“This is going to hurt a lot” Our second Prenatal class

Our second Prenatal class was devoted to the explaination of “Sofurorogi” This is an English word made up by some Japanese health care professionals to describe the breathing and relaxation techniques used by our hospital to get the laboring mom thru the pain of labor without medication. Apparently this is based on natural birthing methods with origins in Spain and France. The basic breakdown of the word is “soft” and “ology” which is roughly translated into a “calm birth”. See how that works?!

Sean, Jess and I showed up late for the class (once again cause we were on time). Sean was the only dad in attendance but my doc said it was a good idea for Sean to be there since he would have attended that sort of class in Canada. It was nice of him to take that into consideration. We watched another video of a woman giving birth but the bulk of this class was devoted to meditation and relaxation techniques. Once again the room was unbearably hot. After we got past the deep breathing portion some of the moms started to drop off to sleep. At least we know the technique works! We went thru the proper techniques for breathing during contractions and how to make adjustments to keep yourself comfortable. The thing that stands out the most in my memory is that the delivery nurse doing the presentation said on more than one occasion “this is going to hurt a lot” and that we basically needed to find our way through the pain using whatever breathing and relaxation worked for us. The reason this stuck out so much for all 3 of us was that she was so uncharacteristically Japanese and up front about the pain. It’s not very common for Japanese folks to be honest about feelings. Perhaps this is another aspect of that closeness and honesty between women folk in this culture. After the breathing instruction we were treated to a tour of the LDR (labor/delivery/recovery) room. All of us mom’s to be got to try out the very cool bed/chair that has MANY buttons and removeable and adjustable parts that basically turn it into a rocket ship for giving birth!

All in all it was a basic but pretty informative class and it was really great to see a bit more of the hospital. Apparently we get another tour of the place a little later on so we’re looking forward to what that reveals as well!