Disclaimer
I suppose my last post was pretty harrowing. I lived it, and have told it so many times now, I know I’ve become a little desensitized. But I still can’t easily read the part where it all goes bad. Today someone asked me if they could share my story with a med student about to start her OB-GYN rotation. I’m happy to share; I did decide to make my story public, knowing that anyone, with any background, could end up reading it.
In fact, I wanted to be sure to tell my story, because it’s not easy to deal with a negative and/or traumatic birth experience. Not only have you been through something awful, you suffer the loss of the perfect experience you hoped for. And though your joy over your child is in no way diminished, you probably feel guilty and/or angry for not being able to say that the day of your child’s birth was the best day in your life. While the majority of births are relatively uneventful and don’t involve medical emergencies, the unexpected is common and I wanted to add my voice to the less-than-perfect. So I guess that’s my first disclaimer.
The other one involves my story being specifically shared with a medical professional-in-training. It occurred to me today (duh) that my experience serves as an example of a certain type of birth experience—one attended by a nurse-midwife, not an obstetrician, where something went medically wrong. And even though whoever reads my story is going to interpret it in their own way, I feel a little hesitant about the potential for it to be seen as a cautionary tale. So I have to say that I don’t regret my decision to see a midwife practice for my prenatal care, and I’m very glad that midwives attended my birth.
(If anything, I think my story could be a cautionary tale for homebirth, but that’s a WHOLE other issue with SO MANY sides.)
When I was pregnant, I had a coworker look at me with fear in her eyes when I told her I was seeing midwives; she asked if I felt OK not seeing a doctor. I can only imagine she was picturing, I don’t know, pagan-y ladies in a tent ministering over me with feathers and crystals or something. The midwives I saw are highly trained nurses with a special background and extra certification in women’s health, particularly pregnant women. They provide care for low-risk pregnancies. While still seen as non-traditional here, they attend 70% of normal births in Europe. In the practice I used, the midwives are supervised by and share an office with several OB-GYNs. My midwives regularly consulted with the doctors on anything that came up. When we needed to follow up on a blip in the anatomy ultrasound, several other doctors were consulted. I liked that, and had no doubt that if my care needed to be escalated beyond what a midwife could handle, it would. And it was.
I am not going to get into blame for what happened, but there’s no denying there was a specific action directly followed by a medical emergency. It might have happened anyway, it might not have. I don’t know for sure, but I’m willing to bet it’s not unusual to have the cord tugged on. What happened to me afterward was so rare.
One of the nice things about working with midwives was that I didn’t feel like I needed a birth plan; I wanted as natural an experience as possible, I wanted any interventions to be done thoughtfully and with clear reason, and I wanted those to be shared/discussed with me as much as possible. All of that happened during labor, because that’s their practice. But then Freya was out, and a cascade of things happened that I wish would have happened differently. I was super dazed and out of it after the birth. I had been in labor for 30 hours with almost no sleep. I had just pushed for three hours using muscles all over my body I didn’t even know I had. I hadn’t been super drugged, but I had a fair amount of pain medication in my system. And then there was the birth itself. I hardly knew what was going on by then. So by the time Mary was pulling on the umbilical cord, I didn’t have the wherewithal to ask her not to. I’ll make sure to discuss that with whoever delivers my next baby, before the baby’s born (Though with my history now I’m sure it would go without saying. Still, I’ll make sure to say it.). There are things I will do next time as a patient, and things I will discuss with my practitioner, knowing what I’ve learned from my experience. But as long as my pregnancy isn’t high-risk and doesn’t require a higher level of medical care, I will happily see midwives again with the confidence that I am in good hands.
And now I think I’m done blogging about Freya’s birth. Maybe I’ll blog more about her first three months, or my return to work, which is so close now I can count it in hours.
