Maren's birth story

As I rewrote my homebirth story, and talked with James about it after he read it, we both agreed I needed to write my other birth stories for my children to read someday. Especially my daughter, who someday hopefully will learn from my mistakes, and feel more empowered to trust her nature and intuition. As soon as I found out that I was pregnant, I started reading everything that I could get my hands on, I wanted to get as much knowledge as I could to know exactly what to expect, what process I wanted to experience, and what I needed to do to have the very best outcome. I'm a planner. In the effort to just share the birth experience, not the entire pregnancy experience, I'll briefly just say that I switched providers 3 times during my pregnancy until I found someone that I felt like was more similar to my choices and was willing to respect them. I went from a female OBGYN, to a male OBGYN, to a female CNM that I was referred to by the instructor of the hypnobirthing class I took when I was 28 weeks along in my pregnancy. I had preterm labor and was on medication along with bedrest until 36 weeks. I had no other children at home to care for, so I prolonged the bedrest until 37 weeks on my own to ensure that the baby stayed in as long as she could. I expected her born early as soon as I started going back to light regular responsibilities, like laundry, but nothing happened until 39 weeks. James and I had spent the evening with my mom on Friday, I had experienced a few painful and regular contractions, and wanted to leave for the night. They were consistent every 5-6 minutes after we left, for a few hours, so we headed over to the hospital that night. The monitored me, and encouraged me to walk for 2 hours, then they checked my cervix, but there was no change. One of the nurses said "This is your first baby, you'll know when it's time. This isn't actual labor yet." And despite the painful and intense contractions I was having every 5-6 minutes, they sent me home early that Saturday morning. Horribly embarrassed and belittled. I cried the entire way home, and James was very supportive and encouraging that entire day. I was awake the entire night with so much pain from the contractions, every 5-6 minutes still. I had gone through 2 sets of batteries playing my hypnobirthing relaxation tape over and over the entire night to get through the pain with meditation/self hypnosis. That next day, Sunday, my dad had come by to visit, and I told James I didn't want to see anyone. I still layed in my bed, with intense pain every 5-6 minutes, still listening to my tapes and zoning out. James and my dad gave me a priesthood blessing, and I was able to sleep that night off and on. I woke up around 4 AM the next morning (Monday) from even more painful and regular contractions, but I had vowed after being embarrassed by the nurses that I wasn't going to go back to the hospital until my water had broke or until God hit me on the head. Well, I felt like God was hitting me on the head. So I woke James up and made him help me take a shower, I hadn't bathed in 3 days and I was NOT going to go to the hospital to possibly stay another day or two without feeling clean. I called my CNM and explained the entire weekend (she never saw me that Friday night, the nurses never called her up because they didn't feel there was a need to after monitoring me.) So she told me that she would meet me at the hospital that morning. When we arrived around 9 AM, my CNM monitored my contractions vaginally to determine their intensity, and listened for symptoms of stress in the baby as well. Then she determined that I was in fact in labor, and my cervix was not dilating. We were admitted to stay for delivery that day, where they put cytotec gel on my cervix, as well as starting pitocin drip to increase the "effectiveness" of my contractions they said. As both of the medications began to take effect, I wanted to climb the walls, the pain was unbearable and it was only beginning. But I had in my ambition that I wanted a birth without the epidural, I didn't even give thought to all the other drugs that I already had intervening the process in the first place. But I was determined to still try. I was entirely unprepared for that intensity. My water had broke about 3 hours into the process as James and I were alone in the room while I labored. He was so scared, he didn't know if he needed to do something, or if they needed to check the fluid, so he dumped his drink cup to catch some of the waters as they flooded off of the bed to the floor. I laugh now, but he was so amazing just trying to be there, always trying to be what I needed him to be. Several hours into the process of both medications aggressively progressing me, I began to black out. I was exhausted. Sick. My CNM at one point slapped my face to get me alert and said I had to make a choice, either an epidural so I could rest, or an emergency c-section if I became unconscious. I chose an epidural. And I blacked out for a while again, I'm not very aware of the entire process as they inserted it, I only remember James helping roll me over, and hold onto me as I moaned and screamed deep in my throat with each contraction. My mom had come to the hospital at that point, and came into the room as I was sleeping and wearing an oxygen mask because the baby's heart rate had fallen very low during the process of starting an epidural. Once I could rest from the medication taking over, it had been 9 hours into the process since they first hooked me up to the drips, and the monitors, and all the bells and whistles. Somewhere around 11 PM a nurse woke me up to check me, said my cervix was fully ready, and they were ready for me to push. James tried to help me sit in the position they wanted me to be to begin pushing. They watched the monitor because I felt nothing, no urge, no instinct. And then the nurse told me when to start pushing, how long to push, how to breath or not breath while I pushed. The way she instructed me is known as "Purple Pushing" where you're holding your breath and pushing with all of your force, possibly until you see flashes of light and wear yourself out from ineffective effort. The baby was hung up so high still, the horizontal position I had slept in didn't allow gravity to help, and I pushed like that for an hour and a half. At one point, my mom was holding one knee while the nurse held the other, and James was behind me helping me to curl my head forward and hunch down to push harder. The nurse was very chatty and bonded with my mom over being mothers and grandmothers, and they talked back and forth over me, letting me know when the monitor showed that I was having another contraction. I felt like I was out of my own body. The CNM had come in toward the end of pushing, as the baby's head was crowning. She wasn't in there with me very much before that point since they started the epidural. She caught the baby, and she held her while she wiped, suctioned, flipped over and back and forth very rapidly and I remember thinking "She's a newborn! Hold her tenderly!" It was very upsetting to me as a new mother that just wanted to see and touch that child immediately. Maren was born on Tuesday January 27th, 2004 after 78 hours of labor. I finally got to hold her after a minute or two and I remember looking at her, feeling such a void of emotion, I thought that I would be so overcome and cry at the moment of seeing my child after birth. I felt no emotion at all. And then I felt horrible for not feeling anything that I had assumed I should have. The nurses took her away from me to measure/monitor/dress her and such, while the CNM stitched me. After the baby was delivered, she said there was a lot of internal tearing that they couldn't see until the baby had passed the vaginal opening, likely because I was pushing so hard for so long. No one supported the perineum. Gravity wasn't used to help the process. It was aggressive. And I paid a dear price. It was a long recovery for me, and was later discovered at my 6 week postpartum check up that I had pre-cancerous cervical cells, which likely is why my cervix didn't dilate without intervention. Then the treatment for that so soon after having a baby, I wasn't feeling myself again until nearly 3 months after the baby was born. But back to the delivery room, when they gave James the baby, he walked her over to me, kissing her face and saying the name we had chosen to give her, and I got to try nursing. The baby was very frustrated, and wasn't latching well, so they told me to just stop and try again later. I was moved to the postpartum floor, and had continual staff coming and going in my room for several hours to insert a catheter, check my legs for blood clots, take a blood test, check the baby's temperature, give me meds, and just over manage. I was insecure about breastfeeding, and all of the people coming and going interrupted the effort that I was beginning to get discouraged about. The next morning a lactation consultant met with me to help me figure out the latching for the baby, we went on to have a lot of problems with our nursing experience, but that's another blog for another day, eh? I had a few visitors from the cardiologist wing of the hospital to come and listen to my heart murmur, it was a teaching hospital I was at so they wanted to use me as a live tool for teaching I suppose. And I just wanted to go home as soon as I could. Since Maren was born at 12:30 AM, we couldn't leave at the 24 hour after the birth point, we had to wait until the following morning. I finally went home with my new baby that Wednesday. I wasn't overjoyed with having a new precious soul to kiss and love, I went through a horrible downward spiral of postpartum depression, I had left the hospital only 2 lbs lighter than when I went in before delivering because I was so swollen with saline solution. I broke a fever at home a few days later sweating out nearly 20 lbs of water retention and had an onset of mastitis. Pain at the site of the stitches for weeks, which later during Kellan's birth the CNM confessed to having stitched too tightly. I kept thinking there should have been a comment card to fill out after an experience like that. Or a counselor might have been more appropriate. Looking back in hindsight now, I've learned more about the process the body needs to take in its own way, that mine didn't. Partly was due to the cervical cells abnormality, but a large portion of it was due to the interventions and protocol of the facility. The lack of empowering the mother, and more of getting tasks done to maximize efficiency for the business aspect of it. I just needed and wanted to touch, connect, experience the mammal process of birthing my young in a natural way, not a managed way. I left that experience feeling violated. That's known as birth rape. And it was a long hard process to put aside the trauma and come full circle later in my life with the other birth experiences that I had to fight for. It was an incredibly hard recovery process, and the emotional aspect of it took months, even some lingering insecurities took years, to work through, but I got an amazing parting gift of a beautiful baby girl who was resilient and strong through every bump in the road and I wouldn't change that part of it for anything in the world.