I knew that the only way out of this mess was to go through the pain, but it seemed impossible that I could take one more second of it.įlat on my back, devoured by the gnawing of seemingly unbearable suffering, I did the first thing that came to mind: I turned up the volume on my iPod and tried to lose myself as much as possible in the song that was playing.
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In the midst of such profound, all-consuming suffering, I didn’t know how to mentally check back in and get back to managing it. I had mentally checked out of dealing with the pain since I thought it was only minutes until it all went away. I felt a tinge of panic so severe that I thought I might lose my mind if I gave in to it. In other words, the epidural was not coming any time soon. The anesthesiologist wasn’t sure whether or not my medical issues would cause bleeding in the spinal cord if he gave me the epidural, so he needed to make some calls and pull some other charts - after he helped a couple other patients. Because I’m no fan of needles near my spinal cord, I waited until the pain was shatteringly unmanageable to ask for an epidural. To manage the notoriously painful Pictosin-induced contractions while almost completely immobile is no easy thing, as I was reminded a few hours into my labor with baby #3. Between the machines and wires and boots I can’t even turn on my side. I’ve found that Tupac’s songs in particular - the infectious beats mixed with rhythmic laments about the human experience - somehow put me in the right state of mind for coping with great pain.Īnd, with baby number three, there was plenty of pain to cope with.Įver since I was diagnosed with a serious blood clotting disorder, all my labors have to be induced and I have to be hooked up to an IV, a few different monitors, and my legs placed in pneumatic boots to prevent blood clots. It’s always been one of my favorite genres of music, and for some reason I find that blasting a good rap song is far better than anything I ever learned in Bradley Method class. Instead I put on my iPod headphones and began my pain management technique of listening to rap.
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And in this case too, I just kind of forgot about the idea of offering up my labor because I couldn’t get a full intellectual understanding of how exactly to do it. In my typical fashion, I always got so caught up in analyzing it that I’d never actually tried it. I didn’t understand how, specifically, you go from “just suffering” to “offering your suffering to God by uniting it with Christ’s.” I mean, is there some form we fill out where we describe the time and place of the suffering involved, check the “offer it up” box, and submit it to God with our signature? It didn’t seem like simply saying the words that you’re offering your suffering to God would really change anything. It’s something I’d puzzled about a lot in the past.
For a while I considered what intention I might want to offer this labor for, but got sidetracked trying to figure out how this redemptive suffering thing works. In the early stages of labor with baby #3, I thought a lot about the idea of “ offering it up, ” uniting our own sufferings with Christ’s for the good of someone else. With my first child I was still basically an atheist, so my thoughts on suffering during the difficult 18-hour labor all basically fell in the category of “how to avoid it.” But my second and third children were born after my conversion, leaving me thinking a lot about the topic from a religious perspective. Snoop and Scoop later talked about what Snoop thinks 2Pac would be doing if he was alive today, with Snoop saying he thinks Pac would remain outspoken on a lot of the issues in the industry now, and that he'd be making more records about police brutality now than all of the ones he made when he was alive.Not surprisingly, I find that labor is a great opportunity to think about the topic of suffering. was recording "Somebody's Gotta Die," and felt so much love when he heard how Biggie referenced him on the track. Snoop also said that throughout the conversation they didn't even bring up the "NY NY" record, and that following their heart-to-heart the Doggfather later linked up with in the studio while B.I.G. And he explained to me how much he loved 2Pac." This is his friend that's dead, they had a misunderstanding and he could never get no justice for his emotions, but he's showing me his emotions. "This is not a man that's happy or glamorized. Snoop went on to explain that Biggie was not in any way glad that his West Coast rival had been killed because they were actually friends, and that the loss really impacted him.