A ‘Get that baby out!’ approach to pain relief

I was blessed by having done an enormous amount of preparation work for my labours and births and pharmacological pain relief just didn’t feel like an appropriate way to deal with the sensations for me. My overall feeling after three full term labours and one 3 month miscarriage is that the pain is there to get that baby out! The best pain relief is to listen to the sensation and move accordingly. Jump up and down, rest on one side or another, wiggle, groove, lean, rest, circle, strectch, crawl, march, act on what you can feel. Take the attention away from the extraordinary power of uterine contraction if you can by using the body to respond to it.

I loved acupressure on the lower back and sacrum, using the voice almost as a vibrating tool to connect with the contraction, sing into it, deep and low. My god the memories are full on! I’m not pretending that its all plain sailing but I do know that we are Amazing! ! ! You can cope with it you know?! I have total faith in the incredible nature of our bodies and the symbiotic way that we can move with our babies to Let Go and to birth them into the world.

I have early memories of moving away from painkillers and what a breakthrough it was for me in dealing with illness. My family and I had a flu over Christmas ten years ago, we were all in varous stages but all pretty bed bound. Instead of taking the familiar lemsips and beechams powders, I decided I had nothing to do but to get better and buried my pounding head in the pillow and gave in to the overwhelming surges of sensations in my body. I hallucinated a lot and slept a lot. I remember seeing images of seven pieces of thick leather type material and knew that my task was to sew them all together. I think the most intense and richest part of this experience was a day or two long, although, like labour, the hours and minutes of the outside world are very distant from the rhythm of the body and eventually I woke with an insatiable appetite, nearly fainting as I fixed myself some porridge and joyfully woke up to the world.

And so, after birth is the relief as those contractions finally give way to peace and pain relief. Get that baby out whichever way its going to come!

01/10/2009. First stage, Thoughts on pain relief.