*** Sorry this is so long. I guess I’m still trying to process what happened myself and it helped to be detailed.***
I had originally planned on a home-hypno-water birth, but I guess one out of three ain’t bad. J
On May 24th, I was spending a relaxing evening in my bedroom on my laptop perusing natural labor induction methods. I had been experiencing PIH (pregnancy induced hypertension) and wanted Roman to be born soon so I could continue with my homebirth instead of being sent to a hospital. Two days earlier I had an appointment where my midwife had said the baby’s head was not engaged at all. That it was still floating above my pelvic bone.
Anyway, DH was upstairs… having fallen asleep on the couch in the den while watching TV. Around 8:30, I felt and heard a pop on the right side of my abdomen. At the time, I wasn’t sure what it was. I went to the bathroom to see if water would leak and while I did have some fluid, it wasn’t anything I couldn’t stop the flow of and then I even captured some and it looked a bit yellow, so I assumed it was pee and that I was making more out of a sound from my ever-surprising bodily functions in late pregnancy.
Soon thereafter, though, I started feeling what I thought was intestinal cramping, like diarrhea pains (sorry TMI). I went to the bathroom again and did have some loose stools. So, I thought maybe I was just having a bad reaction to something I ate. I didn’t even start timing the pains… that’s how sure I was it was “nothing”. (If I had known then what I know now, I would have started listening to my Hypnobabies CD’s.) For about an hour and a half, I rotated between bed and bathroom. I ended up taking a short bath because I felt gross after all the diarrhea. In the bath, I started having even stronger pains, but even then I thought they were gas/diarrhea… just VERY strong ones. I got out of the bath to go one more time to the bathroom and out falls my mucous plug and I begin bleeding a bit. This is about the time I started to clue in to what was going on.
I realized I needed to get DH. He had told me weeks earlier that if he was ever upstairs when I needed him, that I should pound on the wall and he would know to come down (the den is directly above the bedroom). I pounded the heck out of that wall, falling to my knees in between and leaning the front part of my body over the bed. I was starting to get scared because the pains were coming VERY frequently… like 2-3 minutes apart. So, I decided to get to where he could hear me yelling for him. I spent the next 5 minutes taking a few steps and dropping to my knees to get out to our breakfast nook where you can see the second floor because of a vaulted ceiling. Then I started yelling for DH. (This is about 10:30 pm.) He slowly gets up… I’m sure he just thinks I’m asking him for a refill on my water. When he gets downstairs, I’m on my hands and knees on the hardwood floor and he goes “What are you doing?” I reply, “Honey, I think I’m in labor”. And he’s very calm thinking (like I did) that it would be long and start slow, and we had plenty of time. So, he says, “OK, let’s go in and start listening to the CD’s.” I told him, “No, we have to call the midwife. Something’s not right. I’m bleeding a good bit and these pains are fast. I might have to go to the hospital.”
We call the midwife and I’m telling her what’s going on… but I’m not laying it on too thick because I am worried I’m going to make her rush over and it not be time yet… she lives an hour and 40 minutes away, so I‘m really worried about her making a “false alarm“ trip. Looking back, I can’t believe how much in denial I was. I tell her I’m having pains and she asked me how often. Unfortunately, I STILL haven’t gotten around to timing! I say they feel like a few minutes apart. She asks me on a scale of one to ten how painful and I reply that it’s hard to say because I don’t know ultimately how bad they can get… but that I would guess a seven. She attributes my blood to cervical changes and as we’re discussing this, I start having a contraction and ask her to talk to DH. My contractions are strong enough for me to vocalize through the pain. Apparently, she tells DH to have me relax, take a bath, drink a glass of wine and try to get some sleep. She, too, was fooled by the first time labor thing. She thought it would be late the next evening at the earliest.
He runs a bath and when I get in, things start getting VERY intense. I am trembling so hard the water is moving in the bath (which I knew to be a sign of transition). I am telling DH, I don’t know if I can make it to the hosptial. He says “We’re not going to the hospital, we’re having the baby at home.” I just keep saying something is wrong… it’s not supposed to be like this. I tell him I need to push and want out of the tub. The contractions are too strong in there. Meanwhile he had been using the online contraction timer to time my contractions and they are 2 minutes apart lasting anywhere from 45-80 seconds in duration. I get out of the tub and get on my hands and knees, draping the front of my body over the birth ball. This helps ease things a bit, but I do start feeling the urge to vomit and poop at the same time. I do puke a little and tell DH to call the midwife back. It’s a little after midnight.
He calls the midwife and tells her the timing of contractions and that I’ve said I need to push. That wakes her up! She says, “Don’t let her push. I’m leaving right now.” Meanwhile, I don’t care what anyone says about not pushing… during each contraction, I’m grunting and bearing down. There was no stopping it. Luckily, I was past transition so the contractions had slowed a bit. It just felt like I needed to poop.
DH tried to play the Hypnobabies CD’s to calm me down, but it was too late. You really needed to be “in the zone” before transition for it to work. So, I was winging it. I asked once if we should fill the birth tub and DH said, “Do you want me to be gone for a bit?” I was too scared to be all by myself so I told him no.
A little after 1:30 am, the apprentice midwife shows up (she lives a bit closer). I was just so relieved that someone “official” was finally there. She takes my blood pressure and assures me the midwife will be here soon and not to push. I’m on the bed at this point. I had DH put the pool liner down and then some towels. We had no time to make the bed the way we had prepared. Just as we had no time to call my sister to come over and take pictures and video.
The midwife finally arrives and says she can see I’m far along… that she wanted to check me. I was SO worried she was going to say 4 cm or something. Instead, she had a shocked look on her face and said, “You’re at 10, and the baby’s head is right there!!”. I was relieved that I was near the end. I pushed for about 10 or so contractions on the bed on my side. DH held my upper leg up and the doula that came with the midwife talked me through the contractions. After a while, the midwife says that the head is visible and lets DH see. A bit later, she tells me to reach down and touch it. Honestly, I didn’t really want to. I thought it might freak me out a bit and I just wanted it to be over. But I did and I couldn’t believe the feeling! All along, the apprentice is using the Doppler to check the baby’s heart rate and it had been fine, but at the last contraction it dropped a bit so my midwife says, “Let’s get this baby born.” They get a birthing stool set up beside my bed over a tarp. The birthing stool is a U-shaped stool that is low to the ground and allows you to squat while sitting. It was VERY uncomfortable, but I was willing to do anything at this point. I went through a few contractions on the stool before feeling the “ring of fire”. Wow, that is a great name for it, because it did burn!! I kept saying “It burns, it burns, it burns.” I started moaning like a cow. The doula says, “That’s right, honey, sing us your song.” … which struck me as so cheesy that I actually laughed a little. With that laugh, out came his head.
The rest of his body was easy, comparatively. He slithered out in a way that made him feel like a wet fish. (He was born at 3:36 am., 8 lbs, 2 oz) My midwife caught him but immediately gave him to DH to hand to me. He did and I held him up to my chest. It was the most surreal moment of my life. I know that I was in shock. I kept saying, “I can’t believe it, I can’t believe it.” We let the cord finish pulsing and then the midwife clamped and DH cut… which he always swore he wouldn’t do. It was such an amazing moment.
But here is where the complications start… for some reason, my body did not want to birth the placenta. Maybe I was tired from the long pushing stage. My midwife says I had a partial placenta abruption because I started bleeding pretty heavily soon after the baby was born. We tried getting the baby to nurse to help with contractions. She gave me 2 doses of injectible Pitocin after about a half hour of trying with no success. Still nothing, and I’m still bleeding. She starts to get worried and gets me on the bed so I can lay down and stop gravity from pulling more blood. Then she tells me she’s going to have to check to see where the placenta is stuck. I’m trying to go with the flow, but I’m just wanting it to be over. DH is sitting off in the corner with the baby and I’m just worried I’m going to have to go to the hospital. Finally, the placenta comes. I was so relieved but I was weak and exhausted.
The midwife has me rest for a bit and drink some juice for my blood sugar. DH brings the baby over and we all lie down together for a bit. After a time, my midwife wants me to try to go to the bathroom, saying that I needed an empty bladder for my uterus to contract. She helps me to the bathroom and while I’m on the toilet, I remember telling her that I felt lightheaded. Next thing I know, I’m on the bed and DH is standing over me, slapping my face (as an aside, I later teased him that I hoped he enjoyed that since he’d better not ever do it again!). Everyone is calling my name and the midwife says, “Do you know what happened?” Well, I could actually remember dreaming, so I said “Yes, I was taking a nap,” which made everyone laugh. DH says the whole thing scared him to death. That the midwife screamed for him and I was slumped over on the toilet (nice image!) and he picked me up and brought me to the bed.
The next few days are honestly a blur. I guess I lost a decent amount of blood because I was very weak and exhausted. My midwife consulted with a doctor and I was told to spend the next 24 hours totally flat in the bed, but still peeing every hour. You know what that means… bed pan! Poor DH! He had to help me to pee and then help me with my Depends for lochia. I told him I was sorry that we were already at this point. All I did was nurse, sleep, drink water, eat and pee. DH took care of me and the baby. No one could have done a better job. He is a saint, and I can honestly say that I fell in love with him all over again after this whole experience. It doesn’t hurt to see how truly excited he is to be a new dad.
After day one, my midwife came back for a check-up and said I could start getting up to go to the bathroom but I had to spend the next 6 days in bed otherwise. It was such a strange time because I had planned on babymooning for the week, but not like this. Now, though, I feel SO much better and Roman is an angel. I am still awestruck that this being came from an idea DH and I had… and now he is sleeping next to me with his heavy breath and fluttering eyelids. It is truly a miracle.
I had originally planned on a home-hypno-water birth, but I guess one out of three ain’t bad. J
On May 24th, I was spending a relaxing evening in my bedroom on my laptop perusing natural labor induction methods. I had been experiencing PIH (pregnancy induced hypertension) and wanted Roman to be born soon so I could continue with my homebirth instead of being sent to a hospital. Two days earlier I had an appointment where my midwife had said the baby’s head was not engaged at all. That it was still floating above my pelvic bone.
Anyway, DH was upstairs… having fallen asleep on the couch in the den while watching TV. Around 8:30, I felt and heard a pop on the right side of my abdomen. At the time, I wasn’t sure what it was. I went to the bathroom to see if water would leak and while I did have some fluid, it wasn’t anything I couldn’t stop the flow of and then I even captured some and it looked a bit yellow, so I assumed it was pee and that I was making more out of a sound from my ever-surprising bodily functions in late pregnancy.
Soon thereafter, though, I started feeling what I thought was intestinal cramping, like diarrhea pains (sorry TMI). I went to the bathroom again and did have some loose stools. So, I thought maybe I was just having a bad reaction to something I ate. I didn’t even start timing the pains… that’s how sure I was it was “nothing”. (If I had known then what I know now, I would have started listening to my Hypnobabies CD’s.) For about an hour and a half, I rotated between bed and bathroom. I ended up taking a short bath because I felt gross after all the diarrhea. In the bath, I started having even stronger pains, but even then I thought they were gas/diarrhea… just VERY strong ones. I got out of the bath to go one more time to the bathroom and out falls my mucous plug and I begin bleeding a bit. This is about the time I started to clue in to what was going on.
I realized I needed to get DH. He had told me weeks earlier that if he was ever upstairs when I needed him, that I should pound on the wall and he would know to come down (the den is directly above the bedroom). I pounded the heck out of that wall, falling to my knees in between and leaning the front part of my body over the bed. I was starting to get scared because the pains were coming VERY frequently… like 2-3 minutes apart. So, I decided to get to where he could hear me yelling for him. I spent the next 5 minutes taking a few steps and dropping to my knees to get out to our breakfast nook where you can see the second floor because of a vaulted ceiling. Then I started yelling for DH. (This is about 10:30 pm.) He slowly gets up… I’m sure he just thinks I’m asking him for a refill on my water. When he gets downstairs, I’m on my hands and knees on the hardwood floor and he goes “What are you doing?” I reply, “Honey, I think I’m in labor”. And he’s very calm thinking (like I did) that it would be long and start slow, and we had plenty of time. So, he says, “OK, let’s go in and start listening to the CD’s.” I told him, “No, we have to call the midwife. Something’s not right. I’m bleeding a good bit and these pains are fast. I might have to go to the hospital.”
We call the midwife and I’m telling her what’s going on… but I’m not laying it on too thick because I am worried I’m going to make her rush over and it not be time yet… she lives an hour and 40 minutes away, so I‘m really worried about her making a “false alarm“ trip. Looking back, I can’t believe how much in denial I was. I tell her I’m having pains and she asked me how often. Unfortunately, I STILL haven’t gotten around to timing! I say they feel like a few minutes apart. She asks me on a scale of one to ten how painful and I reply that it’s hard to say because I don’t know ultimately how bad they can get… but that I would guess a seven. She attributes my blood to cervical changes and as we’re discussing this, I start having a contraction and ask her to talk to DH. My contractions are strong enough for me to vocalize through the pain. Apparently, she tells DH to have me relax, take a bath, drink a glass of wine and try to get some sleep. She, too, was fooled by the first time labor thing. She thought it would be late the next evening at the earliest.
He runs a bath and when I get in, things start getting VERY intense. I am trembling so hard the water is moving in the bath (which I knew to be a sign of transition). I am telling DH, I don’t know if I can make it to the hosptial. He says “We’re not going to the hospital, we’re having the baby at home.” I just keep saying something is wrong… it’s not supposed to be like this. I tell him I need to push and want out of the tub. The contractions are too strong in there. Meanwhile he had been using the online contraction timer to time my contractions and they are 2 minutes apart lasting anywhere from 45-80 seconds in duration. I get out of the tub and get on my hands and knees, draping the front of my body over the birth ball. This helps ease things a bit, but I do start feeling the urge to vomit and poop at the same time. I do puke a little and tell DH to call the midwife back. It’s a little after midnight.
He calls the midwife and tells her the timing of contractions and that I’ve said I need to push. That wakes her up! She says, “Don’t let her push. I’m leaving right now.” Meanwhile, I don’t care what anyone says about not pushing… during each contraction, I’m grunting and bearing down. There was no stopping it. Luckily, I was past transition so the contractions had slowed a bit. It just felt like I needed to poop.
DH tried to play the Hypnobabies CD’s to calm me down, but it was too late. You really needed to be “in the zone” before transition for it to work. So, I was winging it. I asked once if we should fill the birth tub and DH said, “Do you want me to be gone for a bit?” I was too scared to be all by myself so I told him no.
A little after 1:30 am, the apprentice midwife shows up (she lives a bit closer). I was just so relieved that someone “official” was finally there. She takes my blood pressure and assures me the midwife will be here soon and not to push. I’m on the bed at this point. I had DH put the pool liner down and then some towels. We had no time to make the bed the way we had prepared. Just as we had no time to call my sister to come over and take pictures and video.
The midwife finally arrives and says she can see I’m far along… that she wanted to check me. I was SO worried she was going to say 4 cm or something. Instead, she had a shocked look on her face and said, “You’re at 10, and the baby’s head is right there!!”. I was relieved that I was near the end. I pushed for about 10 or so contractions on the bed on my side. DH held my upper leg up and the doula that came with the midwife talked me through the contractions. After a while, the midwife says that the head is visible and lets DH see. A bit later, she tells me to reach down and touch it. Honestly, I didn’t really want to. I thought it might freak me out a bit and I just wanted it to be over. But I did and I couldn’t believe the feeling! All along, the apprentice is using the Doppler to check the baby’s heart rate and it had been fine, but at the last contraction it dropped a bit so my midwife says, “Let’s get this baby born.” They get a birthing stool set up beside my bed over a tarp. The birthing stool is a U-shaped stool that is low to the ground and allows you to squat while sitting. It was VERY uncomfortable, but I was willing to do anything at this point. I went through a few contractions on the stool before feeling the “ring of fire”. Wow, that is a great name for it, because it did burn!! I kept saying “It burns, it burns, it burns.” I started moaning like a cow. The doula says, “That’s right, honey, sing us your song.” … which struck me as so cheesy that I actually laughed a little. With that laugh, out came his head.
The rest of his body was easy, comparatively. He slithered out in a way that made him feel like a wet fish. (He was born at 3:36 am., 8 lbs, 2 oz) My midwife caught him but immediately gave him to DH to hand to me. He did and I held him up to my chest. It was the most surreal moment of my life. I know that I was in shock. I kept saying, “I can’t believe it, I can’t believe it.” We let the cord finish pulsing and then the midwife clamped and DH cut… which he always swore he wouldn’t do. It was such an amazing moment.
But here is where the complications start… for some reason, my body did not want to birth the placenta. Maybe I was tired from the long pushing stage. My midwife says I had a partial placenta abruption because I started bleeding pretty heavily soon after the baby was born. We tried getting the baby to nurse to help with contractions. She gave me 2 doses of injectible Pitocin after about a half hour of trying with no success. Still nothing, and I’m still bleeding. She starts to get worried and gets me on the bed so I can lay down and stop gravity from pulling more blood. Then she tells me she’s going to have to check to see where the placenta is stuck. I’m trying to go with the flow, but I’m just wanting it to be over. DH is sitting off in the corner with the baby and I’m just worried I’m going to have to go to the hospital. Finally, the placenta comes. I was so relieved but I was weak and exhausted.
The midwife has me rest for a bit and drink some juice for my blood sugar. DH brings the baby over and we all lie down together for a bit. After a time, my midwife wants me to try to go to the bathroom, saying that I needed an empty bladder for my uterus to contract. She helps me to the bathroom and while I’m on the toilet, I remember telling her that I felt lightheaded. Next thing I know, I’m on the bed and DH is standing over me, slapping my face (as an aside, I later teased him that I hoped he enjoyed that since he’d better not ever do it again!). Everyone is calling my name and the midwife says, “Do you know what happened?” Well, I could actually remember dreaming, so I said “Yes, I was taking a nap,” which made everyone laugh. DH says the whole thing scared him to death. That the midwife screamed for him and I was slumped over on the toilet (nice image!) and he picked me up and brought me to the bed.
The next few days are honestly a blur. I guess I lost a decent amount of blood because I was very weak and exhausted. My midwife consulted with a doctor and I was told to spend the next 24 hours totally flat in the bed, but still peeing every hour. You know what that means… bed pan! Poor DH! He had to help me to pee and then help me with my Depends for lochia. I told him I was sorry that we were already at this point. All I did was nurse, sleep, drink water, eat and pee. DH took care of me and the baby. No one could have done a better job. He is a saint, and I can honestly say that I fell in love with him all over again after this whole experience. It doesn’t hurt to see how truly excited he is to be a new dad.
After day one, my midwife came back for a check-up and said I could start getting up to go to the bathroom but I had to spend the next 6 days in bed otherwise. It was such a strange time because I had planned on babymooning for the week, but not like this. Now, though, I feel SO much better and Roman is an angel. I am still awestruck that this being came from an idea DH and I had… and now he is sleeping next to me with his heavy breath and fluttering eyelids. It is truly a miracle.
So glad your DH is doing such a wonderful job, and hope you are continuing to heal up well! Enjoy your babymoon!
