Well, I went from zero to ten in one hour (and yes, it hurt) but that was AT HOME, in the bathtub, and there was certainly no Pitocin involved. OTOH, the one time I was given Pitocin was for my firstborn… who wound up extracted from my abdomen due to “failure to progress” and “macrosomia.” Survey says…

Pitocin is awful. I only had it once and it was far more intense — on the warmup dose–than any other labor. I went from 0 to babe-in-arms in one hour.

And I’m comparing that to a 0 to babe-in-arms labor of 82 minutes (for the next baby.) Rapid labor doesn’t have to be unbearably painful.

Compassionate care of the laboring mom would have been nice.

So I was thinking, “Hey, that’s not so bad…” till I read the context. Not so much, Nurse.

Labor has to happen. Contractions.
Not Pitocin.
And certainly not snarky attitude.
Some back rubbing and a comment like “soon you’ll hold your baby’ would have been much more called for.

Pitocin hugely amplifies the pain of contractions, and women need to know this before it is given to them so they can make an informed decision whether they really want it (or if it absolutely necessary… usually not). Remember, ALL interventions are a slippery slope, and if you agree to the Pitocin bear in mind that rarely will the interventions stop there.

This was a comment that I submitted, it was from one of my very early client births. It was actually a CNM who made the comment. She’d already been at a birth–I don’t know for how long–when my client arrived at the hospital not in labor but with SROM.

She offered many doses of Cervidil and Cytotec (uugggh) to induce labor, and we tried walking, accupressure, and nipple stim. All told, 40 hrs after SROM and 24 hrs after arriving at the hospital, still no labor.

So the CNM put on the Pitocin, and it was horrific–I’d never seen such intense contractions in any of my 3 labors, or in the limited few doula births I’d attended at that point.

I researched it later and what I learned was that it was started at 2-4 times the dose that is reccommended on the package insert. It was then doubled in dosage every 15 minutes (package insert says to slowly raise the dose every 30-60 minutes) until it was at 16 microunits per minute. The package insert says that 6 microunits per minute mimics natural labor, and above 10 is “rarely needed.” It was at this 16 when I finally went out to the CNM and told her that it was too intense for my client, she couldn’t handle it. And was responded to as quoted above.

To her (mild) credit, the CNM did come into the room a few minutes later, observed a contraction, and then turned the Pit down–to 12.

I warned the woman that with her second birth she might tend to underestimate how far along her labor was, that if she labored naturally she would not experience contractions like that. Sure enough, for her second birth…she gave birth in the hallway outside the ER because she underestimated how far along she was.