soapbox

Not “how to make a baby”, that’s already done. This weekend I went to class to find out how to actually produce the baby. Like how you get it out.

It turns out that it’s not really that big of a deal. Hard to believe, but women have been giving birth for over 100 years!

Here are some interesting facts:
Having the water break is the first sign of labor in only 10% of cases.
Typically, you don’t call your doctor or come into the hospital until the contractions are 5 minutes apart and have been nice and steady like that for an hour.
They suggest taking a nap when labor starts so you’re rested for the end.
For a first child, labor lasts 16 hours on average. But, the “labor” part of that is only about 1/3 of the time because of the duty cycle.
Epidurals are kind of scary and can make you really hurt yourself since you don’t know what’s going on.
The reason maternity wards used to be characterized by screaming was that they’d dope up the mothers with narcotics and morphine. The morphine in particular is an amnesiac and would tend to just turn people into animals. Then they’d take forceps and pull out the babies.

Oh yeah, they want you to bring your own robes and pillows just so you’re a little extra bit comfy. However, nothing nice because things get “messy” and it’ll all get thrown out in the end.

Oh, and on this week’s “Dirty Jobs”, Mike Rowe helped with a cesarian section on a cow. Not good.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 30th, 2008 at 9:17 pm and is filed under animals. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.