About 5-6 months after Maddox was born we moved to a new city. An excuse to find a new doctor. I was eventually going to be do for an annual check up, so I looked for Midwives in the area. I cannot even remember how I originally learned about midwives. I do not remember reading ANYTHING about them while pregnant with Maddox. Baby Center and all the other mainstream websites regarding pregnancy and child care did not talk about them.
I found a midwife, I loved her. She was unlike any other practitioner I had ever met. We eventually decided to have another child and got pregnant again. It was no question that I was keeping Kathrine as my doctor. Kathrine delivered at a near by hospital. Originally, I was OK with this. I was under the assumption that the hospital I had delivered Maddox at was a terrible hospital and that this one would be better. After all, they DID have midwives delivering babies at their hospital!
It wasn't until about half way through my pregnancy that I learned the difference between a "Med-wife" and a midwife and really began to realize that I did not want to deliver in a hospital. My midwife was a med-wife. Still, I completely adore her and I honestly believe that she is caught between the lines. Limited by her hospital affiliations and maybe she, herself doesn't REALLY know what it means (what the benefits are) to have a natural, physiological birth. Or maybe she is caught between wanting to treat woman the way that they should be treated, but still does believe in all that your average obstetrician believes. Either way, she's incredibly caring.
I decided to go ahead with the hospital birth for a few reasons:
1. I completely adored Kathrine. And though I know she would have understood if I told her that I wanted to have a home birth, I stuck with her. Probably, mostly because of the other reasons.
2. I'd read A LOT about philosophical birth. A lot for a newbie. And I read all about birth emergencies and unassisted childbirth, but I did not feel like it was something I could handle.
3. I was not confident in going unassisted. Really, besides the books, I have had no training, I hadn't read enough about it.
4. I didn't want to find a new midwife this late in the game. Yes, it would have been very possible. But I didn't know if my insurance would cover it. We wouldn't have been able to afford it. I like Kathrine and I thought that even though I were delivering in a hospital, it couldn't possibly be that bad. They were not going to force to into electronic fetal monitors, hook up antibiotics "just in case", or pump me full of pitocin so that I didn't have a "dry birth".
32 Weeks gestation, my daughter, Faye, is breech. Kathrine doesn't say a thing! 34 Weeks, Faye is still breech. Kathrine says that if she is still breech next week, we can think about trying to turn her. 36 Weeks, the Inversion works and Faye has flipped vertex! Woohoo!
37 Weeks, 9 Days - My "38 Week Appointment", Kathrine offers to strip my membranes. At this point, I'm a day away from being 2 weeks more pregnant than I ever have been. Maddox was born at 36 Weeks, to the day. I agreed and she did a membrane sweep. I went into labor, for 36 hours. Lost my entire mucus plug with bloody show. I went to bed and woke up the next morning to nothing. We went to the Minnesota Zoo and walked all morning til the afternoon and nothing.
38 Weeks, 9 Days, same thing. But this time, I got a couple cramps and then nothing.
39 Weeks, 9 Days, same thing. I went in to labor again, it drifted off by morning. I was crampy all day. Maddox and I made cookies to forget about it. My husband, Clayton and I watched 40 Year Old Virgin to pass the evening. I was contracting all evening and night. Then, just after crawling in bed around 10:30PM, my waters broke. We called Kathrine and were given a couple options:
1. Try to get some sleep. Which was her top recommendation.
2. Take a warm shower for some relief. Which I didn't really care about, I wasn't looking for relief.
3. Meet her at the hospital, if that would make me most comfortable.
I choose the first option. I laid in bed for about 10 minutes, pushing Clayton away from me because every time he touched me, the pain grew more and more intense. It only took me the 10 minutes in bed and then I was sitting on an exercise ball, bouncing up and down like a maniac. I went to the bathroom to potty, then came back. I went to the bathroom again and then something amazing happened!
I was sitting on the toilet and had a contraction. I had been feeling like I had to push previously and there was no exception with this contraction. All of a sudden, part of Faye was coming out. I say part of Faye, because it was her POOP that was coming out. In hindsight, I know it was meconium, but at the time, all I could think was WTF IS THAT?! She got out up to her waist and that's when we realized it. She was BREECH! Of course If I had thought about it early and done a little investigating, I probably could have figured that out before she was born. When I woke up that morning, she stretched my entire abdomen out. For a few seconds I was forced to hold my body pin straight as her body lay vertically across my left side. Faye NEVER went that high. Then all of a sudden, she just slipped back down. If I had thought about it, I could have felt out her head in my ribs. I'm glad I didn't though. I'm sure everything would have turned out much differently.
We got her out, cleaned off, wrapped up, suctioned out. Still sitting on the toilet, umbilical cord attached, barely long enough to get her up into my lap. My mother in law called the paramedics. We called the paramedics because I had no idea how to deliver the placenta. I didn't feel like I would have anything safe to cut the cord. There was really no where for me to go from the bathroom (and instructing my husband how I wanted things to be set up so that I could leave the bathroom might have been more trouble than it was worth!). And though the birth was completely uncomplicated and Faye was beautiful, we were still worried about taking care of her on our own.
Since giving birth to Faye, I have done so much more reading. I have so much more reading that I can do. I have so much more time to prepare. I still want my home birth and I feel like I will get it. Whether it is with a home birth midwife or unassisted. I will have my home birth!
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Note - Shortly after I had given birth to Faye, possibly after telling her birth story, woman at a natural childbirth forum told me that Sweeping Membranes is a huge risk and intervention. Now I realize that it IS an intervention (a non-medicated one), but now I am addressing the risk part. I was searching around for the risks of membrane sweeping and found this study from The Cochrane Collaboration... All other information that I was able to find on the topic said that there was no significant difference between the woman being stripped and the woman being left alone.
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Series of Maddox's Birth Story:
Series of Faelyn's Birth Story:
