The real test to know whether you're in labor

So you know those lists that help you identify whether you're in true labor or not? Turns out, the only real way to know is whether you walk out of the hospital with a baby inside your belly or outside*.

This is what he looks like and we'll call him Little Brother on the internet.

*coming from yours truly, who had to go to the hospital THREE times before actually having a baby. Turns out, you can go to 4 cm dilated with hours of very regular contractions and baby all descended and what not and then go home and wait another 6 (SIX!) days before having said baby.

Eating dates to speed up your due date?

When you’re very pregnant, even if you’re a rational scientist-type person, you can sometimes not help but googleing “ways to induce labor”. My google even already autofilled it for me, it must know more than me about myself. And instead of reading scientifically sound pieces about what might determine when the baby comes, I find myself reading about acupuncture, castor oil and all that. But wait a minute, what does it say on the bottom of the page? Something about a recent scientific study showing that eating dates has a favorable effect on labor and delivery? I had to check that out.

The paper is from a group of scientists from Jordan, published in a journal with the astonishing impact factor of 0.55, and looks at two groups of 45 and 69 women. One group of women eats at least 6 pieces of date fruit in the four weeks prior to giving birth, whereas the other group eats none. It’s a prospective study, meaning that the women who eat dates are not assigned to that group, which I think is important to notice. The researchers find that in the date-eating group, the women arrived to the hospital more dilated than the non-date-eating group, had their membranes intact more often, had more spontaneous labor, and the use of Pitocin was lower. Also, the duration of the first stage of labor was shorter, but I wonder if that isn’t just the case because they arrived at the hospital more dilated. I don’t know about Jordan, but I could imagine that the group of women who eat 6 dates each day, is a different group of women to begin with. They might be the women who refuse induction with Pitocin, stay home longer before going to the hospital, refuse to have their membranes artificially ruptured, etc etc. We might just be looking at two different groups of women who happen to be different in their date fruit consumption. The researchers conclude: “that the consumption of date fruit in the last 4 weeks before labour significantly reduced the need for induction and augmentation of labour, and produced a more favourable, but non-significant, delivery outcome. The results warrant a randomised controlled trial.” I totally agree with that final sentence.

And for those of you wondering, I have not been eating any date fruits over the last couple of weeks.

#PubScience #scimom edition

Yesterday I stayed up past my normal bedtime to participate in #PubScience organized by @DrIsis and @MTomasson. We talked about being a parent in science, and you can watch the episode here and below (do it! It’s a lot of fun and an interesting conversation).

I had to leave about an hour in because BlueEyes woke up and needed some comforting. And then I fell asleep, because as I said: this was past my tired-pregnant-self bedtime. Talking about being a scimom.

What I wanted to clarify is that when I talked about one of the parents stepping back to make sure the other can excel in their job, both Dr. Isis and Dr. Rubidium said that that was a very privileged situation being able to take a step back. I agree that parents that have to work double shifts at McDonalds in order to be able to support their families probably have a way harder time than us academics do. But while there are usually people that have a harder time than others in whichever aspect of their life, for me this is still an issue in my life and therefore worth discussing. I see people around me where one of the parents decide to take a step back, taking a job where you are not expected to travel to meetings, you are not expected to work late nights to make deadlines and you don’t need to be in the lab on the weekend because your experiments require that. By doing this, they give up the dream of becoming a tenure track scientist. Even though I think doing this will increase the chances for my husband (and the other way around) neither of us is ready to do this.

Also, while we were discussing all this, on twitter some people were wondering if, after hearing all this, they were ever going to want to have babies. I have this to say about that (and I may have said this before on my blog or anywhere else): For me, having a baby was an entirely different desire than wanting to be a kick-ass scientist (preferable in academia). I know I would be very sad if I would be forced to leave science because I cannot work hard enough/publish enough papers/get enough grants, but I would have been heartbroken if I didn’t have kids. So for me it’s not kids or career, it’s kids and then see how far I can get in my career.

On enjoying your new baby

When BlueEyes was just born, I was overwhelmed to say the least. I read a lot about birth, but almost forgot that the process is supposed to end with the appearance of a baby. I remember when he was just born I heard a baby cry in the room that I was in too, and all I could think was: “please make that annoying sound go away!” It took a fairly long time before I realized that that sound came from my baby. My baby. This little person that I was now responsible for. I was not only supposed to feed and dress this little person, but I was also going to be his mom for the rest of my life. Wow. I hadn’t fully realized that until then. And all of this happened at a time when you’re body is flushed with this ridiculous amount of hormones that changes you from a normally functioning person to someone who will break down in an ocean of tears over nothing.

Add to this the fact that when both your parents and your in-laws live on a different continent they don’t just come to visit for an afternoon, but rather for a week of two, and you might imagine that it took me a while to regain myself. And so when people told me to enjoy the time with my new baby, it sounded a bit like people saying you should enjoy the waves when there’s actually a tsunami. Just making sure BlueEyes was fed and slept and not hijacked by his grandparents was all I could accomplish for a day. Enjoying that really didn’t seem feasible at the time.

Was this postpartum depression? No, I think it’s just normal; I just hadn’t anticipated it. I promised myself never to tell people they should enjoy these first weeks with their new baby, because I had felt how much of a burden it was to not only do all those things, but to also have to enjoy them.

But apparently you forget these things, because today I did just that; I told someone to enjoy her first weeks with the new baby. Apparently I had forgotten about how it really was, and I just thought about a cute little baby and how wonderful it is to hold it and feed it without all of the reality around it. I guess you forget these things and that’s probably a good thing.

Guest post: Making the postpartum transition easier with a doula

 

Recently, Katie Moore contacted me and asked whether she could write a guest post for my blog. Here it is:

Any mother can attest to the fact that giving birth and the time afterwards can be a challenge.  Many women opt to have a doula help them through the transition into motherhood. Doulas are trained to help a mother before, during and after childbirth. Their skills actually allow them to be useful long after the birth of a child, not only the immediate days following birth.  The use of doulas is associated with increased maternal health and can be helpful to a mother throughout her postpartum period.

The job of a doula is to help a mother learn and enjoy the experience of raising a child.  When used before delivery, a doula can be an educational resource, teaching the mother about options like pain management, umbilical cord blood banking, immunizations and circumcision. They can work with a mother to create a birth plan and work to have that plan carried out in the delivery room.

A postpartum doula performs a variety of jobs in an effort to allow a mother to experience success in raising her child, and to eventually diminish the need for a doula.  Postpartum doulas will stay with a mother as long as she is needed.  This can range from just a few visits to a few months of service.  Depending on the needs of the mother, a doula can be with the mother and child during the day, night, or even overnight. 

Doulas are very helpful during the postpartum period because they give the mother tips on how to handle their new child.  A doula will help the mother gain confidence and experience so that when the doula is gone, the mother has successfully transitioned into motherhood. 

The main concern that many mothers may have is worrying about developing postpartum depression.  While a doula is not a trained counselor, she is very helpful in preventing this type of depression.  A doula is there to ensure a new mother isn’t thrust headfirst into motherhood alone.  She can help a mother slowly transition into her new role. Doulas will also coach the mother on how to eat right and make sure she gets enough sleep.  All of these tasks will make sure that becoming a new mother is not overbearing for the mother, and may help prevent postpartum depression.  

Another worry that some women have is that a doula could interfere with their planned parental approach, but this is simply not true.  Doulas are trained to support the mother’s particular parenting approach regardless of what it might be.  A doula is not there to tell a mother how to raise her child; she is there simply to assist the mother in doing so.  Doulas will listen to the needs of the mother and child, and even encourage the mother to develop her own parenting styles and philosophies. 

Katie is an active blogger who discusses the topics of, motherhood, children, fitness, health and all other things Mommy. She enjoys writing, blogging, and meeting new people! To connect with Katie contact her via her blog, MooreFrom Katie or her twitter, @moorekm26.

A pain-free society?

Before I moved to the US, I never realized that there were so many small cultural differences between my home country and the US. I mean how much can two first world countries really differ from each other? Back home we have the same McDonalds, MTV and lots of other American TV shows. However, one of the most striking examples of cultural differences in my mind is the different outlook on pain, and especially on pain during child birth.

I’m from that country in Europe where about 30% of women have home births and where until very recently anesthesiologists were only in the hospital during office hours, so women were only able to get an epidural if their baby decided to be born between 9 and 5 (I couldn’t find a link in English, but it says that in 2004 only 26% of hospitals had an anesthesiologist on call for 24 hours). I personally know many people that had their babies at home, and no, those were not just granola hippies that decided to eat their placentas and refrain from vaccinating. They are my sister in law, my colleagues, my friends and my mom (I was born in the hospital, but my little brother was born at home too). I know that if you take a child birth class back home, you mostly learn how to deal with the pain; you learn different positions you can use and how to breathe and basically how to get through it. So to me, having a baby without pain medication seemed like a normal thing to do. I figured I would get an epidural if I REALLY couldn’t take it anymore, but until then I didn’t want people sticking needles near my spinal cord. 

In the US, having a baby without pain medication is called a ‘natural birth’. And when I went to a natural child birth class, I was mostly struck by how afraid everybody was to give birth. Of course, having a baby is not the safest thing you will do in your life; a hundred years ago it was the thing most likely to kill you as a young woman, but it seemed weird to me to be afraid of something before it has even happened.

And after the fact I can say that yes, having a baby hurts, but for me it was very do-able, also because I was able to choose whichever position I wanted to be in and relax enough to have lots of endogenous opioids released. I don’t look back on BlueEyes’ birth as being particularly painful. I’d choose the pain of childbirth over a migraine any day.

So why is it that in this country that on the other hand values hard work and some degree of suffering to attain a goal (‘no pain no gain’) so many people seem to be afraid of pain? Why does the dentist have to numb you before giving you an injection with a local anesthetics? (I had never have that happen before) And could this fear of pain be the reason of the high C-section rate?