‘Born stressed’: Giving birth in the 1998 ice storm | 24CA News

When Laurence Cohen walks into Montreal’s General Jewish Hospital, she remembers seeing the entire hospital plunged at nighttime, save for flashlight beams.

That’s the place she gave start to her second son Nathan on Jan. 15, 1998 — in the course of a historic ice storm.

“It’s not how you plan to welcome a child and give birth,” she stated. “The ice, the snow — it looked like the apocalypse.”

Cohen, 49, stated she was initially due on Jan. 5 and was already dilated two centimetres when the storm hit. She stated she was petrified of giving start in these circumstances, particularly after dropping energy.

She, her husband, their toddler and each units of oldsters moved into her husband’s grandmother’s condo — which nonetheless had energy — as she was out of city, and waited for the storm to move.

“What was difficult for me was I was so stressed because to give birth in these conditions would be a nightmare,” stated Cohen.

Cohen gave start the day after her residence obtained its electrical energy again.

“It’s crazy how the mind works, I was able to not deliver for 10 days. I really said, ‘I’m not going to deliver until I’m back home and have electricity,'” she stated.

“I was with my little suitcase for the baby for 10 days, living like this, plus having a young child. Everything turned out to be OK but it was like we were in a war. It was very scary.”

Though the start went easily — she delivered the kid in 11 minutes — she says her son was “born stressed.”

“I read that, years later, they did studies on babies born during that period, that they were more nervous and anxious,” she stated.

“I had this guilt that I communicated all this stress to him in his last days in the womb, but it was scary,” stated Cohen.

“Even getting to the maternity ward that night, all the lights were off and we used flashlights, they were keeping the electricity they used at a minimum because the hospital was working on generators.”

Ice-storm infants

Suzanne King, a researcher on the Douglas Mental Health University Institute, has been researching the consequences of stress on pregnant girls and their kids. She requested girls to recall annoying experiences from their pregnancies many years later, which she stated wasn’t best.

When the ice storm hit, she noticed it as an ideal alternative to observe girls and their kids over a number of years, she instructed CBC’s Radio Noon.

When getting her personal blood stress taken shortly after the storm ended, King stated “it was off the scales I couldn’t believe it. But I felt calm.”

“It occurred to me, this is stress and if I’m stressed, then there’s a whole lot of pregnant women out there who are also stressed.… The women didn’t bring this ice storm on themselves, it was uncontrollable and sudden.”

The analysis adopted the kids of practically 100 households between the ages of 6 months and 19 years outdated. They gathered data on the ladies’s experiences of the storm — like how lengthy they went with out electrical energy, social help and basic outlook on the expertise — and adopted up with them each two years.

King was amazed by the importance of the info gathered by Project Ice Storm. The ranges of stress skilled by the ladies affected many points of the kids’s improvement, together with cognitive, motor, behavioral and bodily, the analysis confirmed.

However, King is hesitant to make too many assumptions a couple of kid’s improvement being influenced by maternal stress alone.

“We can never look at any one kid and say, ‘Oh the reason they’re like this is the ice storm during the pregnancy,'” she stated.

“The genes that they get from their parents are way more important in determining what the child will be like.”

Still, she stated, though genes and DNA cannot be modified, how they’re expressed can.

For instance, how lengthy pregnant girls went with out electrical energy made a distinction in kids’s IQ, physique mass index, immune capabilities, insulin secretion and danger of diabetes. These results lasted not less than into adolescence, stated King.

“I think this liberates moms, it wasn’t their fault how many days they were without electricity, and so they can not feel guilty about that,” she stated.

King stated half the ladies adopted by the researchers discovered optimistic experiences within the ice storm, whereas the opposite half felt impartial or damaging. Those with extra optimistic reactions instructed tales of getting along with their communities, fellowship and serving to one another out.

King is now learning girls who had been pregnant in the course of the pandemic, and have already discovered that those that can discover one thing optimistic from the expertise have much less postpartum stress, she stated.

“The take-home message from Project Ice Storm is that you can’t avoid a natural disaster,” stated King.

“But in situations like the ice storm, they can try to keep a positive outlook and social support. We keep seeing in our studies that if you can rely on people and have good social support, the effects are much lower.”