Even though it pains me to walk, yesterday I somehow managed to skip into my doctor’s office. It wasn’t the appointment that excited me, rather I was three days away from my scheduled c-section and elated. The light at the end of the tunnel was brightly illuminated and my son would soon be in my arms.
As soon as I saw my doctor’s face I knew that excitement would be short lived, a feeling confirmed when she greeted me by saying, “we have a slight change in schedule.”
It turned out she tragically had a death in the family and would be be out of state the day of my c-section. We discussed having one of her colleagues perform the surgery, but due to ongoing pregnancy complications my husband and I decided to wait for her return and rescheduled.
“There’s one option,” she said. “I don’t leave town for another day and while there is no open OR that I can schedule tomorrow, if you go into labor we can deliver. So consider taking steps to induce labor naturally.”
Game on.
We knew we had a finite window of time to bring on contractions. Needless to say we were in a big hurry, and subsequently paid the price for that later.
We started with a mad dash through the grocery store. I took a cart, my husband grabbed a basket and we agreed to meet somewhere in the middle, like a modern-day version of Lucy and Ricky Ricardo literally running through the store. I grabbed anything spicy that crossed my line of sight and nearly cried with hormonal frustration when I couldn’t find a specific tea. Just in the nick of time my husband ran toward me in the checkout line holding a box of said tea above his head chanting, “I found it, I found it!”
Attempt #1: Drink raspberry leaf tea. My husband drank some as well. In addition to inducing labor it is said to cause diarrhea. We both had the same result, you can guess which one.
Attempt #2: Evening primrose oil. Immediately after swallowing the capsule I panicked. “Will this work quickly enough? Or will it take a few days and induce labor over the weekend when my doctor is gone?” In what was not one of my finer moments I tried to make myself throw up, then worried I would “lose” the red raspberry leaf tea and decided to move on to the next item.
Attempt #3: Sex. I’ve been on bed rest for nearly eight weeks, which means I’ve also been on vaginal rest. We hadn’t done this in a while and were like two clumsy, clueless virgins bumbling around in bed, plus we had no idea how to navigate my belly that now housed a full-term baby. I started laughing and my husband was wincing in what looked like pain. We decided to stop embarrassing ourselves and just give up.
Attempt #4: Take a long walk. Our town has a weekly farmer’s market, so off we went. I walked and walked, refusing to sit and rest. By the time we were about a block away from home I could no longer take a normal stride and had to sit on the sidewalk. Eventually my husband got me up and I used him as a sort of human crutch, and the poor guy was wincing in pain…again.
Attempt #5: Eat spicy food: This was easy. At the farmer’s market I had corn on the cob doused in chili pepper, a fruit-jalepeno juice concoction that left my eyes dripping with tears and frozen yogurt (just because it’s delicious, there were no medicinal reasons), and back at home we combined all the spicy garbage we picked up in our supermarket rush into the hottest nachos I’ve ever tasted. All that food resulted in the most rancid gas I’ve ever experienced. You know that awful, pregnancy gas we all get? Like that, except worse.
In the end it was all for naught. Not only didn’t I go into labor — and am subsequently back on bed rest waiting for my doctor’s return — my poor husband ended up with a pinched nerve in his neck from our efforts, hence all that wincing. He had to see his doctor and is now loaded up on muscle relaxers and missing work.
Now I’m hoping my son can wait for six more days, and wondering if there is an opposite to everything I did yesterday. At the very least I will be staying away from jalepeno juice!
Photo credit: Becky Vieira
Did you do anything to induce labor? What did you try…and was it successful?
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