Elizabeth's Tips for a Med-Free, Joyful Labor

This crazy person is writing this for other crazy people who want a pain-medication-free labor and delivery. I wanted to make sure to offer my experience and tips for how I managed the pain so that others might know that THEY CAN DO IT, too! I wrote about the birth of my first baby, which turned out to be many hundreds of words longer than I expected. Separate post, it is!  

I have read and watched dozens of tips and labor experiences from other women. Please be sure to look into others' experiences! I'm just going to list them in an annotated bullet list and I'd be happy to answer any questions left in the comments.

Mindset

• Start positive and know your reasons for wanting a pain-med-free labor and delivery. Write it down.
• Know that fear of pain is useless. You will be on the other side of the pain within 24 hours (most likely) of whenever you feel like you're hitting rock bottom. You'll survive!
• Fear of pain makes pain worse. Start working on eradicating your fear of the pain right now. It's not in charge, God is.
• Tell your support system what is important to you and be prepared to chuck them out if they aren't showing the support you need (for example, I forbade anyone from saying the word "epidural" while in the room with me)
• Know that you only have to get through the first half of the contraction, then it's downhill. Don't panic.
• Relax in the breaks. They really are breaks. You feel no pain during them (except during transition).
• Know your limits. Leaving the door cracked to the possibility of pain meds may eventually empower you when you CHOOSE not to take them rather than refuse them.
• Pace yourself. One of the hardest mental battles is that you will not know how long your labor is going to be. You will be tempted to ask someone how long you'll be feeling that pain and no one can tell you. For this reason, it's essential that you control that part of your brain and pace yourself as if you're going to have the longest labor on record. If you're an athlete, imagine what it's like to begin a workout when someone else is in control. You don't know how long they're going to make you swim, run, lift, play, etc. Control your pace.
• Yes, it's possible to go pain-med-free on Pitocin. Yes, it's wicked, but mine was even faster than it's supposed to be (meaning, no chance for endorphin or natural Oxytocin to build up) and I managed.

Plan and research

• Have a plan and give it to your husband with options. I suggest putting the faith in him, even if you're a little nervous about how he'll handle the medical stuff. It's unbearable for a husband to watch his wife go through the kind of pain you're facing, but having a task can help that.
• Have a breathing plan with options. I drew a little bell curve representing a contraction, plotting out how to breathe through it. I had to consult this when the simple slow breathing wasn't working as well anymore.
• Study. YouTube, blogs, friends, articles, anything you can get your hands on to help you understand what the whole process is going to look like. Ask your physician everything you can think of to help yourself get acquainted with that future day. Surprises are better when they're few and far between.
• Create a list of tools. Mine were a list of affirmations that Kevin read to me at appropriate times, music (didn't work for me by the time I got to it, but I'm glad I had it), massage (at some point, you want exactly NO ONE touching you), warm water tub (I had one in my room, but in trying to pace myself--I had no idea how quickly my labor was going--I never used it), watching a movie in early active labor.

Physical

• Water. All the time. Husbands, this is your job.
• Focus on relaxing everything but your uterus. That's the only place where the contraction happens, so let it do what it's doing and prevent contractions in other muscles.
• Watch videos of a flower opening beginning 2 or 3 days before your due date. I watched the same video during labor, right before I pushed. I was visualizing my body opening to help prevent tearing (and I didn't tear).-
• Use every contraction to visualize moving that baby down. Imagine the movement and imagine that your body is working to open up. Let it do that.
• Pace yourself. Again, this is physical, too. Don't start out using every tool you have to manage pain because you want to save some (like the tub) for later. However, DO walk in the early part of labor. Don't lay around.
• Use multiple positions during labor and for pushing (if your physician will allow it). Hands and knees and a sit/squat position, using the bed as a chair, were helpful for me mentally and in a gravitational sense. 

Last, but certainly not least...

Spiritual

• Give it to God. He's blessed you with this little person(s) and He will help you. I brought a crucifix on which to focus and prayed a lot during labor.
• Offer it up for others or your baby. Suffering is redemptive. Cash in on that.
• Look at the ultrasound pictures to focus on that little one!