It’s a question that runs through the mind of every first time mum-to-be – how will I know when I’m in labour? And if you actually ask the question, you’ll usually get the same reply: “Oh, trust me, you’ll know”.
What often follows is a description of the pain – period pain times ten, waves of pain, purposeful pain – which leaves you with no doubt that, yes, you’ll know when you are in labour.
Sarah Brown, a 27 year old mum of one, had heard the warnings. She did her research, read empowering books, shunned the horror stories and decided she would consider an epidural as a backup plan if she couldn’t cope.
But as she cradled her newborn baby girl, Brown says she was thinking, “Oh my gosh, I did it. I can’t believe that was it. That’s all labour is.” Describing her labour experience six months on, she says, “It wasn’t painful. I didn’t even feel the ‘ring of fire’. It was crazy. It was beautiful. It was the best experience of my life.”
At 38 weeks pregnant, Brown had been at home, putting together nursery furniture and going about her normal daily tasks. Demonstrating a classic case of mother’s intuition, she says she just had a “feeling” she should go to hospital to be checked. She was extra vigilant after being diagnosed with gestational diabetes and warned she was expecting a larger baby. Brown had also felt a few brief and very light period-like cramps – but nothing that she would describe as painful. She had no idea she was in the middle of active labour.
After stopping en route to the hospital at the shops to eat a sausage roll, she arrived at the hospital to be checked. It was then she received the surprising news. “The midwife gave me this look and said ‘You’re fully dilated and ready to push’.” Brown’s midwife then had to put her hand on Brown’s stomach to tell her when she was having contractions and needed to push.
Midwife Zoe Ryan, of BornOnline, says it is extremely rare for a woman to feel no pain during labour and birth. She says some of the signs that a woman is in labour – apart from pain – are nausea, diarrhea, pressure on the bottom or in the pelvis and back discomfort. However these things will almost always be associated with some form of pain.
Jenny Talbot, a 37 year old mum of four boys, says she certainly felt a form of pain during her first two births; she ended up requesting an epidural for both. However, her third baby’s arrival was preceded only by some mild back discomfort and five minutes of contractions that she felt as waves without the pain.
Sounds like the perfect scenario, a pain free labour, right? Without the usual warning that baby was on the way, Talbot’s baby arrived at home: “The whole time I was delivering I was lying on the laundry floor cuddling my then almost two year old trying to normalise the experience of him seeing his brother born and reassuring him I was okay.” She says that while it was the best of the four births, with her fourth birth ending in a caesarean, “there was stress in not being in a medical environment with the backup that provides.”
Talbot’s story highlights the fact that, like birth, the level of pain that accompanies birth can be unpredictable. Miriam Henke, a health psychologist and pain specialist, explains that while pain is known to be a “complex process of the central nervous system… most scientists and doctors don't really understand pain and how it works yet.”
There are things that are known to influence how a person experiences pain, though, she says. “For women during childbirth, there are sensory factors that influence the pain experience, such as baby size, the position it's in, the mother's pain threshold established during her lifetime, the environment she's in… right up to the amount of pain dulling hormones the body releases during childbirth.” A woman’s psychological make-up, including her resilience, also heavily influences pain perception.
While it may seem that the women who experience no pain have won the childbirth lottery, Henke reminds us that the pain of childbirth has a positive and useful element: “This pain has been a pervasive adaptation for survival, as a means of motivating the mother to get the baby out.”
And once baby has arrived, we forget the pain anyway, don’t we? At least until the next glowing mum-to-be asks us how she’ll know she’s in labour.
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