Anesthesia

My book has gone back to a shelf that's too high for me to reach, and I'm too infirm at the moment to climb up a stepladder. But I have to recap the glory of 1940's anesthesia. :)

I loved the excited manner in which he described how, woo hoo! Gone are the days! The days when women must suffer such pain to give birth! Pain is now entirely optional thanks to . . . nitrous oxide!

It goes like this, he explains:

A woman is instructed to bear down just before the worst pain hits. Then she takes a deep breath of nitrous oxide, or "laughing gas." Blissfully unaware of . . . anything . . . the mother quickly awakes to discover that by bearing down before she was unconscious, she has assisted her baby in descending through the birth canal. As another pain begins to come on the process is repeated, until finally the mother awakes to find a newborn baby!

Awesome...!?!

You just have to appreciate our day and age, don't you? (And also, a man-centric medical world that managed to finally care about and address the issue of labor pain, even if the best they could come up with for a while was laughing gas!) Almost-all-of-human-experience Lady had no option but to suffer it out—over and over and over again if she didn't happen to be diligently scared into non-menstrual abstinence. (How sad that your relationship with spouse could be so scary! Imagine!) 1940s lady was still getting pregnant all the time, but she could at least whiff some laughing gas...? Dang! And now there's now, when the average woman can plan her pregnancies, then have a barrage of help during the delivery to manage pain in an actually low-risk way. Acupuncture, jet tubs, your husband, injections, epidural....

And you don't even have to be unconscious?! You have got to be kidding me! :)

Thank you, 2010. And all the research and progress that led to it. :)