I thought of a specific patient when I read this question. A year or two ago I was on call, when one of our patients arrived to the hospital having some cramping. The nurse checked her, and she was 5 or 6 centimeters dilated and contracting regularly.
She was in good spirits, and she had very expertly applied eye-shadow, and looked like a patient who would be sought out for pregnancy related advertisements.
It’s uncommon for patients to be so relaxed and comfortable appearing with such advanced dilation, but it does happen occasionally. Every month or two a patient will present to the hospital reporting mild cramping or mild back pain and turn out to be six or seven centimeters dilated.
Her water broke when she was 8 centimeters.
Okay, now it’s going to get real. This is what the nurses and I thought.
Except it didn’t.
She continued lounging and laughing with her husband.
“She doesn’t even have angry eyebrows!” exclaimed her nurse.
Even the most stoic patients often get ‘angry eyebrows’ as they move through transition and prepare to push.
Soon she was completely dilated and was feeling a mild urge to push.
She put away the iPad where she’d been looking at Facebook.
Over the course of two contractions she pushed her baby out. She held her breath while pushing but otherwise didn’t so much as grimace. Not a single bead of sweat graced her forehead. Her makeup remained perfectly applied.
I told her that I wished we’d filmed her birth, but she might be providing an example impossible for us mortals to replicate.
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