Reality Television

I never used to watch reality television, but pregnancy changed that. My concentration, my ability to metabolise content at any meaningful level, vanished overnight. I attempted reading a book I had been asked to blurb; on finishing, found I could not remember even a single thing about it. I couldn’t watch films. I couldn’t watch vaguely challenging TV. My mum told me to start watching Married At First Sight, because they recap absolutely everything that has happened every thirty seconds. That I could manage.

I remember messaging a friend the night before I went into labour, saying I hoped my unborn baby hung on for at least one more day, because I wanted to watch a particularly juicy episode of MAFS. My waters broke approximately fifteen minutes after that episode ended, so some message must have been received. 

A tiny pop. The quietest start to the most deafening experience of my life. 

Once your waters break you have to go into hospital so they can check you out. A barrier has been breached, and you are suddenly an infection risk.

In the hospital a midwife waxed lyrical her lunatic views on women and birth while she wired me up to a foetal heart monitor. “Pain is a social construct,” she said. “A fear construct.” I blinked at the ceiling. “If you tell yourself you’re in pain then you’ll be in pain. Do you see what I am saying?”

I was sent home with a clutch of disposable thermometers and an instruction to stay there as long as I possibly could. I lay in bed, my partner Pete asleep beside me, while waves of increasingly unbearable pain moved through me. 

Hazel, the rabbit, at that point would spend the nights perched at the foot of the bed, waking us periodically to stroke his head and, to his credit, only occasionally urinating when we did not immediately comply. He was my soft companion through the night; fluffing up the duvet around me, laying curled at my feet. I will show you a video of this if you ask me to, or even if you do not.

By the morning I was in enough pain that I wanted to go back in. Halfway there I made Pete turn the car around as I had not said goodbye to Hazel. I think now, that goodbye was necessary, because I was not the same person to him when I got back; returning with a wailing pink creature I was suddenly devoted to. It diminished my love for him; or shadowed it, rather. I feel very cruel saying this, because he is now very ill, and we are hand feeding him every meal, bathing him every night. But it is true.

Early on in my pregnancy, I’d wanted a caesarean section, and had been referred to a consultant midwife, essentially, to talk me out of it. And they did, telling me I could request an early epidural. This was what I was expecting, but at hospital I was told there were no birthing rooms free, and no anaesthetists available, and so I was put in a waiting bay, blue curtains pulled around me, the moans and shrieks of other women at other stages of labour all over. 

Like most women, I have dwelled on the realities of female pain not being taken seriously. Pain is a social construct. A fear construct. I have endometriosis, and so have experienced a reasonable amount of pain. I have gotten taxis home when I could not walk; have laid down on the floor of an office bathroom, curled around the base of the toilet, only to be told to hang on, that it would improve after I gave birth. Still, nothing prepared me for the pain of childbirth, and how hard I had to fight for recognition and treatment of it. In Leslie Jamison’s Grand Unifying Theory of Female Pain, she writes: 

A 2001 study called “The Girl Who Cried Pain” tries to make sense of the fact that men are more likely than women to be given medication when they report pain to their doctors. Women are more likely to be given sedatives. The study makes visible a disturbing set of assumptions: It’s not just that women are prone to hurting—​a pain that never goes away—​but also that they’re prone to making it up. The report finds that despite evidence that “women are biologically more sensitive to pain than men … [their] pain reports are taken less seriously.” Less seriously meaning, more specifically, “they are more likely to have their pain reports discounted as ‘emotional’ or ‘psychogenic’ and, therefore, ‘not real.’ ” 

I suppose I was forgotten about, in my blue little bay, as I spent around four to five hours there without so much as paracetamol. A caveat about how criminally underfunded the NHS is, is necessary here, and the vast majority of the midwives and nurse who cared for me throughout my pregnancy were consummate professionals, but at that point we could not get someone to bring me a glass of water. 

When I reached the point where my contractions were less than a minute apart, I dragged myself from my bed, trouserless and bleeding, through a hospital corridor, to present myself at the midwives station. “You’ve gone demented,” the attending midwife told me. Reader: I had. 

I was in transitional labour: peak pain, still no pain relief, and as one contraction finished another had already begun. I was taken to my birthing suite, given a shot of morphine. In my NCT class I was told morphine doesn’t really stop the pain, but it makes it feel like it is very far away. It felt a little like this, and also like I was aware of being in the most ungodly agony of my life, but also, that I didn’t care.

I was given an epidural shortly after the morphine. It took three attempts because I kept convulsing from pain; couldn’t stay still long enough. I thought about the David Cronenberg film Existenz, where video game ports are surgically inserted into players' spines. Post-human.

It took awhile for the numbness to travel through my lower body. It felt like ice cold water, moving through my veins. I remembered a quote I couldn’t (and still cannot) locate, about relief being the purest form of happiness. My midwife put on a light projector. It made the room watery and blue, like an aquarium. 

I remember very little beyond this. I think I slept a bit. I vomited constantly; filled pulpy cardboard commodes, one after another. I had a few albums downloaded that I had hoped to relax me: Grouper and Phillip Glass, but the speaker kept cutting out, then reconnecting to one of the other nearby birthing suite’s playlist, emitting bursts of very upbeat salsa.  

It seemed there were lots of people coming in and out of the room. My midwife changed shifts, and another midwife and student midwife took over. A paediatrician. The anaesthetist.  They were all brilliant. At some point I was told it was time. 

I felt very nervous, an expectation that now I was to perform. I could not conceptualise the baby I was about to have: his heartbeat bleeping via the monitor beside me. 

I don’t know if it was the morphine or (as a midwife later theorised, because I might have been holding my breath) but I kept passing out every time I pushed: pushing myself into literal unconsciousness. I would push, cinematic screaming etc, then pass out, waking up a few seconds later. I kept falling into a hallucination that I was a woodland creature, being hunted by woodsmen. I can picture it now: running on all fours, low in the grass. I would come to, my hands positioned like paws, paddling out in front of me. Later, when I told Pete about this hallucination, about my pawing hands, he said “Yes I wondered why you kept doing that”. 

I remember coming-to after one unconscious-making push and not knowing or understanding where I was: in this dark space, surrounded by strangers shouting at me to push. I turned to see Pete, holding my hand, telling me not to be scared. The naming of an emotion. I am! I am scared! 

I pushed for about forty minutes in total, I think. I was cut. They used a ventouse, and when that didn’t work, forceps. Horrible! Glad I didn’t see them until after! But then my baby was born, my little boy, my perfect little baby boy.

My sister is a teacher, and she told me a story a while ago, about one of her classes. This story has warped in my head over time, and the version that now exists in my mind is this: a phone kept ringing during one of her classes. It was a girl towards the back, and the girl kept rejecting the call, apologising, but then the phone would ring again. At the end of the class, when everyone stood up to leave, the girl saw that her best friend had been hiding beneath her desk for the entire duration of the class. It was her - her best friend - who had been calling her phone, from her little hiding place below. 

“It was you!” I imagined her saying, finding her best friend, who had been curled up there all along. Sending her little signs. “It was you! I didn’t know it had been you!”