I know this is an issue that is very sensitive for a lot of people. I am going to state up front that if you think I am crazy/dumb/whatever flamewar type of thing please just keep it to yourself. Polite feedback is ok even if it isn't completely 'on my side' I've just had a bad enough week that I'm not up for being slammed on the internet over this situation even though I would appreciate some feedback. Thanks in advance. 
This is my second attempt at a homebirth. My first ended as a transfer at 40 hours because I was hallucinating from sleep deprivation and I had been unable to progress due to massive cervical scarring. I had contractions every 6 minutes for those 40 hours so I wasn't sleeping at all. The hospital birth was vaginal, though not completely natural (I had an epidural so I could sleep and I had pitocin during the last hour of my 3.5 hours of pushing). Not my ideal birth, but I can live with it.
Last Friday I started having contractions pretty seriously and intensely. I started tracking them and when they were varying between every 6-13 minutes I called my midwife and she decided to come on over because she lives an hour to two hours away depending on traffic. Then I discovered how overwhelming my 'birth team' is in my little house. My midwife has her assistant, ok no problem. But she also brings her 9 month old daughter and her 12 year old daughter as a babysitter. My 2 year old was also here and having all those people around wound her up like crazy and the situation got very overwhelming very fast. I went out walking with my husband and doula and contractions were coming every 2 minutes. (This did go on for hours btw.) I came back to the house and.... complete stall out. Ok. This isn't real labor. Everyone says they are going home. I have a huge crying fit with my husband.
I'm going to digress for a moment and say that my midwife's attitude/speech/physical mannerisms are 100% different when she is in her office at appointments vs. when she is at my house for potential birth. She's really warm and friendly in the office and just... not... when birth might be imminent.
Then on Monday I started leaking fluid. It wasn't all that much fluid and it was coming out very slowly, but I was filling cloth pads and that isn't something I have done before. I called and told my midwife what was happening and she said that means my water is leaking and I'm now racing the clock to have the baby at home before I have to transfer to the hospital.
On Tuesday my doula came over in the morning with some abortifaciant herbs and we do everything we can to kickstart labor. (Herbs, castor oil, pumping, bouncing, walking, she does positioning stuff, all kinds of things.) Throughout all of this my doula is alternating between providing good care and playing with her 9 month old, who is at our house with her. Our 2 year old is off staying with friends. My midwife shows up around 1pm and watches how my contractions are going and thinks that things look serious so she starts bringing all her gear in again. She only had the 9 month old today the 12 year old is in school now. Once again things got loud and chaotic and... contractions stopped completely.
So we sit down and have a chat. I state that the kids being there is just not working for me. My midwife says that she can try to find childcare but it is going to take a few hours. My doula has her husband come get their kid. We chat again about the fact that my midwife thinks I have less than 20 hours left at this point before she is going to transfer care. [digression: the folks who had our daughter at this point were about to leave town so we were scrambling to find other childcare. The next day would have been kind of a pain in the ass because we would have had to deal with shuffling our daughter between people because no one else was volunteering for open ended 'sure I'll just keep her for days'.] We decided that it was probably better to just go into the hospital immediately and hope that pitocin would get things going fast enough that we could come home with the newborn quickly and our daughter wouldn't need much more childcare.
Off we troupe to the hospital. The on-call doctor did exam stuff like an ultrasound and internal. Then I gain this revolutionary piece of information. THEY CAN DO A QUICK SWAB AND WIPE IT ON LITMUS PAPER AND KNOW IF MY AMNIOTIC SACK IS LEAKING. At this point I become quite livid. He tells me to go home and wait for labor but before he can sign me out he is called away because a baby is being born RIGHT NOW. I have to stay on the table with the monitors and other crap until he comes back.
Once he leaves the room my doula says, "I'm going to go now. And remember the next time I see you it should be real labor--five minutes in between contractions, for at least a minute for an hour." Her tone of voice *sucked*. She was hungry and needed to pump so I get that she was cranky too, but we had been offering her a meal all day and she kept turning us down. My midwife bailed with a quick, "Bye! I'll see you later!" We waited for about half an hour for the doctor to come back and then he and the nurse on staff gave us this long lecture about how when labor actually starts we need to come right back to the hospital because what we are planning isn't safe.
So at this point I am furious that my midwife didn't do this simple test to see if it really was amniotic fluid (the doctor gave me a variety of things it could be and said that it is really hard to tell which it is without doing this kind of test) before stressing me and everyone out by telling us that this was an emergency. I feel that was pretty unprofessional and unacceptable. Why in the hell am I paying someone for their medical knowledge if she can't do something that basic? And I'm really upset with my doula. My midwife has been the one telling me to call her each time (my doula lives 20 minutes away and it makes my midwife feel better to have her here early) and I feel like I just got a smack on the wrist to stop being a hypochondriac. I'm not feeling like I want to go back to that hospital because boy howdy do they have a long list of rules (although they do allow the husband and baby to stay in room over night--that's a huge plus over the other hospital options around here) I don't really want to follow.
I know that I conceived on one or two specific days (really there weren't other options) so I'm either 40 weeks today or on Friday. There aren't any other homebirth midwives who will come to my town I want to work with and I don't really think I could afford it if there was one. So at this point I'm highly considering just.. doing this alone. I'm kind of scared of unassisted birth because I've listened to a lot of hype (and it really and truly is more risky especially given that I have not been doing lots of research to help me learn what I would need to know to do it maximally safely). But all of my other options really suck. I'm really really unhappy right now and I don't know what to do.
This is my second attempt at a homebirth. My first ended as a transfer at 40 hours because I was hallucinating from sleep deprivation and I had been unable to progress due to massive cervical scarring. I had contractions every 6 minutes for those 40 hours so I wasn't sleeping at all. The hospital birth was vaginal, though not completely natural (I had an epidural so I could sleep and I had pitocin during the last hour of my 3.5 hours of pushing). Not my ideal birth, but I can live with it.
Last Friday I started having contractions pretty seriously and intensely. I started tracking them and when they were varying between every 6-13 minutes I called my midwife and she decided to come on over because she lives an hour to two hours away depending on traffic. Then I discovered how overwhelming my 'birth team' is in my little house. My midwife has her assistant, ok no problem. But she also brings her 9 month old daughter and her 12 year old daughter as a babysitter. My 2 year old was also here and having all those people around wound her up like crazy and the situation got very overwhelming very fast. I went out walking with my husband and doula and contractions were coming every 2 minutes. (This did go on for hours btw.) I came back to the house and.... complete stall out. Ok. This isn't real labor. Everyone says they are going home. I have a huge crying fit with my husband.
I'm going to digress for a moment and say that my midwife's attitude/speech/physical mannerisms are 100% different when she is in her office at appointments vs. when she is at my house for potential birth. She's really warm and friendly in the office and just... not... when birth might be imminent.
Then on Monday I started leaking fluid. It wasn't all that much fluid and it was coming out very slowly, but I was filling cloth pads and that isn't something I have done before. I called and told my midwife what was happening and she said that means my water is leaking and I'm now racing the clock to have the baby at home before I have to transfer to the hospital.
On Tuesday my doula came over in the morning with some abortifaciant herbs and we do everything we can to kickstart labor. (Herbs, castor oil, pumping, bouncing, walking, she does positioning stuff, all kinds of things.) Throughout all of this my doula is alternating between providing good care and playing with her 9 month old, who is at our house with her. Our 2 year old is off staying with friends. My midwife shows up around 1pm and watches how my contractions are going and thinks that things look serious so she starts bringing all her gear in again. She only had the 9 month old today the 12 year old is in school now. Once again things got loud and chaotic and... contractions stopped completely.
So we sit down and have a chat. I state that the kids being there is just not working for me. My midwife says that she can try to find childcare but it is going to take a few hours. My doula has her husband come get their kid. We chat again about the fact that my midwife thinks I have less than 20 hours left at this point before she is going to transfer care. [digression: the folks who had our daughter at this point were about to leave town so we were scrambling to find other childcare. The next day would have been kind of a pain in the ass because we would have had to deal with shuffling our daughter between people because no one else was volunteering for open ended 'sure I'll just keep her for days'.] We decided that it was probably better to just go into the hospital immediately and hope that pitocin would get things going fast enough that we could come home with the newborn quickly and our daughter wouldn't need much more childcare.
Off we troupe to the hospital. The on-call doctor did exam stuff like an ultrasound and internal. Then I gain this revolutionary piece of information. THEY CAN DO A QUICK SWAB AND WIPE IT ON LITMUS PAPER AND KNOW IF MY AMNIOTIC SACK IS LEAKING. At this point I become quite livid. He tells me to go home and wait for labor but before he can sign me out he is called away because a baby is being born RIGHT NOW. I have to stay on the table with the monitors and other crap until he comes back.
Once he leaves the room my doula says, "I'm going to go now. And remember the next time I see you it should be real labor--five minutes in between contractions, for at least a minute for an hour." Her tone of voice *sucked*. She was hungry and needed to pump so I get that she was cranky too, but we had been offering her a meal all day and she kept turning us down. My midwife bailed with a quick, "Bye! I'll see you later!" We waited for about half an hour for the doctor to come back and then he and the nurse on staff gave us this long lecture about how when labor actually starts we need to come right back to the hospital because what we are planning isn't safe.
So at this point I am furious that my midwife didn't do this simple test to see if it really was amniotic fluid (the doctor gave me a variety of things it could be and said that it is really hard to tell which it is without doing this kind of test) before stressing me and everyone out by telling us that this was an emergency. I feel that was pretty unprofessional and unacceptable. Why in the hell am I paying someone for their medical knowledge if she can't do something that basic? And I'm really upset with my doula. My midwife has been the one telling me to call her each time (my doula lives 20 minutes away and it makes my midwife feel better to have her here early) and I feel like I just got a smack on the wrist to stop being a hypochondriac. I'm not feeling like I want to go back to that hospital because boy howdy do they have a long list of rules (although they do allow the husband and baby to stay in room over night--that's a huge plus over the other hospital options around here) I don't really want to follow.
I know that I conceived on one or two specific days (really there weren't other options) so I'm either 40 weeks today or on Friday. There aren't any other homebirth midwives who will come to my town I want to work with and I don't really think I could afford it if there was one. So at this point I'm highly considering just.. doing this alone. I'm kind of scared of unassisted birth because I've listened to a lot of hype (and it really and truly is more risky especially given that I have not been doing lots of research to help me learn what I would need to know to do it maximally safely). But all of my other options really suck. I'm really really unhappy right now and I don't know what to do.
I am frustrated for you! It sounds like you were put through the ringer for no apparent reason and the attitudes of your care givers were less than professional and caring. I have played with the thought of UC myself, having recently lost faith in my HCP and not having the option of a certified midwife/doula. I will not do it, because this is my first child and I am, quite frankly, terrified that if something were to go wrong I would be ill-equiped to deal with it. That said, I completely understand the urge to take matters into your own hands!
that your conversation with V goes just as well. You are in my thoughts. 
(And it's a girl! I swore up and down I was having a boy.)
