"PattyMomVA" wrote in message
I've always wondered about something with regards to pushing. With
both
babies, I felt the urge to push, as in I knew I was ready to, but I
felt
like I preferred not to. At that point, the contractions became much
less
painful. It felt like I wanted to just do nothing during a
contraction and
feel a little relief from having to deal with them for hours. (BTW, I
had
an epidural with DD and nothing with DS.) The nurse was telling me to
push
when I felt a contraction. Instead, I felt a contraction and didn't
push.
I just didn't want to. But, she figured this out by looking at the
monitor,
knowing I was having a contraction, so told me to push. I still
wonder to
this day if it might have been nicer to me and not unsafe for the baby
to
rest through a few contractions at that point and then push when I
wanted
to. Does this happen to other women?

I think I know what you mean. When I got to the birth center and was
examined, I was fully dilated. The nurse told me to go ahead and push
when I felt the urge. I had been feeling a little "pushy" (I guess) and
had feelings of weird pressure, but nothing involuntary or
uncontrollable, like I hear others describe. I sat in a rocking chair
for a while and talked to my DH and the other people that were there to
help me. I felt very surreal and unreal (I was so shocked to be there
fully dilated, I was in disbelief that I had really done it and was so
close to the end!). After about 30 minutes or so of waiting for some big
"urge" to strike me, I started pushing kind of experimentally, to see
what would happen and then went from there (DS was born after a little
over 1 hour of pushing. A lot of that being just "practice" pushing
really). I did feel like pushing, but it wasn't as intense as I
envisioned. What was incredibly and unexpectedly intense for me was the
prolonged "ring of fire" I experienced. (that was what made me feel
scared too and was when I came the closest to "freaking out" during my
labor). Actually, those pushy feeling and pressure feelings, in
hindsight, had begun while I was still laboring at home, but I didn't
know how to label them other than to say that I had a "weird feeling."
The feelings continued on the drive to the birth center and then kind of
went on a hold a bit while I was mentally adjusting to being at the
birth center and getting ready to push. Anyway, it just makes me wonder
how long I had really been fully dilated and what would have happened if
I had done something about those pushy feelings at home, instead of just
ignoring them or brushing them off as weird feeling :-)

--
Em
mama to L-baby, almost 8 months old!