Welcome to Mothership: Parenting stories you actually want to read, whether you're thinking about or passing on kids, from egg-freezing to taking home baby and beyond. Because motherhood is a big if — not when — and it's time we talked about it that way.
These days, moms in labor are getting shit done. From finishing their college exams to voting for Hillary to cranking out a Mannequin Challenge video for the ages, we women are not going to let a few contractions stand in our way. (I, for one, spent the first 14 hours of early labor cleaning house and watching all of Transparent season two, because why not?)
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Taking the average four to eight hours of active labor and the actual pushing-out-a-child process as an opportunity to catch up on sleep, though? That seems like an impossible feat. But not, according to PopSugar, for Alice Payne.
The site reports that Payne, who was induced at 38 weeks pregnant, was given drugs to help her sleep and injections of the hormone Syntocinon to increase the frequency of her contractions. However, the contraction monitor was malfunctioning (um, nightmare), so they increased her dosage. What the doctors didn't realize — again because of the faulty machine? — was that sleeping Payne was actually 10 centimeters dilated and ready to push.
It's a pretty terrifying scenario, what with all that medical malfunctioning, and yet there's a happy ending: Payne, mid-nap, was able to respond to her husband's voice as he coached her to push. Payne told The Daily Mail that her doctors were "amazed" to watch her give birth to a healthy baby boy "whilst napping." She adds that her medical team called it the "weirdest thing" they'd encountered. Us too, Alice.
Although the stories of the heavily medicated "Twilight sleep" births that some of our grandmothers endured sound terrifying, it's worth noting that hospital birth practices have come a long way in recent decades. And although even Nap Goddess Alice says she wishes she "had been more present for my first baby's birth," the bottom line is there are a thousand different ways to go through the labor and delivery process. Any birth that produces a healthy and happy mom and baby is a successful one.