan, a to-do list is totally different. The weeks passed quickly but with no news.
No news is good news, except when you are 41 one weeks and waiting. Finally they made the decision to convince my baby to come out with drugs. This means painfully and artificially inducing labour.
I was told to arrive at the hospital by 9am on Thursday. I put my own bag in the car and my husband drove me five minutes down the road in an orderly but nervous manner. I caught the lift to the admissions area and I introduced myself. My simple plan was already out the window. Birth Plan Fail.
It didn’t take long to discover that the contents of my bag were useless for the hours of waiting. Pro tip: take a book or confirm in advance that the hospital newsagency has more than trashy gossip mags. Twenty-four hours or more later the obstetrician’s plan had to be changed to yanking it out, then changed again to pulling it out through the sunroof.
“Was it easy?” is a question too many people asked.
“Easy? It was complicated.” This was my standard response when I didn’t want to talk about it. I wanted to throw a bowling ball at them and ask them to put it into their tummy while pinned to a steel table and shaking like a drug addict, but I didn’t.
I had a lot of drugs. I only found this out a few days later when a nurse read my chart back to me and said “Oh, and then you had some more wonder drug A, and then a dose of wonder drug B, and then some more of A,” with an expression of wonderment that I was talking already.
“…and you lost a lot of blood,” came next from the nurse.
“Blood, I lost a lot of blood? How much is a lot of blood?”
She told me and it didn’t take much time on Google to realise that was a lot of blood.
Coming close to dying, that was not in my plan. Being everlastingly thankful that I live in a modern country with an excellent medical system, unplanned but priceless.
Some guy somewhere once said: “If you fail to plan then you plan to fail.” He obviously never gave birth, because just making it through, whether you plan or not, whether the plan works or not, is no failure at all.
So, if a failed birth plan means a bundle of joy at the end of it, I’ll take a planning failure any day.
Vicki
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