I'd long thought I wanted a home birth, and I still wanted one by the time I got pregnant with the kiddo, but circumstances that put me in the technical high risk category took that off the table. My husband and I were still committed to having as natural and non-medicalized a birth as possible despite having to deliver in a hospital setting. I'd been unknowingly radicalized long before I really even envisioned myself as a mother when I stumbled across the incredible book Spiritual Midwifery by Ina Mae Gaskin. The films Pregnant in America and The Business of Being Born, as well as other books by Sheila Kitzinger, Penny Simkin, and Martha Sears sealed the deal on my committment to natural childbirth. I was actually terrified of having to give birth in a hospital, especially after we toured the "birthing center" at the hospital where we had to deliver and were told that IVs and fetal monitoring were mandatory. I was sobbing by the end of the tour, convinced that we'd have to struggle VERY hard to get anything approaching the birth we wanted. As my pregnancy progressed without major complications and as we deepened our relationship with our amazing Ob-Gyn, I began to hope that things might be salvageable if my pregnancy kept on being uneventful. I did have a big scare at 28 weeks when I started having strong contractions that landed me in triage at L&D, with some question for a while as to whether or not they were going to admit me and start steroid injections in the event I went into premature labor. I ended up being diagnosed with irritable uterus, was on semi-bed rest for a little while, and had weekly checkups and regular fetal fibronectin tests for the rest of my pregnancy. As time went by and our confidence increased that these contractions were going to remain non-progressive, it became the "new normal" and we started to relax a bit. With our doctor's full support, we drew up a birth plan that clearly stated our wishes and outlined our ideal scenario for our daughter's birth. We had our doula lined up and ready. We ferreted out tedious details of hospital procedure and policy to make sure we knew our rights. We hashed it out and rehearsed it and picked it apart, back to front and up and down, until we felt we were prepared for anything, and then we just had to sit back and wait.
The day I went into labor, I woke about 6 am to contractions that I knew were the real deal (I'd had 12 weeks of "not the real thing" contractions to compare them to). Part of our plan involved laboring at home for as long as possible, so we went about the business of breakfast, showering, some last minute cleaning, making phone calls, and enjoying the last hours of our life as a two-person family. By the time I had been in labor for about 10 hours, the contractions were starting to become quite painful and, surrounded by family, friends and our doula, we hunkered down for the toughest part of the journey. It was a chilly, rainy October evening and my house was full of people I love having tea and maple bars that I'd made the day before and drifting in and out of the bedroom where I was laboring. It was a really wonderful, supportive environment. I decided it was time to go to the hospital when my contractions were about 3 minutes apart; this was about 8 pm. By about 9 pm, I'd been processed thorugh triage and was dilated to 7 cm and 100% effaced! Show time! Off to the L&D suite... We'd been sweating because our Ob-Gyn was due to go out of town any day, and I shouted with relief when we found out that he was still in town and on his way. Things were happening so fast at that point - the nurses tried to get a heplock started but couldn't due to my tiny, uncooperative veins and the fact that I was in such heavy labor, so they finally gave up, which was one of the greatest reliefs of the night. No IV!
My parents and one of my best friends accompanied us to the hospital and were with us in the labor suite (along with our doula). It was great to have the support, and I guess we seemed like a capable little army since the staff left us alone, for the most part, to labor in peace and relative privacy. My water broke about 10:30 pm, and not long after that I hit a real low point - total and utter exhaustion and the fear that I wasn't going to be able to go on. I had been kneeling on the bed for quite a while as that was the most comfortable way I'd found to ride the contractions. The nurses were, by that time, really starting to push me to get down on the end of the bed and into the squat apparatus. I could hear them and I knew what they wanted me to do, but I just.could.not.do.it. I couldn't access either the strength to move my legs or the command over the periphery of my body to make it happen. All of my senses and energy were concentrated in my belly; my reality had shrunk to just that. Just that. From somewhere out in space, I heard my voice saying that I couldn't, and the next time my doctor came in, he told them it was OK, we'd just roll with it (the man is awesome, awesome).
I really had to struggle to regain focus at this point. I'd done enough reading to know that I was probably hitting the transition and that if I could just get through a little more, our daughter would be born. Not long after I started trying to regroup and get it together, the urge to push came along, and as we had decided to do self-directed pushing, I just went with the urge and the flow. I didn't think about it at the time, but in retrospect it was amazingly easy to do, and worrying that I would know when and how to push was one of my big anxieties prior to labor.
Although I was only dimly aware of what was going on around me, I could tell that the room was starting to turn into a hive of activity. My doctor came in and stayed, I had a couple minutes of fetal monitoring, and the nurses were gathering and starting to roll around several tables of gear. I had expected that once I got through transition my contractions might spread out a bit, but it didn't seem like they did, and I felt like I was still flailing around, psychologically, trying to find a place to anchor myself. I was still feeling an overpowering fatigue, but at some point I heard my husband yell "I can see her head!" and that did it for me! I pulled it together for a few more big pushes, felt that incredible sensation of crowning, and then at 12:05 am on October 15th (five minutes into her due date!) my daughter slipped out into my husband's hands. The doctor pulled her forward through my legs, and there I was, gazing down into the face of my child. She came into the world very true to her personality - hyper-aware and intense. She didn't cry much, but seemed more interested in just checking everything out. The doctor went about the business of giving her a quick once-over, my husband cut the cord once it had stopped pulsing, and then kiddo was placed on my chest and we did skin-to-skin and I nursed her. There were some immediate concerns about her body temp being a bit low, so after she had been at the breast for a while, they took her and put her in a warming bed on the other side of the room. While I nursed her, I delivered the placenta, got an intramuscular shot of Pitocin due to the fact that I had lost quite a bit of blood, and had 2 stitches placed in a small tear. While the kiddo was in the warming bed, my mother helped me shower and get changed, and after that I crawled back into bed and did some more skin-to-skin and nursing. Fortunately, my daughter's temp came up fairly quickly, so there was no need to discuss having to take her away, and we were moved into our room to finally get nested down and have some sleep. Luckily, our hospital had rooming in, so my husband was able to stay with us, all three together in the room for the rest of our stay.
Our daughter, just a few minutes after birth
In hindsight, the only aspect of the birth I was unhappy about was the time my daughter spent in the warming bed. I wish we had been a bit more insistent that she stay skin-to-skin with some warm blankets over top of us, which I think would probably have been more effective. All things considered, despite my fears, we really did have the "homebirth in a hospital" that we had dreamed of. It was without doubt the most intense and most wonderful experience of my life. In some ways, it was almost as if my daughter gave birth to me; so changed was my life afterwards, it was almost as if I was the one completely new in the world. Nursing also came very easily for us, and I believe a big part of that was that I didn't have any drugs during labor that could have made my daughter groggy and interfered with the nursing process. All the more reason, I think, to have a natural childbirth and one more reason I want to do the work of helping other women birth their babies without drugs, too. So - to that end, I'm taking a birth doula workshop next month which will count towards my DONA certification. With any luck, this time next year I will be finished with my certification and seeing clients of my own. I don't think it's possible to overstate how excited I am about becoming a birth professional, and suddenly there are all kinds of things to think about, such as business cards, a web presence, memberships in professoinal organizations - all kinds of planning and things to start organizing in my head. Over the last couple of weeks, it's kind of gone from 0-60 with that and it still has something of a sense of unreality about it, but it's only about 5 weeks until the training, so it's going to get a lot more real very soon! Stay tuned.
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