This is a show that shares true experiences of getting pregnant, being pregnant and giving birth to help shift the common cultural narrative away from the rainbows and roses depictions you can find on social media, and other media more broadly, to a more realistic one (which might include rainbows and rocks). It also celebrates the incredible resilience and strength it takes to create another person and deliver them into the world. I’m your host, Paulette Kamenecka. I’m a writer and an economist and the mother of two girls who had far too many surprises on my path to motherhood.
Today’s topic is one that doesn’t see much daylight, to the detriment of everyone who has kids: the struggle to manage an unwanted pregnancy. There are any number of ways to respond to an unexpected pregnancy, and in today’s show, you’ll hear about an uncomfortable but very real response; one that I’m guessing is not uncommon, but is a perspective we rarely hear because the only culturally acceptable response is Joy; you have to be joyous. But that expectation is wildly unrealistic. Having a child is a life changing event, and on the cusp of such an event, any number of reactions can occur. In part one of my conversation, listen to how my guest managed these uncomfortable feelings.
Paulette: Hi Welcome to War Stories from the Womb. This is a show that shares true experiences of getting pregnant, being pregnant and giving birth to help shift the common cultural narrative away from the rainbows and roses depictions you can find on social media, and other media more broadly, to a more realistic one (which might include rainbows and rocks). It also celebrates the incredible resilience and strength it takes to create another person and deliver them into the world. I’m your host, Paulette Kamenecka. I’m a writer and an economist and the mother of two girls who had far too many surprises on my path to motherhood.
Today’s topic is one that doesn’t see much daylight, to the detriment of everyone who has kids: the struggle to manage an unwanted pregnancy. There are any number of ways to respond to an unexpected pregnancy, and in today’s show, you’ll hear about an uncomfortable but very real response; one that I’m guessing is not uncommon, but is a perspective we rarely hear because the only culturally acceptable response is Joy; you have to be joyous. But that expectation is wildly unrealistic. Having a child is a life changing event, and on the cusp of such an event, any number of reactions can occur. In part one of my conversation, listen to how my guest managed these uncomfortable feelings.
P:
Hi thanks so much for coming on the show. Can you introduce yourself and tell us where you’re from?
Keuka: Absolutely. Thank you for having me. My name is Keuka. I’m from the main island in Hawaii, which is called awful with the one with Waikiki and I’m a mom of 20 years to my birth children this year they they just turned 20 and 18.
P: Wow. So let’s go back to the four kids. Did you grow up with siblings?
K: I actually on my father’s side my biological father had a total of seven, including me, but we just discovered a couple of months ago, someone reached out who is apparently his birth child that had been adopted at birth. So he’s got a total of eight. And my mother who actually actually raised me who I lived with all my life has one other child so I have a younger brother, who is the sibling that I grew up with.
P: So did you have much contact with the other kids that you didn’t grow up with? Other than
K: not really, because my the, the man I grew up with was in the army, so did not spend most of my childhood or young adulthood here, so I knew them. We would visit them of course when we came back home in between duty stations and things like that, but I did not get to grow up with them in the way that people would typically, you know, grew up with their siblings.
P: Growing up with your brother did that make you think I want a family to or did they have?
K: No, I did not want children at the time that I got married. And at the time that I found out I was pregnant I was it was not an it was not a joyous moment no.
P: So it sounds like it was easy to get pregnant regrettably.
K: It it was unexpected. My then he was my husband. We had been together for let’s say, two years, maybe just under two years. I had not been on birth control because birth control sent me on a wild ride of manic depressive hormonal manipulation. So I had come off with that for probably about a whole year before I got pregnant. So I just thought we couldn’t get pregnant. I didn’t understand at the time that those you know birth hormonal birth control can have several years worth of effect, so it probably just kind of had a residual contraceptive effect in my system.
P: So this is a good question about long term effects of birth control here meaning oral contraceptives. I’ve read before about how birth control can dampen your risk for ovarian and endometrial cancer. And those benefits linger long after you stop taking birth control, but I wasn’t aware of negative long term effects. Apparently this is a bit of a gray area. A contested name for these effects is post birth control syndrome. And it’s the purview of naturopaths in part because the medical community doesn’t view the effects of pill removal as symptoms. They think it’s the body’s adjustment. Makes sense that your body would react both to the initiation of synthetic hormones, which alters your body’s own production of hormones, and the withdrawal of these hormones. It can lead to things like irregular periods or no period for varying lengths of time after the pills stopped. In general this like many topics in women’s health is under studied.
K: So I did not expect to get pregnant after that amount of time. I just thought it wouldn’t happen and I was wrong.
P: Wow. Well that’s that is a shocking into that hormone. All right. I also didn’t know that once you stopped birth control. I mean, I guess I thought for like two or three months, maybe it would, it would have some kind of effect on your system, but I would never have thought it would last as long as yours did.
K: Oh, yeah, I’ve I’ve since learned that it can actually because it is you know synthetic hormones. That it can affect your own hormone production for up to several years. So you’re on, you know, birth control pills. And you you know that at some point you want to have children, they actually encourage you to get off of those pills. And this may have changed now but between three to five years before you know you want to have children and change to a non hormonal form.
P: That’s totally interesting. I didn’t know that. I’m not sure what advice was given back in the day, but now according to webmd, you may be able to get pregnant within one to three months of stopping oral contraception in fact, on the list of side effects of coming off the pill, the first one listed in most articles is pregnancy. But most women can get pregnant according to webmd within a year, again, your results may vary.
So how did you figure out you are pregnant?
K: I you know I knew it. I felt it. I didn’t feel right, you know, quote unquote, it didn’t feel right. My body felt off. And I had generally been kind of self aware in terms of my body and I just like my intuition was telling me I was like, this is this is pregnancy and I’m like, no, no, no, it’s not pregnancy. It’s not pregnancy and it wasn’t going away. So we made a doctor’s appointment. And yeah, I was pregnant.
P: Well, that seems really challenging.
K: it was definitely I knew at that point, that I did not want to spend my life with my husband. And it was it was devastation, because that meant that I would be tied to Him eternally.
P: Yeah, totally. And it sounds like he or maybe I should just ask Did you consider ending the pregnancy or No,
K: I I don’t talk about that with my children. But I did. I asked at that point the I don’t know what they even call it but the the abortion pill was relatively new. But it had been established for maybe like two years at that point. And I asked about it, I knew that I didn’t have what it took to go to DNC, you know, the the medical removal, so I did ask to see if they had the pill and we did not here in Hawaii. We did not have it yet. So I I saw it as I that’s not an option.
P: Okay. I totally remember that. I think it was ru 46 And it was like new on the market.
So I went back and look this up. The drug was originally called ru 486. And it was developed in France in 1988. The name you might know it by now is mifeprestone. It’s a steroid that stops the action of progesterone. Progesterone, of course is one of the critical hormones that maintains the lining of the uterus during pregnancy and is one of the two drugs given to stop the advancement of a pregnancy. It was not made available to American women until September of 2000. But as always, when it comes to this charge topic, you had to pick it up at your doctor’s office. In 2001. Only about 5% of abortions were medical abortions.
So that seems I mean, pregnancy is hard enough. Even if he wanted desperately. So it seems like it would be extremely hard to get through the first trimester or take us on that journey. like at what point did you feel like any sort of excitement or
K: I unfortunately, I have to say that there was no excitement through that entire pregnancy because I saw it as a chain coming.
P: Yeah,
K: I couldn’t break. Yeah, it was as most women can attest to it, like it was unpleasant. To be pregnant in general. You know, I was nauseated. Most of the time I swelled up like a freaking water balloon. By the time I got to the end of it that what the tops of my feet jiggled when I walked. I have stretch marks on my inner thighs because my eye was so swollen with water. And that’s because if I was not putting something in something, everything wanted to come out. So I did a whole lot of sunflower seeds.
P: Oh, uh huh.
K: Very salty, lots of stuff. So I took in a lot of sodium. I was maybe halfway through or two thirds of the way through when I was like, I was kind of feeling upset with myself because there was no, there was no way out of it. Right. It wasn’t going to come to an end. And I thought to myself, you know, there are women who they they try, they work they spend 1000s to millions of dollars to become pregnant to become parents. And I did not ask for this but I still have it and no matter what there’s, you know, there’s a baby involved in this. And I had tried to convince myself that I should be happy about it because it’s a blessing because you know, that’s what we’re conditioned to. But it was really, it was really difficult to see it that way because it just felt like a life sentence until the moment she came out. Like truly the second she was laid on my stomach. It was it. I was a different person after that. And I have loved being a mother every moment since then. But I cannot lie and say that I was at any moment excited or looking forward to motherhood with the singular exception of when, when she was in me. She did not like being touched. She did not even swear she knew if you were looking at it and I would surreptitious, my eyes when you were looking at my dog was literally the only person who could read to me and she would respond. When you know when I was leaving my cleaner.
Of course, you know, a Doberman is a tall dog on the side and she put her head on my belly, and she would move more. So they the two of them are tight before she even came out. And they were tight. All the way up until until my Doberman died. We called her sissy she was the third child or the first child I guess. And they were tight tight. If you didn’t know where she was at, what Where’s the dog, then that’s where she went.
P: it’s so cute to be a dog lover in utero. That’s a good quality, right? That’s a good sign. But the pregnancy sounds so hard for you. I’m so sorry. I can’t even… it feels like the slow moving train of disaster. Because you probably you could probably feel the changes in your body and you’re getting bigger once you start showing that you’re going to have to have conversations of I know, I didn’t have the same path as you but we had medical issues. And once you’re showing the only story people want to hear is it’s so great. I’m so happy.
K: Yeah,
P: that’s like the only thing you can really say, which is limiting and is I think it’s just hard to like misrepresent yourself all the time.
K: It’s it’s, I mean, I think that we we do a disservice like how many women come through and they end up with or even before they give birth, you know, they have wide ranging symptoms, and a lot of them do include depression, but like most of the female experience in this country, you’re not allowed to talk about that you’re not allowed to have unhappy feelings like maybe if you just smile a little more, go for a walk, you know, and like, yes, there’s validity in
P: yes
K: smiling and going for a walk but it is not the solution, especially when you are literally be used.
P: Yeah.
K: Your hormones are not your home runs your food is not your food your life is not your life. You know and there are surely there are positive emotions that come along with that but just as surely is there a positive there’s negative stuff too, and sometimes it feels like shit.
P: Yeah, I mean, it’s it is much more complicated than people say it is. I think most people who talk about the second trimester as this glorious time, like in my experience, I thought it was glorious, because I was no longer vomitus at all points. Right. So it’s not like the second trimester. There’s something great about the second trimester. It’s like I all of a sudden don’t want to throw up no matter what the smell is no matter what the food is. And that feels like such a glorious relief that you’re the second trimester. So yeah, I totally agree with you. So let’s go to the birth. How do you know today’s the day how does that go down? And like what are you picturing from birth?
K: I Well, first of all it for any woman who’s listening start don’t don’t watch all the pregnancy cells on TV. You will it’s don’t do that yourself. I had been watching those and I realized after a couple of months I was like everything on this show is it is a trauma. Everything like these are not like the average birth these are like all of all of the horrible births that go wrong or the last minute changes. And then that turned out to be me.
so I wasn’t I was not looking forward to the birth because my husband told his parents that they could come like right at the time of the birth. And I was like in you know, like given give me a little bit of time have them come like a week later or so like, give me like give me some time. And he was like, Oh, I can’t tell them that you know, so I was not looking forward to trying to go through the transition of experiencing birth and then having the baby and having him and having his parents like all at the same moment. And are you guys still together at this point
K: Oh, yes. At that point. Yeah, we we had two children together. This was our first but I fortunately, my water broke. And she came about four days before her due date. So I had a little bit of window of time, but she was a 40 hour labor. So it was over the course of three days that I was in the labor and delivery ward because my water had broken but I did not actually physically go into labor.
P: So lets So let’s talk about that for a second. Where are you when the water breaks?
K: We are getting ready to go to bed I’ve taken just taking a shower, dried off, put my pajamas on and I’m walking to the bed. And that’s it I was like Oh, all right. We gotta go.
I know what that feels like.
P: Oh, it’s nice that you got like a Hollywood water break. So they eat like it’s dramatic enough that you know exactly what it is and you’re not so many women are like did I pee myself? It’s unclear. So now you know you have your bag packed. You go to the hospital and are they you don’t feel anything other than the water breaking.
K: Right? I don’t think I even had, you know Braxton Hicks or you know, the false labor. I didn’t have much of that with her towards the end of the pregnancy. She had chilled out a lot and she didn’t move around a whole lot. So there was not a whole lot of movement. Towards the end of it. It wasn’t the whole like, I look like I have an alien, you know, a 20 that kind of thing. So it was it was enough water that I knew that it was it was unmistakeably that not so much that it was like oh my gosh crisis we need to wash the carpets but enough to know for sure that it was time to hit the hospital.
P: And I’m guessing although it would have been helpful Sissy he was not allowed to come.
K: no, She was not No.
P: So you get to the hospital and they treat you like you’re about to have a baby or what’s their what’s
K: they evaluate me really quickly. They made me put a pad on because they want to verify that I didn’t pee my pants and I was like it’s I’m pretty sure I didn’t pee my pants. I think I would know if the different feel but you know, they have to verify. So I had to walk a lot because again, there was no other labor symptoms. So they’re like okay, well, you know, walk around we’ll have you walk when until you know labor actually starts and I did a whole lot of walking and labor did not start so eventually they had put me on Pitocin which is the synthetic form of oxytocin, which is the hormone that we have only ever cramps and stimulates squishing that thing out.
P: And did that. Did you feel that immediately or took a while or I didn’t feel it?
K: I did feel that Immediately. I ended up being on that, gosh, I don’t know like 30 hours.
So they would continuously raise the dose when my body was not responding. So I was having the contractions because that hormone will create the contractions, but I wasn’t dilating or effacing in my cervix. So, you know, my body itself was not was not doing the labor. It was just responding to the hormone.
P: As kekua says Pitocin is a synthetic version of a hormone called oxytocin. And Its job is to get the uterus to contract and those contractions will eventually do cervical dilation. But there are some important differences between the synthesized version and the one your body produces naturally Pitocin works more slowly and with less affects the natural oxytocin when it comes to cervical dilation, which means among other things, that it could take more Pitocin than it would natural oxytocin for labor to regress to the birth stage.
K: And it got to the point where and I was very much against having any painkillers because I did not want I generally don’t take medicine like it’s got to be pretty bad before I do just because that’s how I grew up. So I did not want any painkillers I didn’t want to have you know, I didn’t love the idea of epidural, that’s something that gets stabbed in your spine. I wasn’t super comfortable with that. But I got to a point where you know they put the monitor belt on your belly to monitor your contractions, the strength of your contractions. You got that little monitor next to the bed.
And the the level of Pitocin that I was on over the next like day and a half was to the point that it was off the top of the monitor and it did not come all the way back down. So I did eventually have I had two epidurals before she decided to make her entrance because an epidural only lasts about eight hours or at least at the time. So after about eight hours, and I tried to hold out and I was like Okay, it’s alright, it’s been eight hours she’s she’s gonna be ready anyway now and No, she wasn’t.
P: And I’m assuming you haven’t slept now.
K: No, no, I probably could have in the early part of being induced with Pitocin when it wasn’t so bad. But because they were induced the me I thought I had no concept this is going to take you know, 40 hours so
P: totally, You’re like any minute now. I want to be up for like breakfast, right?
K: Yeah, I that’s when I figured we were coming along breakfast time. And I was like, you know, at least I’m going to eat lunch at some point.
P: Now, that not so much. I’m glad you’re taking the epidural only because everyone says Pitocin is a much more kind of powerful route to birth and it is much more painful.
Okay, so this is a good question. Does Pitocin create more powerful contractions and is it more painful? There are studies that suggest that labor induction is positively correlated with epidurals meaning women who have their Labor’s induced are more likely to use epidurals, but doctors don’t randomly induce a woman’s labor. Something has happened in the course of birth reduction in the US. So it’s hard to tell if epidurals are more common in this set of women, because Pitocin creates painful contractions, or if induction and epidurals together are a signal of a long challenging birth. Having said that, non clinical sites suggest that these contractions are more painful. They are used in a non induced birth. The oxytocin created by your body causes the cervix to slowly stretch and when this happens, pain receptors send messages to the brain which responds by releasing endorphins which counter the sensation of pain, but Pitocin doesn’t cross the blood brain barrier. So you’re contracting yours is not sending signals to release endorphins
K: It’s painful. My dad had told me that at one point, I was twisting the arm on the you know, the arms that come up on the side of hospital beds. And he thought that I was going to break the bed because it was actually like turning in my hands. I can’t I can’t remember that. You know, trauma like yes, trauma puts those pretty curtains. over that. But I do remember that it was excruciatingly painful
P: well thank God your husband’s parents weren’t there for that.
K: Oh, he was on the phone with them like the entire time. Well, that’s good.
That’s two birds with one stone. That’s right, like everyone’s busy. That’s fine.
K: It did keep him away. It was very frustrating though when I when I actually needed him. And he was he was just never there. It was always on the phone.
P: Yeah, you know by my side. So once you’re it sounds like you had this flip. Switch once the baby was born.
K: I did towards Well, obviously at the very end they started talking about, you know, we have to consider alternate methods of birth, you know, meaning C section.
P: Yeah.
K: My auntie was a labor and delivery nurse. She actually worked at the hospital where I was giving birth. So they came in and they said a few things. And I looked at her and I was like, you need to do something about it because they’ve already had me in here for 37 hours. We’re not cutting now. You they need to figure it out.
P: Yeah, yeah.
K: And which is not necessarily wise because you don’t want to stay in that condition. But I was already in such a messed up mental state that I was like, No, you lost your chance to cut you figure it out. You figure figure out what you’re doing. Like how do you guys not know what you’re doing? Like I was aggravated. So she came in and she even though she was not working Of course. She you can’t work your own relative but she started working. And she had me turned side to side. And immediately immediately they turned me on my side and she went oh, here we go. It’s time.
P: Wow
K: And oh, knew it. I was like, oh, okay, she’s ready now. And they checked me and they were like, and I was finally like effacing and dilating. And but they still thought after all this time, you know, it’s gonna be another couple hours and I was like, No, I think she’s ready and they didn’t take me seriously because, you know, they do have more experience so their previous experience suggested that I was wrong.
P: Yeah.
K: But I wasn’t. So within 15 minutes. She was like, they were like, oh, we need to stop pushing. I was like, I can’t stop pushing. This is not my decision. She’s.
And so when she came out like I said that we’re not expecting her to pop out that fast. Everybody was still in the room. My mom’s here. My dad’s here. My brother’s here like everybody here because they’re like it’s don’t worry about it. You have time. Oh, no, didn’t have time. So when she’s like, you know, just a little heads popping out and they’re like oh, hit the doctor call button please. And my dad does this little panic dance. And he actually hits the code button on the wall.
P: Oh my god.
K: So so like they bring the crash cart in and the NICU comes in and like suddenly the room fills with people. I don’t know that he has hit the crash. I’m, I’m like, Oh my God, what’s going Why are there so many people? And she comes out and they lay her on my belly. And she’s kind of blue. She’s a very light. I can see even in the dim lights. I’m like she’s blue. And I look at my husband and I’m like why is she blue and he’s just staring at me. And then you know, so they cut and then they take her over so because the NICU had Brandon with their all of their equipment. They they take her to the NICU cart. I mean, you know, just there’s so many people I can’t see what’s going on. So I’m saying to him because he’s standing right there. I’m like, what’s going on? And he’s just standing there and I’m like, what’s going on? Find out what’s happening. And he still just keeps looking. I’m like, go over there and find out what is happening. Because the second like I said the moment they laid her on me and I put my hands on her. There was absolutely like you said like there was a switch and an entirely different person filled up my being because the second she came out that was my number one priority. And it was like I don’t know if there’s a way that you can correlate that to some other experience where people who’ve never had that experience could understand it. I don’t know any. All I know is that the second I actually became a mother to a living, breathing baby. I was a different person.
P: That’s awesome. And it is true that every birth you’re creating a baby no mother right at that moment, so that seems to me like that makes sense. Does she does your girls still like to make an entrance is that what was going on?
K: She’s she very much in her infancy was similar to as she was in the womb where she was fairly quiet. She would be animated when she was doing her thing. But if something came along, she would kind of not that she would freeze but she would stop whatever other things she was doing and she would just be very observant. So she might you walk in the room and she would just look at you.
And her eyes would follow whatever was going on. If you oh man is so I have so few pictures of her smiling as a baby because the second she saw the crank camera, she would focus on it. And like her eyes would go large and her face would go slack and she just like stare at it.
So it was really hard to catch her off guard and get a picture of her like giggling or anything like that. But she was not so resistant to others as she had been in the womb she was perfectly happy to go to her grandmother, her grandfather or you know, all of the rest of it changed. But she was I mean I don’t know what else to say it was she was a delight. I fucking loved every moment.
P: That’s awesome. Whenwe last left her she’s blue ICU guard. Did they just warm her up or what happened? They warmed her up.
K: She had been not deprived. I don’t know what’s the proper word but she had her cord had wrapped around her neck, but her arm was underneath of it so her one hand was crossed over her face. So a part of her neck was getting a little bit squished with the cord but not entirely.
P: Yeah.
K: So she was breathing but she hadn’t been breathing wonderfully, especially for the amount of contraction that she was under because of the level of Pitocin. So it was probably, you know, not a oxygen rich environment for that past day and a half but not enough to create any kind of damage, no long term, you know, problems or anything like that. She was she did come out as a healthy child who was just a little bit under oxygenated. So you know they rubbed her down they gave her a little bit of oxygen while they kind of stimulated her for a couple moments. And then she came back to me nice and pink. And did what was what
how long do you sit as before and what is postpartum like?
K: Oh gosh, postpartum was physically it was miserable because I had laid on my back for you know, so many hours because I couldn’t move and you know, you’re not supposed to lay on your back because of all that weight on your spine.
P: Yeah.
K: So my back was very sore, especially the spot where the epidurals had gone in because you know that it is a wound that’s healing after that. So that little spot in my back stayed sensitive, probably. Probably about a year.
P: Wow.
K: If I bent the wrong way, or if I hinged, you know, in a certain way it would kind of like, like it would just hit a nerve. It wasn’t, you know, a permanent weakness or anything like that, but my body was in rough shape. For a couple of weeks after that. There was definitely none of this. I walked out of the hospital looking great kind of thing. And I stayed I still looked pregnant. She was born December 12. We of course our Christmas pictures right December 25. I still looked like I was pregnant
You
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