Posted by My OB said WHAT?!?.
May
14
Posted by My OB said WHAT?!?.
“…You’re Not In Real Labor.”
“I’m sorry, your dilation has not progressed since we last checked you, you’re not in real labor.” - Midwife to mother
There are 24 comments to this post.
Um, I spent 12 hours at 7 cm. Guess I wasn’t in real labor.
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first time mommy had this to say,
May 14, 2012 @ 11:50 am (Quote)
JUST happened to my friend.Sent her home bc she “wasn’t” in labor. Was abt 6 cm dilated and contracting every 2 minutes. They discharged her, she got home (lives 5 min away) and she ALMOST birthed the baby RIGHT IN THE CAR.
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I got stuck at 9 for nearly 6 hours with a posterior baby. (I think being at home was the only thing that saved me from a cesarean…) I’d been dilating before that, maybe that’s why my midwife believed that I was in labor?
Progress in dilation isn’t the only sign of labor, you know.
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Haha! Mine is a little different. With my first I was OBVIOUSLY going through transition but nursey poo didn’t think I was because the monitor wasn’t picking up my contractions. She kept saying “its going to get worse when you’re really in labor, you still have a loooong ways to go” I started begging for an epidural, to which she said “you can’t have an epidural until you’re at least 4cm, and I know you’re not” after arguing with her (in transition, mind you!) she agreed to check, just to humor me. Well guess, what I was 10 cm and my body was starting to push! Ohhhh how I hated that old nurse, she was a “PUUUUUSH! 12345678910 PUUUUUSH!” type and told me to stop it when I pushed longer than her counting or before she started the stupid counting again.
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Kit Reply:
May 14th, 2012 at 2:28 pm (Quote)
The nurse at a cousin’s pregnancy kept doing the yelling “push!” and counting.
The OB looked up and said “Oh WILL you SHUT UP! You’re giving me a migraine, and I’m not in labor. If she pushes badly and tears I’m gonna take it out on YOU!”
It might not sound funny, but it kinda was at the time. The nurse stormed out and the baby was born with barely a skid mark.
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Kit had this to say,
May 14, 2012 @ 1:44 pm (Quote)
This I’d not me, but it could be. I had the joy of a three week long prodromal labor with my second. I went into labor on Christmas day and my son was born January 17th. I went to L&D three times. My blessed midwives and most of the nurses were sweet and comforting. One nurse on my second trip was awful. Told me I wasn’t in real labor. Told me there was no way I could handle real labor. And she actually refused to believe I had already had a natural birth because I should know what real labor feels like. Grr.
When I was back the next time, another nurse I knew came in and I made a comment about being glad to get one of the nice ones. She asked me what I meant and I told her all about Nurse Horrible. She not only filed a complaint for me, she said “You are not in normal labor, but that does not mean you are not in labor and that does not mean you should not be treated with respect.” God bless her! FTR, my beautiful baby boy did eventually decide to come on his own and I had my second natural birth.
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I had this too. It totally undermined my confidence and made me feel like an idiot. I had been laboring for nearly 24 hours and had overwhelming urges to push for about half – I might not have been dilated to what a textbook would say was “real labour” but I WAS in labour, and it was hard. She obviously decided that as a first timer I had underestimated the pain and wasn’t coping even with the “easy” bit.
My labour was very difficult due to malpositioning, but I was working through it, I was ok, positive, happy. I made a comment after one of the big pushing urges that they were painful, then she laughed at me and said “imagine how you’d feel if you were really in labour!”
I thought I was doing so well, I was in a lot of pain but happy and confident.. then she brought me crashing down. Stupid dismissive midwife. Makes me so angry to think about it.
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Darsy Reply:
May 15th, 2012 at 9:07 am (Quote)
Oh man, I can’t help but contrast that with the awesome L&D nurses I had, who were unrelentingly optimistic! One made a comment about how I ‘could even be at 7 or 9 centimeters by now!’ As it turned out, I’d only dilated about 1 more from when I was admitted, but I was barely disappointed because the hopeful and ‘we’re progressing’ attitudes of the staff there were so strong and helpful. In the end I was only in labor for about 5 and a half hours anyway! So they were right to be so optimistic, IMO.
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I didn’t dilate for over 24 hours (in a 36 hour labor).
The last five hours of that 24 hour period I was having pitocin induced contractions so strong that I was hyperventilating. STILL didn’t dilate. Not until about 3 hours AFTER they gave me the epidural.
WAS TOO in labor!!!
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Lame! After 12 days of prodromal labor followed by a week of early labor with my fourth, things were finally picking up. My midwife and I decided that I should come in. When I got to the birth center, I was 3. She said I could stay a couple hours and check again, or go home. I decided to stay, since getting three pretty young ones out of bed and getting there was a production. After two hours of contractions 3-4 minutes apart and easily 90 seconds long, no. Change. She said it still looked a bit early, and I could stay there or go home and try to get a nap – she was in favor of the latter, but it was my choice. I felt the same way, it could still be hours, so I decided to go home. Yeah, oops. I was back to have a baby less than three hours later (but when you count the 20-minute one-way drive, wrangling the kids, the tune it takes to even get out of the room, much less out of the house, in transition… Yeah). But I was treated with respect, it was my choice, and I was certainly in labor!
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In defense of all L&D nurses out there….you wouldn’t believe the amount of women you come in and think that they are in labor and they aren’t. They don’t come back in real labor for days and sometimes weeks. We do send women home a lot when they are just in early labor because 1. It is much more comfortable to do that at home. 2. It decreases their risk of c-section if they have early labor at home.
There are always times when women are at the hospital for long periods of time and don’t do any cervical changing at all and we have to send them home (not our choice, but the doctors) and they end up coming back shortly and delivering, but it is not too common. Also, I know that not everyone labors the same way which is why I try to evaluate to the best of my ability every time I see a new patient and go from there.
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Jane Reply:
May 15th, 2012 at 9:36 am (Quote)
I went in once for false labor with my first because I’d never experienced labor before and because my mother had described her labor as mostly painless, so I really didn’t know what to expect. The nurses were fine about checking me, saying these were likely BH ctx, and giving me information so I could decide when to really come in to deliver. (Which turned out to be two weeks from then.)
I think it’s in the tone of voice and the attitude when conveying that information to the mother. “You’re not in real labor” implies she’s faking it or her body is defective. But, “We think this may still be the warm up to your actual labor, so it’s best for now to go home, relax, get your mind off it, and come back when the following conditions are met…”
BTW, I’d have loved to have you as my nurse with my first and send me the heck back home when I was in early “real” labor. 
I didn’t need to be there for as long as I was with nothing happening. :-b
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Mine. I’ll preface this by saying that other than this experience, my interactions with these midwives were awesome. The midwife that actually attended my delivery was phenomenal. This one, I could have done without.
I was a bit of a “pain” patient, with all sorts of problems. I had severe SPD and some bleeding issues. The morning of the day I went into labor I had copious watery discharge and went to L&D to see if my water had broken. It had not. I think they got the idea that I was an hysterical first time mom not to be trusted. So when I showed up at the hospital at 1 am with contractions 3 minutes apart, I wasn’t exactly welcomed. I was put into triage with a fetal monitor. The monitor detected a high fetal heart rate so they hydrated me. I vomited repeatedly (as I had been doing), and they decided that my close contractions were because of dehydration, and not “real labor”. This midwife came into to do an exam to verify that I was not, in fact, in labor (what?), and proceeded to give me the most painful cervical exam of my life. I don’t know if it was because she had short arms and tiny hands, or what, but she shoved so hard to get up in there I screamed out in pain (further confirming my wussbag status), and I’m convinced that stalled my labor.
They told me to go home, it could be days before labor actually started. They told my husband to take a benadryl to try to get some sleep. The whole time they treated this as an annoyance, and treated me like a child.
We got home at 4 am. I labored alone from 4 am to about 9 am, the whole time thinking I wasn’t actually in labor, and the whole time getting more and more scared. Because if this wasn’t actual labor, there was no way I could handle labor. At 9 am my husband tried to convince me to go back to the hospital because he felt things weren’t “right” and was getting worried. I refused because I didn’t think I could handle that rough car ride only to be told to go home again. It wasn’t until my husband discovered that I had been going to the bathroom to push (what I thought was a bowel movement), that he insisted we go to the hospital. At that point I agreed because I knew I would need pain meds. I mean, if this was just pre-labor, how on earth would I be able to handle active labor and transition?
I got to the hospital, and thankfully shifts had changed. The intake nurse must have been able to tell just by looking at me that I was far along because she skipped the triage room and sent me right to a delivery room and rushed a midwife in. The midwife when to go do an exam and pronounced that the baby was almost out. 2 pushes later, and he was here.
The thing that made this the hardest was going through all of it alone and in fear. I don’t blame the midwife for “incorrectly diagnosing” me, or whatever, I blame her for her attitude of condescension and annoyance. It made me loathe to “make another mistake” by coming in again. So instead I was at home, in transition, dealing with it by myself, and felt there was no way I could handle this.
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Jane Reply:
May 15th, 2012 at 6:07 pm (Quote)
I’m sorry they treated you like that. 
Maybe someone who doesn’t want to deal with women in labor shouldn’t have become a midwife…? Just a thought here. Maybe, just maybe, first-time moms will sometimes jump the gun, and maybe (bear with me on this) maybe midwives should consider that to be a part of their job…?
It would have been so different for you if they hadn’t brushed you off like that.
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On then 13th in the middle of the night I had pains that kept waking me up, then the next day I had pains here and there but for some reason I never considered it contractions, then about 10 pm on the 14th my contractions we constant and 5 min apart. I went to the hospital and they checked me and said I had not dilated at all, to come back if I could not sleep; I was in so much pain I could hardly sign my discharge papers and I could not sleep the night before. So before I got home we turned around and went back and the nurses were very rude and did not believe me. Well at that point my contractions were 1 min apart, they finally called my doctor at 3am and he showed up at 6 am and did c-section, I never did dilate. The anesthesiologist was so mad by the time I was on the operating table and wanted to know how long I had been in labor…This was 20 years ago and my daughter is not considered mentally retarded and I can’t help but blame the nurses!
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Not mine, but BTDT. In my (2) cases it wasn’t dilation but the apparent strength of contractions on the monitor that led to the declaration of not-labor. In one, I gave birth less than 3 hours later, and in the other it was less than 5 minutes.
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