I've had two positive hospital births! One of them with twins! In both cases I had unmedicated, natural labors, and in both cases I spend the next couple of days rooming in with my babies, co-sleeping (more like co-napping
), and exclusively breastfeeding. I've actually LOVED my hospital births. Really and truly loved them.
Some tips:
1. Birth plan (as you mentioned)...make sure your OB agrees to it, that you bring a copy with you to labor to share with your first labor nurse, and that if any conflicts come up you have them call your OB to reaffirm the plan of labor you agreed to.
2. Ask, right away when you arrive, for a labor nurse who is experienced in natural labor and who will not offer meds.
Saying it right up-front at the check-in window helps the whole staff know what kind of labor you expect. If you're there early enough to be really with-it, ask early in labor for your room to have the tools you might need for labor...a birthing ball, extra pillows, etc. Ask what they have and what is at your disposal. My only early-labor experience was with my twins, but we used that early, clear-headed time to make sure our labor path was fully set.
3. In your birth plan, have your baby plan written as well. Bonding time, no eye ointment until x-time, no vaxes, exclusively rooming in, exclusively breast-fed...make it short and simple (I bullet-pointed my most important wishes).
4. Ask for a minimum of interruptions...ask for no extra nurses or doctors in the room during labor (students, assistants, etc.), ask for miminum disturbances during the hospital stay, and if you're going to try to sleep for a while, ask for a period with no disturbances (nurses, sanitation workers, whatever) for the next x hours.
5. Be friendly. It's amazing how quickly you can bond with labor nurses and post-partum nurses. Even though they were strangers to me, I still really loved the people who worked with me and dh during our labor/hospital stay. Some labor nurses are pretty incredible women...so empowering, so knowledgeable.
Heck...with my second birth I arrived to the hospital practically in transition, had the baby 40 minutes later, and the labor nurse worked like you wouldn't believe to STILL make the birth follow my birth plan exactly! I needed/wanted a hep-lock for being GBS positive, and while she was getting that in, and trying to get a sense of my contractions, she was using every spare second to read my birth plan and re-adjust everything so the birth would go as I wanted it to. When our son was born, there were no questions asked. He was placed on my chest the entire time I was stitched up, the cord was cut at the end of the stitching process (long after it stopped pulsing), he was weighed quickly and returned to me, and then everyone left the room for over an hour. It was so quiet and so peaceful, that time with him. I think a couple of nurses had to come in and get the labor bassinet out (it wasn't needed for us, but someone else needed it), but they were quiet and went in and out quickly. An hour-plus later, the nurse came back in to do the eye ointment and check vitals.
Bliss.
The hospital I deliver at isn't some beacon of natural birth, either. It's not even a hospital that gets a lot of attention or praise for being woman- or baby-centered. I don't think my experience is that far from what many women could expect giving birth at an average large hospital, as long as you have a supportive OB and find supportive staff.
