Freya’s Birth Story
We wanted to have a natural, unmedicated childbirth if at all possible. We took a nine-week class in the Bradley Method and hoped we could use the Alternative Birthing Center at the hospital, but also prepared for the possibility that our birth wouldn’t go as planned. There were lots of factors that could intervene in our vision of a perfect natural childbirth. Unfortunately, we ended up having a highly medicalized labor with a heaping portion of life-endangerment. This birth story isn’t necessarily pleasant and definitely doesn’t describe the best day of my life—rather, one of the most long, difficult and scary. OF COURSE, we got our beautiful daughter out of it. The moments when Freya was born and I immediately got to hold her were the best of my life.
If you can’t handle pain and gore, here’s the Cliffs Notes version: induced labor, lots of needles and other bodily prodding, long and painful labor and delivery, *big, beautiful baby is born*, I have a serious medical emergency and spend the night in the ICU, lots more needles and bodily prodding, we all come home happy and mostly healthy two days after Freya was born.
If you want the gory details, read on. It’s super long…
Monday morning, January 17, marked six days past my due date. I had been slowly using up time off at work while trying to maximize my maternity leave by working until the bitter end, but it worked out that I hadn’t had to work a full week since mid-November. This week I was all out of banked time off and didn’t really want to dip into my maternity leave, but couldn’t stand the thought of sitting hugely and rather uselessly at work for possibly the entire week. There were no signs of labor, besides some very irregular contractions. I hadn’t slept well the night before and had a midmorning appointment with my midwife that would probably be long, so I decided not to go to work until afterward. At the appointment we had a nonstress test, which is basically about 20 minutes of monitoring the baby’s heartbeat and movement. They want to see the baby move a certain number of times to make sure it’s happy in there. This happened to be a time of day when Freya wasn’t disco dancing in my belly and I think she probably moved one less time than the midwife wanted, so we were going to have an ultrasound to get a closer look. First, though, my blood sugar needed to be tested. While we were waiting for the results the midwife briefed us on natural ways to coax my body into labor. Even though I wanted to go into labor naturally, I was so uncomfortable and ready to be done that I had a moment of irrational hope that we could just get her out, oh, NOW, by any means possible. But when Juliet the midwife walked back into the room saying “scratch everything I just told you, we need to induce you today,” I burst into tears.
My blood sugar was high. I probably had late-onset gestational diabetes, and since my due date had passed it was induction time. No going into labor naturally and laboring at home for as long as possible. No walking around in labor without being attached to an IV and monitors. No Alternative Birthing Center. And diminishing hope that the pitocin drip would be our only medical intervention.
We left the office with induction orders for the hospital, as well as an order for an ultrasound to make sure I wouldn’t need a c-section to remove a giant hulking baby, a speech about gestational diabetes and its attendant risks, and instructions to get lunch and head to the hospital. We went home and cleaned the house really quickly (it wasn’t that dirty, I had been cleaning plenty of walls and crevices), packed, and went to Potbelly’s for lunch. It was Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, so Potbelly’s was packed with little kids and their moms taking up all the chairs and space. I didn’t get a chocolate malt only because I thought they’d want to test my blood sugar at the hospital. This ended up being a big mistake because the next meal I ate wouldn’t be for another 48 hours, and of all the millions of times they drew my blood they never tested my freaking blood sugar again.
At the hospital we checked in to a labor room and got an IV hooked up right away with pitocin and antibiotics. Oh yeah, did I mention I needed antobiotics every four hours? I had tested positive for Group B strep, so we needed to minimize the risk of passing it to the baby during birth. It turned out I wouldn’t be off that antibiotics schedule until three days later. The IV needle hurt like a mother going in, and Jed couldn’t believe this was my first IV. I left the hospital on Thursday with holes in my arms, wrists and hands from FOUR IV needles. The nurse needed to get my advance signed consent for receiving a blood transfusion if it became necessary. I signed it while thinking of course it wouldn’t be necessary… but are you detecting a pattern here?
We had a few hours of just hanging out, watching tv, closing up shop with work email, playing solitaire on my iPad. Jed had gone to get dinner for himself and we were watching a movie on his laptop when the midwife, Shirley, checked my cervix & it was almost completely effaced, but not dilated very far at all. She suggested a Cook catheter to help the cervix dilate, which is exactly as much fun as it sounds. Especially when it takes two tries to get it in place. Around this same time, contractions really got going. And it was back labor. You may have heard women talking about back labor. Maybe someone else responded in sympathy. But you don’t really know what back labor is all about, besides the fact that it’s contractions felt in the back instead of the belly. Well, that’s because the only way to describe the experience with words is to say “back labor” with a dark undertone and know you’re in solidarity with other women who have experiened it.
I have an impressive tolerance for pain, but this was in a whole new league. I tried laboring on the birthing ball and leaning over the bed, but nothing helped, plus the IV, catheter, and the two monitors strapped onto my belly (one for contractions, one for the baby) made it impossible to move freely. Since these contractions were caused by the pitocin they weren’t following the gradually increasing pattern of natural labor contractions. No, they were coming hard and fast, one right on top of the next, no break in between to catch my breath and get on top of them with the strategies we learned in Bradley class. I asked for pain relief. They administered stadol, which really took the edge off and gave me that sweet, sweet mild narcotic glow. Until it wore off and the contractions were even worse than before. A second dose had no effect. By this time it was the middle of the night. Jed was trying to sleep on the ridiculous fold-out armchair in the room, and I was moaning and groaning through contractions and making him get up to put pressure on my back. Good news, the Cook catheter had done its job, I was dilated about 6 cm. Bad news, I was in unbearable pain. It was early morning and I hadn’t really slept—the stadol gave me maybe a couple hours. I had been in labor for roughly 15 hours with no end in sight. Our midwife was concerned about the long haul—I needed to have some strength left for when it came time to push. Jed and I had already discussed the fact that I might end up deciding to get an epidural with how it was going. Shirley assured us that an epidural was not a cop-out; this was not a natural labor and if I wanted to get this baby out vaginally, having some better pain relief and the ability to sleep would help me toward that goal.
By the way, there were very few people involved in this process that thought this baby was coming out naturally. We were attended by 3 midwifes during labor, and I think only one of them was convinced it would happen. I think all the nurses assumed it would be a c-section. We had an ultrasound to estimate the size of the baby and it came back at 9 pounds 5 ounces. Bigger babies have happened. And the tech assured us the estimate was usually significantly higher than the reality. I never allowed myself to think I’d end up having a c-section.
So, it was time for the epidural. The anesthesiologist came in, banished Jed to the corner of the room, and stuck a needle in my spine. It felt SO WEIRD and it was a little scary, but oh man was it a relief. Shirley broke my water right before the end of her shift at 7 am. I then slept on and off into the early afternoon. Until the epidural started wearing off. By now my and Jed’s parents were at the hospital and took turns visiting me. I was on my side with my eyes closed, gripping the bedrail and moaning through the contractions again. I was not very good company. First the moms came in, then the dads. Jed left so this could happen, since only two visitors at a time were allowed in. So they chatted with each other and felt helpless and I didn’t have Jed to push on my lower back, the only thing that was remotely helping me. Eventually the terrible contractions reached a peak as the epidural had less and less of an effect, even after an anesthesiologist came and bumped it up more. I don’t really know how it works or what he did, but he did something and whatever he did didn’t work. I called in the midwife, Kim, basically begging her to do something to help me. What she did was check my cervix and tell me I was fully dilated and could start pushing.
The epidural was mostly gone, so even though I couldn’t get out of bed I could at least move around on the bed. I started pushing on my back, then my side, then my knees and finally on my back again, only with a bar attached to the bed so I could pull on it. Does that make sense? I pulled back on a sheet wrapped around the bar in front of me, which gave me leverage for awesome pushing. By this time we could see the head. And yes, when they asked if I wanted a mirror so I could see, I gave it a try and it was cool. It gave me something to work toward—seeing more of that tiny head that had hair on it! I pushed for three hours. Yes. And the whole time there was this annoying nurse Robin that kept calling me Anne Marie and yelling “PUSHPUSHPUSHPUSHPUSHPUSHPUSHPUSHPUSHPUSH!”
Her head was visible for a long time, and I started to feel relief the lower she got. I was also getting really worn out. Kim was so great during this whole thing, and really wanted to deliver the baby, but it kept getting closer to the 7 pm shift change. It took forever, but finally her head was almost all the way out and Mary the next midwife walked in at 7. Poor Kim. And poor me, as you’ll soon see. A few pushes later, Freya’s head was all the way out and apparently the nurses were already exclaiming how cute she was. And there were a lot of nurses, since everyone whose shift ended at 7 stayed to see the birth, which happened at 7:22. Mary cut a small episiotomy, Freya tumbled out, and Mary plunked her right onto my chest. It was AWESOME. She was big, pink, clean and started crying right away. We just looked at each other. She felt just like she had in a dream I had while I was pregnant—soft, warm and a tiny bit slippery. Jed started talking to her and she turned her head toward that voice she’d been hearing all those months.
After a few minutes Jed cut the cord and they took her to get her weighed and measured while I delivered the placenta. She was 8 pounds 15 ounces! Throughout my pregnancy I hoped my baby would be smaller than that, but kind of knew she wouldn’t. Three of four girls on my side of the family have been just about 9 pounds at birth. Plus, I had been on IV fluids for the past 30 HOURS OF LABOR, which has been known to inflate birth weight a little. But I digress from the action, of which there was a lot. Mary really wanted to get my placenta out. She was telling me to push and pressing on my belly. Kim was hovering around asking her what was the hurry, it had only been 11 minutes. Mary started pulling on the cord, and I felt a sharp pain in my abdomen. It felt wrong, like she was pulling my uterus out, which I should have mentioned because that’s what was happening. I was a little dazed after the birth and suddenly there was this new horribleness. The placenta came out, but didn’t detach and it was clear that Mary and Kim were mystified by what they were seeing. Mary, who had seen me for many of my prenatal appointments, was especially thrown off because I had had many ultrasounds and my placenta looked completely normal in all of them. So it wasn’t an undeveloped TWIN like Kim suggested in a whisper from between my legs. Mary commented that it was the biggest placenta she had ever seen. Meanwhile, I’m yelling “OW” and she’s manipulating it because it was also a lot harder than it was supposed to be. Then apparently it started gushing blood. Jed had been watching from over near the baby, and I saw him get really worried and sink to the floor with his face in his hands. I didn’t see all the blood.
Mary figured out that it was a uterine inversion and started yelling for Demerol, to have the surgeon paged, to prep me to be moved to the OR, to get blood ready. The room flew into a panic. I heard someone shouting my blood pressure (way too low) and my heart rate (way too high). Mary told me to keep talking, to stay with them. Uh, “stay with you?” Obviously by now I knew something was very wrong. They picked me up, tossed me on a stretcher, and RAN me to the OR. I watched the lights and ceiling tiles fly over my head like an episode of ER, and since they had told me to keep talking but I couldn’t come up with any topics of conversation I narrated how I felt, which was clammy. The last thing I remember was my lower half being roughly jostled as someone yelled “we’re running out of time to get this uterus back in!”
The next thing I knew I was waking up in the ICU, to a doctor telling me that my uterus had come out, but that they had fixed it. I had received two units of blood. I would be OK, but I needed to stay in the ICU overnight for monitoring. I was very out of it, and all I could do was ask about my baby. The nurse asked if I wanted some morphine, and I told her yes, I just wanted to be able to sleep until I could be back with my baby. Did she know I had just had a baby? It was a girl, and she was almost nine pounds. I think I told everyone that—the nurses, the phlebotomy tech, the chaplain, the OB fellows that visited. I hadn’t even gotten to feed her yet. Jed came and showed me pictures of Freya. And finally, FINALLY, they moved me down to my postpartum room and I got to see and hold my precious little baby. It took probably an extra day to get nursing down after being separated for the first 15 hours of her life, and I needed a lot of monitoring, but we were still able to go home on Thursday afternoon, about 43 hours after Freya was born. Miraculously, after a life-threatening complication and losing 1/3 of my blood, I was fine. And it’s a good thing Freya was fine, because they kind of threw her under a warmer and forgot about her for a while.
I wish I could get those 15 hours back. I wish Mary hadn’t pulled on the cord, I wish I had asked her not to. I wish Freya’s first meal hadn’t been formula. I wish I could have gone into labor naturally. It’s so scary to think that I was a few minutes away from losing my uterus, and even scarier that I was a few more minutes away from leaving Jed alone with Freya. But we’re all ok now. I’m fully recovered, Freya is really good at eating, and besides that she’s an absolute joy. And that’s her birth story.
