Originally published in Twenty Bellows Matriarch: Meditations on Motherhood (2025)

The epidural was created by someone who cared. 

I looked up the history once I realized how this individual has saved my life three times. 

I know little of who created the epidural because as I was reading about them, my children interrupted me with cries for snacks, attention, and love. I know they were male, a Spaniard, and a medic in a war. I know, like all mothers, they were not given credit where credit was due, and their idea was originally claimed by someone else (and eventually handed over posthumously). I know they helped ease dying people’s pain more than they saved lives. I know their efforts were valiant but more painful than the amputations they performed. 

The epidural has helped many mothers. An epidural, to me, is one of the most frightening yet pleasant gifts to receive. A body soother, a warm blanket, and a reprieve from labor pains that cause one to buck up their pain tolerance to endure what the body perceives as part of its universe. 

Laboring mothers go into a beast mode they’ve never known before. They become tolerant of the off-road racing happening in the lower body. The dirt ramps, the wheelies, the crashes into walls – the hips feel that. Part of them craves it. They deny needing an escape, brave enough to power on and see how bad it can actually get. In fact, it gets much worse. 

I received an epidural with all my children – once after I was fully dilated, in the thick of active labor, and afraid I would have the baby in the car, and twice in a methodical manner when the contractions started getting strong. Whenever I decided to take the plunge into numbness with the epidural, the experience was harrowing but a survival savior, nonetheless. 

The anesthesiologist arrives, big needles in hand and a gleam in their eyes. Most are dedicated to doing the stick with perfect poise, not knowing the patient in front of the rear patch of skin that stares at them with a fierce growl. They hope the patient commits to the posture and makes it possible for them to dig into the blank space in the back, pristinely reserved for a special fluid shared only by the brain and the spine. 

The anesthesiologist is cool as a cucumber, collected as a monk, focused like a person deactivating a bomb. They prep the area as if they were going to eat off your back. The chilled temperature of the alcohol amplifies the screams in your nerves. Your torso convulses as if you were dancing along to the second encore at a Led Zeppelin concert. 

“You are about to feel a sharp twinge,” they explain to you. It is the beginning of the end. The numbing flows into your back as they replace the small syringe with a large-bore needle. The needle is interested in consuming you, becoming a part of you. Wanting to insert itself into your business.

Along comes another contraction as they prepare to stick in the needle, the needle of which you do not know the length, but if you did know, you would know that it is longer than a mini-golf pencil. They are smart and watch the monitor, waiting for the proper time, waiting for the wave to wash away. 

By this time, you are breathing. Smelling the air as if the promise of a baby were entering your nose like a vapor of smoke. You try to stop the shaking. Thoughts enter your brain of your two girls in a grassy meadow. You are standing with them in a circle, breathing in and blowing out collectively, keeping a purple-tinged bubble the size of a washing machine up in the air. Inside the bubble is a flame, burning madly. Your breathing continues in the hospital bed because of these thoughts. The two girls calm you down. The shaking stops. Your breaths are in unison. 

“You are going to feel some pressure now,” they say. You brace yourself. Keep blowing up that bubble, whatever you do. If it pops, the flame will extinguish. You can do it. You have help with you – the girls have strong lungs. 

The lather of desensitization whips over your body like buttery silk, beginning in your back and spreading like a growing corona into your legs and lower body. The scent of relaxation overtakes your soul. You are one with the idea of not feeling the experience of childbirth. You’d rather be in numb harmony when the baby arrives. Focus all your energy on holding the human you’ve been unable to reach for nine months. 

The epidural was created by someone who cared, and just like my children, without even seeing them, I know I already love them.