When Tess Camp was pregnant with her second child, she knew she needed to go to the hospital as soon as the baby was born. Her first labor is short (7 hours) for her first-time mother, and second babies tend to be more rushed. Still, she was unprepared for what had happened: one day at 40 weeks she thought it was just her back pain during her pregnancy. , 12 minutes later was holding the baby.
Needless to say, she didn’t get to the hospital on timeBut the first labor pains after Camp’s water broke at home were very intense. I could barely speak.”—She and her husband ran into the car. They were turning into the ER when she saw the baby’s head between her legs.Her husband screamed out of the car for help. A guard ran to the horrifying camp in the passenger seat, and at that moment her son slipped and fell into the guard’s hands. It looked like the ER nurse had finally taken the baby, still blue and limping at her.
What the camp experienced was what is called a “burst”, when a baby is born in less than three hours of normal labor.It’s rare, but not completely rare, and happens about 3% of delivery, usually in the second, third, or later labor. Like Camp, if you’ve had a premature birth before, you’re more likely to have an abrupt delivery. But otherwise, doctors cannot reliably predict who will get pregnant, especially among first-time mothers who have never given birth. Not well researched.
Perhaps counterintuitively, a very fast delivery is not necessarily a good delivery. It can even be terrible. “It was like being hit by a truck and being dragged behind you,” says Doula and her birthing class instructor Stephanie Spitzer Her Hanks. “People would say I was lucky, but I don’t feel that way. I tell my students, ‘I don’t want you to have a delivery like this.'” , the cervix gradually opens with each contraction, pushing the baby out. In rapid labor, the cervix still has to open just as wide, and the baby has to travel just as far, but in much less time. It’s like running the length of a marathon.
Babies born in abrupt labor tend to go on without problems, but the process can be traumatic for the mother’s body. During normal labor, the perineum is stretched when the baby’s head moves back and forth during labor, says Tamika Auguste, an obstetrician and gynecologist at MedStar Washington Hospital Center.in one studyabrupt labor was 25 times more likely to have a severe third-degree perineal tear and nearly 35 times more likely to have postpartum hemorrhage. case report I’ve seen titles with the words “Rupture of the External Anal Sphincter”. )
Even ER doctors say, “Emergency labor is with some of the most stressful events we’ve managed,” says Joelle Borhart, an emergency medicine physician also at MedStar Washington Hospital Center. A threatened labor can occur so quickly that even when the mother arrives at the hospital, she may not have time to move from the ER to the delivery room. ER staff are trained in childbirth, but this is not routine. Borhart said the emergency department at her large hospital in Washington, DC sees about one case a month. Brian Sharp, an emergency physician at UW Health, a large academic hospital in Madison, Wisconsin, told me that his hospital averages him just over one a year. The small community site he works at has its first labor contractions in years. The rarity of these events means hospitals aren’t always the most prepared: when Ms. Camp was about to give birth at her ER entrance, the hospital made a mistake. code, falsely implying that there has been a kidnapping. None of the people involved in her labor and delivery came to see her because she was counting babies to make sure no one was missing. The hospital later reviewed her case and came up with ways to improve its response in future situations.
All this means that sudden labor pains can be emotionally painful as well.Bryn Huntpalmer, who runs the podcast birth time And in the birthing course, we talk to postpartum mothers. Some of the mothers I interviewed told me that she was out of control and that she felt deeply disconnected from her body. “I was speechless. I couldn’t open her eyes. says. “I couldn’t do anything.” process. In the early stages, you can joke, laugh, and walk, but after a few hours of mental preparation, the screaming and vomiting take over. I remember fondly my first birth. She spent her early years at home with her mother and her sister, preparing her home for the baby. Due to her sudden labor pains, she didn’t have time for that. She plunged straight into full-blown pain.
“There’s no buildup to prepare your mind and body,” podcaster Hunt Palmer, who has experienced hard work herself, told me. “Everything was so compressed.” by talking about and since birth time About Hundreds of Women and Their Experiences—She eventually came to see her sudden labor pains as positive too: her body knew what to do. I could do it all myself,” she says. Emily Geller, who gave birth to her second baby during a painful labor in her car, told me the same thing. wanted a natural vaginal delivery. Ultimately, she said, she was empowered to know that she could do it.
But when Camp became pregnant with her third child, she never wanted to give birth in a car again. She was frightened of her husband as well. He kept saying he was going to rent a trailer so she could spend the last weeks of her pregnancy lying in the hospital parking lot. “$150 a week to rent a trailer,” she remembers him telling her. They didn’t, but she was scheduled for an introduction at her 39 weeks. A daughter was born with a double push.
