Below is the full, unedited text of a submission detailing the experiences of one mother who gave birth during the first year of the Covid era amid hospital demands of Covid tests, restrictions on visitors and masks. Please contact Covid Stories Archive if you would like to use or reproduce this essay, in whole or in part, for your research or writing. Also, please consider sharing your own stories for preservation in our archive.
I imagine I will always look back on 2020 as simultaneously the worst year of my life and the best. The best, because my son was born in May of 2020 and the worst because right as the world started to unravel, my father unexpectedly died from the cancer I thought he was successfully fighting. Nothing will ever break my heart more than the fact my Dad missed the chance to meet his grandchild by just a few months.
As we made our way in and out of the hospital each day to sit by my dying father’s side in February of 2020, things were starting to get weird. We knew that a funeral was imminent, and we were hearing rumblings from Washington state about a virus killing nursing home residents and spreading elsewhere. We started to wonder if family and friends would make the trip to the funeral to say Goodbye?
The hospital started to limit visitors, but we had an “in”. My Dad’s wife was a nurse and an administrator at the hospital so we came and went without too much pushback. Knowing so many were denied this same opportunity to give comfort to their dying loved ones and were kept from overseeing the care their family members were receiving, will never not enrage me. Had I been put in that situation, I can almost guarantee I would have been arrested attempting to gain access to my dying father’s bedside.
The timing of my father’s death was such that we did have a funeral and guests did attend. We were lucky to be able to say our goodbyes with family and friends gathered in person. Just a few short weeks later, the majority of others would be deprived this important ceremony of closure for many, many months to come.
The weeks and months to my due date ticked by in excruciating slowness. Time had slowed down for everyone. My work had dried up, I was losing a lot of income. Spouses were no longer allowed to attend prenatal appointments or be present during sonograms. When I entered the hospital to see my Obstetrician I watched horrified as confused, elderly patients were denied the assistance of their caretakers (typically their adult children) for their appointments, forced to go inside alone and un-advocated for. Our temperatures were checked. We were handed a mask
while being interrogated with a litany of health questions before being permitted access beyond the lobby of the hospital. I placed the mask in my purse.
During one of my final fetal testing appointments I couldn’t help but overhear (she had the call with her husband on speaker phone) a woman in the next bed over lamenting being denied her husband’s presence because she made the innocuous mistake of being brought in by her mother when her contractions started. Apparently the hospital would not allow you to swap out your support person. Whoever brought you in was who you were stuck with. He was floored at being denied the opportunity to witness the birth of his child and be present to support his wife in labor. When the nurses left I told her, “Discharge yourself, and then come back with your husband. Don’t listen to them, they’re not going to force you to stay or deny you coming back.” She didn’t seem to have any fight in her, so my suggestion probably didn’t go anywhere.
Contractions started for me at 6am on May [date redacted for privacy], 2020. I waited at home for as long as possible before going to the hospital. The hospital had become a profoundly unwelcoming, totalitarian place that I wanted to avoid for as long as I could manage. I had done my research and was well aware what might happen if you tested positive for COVID-19 while in labor. I was also well aware of the high, false positive rate due to PCR tests being run at over a trillion-times more sensitive than was reasonable. (My work had all but dried up so I had a lot of time on my hands for research.)
We got to the hospital around 11am and my contractions were extremely painful. My thighs felt like they were on continuous fire. I was brought into a triage room but not yet admitted. They confirmed I was in active labor and were making arrangements for me to be admitted when I was told they needed to do a COVID-19 test. (Interestingly enough they did not ask to test my spouse or the doula I had hired to be there with us. Only my presence, the vulnerable, pregnant woman’s presence was a threat to the staff.) I refused. They told me that if I did not take the test they would treat me as if I was positive. Which included not being permitted to have my spouse there. I did not agree to that and told them I needed pain management. I asked for gas and air (nitrous oxide mixed with oxygen) as I wanted to avoid an epidural if I could because epidurals can slow down labor which leads to increased risk of cesarean-sections, not because I’m a
masochist. The nurses kept referencing printed pages with sections highlighted at every request I made, to check what I assume was the hospital’s ever changing COVID-19 policies. I was told by one nurse they could not give me gas and air because COVID-19 was airborne. I told her that she wouldn’t deny an asthmatic an inhaler so why was she denying me an inhaled pain management drug. She said “it wasn’t the same thing” but of course it was.
Hours went by and I still had not been admitted or given any pain management. I was left alone in the room and my pain continued to intensify to the point I couldn’t take it anymore. After vomiting from the pain I sent my husband to get help and tell them I wanted the epidural.
They refused to give me an epidural unless I took the COVID-19 test. They withheld pain management as a means to coerce me into taking a medical test I did not consent to. I relented, desperate for pain relief. In active, excruciating labor, struggling to sit upright, they shoved a long swab so far up my nasal passage I could swear it was going to touch my brain. It felt like torture. I was told the test would take an hour to get a result back and that they were not allowed to re-enter my room for 30 minutes after administering the test. The reasoning for this “precaution”, I can only assume is mass hysteria.
An hour came and went and no results, no epidural. I sent my husband back out with
instructions to tell them to “stop dicking around and get me the fucking epidural”. They had not previously told me they wouldn’t give me an epidural until the test results were in, but they told us this now.
A new nurse came in, I guess the others had had enough of me. She took pity on me and gave me a shot of fentanyl which took the edge off and made my labor more manageable.
It was three hours before the test results came back. My results were negative. (As I had no fever and no signs of illness this was not a surprise, but it was a relief to have not been burdened with a false positive.)
The nurses withheld my admission for hours while I was in active labor, withheld the epidural I repeatedly cried out for, for hours, waiting for these results. To further punish me for not being a “compliant” patient they made me wait another whole hour for the epidural beyond this point as they put me through the admissions process that should have been completed hours prior. I finally got the pain relief I was desperate for (the fentanyl had long since worn off) after 6pm which was over twelve hours after my contractions had started and over seven hours since I had first arrived at the hospital.
I was lucky to get a delivery room at all with how long they made me wait to be admitted, I was told I got the last one. The nearby naval hospital’s delivery ward had been shut-down for some reason related to COVID-19 and the hospital I was at had taken on all of their laboring patients. This doubled the size of their typical patient load, running the staff that was much too thin to handle it ragged. Despite this, to their credit the nurses did handle an emergency with my son that came around 11pm with great care and urgency.
My labor ended up lasting 28 hours, I didn’t meet my son until late the next morning.
The next day in the post-delivery room my postpartum nurse swooped in, demanding I wear a mask. Tired, angry, frustrated and in pain I snapped something to the effect of, “I will not wear a mask, I just had a baby, furthermore you forced me to take a COVID-19 test and it was negative so there is no reason for me to wear a mask. I will not!” She told me I only had to wear it while she was in the room, but I told her I would not and I did not. She of course was wearing her own mask. I must have startled her with the aggressiveness of my response, she didn’t ask again.
Of course no visitors were allowed into the hospital, which frankly I was fine with. The last thing I wanted was the expectation of interacting with well-wishers, feeling as I did. I pressed to get discharged as quickly as I could. The idea of spending another night at the prison-like hospital was too much. We went home the next day.
Giving birth is stressful, scary and dangerous enough as it is. It is also supposed to be a joyous time. The response to COVID-19 has been so authoritarian, so myopic, so over the top, that it has robbed people of so much, including normal birthing experiences. It robbed each and everyone of us of missed experiences. The knee-jerk hysteria stole from us funerals, graduations, moments with newborn babies, and even just normality in a variety of situations including birth and face to face interactions. Where the virus itself has robbed many of their very lives, the response layered needless devastation on top of those losses with no benefit. Life is the collection of our experiences. We killed a year’s worth of experiences trying in vain to stop a virus that was never going to be stopped by those restrictions. Worse still are the now-fatal cancer diagnoses that went missed in time for treatment, those that died from too scared to go to the hospital to get treatment for their heart attacks, the delayed “elective procedures”, the suicides and substance abuse fatalities spurred by lockdowns. These non-COVID19 deaths are
laid plainly at the feet of humanity’s desire to do SOMETHING even if that SOMETHING does nothing good.
What we’re now left with now, over a year later, is a large swath of the population that are married to the idea of masks, lockdowns and fear of their fellow man so deep that it’s going to take years for them disentangle themselves from these talismans and phobias. I can only hope the truth does come out and is so undeniable that those who need it most will have a reckoning of what they have done in the name of stopping COVID-19.
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