Ilse Witch writes:

I don't know if it would be a good idea or not, but I do know that once
labour starts, your hormones will take over control. You may not need
any sleep for 30 hours and you will still be able to have an
intervention free birth. It is truly amazing, but your body is build for
it and you will make up for the lost sleep afterwards.

Second this. I'm someone who needs my sleep in general, but my pattern went
like:

Day 1: up some time, I forget, maybe 9am
awake till 10pm-ish
midnight-5am, waking every 15m or so for contractions + bathroom trips,
dozing between them
Day 2: 5am up; in labour (to some extent) all day, all the following night,
Day 3: all the following day, till DS was born c7.30pm the following day.
Asleep maybe at 11pm?

IOW in over 2.5 days (2 nights), I had 2 hours of uninterrupted sleep, plus
perhaps another 3-4 hours of sleep in 10 minute chunks. I had problems,
chiefly a very annoying midwife, but tiredness was not one of them!

What would be good to discuss with your doctor is how to get enough
sleep in the months and weeks *prior* to labour, since sleeping gets
more and more uncomfortable. If they can prescribe you a sleeping aid
that is safe, you will be as fit as possible. That is far more efficient
than trying to catch sleep during labour.

Yup.

Another thing that occurs is, have you got a plan for *after* the birth? I
had a feeling that benadryl was not OK for breastfeeding, though I could be
wrong. With any luck, you won't have a problem with insomnia after the
birth, provided you breastfeed: it really does seem to be true that the
breastfeeding hormones released during a feed help you to relax and sleep.
Apparently a breastfeeding mother can reach the deepest level of sleep much
faster than normal, so you get the maximum benefit from the sleep you do
get. Although I couldn't sleep while nursing, as many can, I did notice
that I hardly ever lay awake after the feed was over, even though it
usually takes me quite a while to fall asleep, even if it's the middle of
the night and I'm tired. Of course this works best if you can go straight
from breastfeeding to sleep, without having to move or get cold in between.
Are you planning to cosleep? That makes it easiest of course, but a warm
room sufficiently close to where the baby sleeps would probably also work.

Thing is, if you *do* have a problem going back to sleep after a feed
(whether breastfeeding or articifial feeding) you've then got a problem,
because you don't know when you're going to have to wake up again, which
makes using drugs to sleep tricky. My experience of the sleepiness induced
by antihistamines (of which Benadryl is one isn't it?) is that it makes
waking up a couple of hours after a dose a very unpleasant experience. If
you haven't already worked it out, maybe it's worth thinking about, since
there might be simple things you could do that would help from day 1.

Sidheag
DS Colin Oct 27 2003