Fair and Balanced? I Think Not.

So we are 75% through with our childbirth class and I'm kind of happy about that. It's actually been an interesting experience and yes, we got to watch more TMI-style videos. That's TMI as in Too Much Information, not TMZ, home of Britney Spears Watch.

We finally reached the point in class where we review epidurals. I've been looking forward to this given my aforementioned commitment to a narcotic-aided birth experience. Our instructor goes out of her way to tell us that, essentially, she couldn't care less if we use "medication" or not and has no opinion whatsoever, blah blah blah. This is her approach to a Fair and Balanced and Fox News style presentation, so I beg to differ. If that were actually true then we wouldn't have spent the first seven hours of class to date discussing hard core labor and delivery with the word pain really never getting mentioned. We are given various squats and hanging positions and 19 breathing patterns to address the contractions, but again, the word pain is conspicuously absent from the discussion, let alone any adjectives to describe the level of pain...such as excruciating, train wreck, vomit-inducing, etc.

So when talk turned to medication we got the "I don't care" schpiel, and then spent 5 minutes discussing the benefits and 45 minutes discussing the risks, some factual, some "anecdotal" (her word, not mine) of epidural. The risk she reflected on most was that I'll have approximately four different things strapped to me and I won't be able to get up and go to the bathroom. Is that supposed to make me not want to do it? So let's see, have four things strapped to me or experience a level of pain that cannot be adequately described using the English language as we know it? That's not really a hard choice for prego. We then watched a video that contradicted a portion of the risk discussion. I knew going into this class that there would be an attempt to steer me away from my epidural, but it did not work. I'm having one. Deal with it.

"I'll have a Maker's Mark, please. Up."