Question about waiting to going to the hospital - Page 2

[AlexisT]

My major concern with waiting would be the timing--if you're really trying to show up pushing, you could wind up like my mother, who had 1 baby in the hallway and one in the elevator! (I was the only one born in the delivery room.) If I knew I was prone to a very fast labor, I might choose to come in a bit sooner to avoid that. My mother said that as much as she didn't want to get there early (this was in the shaving and enema days), she thinks she wasn't very good at judging the timing and it would have been much easier getting to the hospital a bit earlier.

The other potential downside would be that if you are having a particularly slow or abnormal labor, you could wind up waiting until you're really exhausted, and it could end up with more interventions than if you'd gone in a bit earlier. But this is one of those things that's often only obvious in retrospect, and if you went in and did end up with "failure to progress" and a section, you might always wonder if it would have been all right if you'd waited.

Some of it is about a tradeoff: with a VBAC, for example, you're trading off the advantages of monitoring with the disadvantages of hospital VBAC procedure.

I think the question of when to wait is really an individual one. It also depends on your hospital/provider and their policies, distance from the hospital, any personal risk factors, et cetera.

[katelove]

Originally Posted by erin_brycesmom

The other thread was on a private board outside of MDC but I can PM you the group if you are interested.

For my natural hospital birth, my ideal time to get there would have been about 1-2 hours before transition. Of course, that's hard to predict, lol. I didn't want to be in a car during transition. I wanted to be able to check in, triage, and get to my room with as much peace and calm as possible. The idea of going in pushing with people rushing towards me to "help" and a frantic scene with baby trying to come out while I'm checking sent my anxiety through the roof. I really need time to adjust to new surroundings/people and especially to hospital surroundings. I didn't want to the staff to feel rushed either. I wanted them to have time to find out what I wanted for the delivery and immediate after. It's really really important to me to feel safe, secure and calm during second stage so I wanted to do what I could to facilitate that. Homebirth sounded great, but car birth sounded really unappealing.

Figuring out when to go in is definitely one of the downsides to hospital birth. I had a homebirth the next time around and I really loved not having to worry about that.

That sounds like great timing to me. I know I said in my previous post that I thought 8cm was ideal but when I read your post I remembered that I had thought previously about those issues and thought that I would also like to avoid transition in the car, staff in a flap etc. I wonder if I blocked those things out after reading all the hypnobirthing stories about people not believing that someone was in transition because she was so calm? I may have to reconsider my plan. I'm sure I could still get all the things I mentioned in my PP by going in a bit before transition.

When I read the other posts in this thread I was thinking "early" equalled less than 4 cm/irregular contractions etc. I have assessed lots of women in Birth Suite who come in with the first contractions and are very surprised and put out to find that they are not in active labour and don't need to be in BS. The lack of understanding/education is really sad IMO.

[nia82]

Out of experience I would want to show up later next time. I hadn't read too much about water breaking and infection, so I got sort of scared to go to the hospital after my water broke, but I still lied about when it happened. Nobody though wanted to induce me. I was already 3-4cm without any contractions and started having them 5 hours into our hospital stay, and like I mentioned, nobody mentioned induction at all.
I would like a homebirth, but I feel 3.5K is quite a bit out of pocket when hospital is absolutely for free for me. The birth center is for free too, but 2 hours down the road in Denver, and traffic is horrible depending on the time of the day, so it might be up to 4 hours to go there... Pretty much off the table!
I do tend to worry which is why I would rent a fetal doppler for the at-home-labor stage. I agree on checking your temp and maybe blood pressure if it is creeping up towards end of pregnancy (I had that according to the ob, but miraculously it only was elevated at his office, guess why!). I guess I wouldn't want to check my dilation, don't want to introduce germs
But I think I will be much, much happier laboring at home until it is really time to go. I don't know how to tell next time, I will trust my instincts. Last time it was all fuzzy and I hovered at 5cm for a long time and then dilated to 10cm within 60 minutes... And even though my mom once had a labor of 4 hours, I will risk not risk going in too early. Rather too late than too early, just because of all that stress at the hospital!