Healing Through Birth

I’m writing this in hopes that it will help with my healing. It’s been two months since my son came into this world and I feel like my story needs to be shared.

A little back story: My husband and I got married at the ripe old age of 20 after only dating for a year! I found out I was pregnant at 21, and had our first child at 22. I had an amazing birth experience with him (Jackson). He was posterior which lead to MAJOR back labor, but after only 7.5 hours, he was mine!  Recovery was difficult because my husband went back to school the following week. I dealt with severe PPD and it took about two months to heal!

6 months later… I was pregnant again.  We found out that I was pregnant the same day we found out that a good friend of ours had passed away.  I had also stopped breastfeeding the month before and was dealing with the emotions of unexpectedly weaning Jackson.  I was not ready to be pregnant again, but I embraced what the Lord blessed me with.

We found the perfect midwife and started planning our home birth. We knew that we wanted an out of hospital experience since that is what we had with Jackson.  Everything went smoothly up until my last trimester.  My blood pressure started creeping up. I changed my diet, used my essential oils, took an herbal supplement… But it just did not do the trick.

July 18th I woke up with a massive headache. I knew that my midwife warned me that I needed to contact her if I started showing signs of pre-eclampsia. I was only 38 weeks pregnant and I always assumed that this baby would be born late since his brother was… So I used some essential oils and it didn’t help. I chugged water and it didn’t help. I took Tylenol… Nothing helped. I finally called the midwife to tell her what was going on and she recommended that we go to the hospital.

After sitting in triage for a couple of hours, it was decided that I had pre-eclampsia and that I needed to be induced that night. My dreams of a peaceful home birth were shattered. My husband and I were devastated, but determined to go ahead with my “birth plan” as much as I could.   Unfortunately, that did not happen.

After 8 hours on Pitocin, I thought I was in transition. They started prepping the room and I was trying to hold back my excitement!!! I was ready to meet our little boy!  I got up off of that birth ball and positioned myself in the bed (not as gracefully as this sounds since I had probably 3 killer contractions between the ball and the bed!).  The student doctor checked me and to my horror, I was only 4cm.  When that doctor couldn’t figure out his “station”, another student came in. I felt so violated. I felt so defeated. The student doctors didn’t take a second to look at me and see that their attempts to find his station were causing me so much pain.   After that, it was all over.

My emotions went crazy after that. I agreed to the laughing gas to try to help me calm down, but it just made me a crazy woman. The gas caused my blood pressure to get to the dangerous level. I finally had to consent to the epidural… Which of course was administered by another student. It’s a little unnerving when you hear the teacher say “no… I don’t think that is the right spot” when they are dealing with your spine.   Eventually they figured it out and the epidural worked on half of my body. They would come in to roll me onto my side so that the epidural would work better, but that just caused the other side to be numb and the first side to be in pain again.

About an hour after the epidural was administered, I felt the need to push!!! I woke my husband and got him to call the nurse back in. She checked me and it was time to go!!!  As the baby was crowning, the doctor realized that my water never broke. He kept saying that he was going to break it, but I refused it.  Our son Aiden was born at 1:24pm in the arms of his father IN the amniotic sack after 13 hours of labor.

Things may not have gone the way we planned it by any stretch of the imagination, but I believe that his entrance was like the rainbow after the flood!   I’m still dealing with PPD and I have been diagnosed with PTSD and this is why I felt the need to share my story.

Rachel