Birth by Chainsaw

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Hey, everyone! Normally this is a series of posts I share every Monday for my paid subscribers at just $5/month. But I wanted to share this with everyone this time because this story is really important to me. It’s a graphic novel in progress!

The preamble: My youngest had to be born premature in Spring of 2020 by emergency C-section to save both of our lives.

Did you know that the chainsaw was first invented to help birth babies? (and another doctor developed one simultaneously for amputations and the like. You know, good old horror movie bone-sawin’)

The first saws were invented by Germanic tribes in 5,000 BC, but the first chainsaw was a grotesque-looking hand cranked device. And to make matters even more horrendous, anesthesia was rarely to never used in those days.

These days, chainsaws are gas or electric and used to fell entire trees, emerging out of a period where there as a shortage of lumberjacks.

But just imagine being cut open with this, as a last-ditch effort to save your life and the life of your child, feeling the complete brunt of the pain of being systematically and brutally cut open by a round of sharp teeth:

Source: https://www.popsci.com/story/science/weirdest-thing-chainsaw-childbirth-santorio-delayed-conception/ ALSO, this article is a source of some of my information about this history of this device: https://science.howstuffworks.com/science-vs-myth/everyday-myths/why-were-chainsaws-invented.htm

Is this a werewolf tale (which I’m also writing one of these about the predators who live among us and Borderline Personality Disorder), or ax-murderer thriller, or what? Horror as a genre has ancient roots. In Victorian times it was a genre particularly for women. And there’s no wonder why.

This gnawing open by an unending and brutally-toothed tool is how it felt to me to be close to death, close to expiring in a cloud of what’s either long covid/and or my crippling PTSD—which induced extreme hypertension that will likely need to be medicated for the rest of my life. I was so close to losing a child I’d spent months growing every bone and organ of. And growing my love for.

I was so close to losing myself. I was weighted by the mantle of emotional terror laid upon us all during the global Covid-19 pandemic—a time of loss and long-term illness and terror, aided and abetted by ineffective government and massive morgues in tents and trucks parked alongside the overfull coffers of the dead and dying within the walls of the very institutions who were desperately trying and horrifically unable to end our collective trauma.

Birth by Chainsaw:

A Horror Tale of My Near-Death Experience of Birthing a Child during a Global Pandemic

Below is how my ideas form, from a kernel of this fact about chainsaws, which I immediately related to my birthing experience and my proclivity for writing about PTSD and my life within the horror genre. This idea formed in part because the history of trauma is the story of women and other folx deemed outsiders by the patriarchy and embedded systems of power. And in part because I’ve been watching brutal horror movies since the age of 3 or younger.

Did you know that chainsaws were invented to help remove babies from the womb in the 1830s?

They were used in symphysiotomies—a sawing of the pelvic joint, cartilage, ligaments, and even bone—to help babies fit out.

Though not used much anymore since the 20th century, it doesn’t mean modern day birth is easy—particularly when assistance is necessary.

While not a chainsaw massacre, there is plenty of horror yet.

[One Day Old Baby]

First off, if you don’t birth “natural,” half of womenfolk are already judging you.

“Psst… that doesn’t look like the head of a vaginally-birthed baby!”

“No, you’re right, Karen, it sure doesn’t.”

“Nobody’s free without breaking open.”

-Ocean Vuong

If you DARE to have a c-section for any reason, those who pushed babies out “on their own,” hardly deign to credit your experiences as a “birth story” at all.

“See, the doctor did all the work for her while she was blissfully medicated.”

“Cesareans became the safer alternative to being chain-sawed wider, particularly once there were additional advancements in anesthetics for surgery.”

I’ve had two, both brutal, and both misunderstood by the majority of folks around me.

My first, Levee, was born 39.5 hours post-induction and he had a cone head from hanging out in the birth canal so long.

“The main thing I love about memoir is the challenge of finding a coherent story in the random events of life.”

—Allison Bechdel in a zoom lecture

I have a narrative stored in my brain that is my first-born’s “birth story,” but it has a lot of holes in it.

December 2nd was my due date. As a high risk pregnancy with a low-weight baby, they mandated I be induced on my due date if labor didn’t begin before then.

I chose a manual, unmedicated balloon-catheter induction.

I had a very naïve, idealistic birth plan. I bargained for everything I could.

I’ve always been strangely proud of dialating my own cerviz within seconds. If only in the hours and days that followed, I’d been able to stretch more than 1 additional cm.

You see, the bar is 10cm. No less. You have to have room to fit out the biggest, most infexible part of the baby: their head.

And my first-born had (and has to this day) an absolutely enormous head.

In times past, “the old days,”he would have been what’s known as “a dead baby.” And I might have died, too.

But in modern times and with a desire for a “natural”

and “unmedicated” birth, I labored on…

Next, they insisted on “breaking the bag”/”my water.”

That done, and I labored on many more hours. I wasn’t allowed to eat anything, which I later discovered was a silly mistake/communication error on the part of the staff.

Thankfully, I’d frozen cubes of juice and tea that I’d brought from home, so I had something to go on… Because 3 days of labor is already

I won’t type out the rest of the text of this comic in progress, but you get the idea!

And there’s more. Some snippets here and there explored in other sketchbooks. But I’ll save that for my writing process.

Would you have any interest in reading this story in comic form? I hope so. I long for a time in my life where I can afford to dedicate the time to caring for and fostering all of these seeds of narratives inside of me. I badly want to grow them into their full forms. To make them the best I can.

Anyway, thanks again for reading. This also keeps me going just on its own, even if it doesn’t keep my lights on.