An Emotional Journey from Natural Birth to Emergency C-Section
LOU IST DA
The Perfect Pregnancy
Nicole’s pregnancy was easy. She passed every test with flying colors. Every feeling in her body told her: all is well.
She experienced none of the usual hurdles: no nausea, no insomnia, no complications, (though she did start snoring like a chainsaw). She slept deeply, ate well, stayed active. She never missed a prenatal checkup. She took her supplements with yogic discipline. She practiced seed cycling with her moon phases. She got acupuncture, read the latest research, rested, stretched and listened. Nicole was a textbook example of a prepared, healthy mother-to-be.
And Lou responded in kind. Always in the right position. Heartbeat steady and strong. Doctors could tell he was a male extremely early, actually mistaking his member for a third leg. The entire pregnancy unfolded like a slow, quiet miracle.
But despite all this, modern medicine slapped an outdated label on her: geriatric pregnancy.
Geriatric. Jesus Christ. She doesn’t wear diapers, she was 43, not 83.
That word has no business being anywhere near a woman fit as an ox , glowing with vitality and more in tune with her body than most people will ever be. But in the clinical language of obstetrics, she was considered “high risk,” based not on her actual health, but on her birth date.
Because that’s what the modern health system does, it reduces people to data points and checkboxes. It doesn’t ask how you feel, how you live, what you eat, or how strong your intuition is. It asks how old you are, what your BMI is, and whether your hormone levels fit inside its little charts.
Birth Is Not a Diagnosis
It felt like Nicole’s pregnancy was treated as a problem to be managed rather than a natural process to be supported and nurtured. For example: every time Nicole came back from a checkup, she’d carry with her a list of statistical warnings and technical suggestions. “Based on the data, this level is on the lower end of normal and there’s a slight risk of this or that, so we’ll just need to monitor it.” Modern medicine has come far, not doubt, but at what point is too much information too much information, when does it stop helping and start bleeds into worry?
It felt absurd sometimes. Like, “Ma’am, just so you know, there’s a 0.13% chance that if you fart, you might also shit a little, so maybe where a diaper.” I mean, come on. We’re drowning in data and yet somehow forgetting the most basic truth: that women have been giving birth since before the word “birth” existed.
The body is not a machine. It’s not predictable, clean or linear. It could give a shit about statistics, its here for two reasons: to serve us and to teach us. A finely tuned organism that gives us feedback disguised as symptoms we’d otherwise not notice. It’s mysterious, intuitive, and tuned to rhythms chose not to understand and discard as woo-woo. Science likes to pretend it’s got it all figured out, but in the end, it just wants something to hold onto because it fears what it does not know. We’re just animals trying to interpret fart, analyse the fart, argue about the fart when instead we could just fart and than laugh at it.
And then there’s that stupid due date, that arbitrary line in the sand that the medical world clings to, a guess, a statistical average dressed up like prophecy. Predicting the exact moment a soul decides to enter the world is like trying to clog a toilet with piss.
But what the hell do I know?
Maybe it’s not even the doctors. Maybe it’s the machine they’re forced to operate within. A system designed less for care, more for liability coverage, metrics, and pharmaceutical incentives. Maybe they’re just trying to survive a world where healing takes a backseat to billing codes, insurance policies, and malpractice fears.
Or maybe they’ve simply stopped asking real questions, forgotten how to trust what they can’t graph.
Maybe it's easier to say, “Based on the data,” than to sit with the unquantifiable mystery of birth. Easier to hide behind printouts and charts than to kneel at the feet of something ancient and wild. Because birth ain’t clean nor polite. Birth doesn't give a shit about logic or timelines. I mean, for Christ’s sake, think about the absurdity of how we humans have made it to this point in the first place.
If we trace “birth” back to its origins, we’re not just talking about babies. We’re talking about existence itself. A single cell, molecule, perhaps even an atom, splitting, dividing, multiplying, morphing. A cosmic accident or divine intention, take your pick. But either way, we were never in charge. No one sat around a whiteboard planning uteruses or amniotic fluid. No committee invented the placenta. It all just... happened. In oceans. In caves. Perhaps a rogue asteroid floating in the universal abyss, loooong before it happened in huts.
Women gave birth in fields, in rivers, under stars, surrounded by wolves, gods or no one at all. They bled. They roared, squatted and pushed with nothing but instinct and maybe a tree to hold onto. They died, yes, but they also lived. And their babies lived. And those babies eventually became us. Not because of data, but because of something else, something no chart has ever captured.
Now here we are, centuries later, sterilizing the whole thing, trying to outwit biology with Bluetooth monitors and playlists labeled “Calm Vibes for Labor.” We schedule birth like a meeting. Pencil it in between grocery pickup and Zoom calls. Predict the moment a soul will decide to enter the world as if we’re organizing a wedding. “Oh don't put uncle Billy next to auntie Susan, they always end up sneaking away and fucking in the portapotty”
It’s laughable, really.
And all the while, the body just keeps doing what it’s always done, waiting for us to remember that the mystery was the medicine all along.
Lou’s Birth Begins
We had decided to give birth at the Luna Geburtshaus, a midwife-led birthing center that offers a home-like environment for pregnancy, birth and postpartum care. Housed in a restored old farmhouse, we thought its stone walls, ceilings yielding beautifully exposed wooden beams and softly lit birthing rooms would provide a calm space for Nicole to give birth with some experienced supervision. Unlike a hospital, Luna emphasizes minimal medical intervention, rather the midwives support women through labor with warm baths, movement and massage.
Lou decided it was time to begin his descent around 1:00 AM. At first, the contractions were scattered, intermittent like a dull thunder storm, but by 3:30 they had settled into a steady rhythm, coming every two to three minutes with an undeniable insistence of nature in motion.
After helping Nicole descend the five flights of stairs, we waited for our taxi in our run-down apartment’s tiny entrance. Nicole, I watcher her focus on her breathing as she sat under the dim entry light on a cardboard box filled with other flattened cardboard boxes. There was something beautifully absurd in that moment. Birth, quietly happening on a pile of cardboard.
I stood beside her, mostly in my own head. Finally, the time had come.
And yet there was a calmness that I wasn't expecting, placed me on the verge of uneasy. I was ready for the thunder, the lightening, the “oh shit its coming right now, we gotta delivery this bad boy ourselves” type of energy. I was bracing for nicole to scream and grab my hand with vice grip like intensity. Yet here we were, in a damp cold cellar, blanketed in an ear ringing silence. We were together, yet alone in our own experience, completely unaware of what was to come.
The minivan taxi arrived and glided us quietly through Bern’s sleeping streets. The world felt paused, surreal. Frozen in the dark silence of a winter morning. Nicole, hunched in pain, still managed to make small talk with the driver, cracking jokes between contractions. I, on the other hand, was still bracing for the storm.
We arrived at Luna at 1:30 AM and were welcomed by the soft presence of a woman who had dedicated her life to the sacred intimacy of birth. She silently led us down a quiet hallway to our private birthing room and gave us a few moments to arrive.
Strangely, i felt it had the energy of what i imagine death to look like. I wasn't uneasy, but I remembered it differently, it now felt heavy like a dungeon. But i wrote those thoughts off as pre birth jitters.
The hours flew by. There was a sense of magic in the air, the newness of it and the anticipation. Dawn crept in through the windows, casting a soft, muted light across the room’s gray stone walls. It had been easy to stay present thus far, Nicole was managing the contractions with grace, breathing through them with strength and focus, and I was filed with the thrill that at any moment, we might meet our son.
But as the hours wore on, slowly the energy began to shift.
A Laborious Labyrinth
The contractions kept coming, not stronger, not closer, just… relentless. Steady and unchanging, like the ticking of a clock. Occasionally, one would spike, a deep wave of pain that made her double over and vomit into a bucket. Bile, stomach secretions, what little bit of stored energy Nicole had inside of here was coming out. The rhythm of labor that once felt like forward momentum now felt more like a loop, like one of those dreams where you are just trying to get somewhere, but something always gets in the way and you never arrive.
Morning gave way to afternoon and then to evening. We tried soaking in the warm tub, swaying on the birthing ball, shifting positions, pressing into counter-pressures, groaning, humming, breathing. And still, the contractions kept coming, offering her no more than five minutes of rest between each one. Nicole hadn’t eaten since dinner the night before, over 24 hours ago. She couldn’t keep down even a sip of broth. She hadn’t slept. Her strength was beginning to visibly wane. Purplish-blue rings beneath her eyes deepened into bruised shadows. Her skin broke out in goosebumps that arrived unprovoked, ghostlike, as if her body were reacting to something unseen. She was trembling in flashes. Her system was beginning to unravel, slipping out of sync with itself. Like a symphony slowly falling out of tune.
By the time the third wave of midwives rotated in, night had fallen again. The hours had blurred, time bent, it was now early in the morning, though the concept of morning had lost all meaning as little light came in through the windows. Nicole was suspended in a torturous trance, caught in a liminal world between worlds, releasing deep and primal moans that now sounded otherworldly with her contractions. A depth of sound that seemed to come from some ancient place beneath her consciousness that the stone walls swallowed and echoed back like a slow exorcism. It began to feel like a dungeon, like we were back in medieval times, undergoing a slow death.
Occasionally, her eyes would meet mine and there was something in them that shook me. Not fear, not panic… but something quieter. A fading. Her skin had gone pale, her hair damp from sweat, cold and sticking to her forehead. She looked like she was dying, her soul slipping away with each contraction.
And there was nothing I could do.
I rubbed her back. Held her hand. I curled my body around hers, my chest pressed against her back like a steady wall, becoming the big spoon, holding her, trying to keep her from contracting into oblivion. My arms wrapped over her belly, cradling the life that had not yet arrived and. Each time a contraction took hold, I could feel it ripple through her and into me, a tight, trembling wave that seized her from the inside out and transferred through her spine and into my ribs. Her body would stiffen against mine, her muscles tightening like cords drawn too tight.
The hours became a tunnel, no longer tethered to day or night.
And still, Lou was not yet here.
The Energy Breaks
After we entered the wee hours of the next day, Nicole knew something wasn’t right, not just with the birth, but the entire energy of the space surrounding us. On top of the 24 hours of convulsing, sweating and vomiting, the midwives we had grown to trust, who had cared for us so tenderly over the last 12 hours, handed over the torch, and in their place came two new faces: one a certified midwife, the other still in training.
Nicole was in the bath again when the switch happened, shivering because she’d been in their long enough for the warm water to turn lukewarm. And then the door opened and in came these two strangers, offering encouragements that fell into the room like plastic confetti and gas station cheeseburgers that’ve been under the hot lamp for 7 hours.
“gooood , just breathe”
“Nice job, rellaaaxxxx”
It felt like a sick joke the world was playing on us.One of them, in an attempt to lighten the energy, suggested putting on a playlist, some premade collection of “healing” and “spiritual”, two-minute tracks that sounded like they belonged in a yoga class in a strip mall. I felt nauseous how wrong the moment felt and for the first time i was genuinely scared. All of those pre birth thoughts stemming from birthing horror stories where either the baby or the mother, or even worse, both of them die during birth. It sent shivers along my arms that crawled up the back of my neck to the base of my skull.
It felt like we’d been floating down a river, exhausted from treading water all day and now night had fully swallowed the sky. Somewhere ahead, a low rumble arose, the unmistakable sound of a white water drawing near. It was as if we were drifting straight toward death’s door.
The midwives left us alone with that horrid playlist and I helped Nicole out of the bath, guiding her gently to the bed. We curled up together, her skin cold to the touch and bubbling with goosebumps, yet she wasn’t shivering. She looked at me with exhausted eyes and I looked back. No words were exchanged. We both knew, the moment was not right, not in sync, not in harmony.
“I want to go to the hospital.” nicole said.
The transfer and Revival
The decision, once spoken, gave us something to move toward a crack of light in the dark. For the first time in hours, I felt purpose seep back into my body. We gathered our things: her cold damp clothes in a ball on the floor, snacks we hadn’t touched, a half-empty water bottle. There was something relieving in the quiet rhythm of packing up. The act itself felt like a turning point, like we were climbing our way out of a hole. And so, once again, we found ourselves gliding through the cold, dark sleepy streets of Bern.
The contrast was jarring. The soft stone and wood of the birthing house gave way to bright fluorescent lights, masked nurses in blue scrubs, sterile white walls and an unmistakable sense of sterility. Relief washed over me, i knew that we were now in the right place, back in sync. Nicole was wheeled into a spacious labor and delivery room surrounded by large, humming medical devices, their blinking lights rhythmic and steady, reassuring in a cold, clinical way. She signed a few papers, met the doctor on site, and then was prepped for the epidural.
For the first time in over 30 hours, I watched her relax. Her eyes softened. Her lips curled into a tired smile. I smiled back. The energy shifted instantly, like someone had flipped a switch. We synchronized immediately with our new midwife, who mysteriously felt like an old friend.
Things blurred for me. I was too exhausted to keep my eyes open, so the nurse brought in a cot for me in which I could lay next to nicole. I drifted in and out, catching fragments of nurses coming and going and beeping machines. When I woke, it was just in time to say goodbye to that incredible midwife and meet two new ones. And suddenly, the energy shifted again. It felt like the moment before a show begins, just as the band begins the unmistakable first chord of a hit song or like a legendary closer jogging onto the field. Nicole came back to life. She sat up straighter. Her eyes sharpened. Determination returned. The energy raised me from the cot. Finally, the moment i had anticipating birth would look like, cinematic. Action.
I positioned myself next to nicole, held her hand. Her legs were propped up. The movie scene version of birth had arrived. The contractions came and with the help of the epidural, Nicole was once again able to push with everything she had, squeezing my hand just like I had imagined.
A Ticking Clock
Gradually, more nurses entered the room until there were at least seven. Then the doctor arrived, a confident woman I trusted immediately. She gave us the low down, (in german) and although i didn’t understand, i understood the tone. There was still a chance, but time was running out. Apparently Lou had turned. The back of his head was now pressed against Nicole’s pelvis, making descent almost impossible. And that time was running out, the amniotic fluid was nearly gone. The window to avoid an emergency C-section was closing fast.
The doctor assumed her quarterback-like position in front of Nicole's whoo-who, taking her fingers and prying open Nicole's vagina like a heavy sliding door of a burning house. She encouraged me to look, pointing to what was undeniably Lou’s head, soft and full of brown hair. So close. And yet, he wouldn’t budge. His head was stuck. Nicole pushed with all she had left. It wasn’t enough.
The air thickened. It was time. Nicole was taken from me, wheeled out of the room to the operation room and I was led to a small room to suit up: paper gown, shoe covers, hairnet, mask, gloves. I sat alone on a plastic chair waiting, watching the nurses move in and out of the operating room through large sliding doors as they finished preparing the space.
Finally, I was ushered in. Nicole lay on the table, draped from the chest down by a large curtain. I sat beside her and as gently as i could, rubbed the back of my fingers along her sweaty forehead and then kissed her. I could taste the salt on my lips. Her eyes were tired, yet strong, way stronger than mine, i felt ready to break down crying. Thirty-four hours of watching, unable to help other than remain present and strong for her had wore me down. My nerves were shot. And she lay there, moments from being cut open. I sat there fighting back tears and the sickening thought: What if she doesn’t make it?
LOU
The doctor asked, “Are you ready?”
And then it was silent, a charged pause. I peeked over the curtain. A small, blue body was being raised from Nicole’s stomach. Umbilical cord hanging, limp, not crying.
I looked down at nicole, my eyes stinging with tears and kissed her.
She placed him in my arms, a tiny 3.4kg body that was hot against my forearms. We both looked at him, this tiny curled body with closed eyes gently breathing. My arms trembled as i wept. Hot tears streamed down my face, lips pressed tight.
The nurses instructed me to take him to a tiny table where i placed him down as gently as i could. A nurse handed me a tissue with a gentle smile. I wiped away tears, blew my nose. His eyes still hadn’t opened. He wiggled softly like a human worm.
They performed a quick series of tests, checking his breathing, heart rate, reflexes, muscle tone. Apgar scores. Then I was told to carry him to another room. I laid him down once more and they wiped him clean, weighed, and measured him.
His head tilted to the left, directly facing me. I looked at his eye lids, watched as he opened them and we saw one another for the first time.
It cracked me open.
From a deep part of me, somewhere i had never been, never knew existed, poured a love that put fear in my heart.