Philippa's Birth Story

As a postpartum doula I find that it is very important to process your birth, especially if there was any trauma involved. I can't expect someone else to process with me if I am not willing to share my own story. This is the birth story of my second daughter. I have yet to write about my first, though I really should take the time to do that one of these days. Stay tuned, maybe I'll write about it soon! This one is long so find somewhere comfortable to sit ;

40 weeks and 5 days

Full membrane sweep the afternoon of Feb 27th (tried two times previously without success because of lack of dilation)

2/28/2020 2:47 AM

I was laying in bed and I felt a strange shift, then a click and then an audible POP! It HURT! That’s certainly not shown in movies. With H I did not have the pleasure of feeling my water break, I went a full 42 weeks and the midwife broke my water in the hospital. Anyhoo, it was not a gush or splat of fluid, but a slow leakage. “Did you hear that?” I asked my husband, who affirmed that, yes, he had. I stood up by the bed and said dazedly having not slept a wink, “I think my water just broke”. Jeff jumped to grab me a towel to stand on, and I texted my doula (who was pregnant at the time and so was already awake because of pregnancy insomnia), and she celebrated with me. My water breaking at home meant one less intervention at the hospital.

I sat on the toilet to see if there was a color to the amniotic fluid indicating meconium and I couldn’t tell. It was only when I took a shower that I noticed that the fluid leaking was definitely brownish green. Definitely meconium there. Meanwhile, my mother in-law arrived ready to take care of H in the case of a mad dash to the hospital. At this point I don’t have any increase in contractions as I thought there should be. When I did finally have a contraction I texted my doula and she cheered me on with, “Yay! (I feel like the worst cheerleader ever. We want pain, yes we do! We want pain, how about you!)”. We are celebrating the pain because I am trying for a VBAC. I want to labor and push this baby out on my own. So yes, I wanted to embrace the pain.

Called the on-call phone and got the voicemail...yay, but the midwife was quick to call me back. Poor woman had already caught two babies that night and sounded exhausted. She advised me to stay home and to not time contractions yet. Jeff called my doula and told her to come on over. I actually had the privilege of having TWO doulas because my primary doula had a shadow. I felt very special lol.

Doulas arrived sometime around 5:00AM and I came out to greet them in the dark living room. I didn’t have my glasses on so I was not sure who was who, and a comedic moment of “Hey, not sure who is who, but thanks for coming” followed. I clearly remember saying “My baby is going to think I should smell like Barbasol” because I had shaved my legs and underarms when I showered, and that was the only shaving cream we had on hand. We used the rebozo wrap to sift my stomach and I also found comfort in leaning on the exercise ball, all great techniques for laboring at home, and things progressed quickly. Contractions were mere minutes apart and excruciating. Jeff finally made the decision to roll to the hospital, which was the right choice. From there it was a bit of a mad dash to get out to the car, my mom had just woken up and had to hurriedly get dressed.

The drive. Was. terrible. And we only live about 10 minutes, maybe less, from the hospital. Contractions were coming faster and all I could do was contort in the passenger seat and squeeze the padding of the chair with a deathgrip. We pulled up to the hospital at about 6:00AM. Jeff and I got out, and I shuffled and moaned my way towards the doors while my mom parked the car and Jeff ran for a wheelchair. We reached the L&D ward and, of course, had to WAIT! Good God, I cannot tell you how absurd it was to be in so much pain and wailing as I was, to have to sign paperwork and wait for a room. They call it triage...to me it was actually, “Hey, welcome! We can’t believe you are actually in labor until we have proof that is not your pain filled face and screams…”. I could barely walk. I was moaning/screaming. I was in tears.

Nurse: “We need to hook you up to this monitor”

Me, wailing and in tears: “Can’t I just get a room?” (Repeated this over and over)

Nurse: “Well, we would like to have you on this monitor for at least 30 minutes” (Um, what?! I stare at the obviously uncomfortable gurney, not bed, gurney with scorn and disbelief)

Meanwhile, I find out that the midwives are in the process of switching out, which means that no one from the midwife clinic was there. I had a random unknown to me OB ask me if she could check my cervix. To which I adamantly refused and had to do so at least THREE separate times before the midwife on call got there. No way did I want a stranger’s fingers up my vagina, thank you very much. At one point I screamed no at her lol, she was quite taken aback by that. Women aren’t supposed to feel like they can advocate for themselves apparently.

They finally decided that I was serious and “let” me skip the monitoring room and put me in an L&D room where I promptly camped out on the floor on my knees. I remember scribbling my signature on the epidural refusal and shoving it away after. I vocalized very loudly and felt like I needed to bear down, which gave me hope that delivery was close and that I would indeed have my VBAC. The on call midwife had finally returned and she said we should check my cervix since I was feeling the urge to push...I was only 3cm dilated. So sucky. Shortly after, another midwife took over for the exhausted one who had already had a very long night.

Contractions continued to come fast and painful. When I say painful, I mean not the kind I can breath through like you’re taught in birth classes. I had no gentle rising ocean waves. No, mine were all jagged peaked mountains ready to cut me up from the inside out. Even my doula who had attended many births said I definitely had it worse than is normal. Mind you, I know that cervixes are magic and all, and that they can dilate in a matter of minutes, but this happened with my first birth too. I happen to have an overachieving uterus and a very lazy cervix.

A couple of hours later, writhing on the bed, I looked at my husband and said in a very small voice “I want an epidural”. My husband and everyone else in the room made sure that I knew that no one judged me for this decision. So, AN HOUR AND A HALF LATER I finally got some relief. Freaking hour and a half I had to wait after saying I wanted to get one. Pardon my #firstworldproblem, but with my other daughter I had an epidural done about ten minutes after it was decided I should get one, so I had that expectation, but this hospital does stuff different apparently.

So, while I waited an eternity for the resident anesthesiologist to get to my room and set up a sterile field behind me, I sat on the edge of the bed and dealt with a patronizing L&D nurse who I’m sure thought I was exaggerating my pain. I was being hooked up to a monitor, and I had to listen to the epidural agreement and consent to treatment, or whatever, to get read to me word by agonizing word and then I scribbled another signature. I felt a sudden gush between my thighs and begged the nurse to look to make sure it wasn’t blood...she wouldn’t do it, just told me it was probably residual amniotic fluid. So when I was finally administered the epidural and my BP tanked my husband was left thinking that it was because I was hemorrhaging even though it was just my body’s response to the epidural. That is part of his own birth trauma story (yes, partners can experience birth trauma as well).

A rush of people suddenly appeared in the room and I was helped to a hands and knees position on the bed, my bum was super exposed but I couldn’t bring myself to care. Sweet relief warred with worry and exhaustion. I was given a shot of something to bring my BP back up so that the baby would be okay, and it made me shake involuntarily, as if I was freezing cold.

And so began the hours in bed with a peanut ball between my legs, silly Veggietales songs, attempts to sleep, tears, a possible uterine rupture scare from baby disengaging from my cervix and having a low HR, and lots and lots of prayer.

I had a random pain on the right side that never quite went away (I had a nerve that did not respond to the epidural in my first birth too). The pain was in my lower right pelvic area and it wrapped around to my right low back. Counterpressure helped, but what helped the most was laying on my left side. Any time I turned directly onto my back or all the way to the right baby’s heart rate would lower. The assumption was that the baby was laying on the cord when I turned that way. This will be explained later.

Now, hours and hours and another cervical check later revealed that, while I was almost fully effaced, my cervix was still only 4-5cm dilated and the lip was beginning to swell. When the baby's heart rate slowed to below 100 BPM and stayed that way for 11 minutes, the midwife and surgeon on call came in to break the news. C-section. This was about 17 hours post my water breaking. I was slightly more ready for it this time than the last, I had a contingency plan for it in my birth plan and everything, but it still sucked. Why couldn’t my body just do what it was supposed to? Like all those wonderful zen birth memes that say: “Your body knows what to do, blah blah blah”...well, mine didn’t. Mine said “Um, no”, once again.

Only one person was allowed in surgery with me, so my husband took the camera that my doula would have used if she had been allowed. My mom and my doulas left the room and went to wait in the mommy baby ward for me to be out of surgery. I was initially alone in the freezing cold OR as my husband gowned up, surrounded by virtual strangers, aside from my midwife, getting prepared to cut my baby out. The nurse dropped a paper towel onto the sterile instrument field so the whole thing had to be re-done...and she had the audacity to laugh about it. Yeah, haha, I’m just laying here shivering while you make this last longer than it should with your clumsiness. Thankfully, once surgery began no one discussed their lunch plans or anything else ridiculously trivial whilst slicing me open, so that’s nice.

Now, back to that mysterious right side pelvic pain. At some point during the surgery the lead surgeon said, “Where is that green stuff coming from? Did we nick the bladder? How many times have I told you… (speaking to the resident surgeons)”...NOT something you want to hear, ever. Apparently there was green pus all over my internal organs from an abscess that was on the outside of my uterine wall where the incision happened to be. It had turned all the tissue it touched green, fun, right? They had to lance the abscess to drain the remaining pus, and remove my organs and wash them (after the baby was removed). When it came time to pull the baby out my midwife and the anesthesiologist dropped the drape per my birth plan wishes. Next thing I hear is, “Where’d she go?!” and one of the resident surgeons violently palpated my stomach trying to get the baby back down towards the incision. All I could think was, well where could she go? Of course the baby also had to be whisked away and washed free of pus and so I did not get my desired skin to skin in the OR. However, when they did finally get her out the first thing I remember is hearing Jeff say, “She looks just like Haddie!’, and “She has my pinky toes!”. I had the privilege of seeing her birthed because of the dropped drape. I wanted so badly to reach out and touch her, and even moved my left hand up to do so, but you can’t just reach across a sterile field even when it's your own baby you want to touch.

She was beautiful. She was also very quiet, which worried me, but she soon let out a shaky little mewl, nothing like her sister’s wail of absolute rage, but reassuring nonetheless. 10:53PM. She avoided being a leap year baby by an hour and seven minutes. Funny thing is they shoved me in front of another woman getting prepped for a cesarean, they were that concerned.

So while the nurses were busy cleaning the baby, I was being put back together like a jigsaw puzzle, my organs lavaged and pus samples were taken for bacterial cultures. I was in the OR for an hour and a half because of that stupid abscess. The lead surgeon came around the drape and let us know that he had never, in all his 20+ years as a surgeon, seen an abscess like mine just hanging out on the outside of my uterus. Yay for being a medical anomaly! Not. I found out later that my mom and doulas saw the entire nursing staff sprint from the nurse’s station towards the OR, and they all knew that it was because of me. Talk about vicarious trauma!

The cherry on top was feeling the needle as they sewed me back up. I let the anesthesiologist know real quick that I could feel it and got a new cocktail of drugs. Unfortunately, they were administered before I saw my baby up close so when Jeff brought her to me I was having an almost out of body experience. My voice was coming from outside of myself, and my hand and arm seemed to float beside my head, like I was a marionette being controlled by a puppet master, as I lightly touched Philippa’s face and held her tiny hand. That moment of meeting her was so painfully brief...I find that it is the most difficult part to cope with (crying right now). I had to wait an hour in recovery before they would bring her to me. By the time I held her I had not slept in over 24 hours.

There you have it. I can be thankful for modern medicine and cesarean sections and still be bitter about not getting my desired VBAC. Yes, my baby is extremely healthy and thriving. Yes, I probably would have died of sepsis if that abscess had burst, and it probably would have burst from the pressure of giving birth vaginally. But, I still mourn my VBAC. Now I have to come to terms with having a cesarean section with each subsequent pregnancy. Do I want more kids? Right now I still am not sure. I’ve been told that scheduled cesareans are not as hard on a woman’s body (and probably their minds as well). I have talked to women who rave about their wonderful c-section experiences, and I just cannot relate. I have time to decide, I know. But it still sucks. If you made it all the way through, thanks for reading.