Women who don't want kids...

[Joz]

I'd like to hear yours.

 

[Said1]

Said, I planned EVERYTHING! From the wedding through each pregnancy. To buying up houses and savings for 401K's. It still didn't work out. Don't think you could have done better. I know I'm better off than 10 years ago!

I agree 100%. If things didn't go that way for me, I would not be where I am today, and doing what I'm doing. Despite everything I said earlier, one of my main reasons for not wanting kids was HIM (duh, I know, I know). Funny how things work out sometimes, but I wouldn't change a thing.

 

[Moi]

Well, mine's not a war story, really. But yes, let's start a thread for Iron Woman...those of us who face childbirth!

 

[Joz]

Oh, mine was definately a horror story delivery (deliveries). But, I'd go through it all again, except this time I'd cuss out a doc and maybe a nurse or two!!! LOL!!

We're waiting......


Isn't it funny ( & I don't mean ha-ha) how the nurses who need to treat their patients with the utmost respect and tender care are witches?

 

[Semper Fi]

How do you know, Joz? It seems like their pointy black hats might get in the way of those sexy bonnet things they have to wear. And their black cape things might get in the way of the sexy little nurse suits they have to wear...

 

[Joz]

Well, mine's not a war story, really. But yes, let's start a thread for Iron Woman...those of us who face childbirth!

Waiting for yours, too.

I agree. We need a section here or a thread just for women. Beauty tips, fashion stuff, helpful hints, problems, solutions, girl talk.

 

[Joz]

..... the sexy little nurse suits they have to wear...

What hospital do you go to??!!

 

[Semper Fi]

What hospital do you go to??!!

Oh I havent been to a hospital in a long time, Im refering to what I see on TV. They cant put stuf on TV that isnt real, right?

 

[Said1]

You asked for it, LOL!!!
I went to the OB~GYN for a checkup at 38 1/2 weeks. I had pre-eclampsya. They sent me to the hospital and I was admitted. They said I wouldn't have the kids until the following night so at 10pm they gave me 2 sleeping pills. Also because of the pre-eclampsya, I was given magnesium sulfate (also causes you to sleep!). Between 10pm and 4am they had given me 2 sleeping pills, 2 shots that cause drowsiness (for pain), and the magnesium sulfate that also makes you sleep. Finally at 4am, I was hurting so bad they called in for the epidural. They took me to the OR (just in case of C-section) and I was so sleepy I couldn't keep my eyes open. They let me eat the night before since they were positive I wouldn't have the kids that morning, so the food was coming back up. With the epidural it made it extremely hard to throw up so that SUCKED!! Everytime I had a contraction they had to wake me up to push. Finally at 8:13, Payton was born vaginally. I remember waking up to my husband saying "It's a girl, we have a girl". We already knew one was a boy, but had no idea about the other, so that was exciting and very memorable. After Pate was born, that's when it got really bad. I slept, and slept hard. They were yelling at me to push, and I was trying so hard, but I was so tired!! These people had me so drugged up, what in the hell were they expecting. They kept yelling that if I didn't wake up and push that they'd have to slice me open and is that what I wanted, so, I told them YES!! I finally passed out. When I woke up it was late that night. I asked what happened and they told me that I fell asleep and they couldn't wake me. That they tried forceps to take my son out, then they tried the vaccum, which left a big bloody circle on his head (and later they told me that's what caused him to have jaundice). They tried an apisiotemy, then finally an hour and a half after Pate was born, Joshua was born via C-section. During all this waiting, I lost blood, alot of blood. I ended up having a blood transfusion because I lost over half the blood in my body. This had me a nervous wreck. A friend of ours had a blood transfusion and got Hepatitis C. I was freaking. I was planning on breast feeding my twins but was scared to death I had attracked something that I could possibly pass on to them, so scratch the breastfeeding. During the transfusion, I kept getting air bubbles in the line and the nurse had me freaked out that this could kill me. It was just a very emotional and scary expeirence. When leaving the hospital, I could only take Pate with me. My first night home all I could do was cry. I felt like I had abdanoned one of my kids. Okay, the doctor prescribed me Oxicotton, WHOA!! I know why they stop giving these things out. I was paralized from the neck down, which I can say, that was a good thing, LOL!!
So, that's my story. I was drugged to almost coma, yelled at and threatened because I couldn't wake up. Almost died of loss of blood because the doc didn't want to preform a C-section, and had air bubbles in my transfusion.
It may not sound as bad as it felt, but when you're going through labor, with all the emotions and confusion, it was the scariest day of my life! But, I have my babies, and they are happy and healthy!
Pate was 6pds. 3oz, Josh was 7pds 5oz. Big babies, LOL!!!

Sometimes I really wonder if they know what they are doing when it comes to administering drugs!! I had a similar experience with the nurse who turned the epidural off, then turned it back on, only to increase the flow. The doctor came in after this, and both of them stood there stunned, unable to figure out why the epidural wasn't working! I mentioned that more probably doesn't mean faster, and they literally told me to be quiet! Then they gave me shit because I wasn't pushing when I was having a contraction...duh, remeber the epidural! It finally kicked in full force when the doctor was stiching me up. I told her the epidural is really working while she was doing this, and I swear she gave the the needle an extra hard tug - which I felt! I told her to be careful my foot was really close to her head, and I'm not afraid to use it.

They used a vacuum on my poor baby too. The cord was wrapped around her shoulder, and they were worried about it being broken. They wanted to use forcepts at first, but my husband flipped out and said NO WAY. They told him to be quite and said the baby would DIE if it didn't come out in the next few minutes. Of course, this made me panic, and they said it's my fault because I'm not pushing hard enough, and I obviously had not taken pre-natal classes - not true, I did. By this point my husband was freeking right out, and started demanding another doctor. They threatened to have him thrown out unless he clamed down, which he didn't. It gets kinda blurry after that, but needless to say, they didn't use the forcepts, and they left a big red bruise on the top of my daughters head! I can't say for sure if I was fully dialated, because no one checked after I was 7cm! I didn't realize this until the next day, I think that may have been part of the problem grrr.

 

[Moi]

Those two stories are the reason that I did not have an epidural right away and kept holding out so long. In fact, after delivery my doctor wrote me a scrip for tylenol with codiene (sp?) but I never even got it (stupid nurses never brought it is more like it) but eventually I just gave up on drugs.

I rarely take any medication because I'm so paranoid.

Speaking of stupid nurses, the one I had in the delivery room was AWFUL. She was rude, harsh with her hands and damn lucky that by the time she actually touched me I was too pooped to sucker punch her. The thought occurred to me several times! And I am the least violent person, really. The nursing care never improved - they never told me what time the baby classes were. The hospital is one of those really special ones which teach bathing, diapering, umbilical cord care, etc. That's why I chose it. They never brought me the right food - which ordinarily isn't a big deal because I hate to eat - but then they yelled at me when I wouldn't eat it. When I left, my husband and I literally walked out of the hospital because they never prepped me for discharge...you know, the whole "here's your diaper bag full of samples, your wheel chair, etc." An orderly of some kind saw me trying to make my way down the hallway and brought me a wheelchair!

I wrote the hospital a letter describing my horrible stay. A nurse supervisor called me to apologize but by then who cares...

As far as delivery, mine wasn't a war story. I walked around for about 10 hours. The doctor told me at 6 p.m. that he was going to dinner and I had another few hours because I wasn't dilated properly (they'd broken my water hours earlier...still no progress...just tons of contractions every 40 secs.) then, 10 minutes later he sweeps in and says, push push push. Because my labor had started and stopped two weeks earlier (6 weeks premature) we'd not yet been to the full lamaze classes so I was so stupefied by the whole push push thing...legs over my head, nasty nurse grabbing my privates...radical episiotomy (OUCH)...then at 6:45 p.m. my perfect little boy born...stitches....holding baby boy.

Never looked back.

 

[Moi]

To Hannitzied and Said 1:

You deserve the nobel peace prize for not bashing your doctors/nurses.

That's a heck of a lot more meaningful than most of the men they give it to.

 

[Annie]

Ok, here are my contributions to scaring anyone contemplating children. I did do Lamaze and never had any meds during deliveries. I do think that probably the contractions weren't that bad, because the kids didn't 'drop' without assistance, which when rendered, caused the kid to pop out! I can't complain about the medical care, it was excellent, all 3 of my kids are healthy and now in college! That's the 'happy part'.

#1 This was the only pregnancy where 'morning sickness' was a problem. However, it didn't stop in morning or at the end of the first trimester. When my daughter was born-healthy, more on that later-I had gained a total of 9 pounds-from my normal 110. Twice I had to get iv's because of dehydration.

In the 3rd month, I started hemorraging. In the ER they were able to stop the bleeding. My ob/gyn said things weren't 'looking great'. I moved up to 'high risk' pregnancy and would have to go to city teaching hospital, (ended up being the case for all 3 pregancies). At this point I was put on 'bed rest' and had to leave my job. A week after the ER trip, the doc wanted another ultrasound. The tech could not find a heartbeat. Left there, go to the docs office, he checks and says he thinks the baby is still ok, repeat the test the next day. Now, at this time, probably has changed now, you had to drink like a gallon of water before the test. I was having mucho problems keeping anything down! The next day, good news, the tech found heartbeat and baby.

Other than basically having to lay down for the rest of the pregancy, toximia and preenclampsia, this one's trials pretty much stopped at this point. Except in the hospital, the kid wouldn't 'drop', even though everything was supposed to be ready. Some foreign accented doctor was explaining that he was about to land on my abdomen, while breaking the water. At the same time, another foreign accented nurse was yelling at me to sign a piece of paper, which I wanted to read, before signing. On a good day, I have trouble hearing English spoken well, this was not a good day, nor well spoken English. I threw the clipboard at the nurse, (turned out to be a consent for circumcision). At that moment the doc with arms folded leaps onto my abdomen and sticks me in a very private area. Daughter was born like 1 minute later. She didn't need a circumcision!

#2 Joy, the pregnancy was normal! Problems with delivery though. Same delivery problems and solutions as #1, though I signed the form that time! :funnyface But, he aspirated merconium, while being born. Suddenly, all hell broke loose. "Neo-natal cardiologists, neurologists, pediatrics". His first apgar was a 1. Then 9. He was ok, except the cardiologist found a hole in his heart. He's ok now though!

#3 Pregancy wasn't bad, though with 2 preschoolers, tiring. In the 7th month though, went into labor. Again, the ER was able to stop, but now they wanted me on bed rest again, not going to happen! Had to take 2 preschoolers on a 45 min ride 2 times a week for non-stress test. Two weeks before due date, doc said, start walking-we want him to come, my blood pressure was beginning to rise and they figured the baby's lungs would be fine. Every night my friend and I would walk 2 miles or so! It was late July and hot and I was a whale! I kept picking up Big Gulp for the walks. Needless to say, finding bathrooms was important! Due date came and went.

By this time going for non-stress test every other day. We had gone from premature labor to the realization that this one wasn't budging. Tuesday morning went for the test, the nurse is like, well seems the contractions are starting to do something, but not fast enough. Walk, but if that doesn't do it, Thursday he'll do a C-sec. I felt sick. I told her that I thought I was in labor and should stay, as I was far from home. Oh no, you don't have to worry, you'll have plenty of time. Go home. Really punkish. Snapping all over the place at my mom. Decide I need a shower, now the contractions are coming and I guess she must have heard. She's telling me to go! I'm like, after I shampoo my hair!

Somehow she found the now ex, no easy matter, I'm sure. We head onto the expressway and traffic is stopped. It's like 5:30. We are about even with Cook Country/U of I Hospitals and I'm like, maybe we should just go there-*&(&!!!! But the genius, well, no! we have to go to Michael Reese. Inching towards Lake Shore Drive, we find that a bus full of kids, heading for Bruce Springsteen Concert at the Stadium had crashed, killing many. Got to Michael Reese about 7, they cut off my pants, did the hop onto the abdomen, and he was born.

Not surprisingly, the now ex had a no choice vasectomy 2 weeks later. :funnyface

 

[Joz]

"Wow"!, is about all I can say to all of you.

Don't you just love it when people say, "What's the big deal? Women have been having babies for centuries"!

 

[Annie]

"Wow"!, is about all I can say to all of you.

Don't you just love it when people say, "What's the big deal? Women have been having babies for centuries"!

LOL I just always fear that someone like your daughter in law, will hear these stories. I can't believe the horror some women will tell you when you're pregnant! May be true, but STFU! My advice, take out the picks of the happy kids!

 

[Joz]

LOL I just always fear that someone like your daughter in law, will hear these stories.....

You have a good heart, Kathianne. Your kids have been blessed.
Yeah, these are the stories we save til AFTER the baby is born.

 

[Annie]

You have a good heart, Kathianne. Your kids have been blessed.
Yeah, these are the stories we save til AFTER the baby is born.

I've got something for your son, AFTER the baby is born, if I can find it:

http://samantha.bertier.net/scruffy/fatherFacesLife.html

I'm going to chance this, I read it in the hospital 23 years ago, probably from today. My daughter turned 23 Wednesday:

Father Faces Life - A long overdue attack on natural childbirth

By Dave Barry



Let's take just a quick look at the history of baby-having. For thousands of years, only women had babies. Primitive women would go off into primitive huts and groan and wail and sweat while other women hovered around. The primitive men stayed outside doing manly things, such as lifting heavy objects and spitting. When the baby was born, the women would clean it up as best as they could and show it to the men, who would spit appreciatively and head off to the forest to throw sharp sticks at small animals. If you suggested to primitive men that they should actually watch women have babies, they would have laughed at you and probably tortured you for two three or four days. They were REAL men.

At the beginning of the 20th century, women started having babies in hospital rooms. Often males were present, but they were professional doctors who were paid large sums of money and wore masks. Normal civilian males continued to stay out of the baby-having area; they remained in waiting rooms reading old copies of Field and Stream, an activity that is less manly than lifting heavy objects but still reasonably manly. What I'm getting at is that, for most of history, baby-having was mainly in the hands (so to speak) of women. Many fine people were born under this system. Charles Lindbergh, for example.

Things changed, though, in the 1970's. The birth rate dropped sharply. Women started going to college and driving bulldozers and carrying briefcases and freely using words as "Debenture". They just didn't have time to have babies. For a while there, the only people having babies were unwed teenage girls, who are very fertile and can get pregnant merely by standing downwind from teenage boys. Then, some professional couples began to realize that their lives were missing something - a sense of stability, of companionship, of responsibility for another life. So they began to get Labrador Retrievers. A little later, they started having babies again, mainly because of the tax advantages.

These days you can't open your car door without hitting a pregnant woman. But there's a catch; women now expect men to watch them have babies. This is called "natural childbirth", which is one of these terms that sound terrific but that nobody really understands. Another of these terms is "Ph balanced". At first, natural childbirth was popular with hippie-type, granola oriented couples who lived in geodesic domes and named their babies things like "Peace Love Understanding Harrington-Schwartz. The males, their brains badly corroded by drugs and organic food, wrote smarmy articles about what a Meaningful Experience it is to see a "New Life Come Into the World". None of these articles mentioned the various other fluids and solids that come into the world with the New Life, so people got the impression that watching somebody have a baby was just a pack of meaningful fun. At cocktail parties, you'd run into natural-childbirth converts who would tell you how much they bought their houses for in 1973 and how much the houses are worth today. Before long, natural childbirth was everywhere, like salad bars, and now perfectly innocent civilian males all over the country are required by federal law to watch females have babies.

I recently had to watch my wife have a baby in our local suburban hospital. First, we had to go to 10 evening childbirth classes at the hospital. Before the classes, the hospital told us, mysteriously, to bring two pillows. This was the first humiliation because no two of our pillowcases match and many have beer or cranberry juice stains. It may be possible to walk down the streets of Kuala Lumpur with stained, unmatched pillowcases and still feel dignified, but this is not possible in suburbia. Anyway, we showed up for the first class, along with about 15 other couples consisting of women who were going to have babies and men who were going to have to watch them. They all had matching pillowcases. In fact, some couples had obviously purchased tasteful pillowcases especially for childbirth classes; these were the North Shore couples, wearing golf and tennis apparel, who were planning to have wealthy babies. They sat together through all the classes and eventually agreed to get together for brunch. The classes consisted of sitting in a brightly lighted room and openly discussing, among other things, the uterus. How I can remember a time, in high school, when I would have killed for reliable information on the uterus. But having discussed it at length, having seen actual full-color diagrams, I must say that although I respect it a great deal as an organ, it has lost much of its charm. Our childbirth class instructor was very big on the uterus because that's where babies generally spend their time before birth. She also spent some time on the ovum, which is near the ovaries.

What happens is the ovum hangs around reading novels and eating chocolates until along comes this big crowd of spermatozoa, which are tiny, very stupid, one celled organisms. They're looking for the ovum, but most of them wouldn't know it if they fell over it. They swim around for days, trying to mate with the pancreas and whatever other organs they bump into. But eventually one stumbles into the ovum, and the happy couple parades down the fallopian tubes to the uterus.

In the uterus, the "Miracle of Life" begins, unless you believe the Miracle of Life doesn't begin there, and if you think I'm going to get into that, you're crazy. Anyway, the ovum starts growing rapidly and dividing into lots of specialized little parts, not unlike the federal government. Within six weeks, it has developed all the organs it needs to drool; by 10 weeks, it has the ability to cry in restaurants. In childbirth class they showed us actual pictures of a fetus developing inside a uterus. They didn't tell us how these pictures were taken, but I suspect it involved a great deal of drinking. We saw lots of pictures. One evening, we saw a movie of a woman we didn't even know having a baby. I am serious. Some woman actually let some movie-makers film the whole thing. In color. She was from California. And another time, the instructor announced, in the tone of voice you might use to tell people that they had just won a free trip to the Bahamas, that we were going to see color slides of a Caesarian section. The first slides showed a pregnant woman cheerfully entering a hospital. The last slides showed her cheerfully holding a baby. The middle slides showed how they got the baby out of the cheerful woman, but I can't give you a lot of detail here because I had to go out for 15 to 20 drinks of water. I do remember that at one point our instructor cheerfully observed that there was "surprisingly little blood, really". She evidently felt this was a real selling point.

When we weren't looking at pictures or discussing the uterus, we practiced breathing. This is where the pillows came in. What happens is that when the baby gets ready to leave the uterus, the woman goes through a series of what the medical community laughingly refers to as "contractions"; if it referred to them as "horrible pains that make you wonder why the hell you ever decided to get pregnant", people might stop having babies and the medical community would have to go into the major-appliance business In the old days, under President Eisenhower, doctors avoided the contraction problem by giving lots of drugs to women who were having babies. They'd knock them out during the delivery, and the women would wake up when their kids were entering the 4th grade. But the idea with natural childbirth is to try to avoid giving the woman a lot of drugs so she can share the first intimate moments after birth with the baby and father and the obstetrician and the pediatrician and the standby anesthesiologist and several nurses and the person who cleans the delivery room.

The key to avoiding drugs, according to natural childbirth people, is for the woman to breathe deeply. Really. The theory is that if she breathes deeply, she'll get all relaxed and won't notice that she's in a hospital delivery room wearing a truly perverted garment and having a baby. I'm not sure who came up with this theory. Whoever it was evidently believed that women have very small brains. So, in childbirth classes, we spent a lot of time sprawled on these little mats with our pillows while the women pretended to have contractions and the men squatted around with stopwatches and pretended to time them. The North Shore couples didn't care for this part. They were not into squatting. After a couple of classes, they started to bring little backgammon sets and playing backgammon when they were supposed to be practicing breathing. I imagine they had a rough time in actual childbirth, unless they got the servants to have contractions for them.

Anyway, my wife and I traipsed along for months, breathing and timing, respectively. We had no problems whatsoever. We were a terrific team. We had a swell time. Really. The actually delivery was slightly more difficult. I don't want to name names, but I held up my end. I had my stopwatch in good working order, and I told my wife to breathe. "Don't forget to breathe", I'd say, or "You should breathe, you know". She, on the other hand, was unusually cranky. For example, she didn't want me to use my stopwatch. Can you imagine? All that practice, all that squatting on the natural childbirth floor and she suddenly gets into this big snit about stopwatches. Also, she almost lost her sense of humor. At one point, I made an especially amusing remark and she tried to hit me. She usually has an excellent sense of humor.

Nonetheless, the baby came out all right, or at least all right for newborn babies, which is actually pretty awful unless you're a big fan of slime. I thought I had held up well for the whole thing when the doctor, who up to then had behaved like a perfectly rational person, said, "Would you like to see the placenta?". Now, let's face it. That's like asking, "Would you like me to pour hot tar into your nostrils?". Nobody would like to see a placenta. If anything, it would be a form of punishment:

Jury: We find the defendant guilty of stealing from the old and crippled.

Judge: I sentence the defendant to look at three placentas.

But without waiting for an answer, the doctor held up the placenta, not unlike the way you might hold up a bowling trophy. I bet he wouldn't have tried that with people who have matching pillowcases. The placenta aside, everything worked out fine. We ended up with an extremely healthy, organic, natural baby, who immediately demanded to be put back into the uterus.

All in all, I'd say it's not a bad way to reproduce, although I understand that some members of the flatworm family simply divide in two.

 

[Joz]

:rotflmao: :rotflmao: :rotflmao:

That's toooo funny. I'll pass it along!

 

[Annie]

:rotflmao: :rotflmao: :rotflmao:

That's toooo funny. I'll pass it along!

LOL, I thought you might! :happy2:

 

[Said1]

Quote: "These days you can't open your car door without hitting a pregnant woman."

Sounds like the street I live on! 3 new babies, and two on the way. It was like that when I moved here, only I was pregnant, and so was everyone else - or so it seemed. There must be something in the water around here hahaha.

 

[Moi]

Nonetheless, the baby came out all right, or at least all right for newborn babies, which is actually pretty awful unless you're a big fan of slime. I thought I had held up well for the whole thing when the doctor, who up to then had behaved like a perfectly rational person, said, "Would you like to see the placenta?". Now, let's face it. That's like asking, "Would you like me to pour hot tar into your nostrils?". Nobody would like to see a placenta. If anything, it would be a form of punishment:

Jury: We find the defendant guilty of stealing from the old and crippled.

Judge: I sentence the defendant to look at three placentas.

That was the greatest! I must say, all my friends are men and they had me TERRIFIED of child birth. Of course my sisters in law (ahem ahem) didn't help matters either! Nor, I might add, did the screaming banshee in the next room...tell that girl to bite on a towel for god's sake! But for me, the reality was far from the doomsdaying they told me about.

From this quote, you'd think he was in my delivery room! When they broke my water, it went all over....like gallons! I thought Jim would DIE right there.

Then, the placenta. He left shortly thereafter and didn't come back (just kidding, he came, eventually).

In all fairness to Jim I should also point out that I too was a bit off that day. We went to the hospital somewhere around 7 a.m. Jim smokes. He didn't smoke all day but at about 3 p.m. he said he was going to go outside with my stepfather and have a cig. Well, I started bawling and "you proooooomissssed" etc etc. Man, in the cold light of day I am horrified at that!