It wasn't until half way through my pregnancy of my first child that we even looked into a home birth. I had never really considered one or for that matter really heard much about it. I have a medical background in EMS and so I was very familiar of everything that could go wrong. My mom was also in nursing school and was studying, none other than, pregnancy and childbirth. Even still, we started doing A LOT of research of all types to figure out what the best choices for our family would be. We explored all the options and why people do what they do now as opposed to how they used to do things.. We strongly believe that a woman's body was designed to have children and it knows how to do it, whether we do in our heads or not.
So, here I am over 20 weeks pregnant and I was getting information overload! To be honest, it stressed me out a little. We decided at that point we would stick with our OB and a hospital delivery for that pregnancy, but we still continued our research for our future deliveries.
At 39 weeks, I went into labor with my baby girl. I had already prepared myself ahead of time for a natural hospital birth. I planned on staying home as long as possible and my OB and doula were all on the same page with us. After being in labor for roughly 18 hours we decided to go in. Knowing that they wouldn't let me eat after I got checked in, we grabbed something first even though I wasn't that hungry. When we got settled in my temporary admitting room, we thought it would be a short time and we'd be whisked away to my private room upstairs. There was a lot of commotion going on and a lot of woman who were screaming for drugs (probably just as they've seen in the movies). This was a temporary set up so I was litteraly surrounded by curtains and couldn't really focus on my birth. After 5 hours and a threat from my husband they finally brought us upstairs to our labor room. Once there they have to re-do everything that was done downstairs. More monitoring, more checking, more questions, less focused laboring... Isn't that what I was there for? I pushed for 3 hours and during that time there was a lot of attempted fetal monitoring, but I kept pushing it away. I came away with a beautiful baby girl and I did do it all naturally but only after 29 hours and many unecessary hurdles.
I don't remember ever having to go over the things on my birth plan with the nurses, they didn't force drugs on me or tell me if I didn't hurry up I'd have to have a c-section. Although my husband says differently. I had a wonderful OB who was with me all the way even though I'm sure his doubts were in his head. My doula was there to help me with anything I asked for and a lot of things I didn't know to ask for. My husband was my supporter through and through... But would we do it this way for our next? No.
We are now expecting our second child. They'll be 20 months apart so the birthing process is still fresh in my head. We decided to call up a midwife this go round for multiple reasons. You've already seen some of the struggles we went through at the hospital that no doubt slowed my progress. Our midwife comes to our home for the visits and is very flexible with the time so my husband can easily be there. She's always on-call for all of our questions or concerns. She respects our decisions and makes us feel like we're her only patient. I'm planning a water birth this time and would like to have candles lit, both of which we're no-no's at the hospital. There won't be any fetal monitoring if I don't want it and the cervical checks will be very limited if at all. Best part is, I won't have to struggle with when to leave the comfort of my home to go to a place of a lot of unknowns. I know that everyone present at my birth will know going into it exactly what we want.. There won't be any fights to expect, papers to sign, and we can eat drink and be merry if that what we choose to do.
For us, homebirth is our choice because we have faith that everything is going to go right. We want our birth to be as natural as possible to allow my body to do what it was designed to do... Give life.
Thank you so much for sharing!!!!!!!!
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