There is someone I work with now and again – I’ll call her E – who has two grown kids. A bunch of us were talking about animals yesterday and some of the vet work that needs to be done on them (My boss found a cat on the side of the road that had been hit by a car – thankfully it only had a concussion! Very lucky cat!) and E talked about how she faints at anything like that. She said when she first got pregnant they put her in a room and showed her a little movie about childbirth – and she walked out and fainted flat on the floor.

And then she went on to say that she had both children medication-free. I asked her a little about what brought that about, and she said, “It’s funny, the mind over the body. I wanted what was best for my babies. That poor doctor, though – if I could have scratched his eyes out, I would have. But by the time I was begging for medication it was too late.”

I thought that was pretty amazing. It just goes to show you the strength we all have inside us that we can call up when we want to – that even someone no one would expect to get through childbirth in one piece can decide to do it without medication.