Different Seasons(182)
During mid-labor, when more painful contractions begin coming every fifteen minutes or so, the woman switched to long inhales followed by long exhales—it’s the way a marathon runner breathes when he’s starting his final kick. The harder the contraction, the longer the inhale-exhale. In my pamphlet, I called this stage “riding the waves.”
The final stage we need concern ourselves with here I called “locomotive,” and Lamaze instructors today frequently call it the “choo-choo” stage of breathing. Final labor is accompanied by pains which are most frequently described as deep and glassy. They are accompanied by an irresistible urge on the mother’s part to push ... to expel the baby. This is the point, gentlemen, at which that wonderful, frightening engine reaches its absolute crescendo. The cervix is fully dilated. The baby has begun its short journey down the birth canal, and if you were to look directly between the mother’s legs, you would see the baby’s fontanel pulsing only inches from the open air. The mother using the Breathing Method now begins to take and let out short, sharp breaths between her lips, not filling her lungs, not hyperventilating, but almost panting in a perfectly controlled fashion. It really is the sound children make when they are imitating a steam-driven locomotive.
All of this has a salutary effect on the body—the mother’s oxygen is kept high without putting her systems on an emergency basis, and she herself remains aware and alert, able to ask and answer questions, able to take instructions. But of course the mental results of the Breathing Method were even more important. The mother felt she was actively participating in the birth of her child—that she was in some part guiding the process. She felt on top of the experience ... and on top of the pain.
You can understand that the whole process was utterly dependent on the patient’s state of mind. The Breathing Method was uniquely vulnerable, uniquely delicate, and if I had a good many failures, I’d explain them this way—what a patient can be convinced of by her doctor she may be unconvinced of by relatives who raise their hands in horror when told of such a heathenish practice.
From this aspect, at least, Miss Stansfield was the ideal patient. She had neither friends nor relatives to talk her out of her belief in the Breathing Method (although, in all fairness, I must add that I doubt anyone ever talked her out of anything once she had made up her mind on the subject) once she came to believe in it. And she did come to believe in it.
“It’s a little like self-hypnosis, isn’t it?” she asked me the first time we really discussed it.
I agreed, delighted. “Exactly! But you mustn’t let that make you think it’s a trick, or that it will let you down when the going gets tough.”
“I don’t think that at all. I’m very grateful to you. I’ll practice assiduously, Dr. McCarron.” She was the sort of woman the Breathing Method was invented for, and when she told me she would practice, she spoke nothing but the truth. I have never seen anyone embrace an idea with such enthusiasm ... but, of course, the Breathing Method was uniquely suited to her temperament. There are docile men and women in this world by the millions, and some of them are damn fine people. But there are others whose hands ache to hold the throttles of their own lives, and Miss Stansfield was one of those.
When I say she embraced the Breathing Method totally, I mean it ... and I think the story of her final day at the department store where she sold perfumes and cosmetics proves the point.
The end of her gainful employment finally came late in August. Miss Stansfield was a slim young woman in fine physical condition, and this was, of course, her first child. Any doctor will tell you that such a woman is apt not to “show” for five, perhaps even six months ... and then, one day and all at once, everything will show.
She came in for her monthly checkup on the first of September, laughed ruefully, and told me she had discovered the Breathing Method had another use.
“What’s that?” I asked her.
“It’s even better than counting to ten when you’re mad as hell at someone,” she said. Those hazel eyes were dancing. “Although people look at you as if you might be a lunatic when you start puffing and blowing.”
She told me the tale readily enough. She had gone to work as usual on the previous Monday, and all I can think is that the curiously abrupt transition from a slim young woman to an obviously pregnant young woman—and that transition really can be almost as sudden as day to dark in the tropics—had happened over the weekend. Or maybe her supervisor finally decided that her suspicions were no longer just suspicions.
“I’ll want to see you in the office on your break,” this woman, a Mrs. Kelly, said coldly. She had previously been quite friendly to Miss Stansfield. She had shown her pictures of her two children, both in high school, and they had exchanged recipes at one point. Mrs. Kelly was always asking her if she had met “a nice boy” yet. That kindliness and friendliness were gone now. And when she stepped into Mrs. Kelly’s office on her break, Miss Stansfield told me, she knew what to expect.
“You’re in trouble,” this previously kind woman said curtly.
“Yes,” Miss Stansfield said. “It’s called that by some people.”
Mrs. Kelly’s cheeks had gone the color of old brick. “Don’t you be smart with me, young woman,” she said. “From the looks of your belly, you’ve been too smart by half already.”