Our Birth Story (Part 1)

Long before we even became pregnant, we planned and prepared for a completely natural birth in a non-hospital setting. Our reasons were many and well thought-out. This isn't the story I will tell here, but the bottom line is that we wanted a natural birth for the health and safety of both me and the baby, as well as the emotional and spiritual benefits that accompany a birth that is viewed as a profound but natural process that usually does not require a clinical approach.

We read, exercised, attended childbirth classes, and arranged for a midwife-attended birth at a freestanding birth center.

The pregnancy continued flawlessly.

We came very close to having the experience we had hoped for. In fact, we had about 95% of the experience we wanted. However, at the very last hour of our labor, we needed medical intervention. Although it is difficult for me to write this story, it's not because I was disappointed or felt cheated of anything. These were the hardest and scariest hours of my life, and I have no regrets.

Our original due date was February 1st. I had started to dilate slightly about 3 weeks before then. The midwives felt that Grant would certainly come a little early. We waited not-so-patiently. I had about a million Braxton-Hicks contractions, but nothing escalated. When the due date came, the midwife talked to us about our plan of action if labor didn't start during week 41. We talked about the natural methods of encouraging contractions and we did them all. As the week went on I started to get really scared that I would end up having a C-section, which was my worst nightmare (I recognize that it was my lifelong fear of surgery in general that was fueling that, but still, I literally had nightmares about it).

By Saturday the 6th, I was frustrated, crying, tired, scared, all of it. I was down to my least appealing option: castor oil. I was fearful of this method for a lot of reasons, but I decided to take a very small dose and see what happened. Whoa Boy.

My mom was staying the weekend with us (having planned to do so when we thought there would be a baby by then) and she and I were watching a movie. Shane had gone out to meet friends for a drink. About 9 pm, 4 hours after the castor oil, the laxative effects of the oil kicked in and I was fairly uncomfortable. About an hour later, I started having big, painful cramps very low in my pelvis. At that point I didn't think I was having contractions, because my belly wasn't really squeezing like it did with the BH contractions. Also, we had been taught so thoroughly about timing contractions and false labor and blah blah blah, and these pains were only about 30 seconds long and came very irregularly. I was in a lot of pain, though, and it wasn't long before my mom had seen enough and texted Shane to come home.

At this point in the story my tracking of time gets very weird and based only on a few points of reference. After helping me get through a few contractions, Shane called the midwife. Apparently she could hear me yelling in the background and said to bring me in to the birth center. At some point she talked to me on the phone and tried to ask me some questions but I couldn't really focus on what she was asking. We got in the car at 1am and the birth center was only a couple of miles away. My mom stayed at our house with the older kids who were asleep long before all this started. I'm so glad she was there, because it would have been chaos to try and get them up or go through with any of our other contingency plans for them.

Once we got to the birth center, the midwife had to start an IV to give me antibiotics since I was beta strep positive. It only took a little while to get the antibiotics in and she capped the IV so I could get up and walk around. The pains were still coming relentlessly every 3 minutes or so, making it hard for me to regroup and stay focused in between. Eventually we managed to get some music on and I sat on the balance ball for a bunch more contractions. I really relied on Shane sitting with me and helping me stay calm. At some point the contractions got a little bit longer and slightly further apart, maybe about 5 minutes apart. It was better like that for a while. Once in a while the midwife checked my dilation but I didn't listen or care what the result was. We were making progress, which is all I cared about.


Shane was awesome through all this. I could stay focused on his voice and his face, and he took care of everything else, like getting juice and letting my mom know what was going on, etc. Sometime during all this, our friend Jen came to help us. She was absolutely awesome. She helped with everything, and her energy was calm and strong. I was so glad to have her there, and to know that she was giving Shane some support.

I don't really know what time it was when my water broke. It seemed inconsequential at the time. What I remember more clearly was that at some point I lost the ability to pee (sorry for TMI). So the midwife had to put in a catheter a couple of times, which meant I had to lie down on my back for a few minutes, which seemed like the worst possible thing to do.

This next part is where I get even more fuzzy on the timeline... Sometime in the early hours of Sunday morning, I heard the midwife tell me it was time to hold on to the massive square wooden bedpost, squat down, and start pushing. I didn't really like that idea, but once we tried it, it felt like the right time. About the same time, they started giving me more IV antibiotics as well as fluids, though I'm not sure why.

There were many, many, many of these squats. Sometimes the midwife and sometimes the assistant sat beside me and tried to move a lip of cervix that was caught on the baby's head. They all said I was pushing with incredible strength and they couldn't believe how great I was doing and blah blah...but each time the contraction ended, the baby slipped back up a little and not much progress was made.


Hours passed. Many squats were done. Well-intended promises that we were almost there were made. Later I found black-and-blue bruises on my wrists where I had hung onto the stupid square bedpost so many times.

We pushed. And pushed. I started to hallucinate (I'm not kidding).

They said they could see his head each time I pushed, but that he wouldn't come. My legs were shaking and I couldn't hold myself up on the bedpost anymore.

Sometime around 8am (I think), the midwife called and asked one of the doctors that they work with to come over and take a look at me. She came, and within a matter of seconds told us that he was in "transverse arrest" which later I learned basically meant his head was turned the wrong way, and was hopelessly jammed up against a too-small arch in my pelvic bone.

She put me on the bed and tried to use her hand to gently turn him. I know I screamed, and I saw stars and flashes of light in front of me.

I remember her saying that she had to turn him, and soon. She said I would need to be taken across the street to the hospital to have an epidural for that. Later Jen told me that she said to try and turn him without an epidural would be "unkind."

to be continued...