My pregnancy with E was fairly uneventful. I had the usual morning sickness and aches and pains. I was terrified of miscarriage due to miscarrying my first pregnancy, and felt a great deal of conflicting emotions. That was the worst of it though, until we had his anatomy scan. At 20 weeks gestation, he was diagnosed with a velamentous cord insertion. Basically, instead of being attached in the middle of the placenta, his cord was attached near the edge, at the membranes. I was terrified. But, I had several follow-up ultrasounds to ensure he was growing appropriately (he was), and the perinatal clinic told me all was well. So I settled into pregnancy.
At some point in my third trimester, we watched “The Business of Being Born.” Both of us were intrigued by home birth and were appalled by some of what happens in the hospital. But, we had planned a hospital birth, and even if we hadn’t we likely would have been transferred due to the velementous cord insertion.
At 38 weeks and 3 days, I decided to go in for an induction massage. I was huge, tired, and needed to relax. I didn’t expect anything to happen at all, but figured that if it did it was a bonus. The next morning I woke up at 7 am as my partner was getting ready for work, and my water broke! I sent my partner to work anyway since I wasn’t having contractions yet, and he needed to get things ready for the supply teacher that they would have to call in. After an hour, the velementous cord insertion started to enter my mind and I called the hospital asking about if I should come in. They told me I should, so my partner came home and brought me in. In retrospect, I should have stayed home as I still hadn’t had a single contraction.
They checked to ensure it was my water that had broken, as they didn’t believe me. I waited in the assessment area. And waited. Finally, contractions started around 10:30 and started to increase in intensity. My OB came in and wanted to insert cervidil to “get things going” but she agreed to wait when we asked to see if my body would do it on its own. After laying in assessment for over four hours, I was finally given a room. I walked there, and that was the last time I was on my feet until well after E was born.
Once in the room, the nurses insisted on continuous fetal monitoring which meant I was confined to the bed, and couldn’t really move or it would lose the heartbeat. E was posterior, and I was having a lot of back labour. I asked to shower, several times, but the nurses insisted that the continuous fetal monitoring was necessary. They even said that if they didn’t have it on, the cord could detach and they wouldn’t know and my baby could die. I knew then that that was unlikely from research I had done, but at the time I wasn’t able to argue with them. I wish I had had a doula to help me.
I had gone in wanting to have a “natural, drug free” birth. But the back labour coupled with being unable to move around was just too much. At about 4 pm, after 6 hours of back labour, I was considering morphine. It was shift change for my nurses at that point, and we got a nurse who was very opinionated and stern. She wouldn’t even let me have a glass of water! Her first words when she came in the room were “How come this girl doesn’t have an IV? What if she needs a section??!” It sure didn’t instill much confidence in me. She did, however, talk us out of the morphine and we decided on the epidural. My OB knew I had wanted to go drug-free and she wouldn’t agree to it until talking to us herself though.
Finally, at 5:30 pm, I was given the epidural. I’m not going to lie. It was heaven after 7 hours of back labour while also laying on my back. I was able to get some sleep, and did so. They upped my epidural at about midnight to such a level that I couldn’t even feel my upper arms. The anesthesiologist was incredibly condescending to me, insinuating that I was silly for wanting to try to go without drugs.
At 3 am, I started to feel the urge to push. With another new (a fabulous one may I add) nurse, I started to push. After 2 hours of my partner holding my leg, my OB decided that I needed help. E wouldn’t stay past my pubic bone. I wish that I had tried another position (not easy with an epidural), and often wonder if that would have helped to get him out. Instead, my OB got the forceps and “helped” me. Later I would learn that there were options that I could have tried to avoid the forceps (including just giving me a little more time), but nobody suggested them to me. Instead, my OB used forceps and I was set down the path of pelvic floor damage which would eventually turn into pelvic organ prolapse.
We hadn’t found out the sex, so we were excited to hear he was a boy! E was born at 5:14 am. They whisked him away since I had had a bit of a temperature and weighed him and then wrapped him up and brought him to me about five minutes later. I didn’t get the initial skin to skin that I wanted, nor did we get the delayed cord clamping that we wanted. It was pretty disappointing, but I was still so excited to hold that little boy. It was so amazing to know that my body had created such a perfect little man! And even though there were aspects of his birth that I wished I could have changed, I was still so much in love with him.
That is E’s birth story. It leads into why we chose a home birth for our next three children. Stay tuned for their birth stories!
