There was a point during labour when I would quite happily have ripped off every scrap of clothing, hunkered down into a squat and moaned like a pilot whale in the middle of a busy Frankie & Benny’s to deliver that baby. You could have thrown 10-inch four-cheese pizzas at my face and served cajun cheese fries off my head and I would hardly have noticed. Forty hours in, I was so beyond my body, so utterly absorbed by the swollen, fuzzy, monumental pressure beneath my skin, so transported by a feeling that wasn’t pain but felt like the tearing open of rock, that I would hardly have noticed if a family of four from Smethwick had turned up and started eating chicken wings in the corner of the birthing room. I have never been more aware of and more occupied by the present moment in my life.
Which is why, when I first read that University Hospital of Wales in Cardiff is offering labouring women virtual reality headsets during labour, I wondered, why bother? During the last 12 hours of my labour I was so completely transported by my physical experience, as I hung off door handles, appeared to slide up the wall and felt my breath leave my body like a coil of golden thread, that visions of a herd of buffalo or a quick virtual swim through a coral reef would hardly have registered. The idea of walking around my room in that wonderful east London birth centre, utterly naked but for a Daft Punk-style helmet over my pale and sweaty face, colostrum falling across my pulsating orb of a stomach, shuddering with each contraction like a freight train, seemed faintly ridiculous.
Except, this new trial is not intended for women during those advanced stages of labour. It is, as Suzanne Hardacre, the head of midwifery for Cardiff and Vale health board, explained, hoped that the virtual reality experience will allow women in early labour to relax, be distracted, perhaps guide their thoughts away from what’s to come, especially if they have had a traumatic birth experience in the past. This makes much more sense to me. About six hours into labour I was on all fours, rotating my hips, watching Dr No with my cousin. Another six hours after that, as the day began to fade and the light from my Aldi candles flickered up my bedroom walls I, inexplicably, asked my boyfriend to put on an audiobook of Harry Potter (I had never before read, nor taken much interest in, Harry Potter, but would like to sincerely thank the American teenager who recorded the entire second novel on her webcam and then uploaded it to YouTube so people like us didn’t have to suddenly subscribe to Audible in the middle of labour). I, too, wanted escapism.
The headsets (which, judging by the number of times I vomited during the early-to-mid stages of labour, are hopefully easy to clean) may also be useful for women who are being induced. I wasn’t, so cannot speak from experience, but I knew one woman who, having had an epidural after her induction, ended up reading a magazine to try to keep herself occupied. Roving across Mars or watching the northern lights through a 360-degree virtual reality experience seems superior to lying under hospital lights in a backless gown, flicking through the pages of the Angling Times.
Would it be useful during a caesarean, I wonder? Once you actually get into theatre, a caesarean is so quick all you’d have time for was about one episode of Hey Duggee, joked my friend, who gave birth via a planned caesarean section two years ago. Besides, for many women this is probably the most profound, most significant moment of their life: they want to be there, present and aware. Not necessarily marching through a colony of virtual penguins or lying across a white sand beach.
The truth is, however you give birth (and all births that result in a happy, healthy baby and happy, healthy mother are good births), and however you prepare, there is no escape from what’s coming. Your body has performed the most towering, awe-inspiring, transformative process the human frame can endure. Whether what dances across your eyes in the early stages is a shoal of silver fish, your hall carpet or a wall-mounted hand sanitiser, it is ultimately peripheral. You have made a life. It will be bloody, it will be overwhelming, it will be an experience beyond language. But it will happen. And no amount of charging buffalo or curly fries can change that.
• Nell Frizzell is a columnist and writer
