Our Home Birth, Turned Hospital

We were having an amazing homebirth with our midwife team. I had reached 9 1/2 cm, and my body was ready to push. What we didn’t know was that Emma-Leigh had turned “sunny side up” and her head was creating a lip on my cervix that was swelling with each contraction. I swelled all the way down to 6cm, but my body continued to bear down and push with each intense contraction.

After realizing that my body was unable to correct the problem on its own, and with my strength quickly fading, my husband and midwife team decided I needed to be immediately transferred to the hospital for an epidural. It was a “last resort” to get my body to stop pushing long enough for me to, basically, start labor over again and reach 10cm.

We arrived at the hospital around midnight and I was able to finally get some rest. The hospital ended up giving me a small dose of Pitocin, after a few hours, to get things going again. That made Emma’s heart rate drop dramatically (WORST moment of my life), but we got everything under control and at 12:20PM on October 3rd, 2015, I vaginally delivered our perfect angel baby.

Our lives became filled with more love than I ever thought possible. I don’t feel like I had a “failed homebirth” – instead, I am proud of the fact that I labored twice for one birth. It was two days of pre-labor, then a total of 34 hours of active labor.