My First Birthing Experience Was Less Than Ideal

…it was downright traumatizing..

We took an AMAZING birth class with a woman who actually made me excited about having a natural birth! The human body has always fascinated me (might be just a part of why I do what I do) and learning about the natural hormones released in the body at what times and how the uterus is actually building up muscle up to the top of it with every contraction so that when it comes time to push, you literally have the strongest muscle ever ready to push that baby out. Seriously, fascinating! I was going to try to go without medication, but I was honestly open to getting an epidural if I felt I needed one. I also wanted to make sure my baby was truly ready to come out, so did not want to be induced if at all possible. My personal history of immune system issues made me very against having a C-section (because the baby’s immune system is created through a vaginal delivery and swallowing the flora from the Mother) and anything that increased my chances of that was top priority to avoid.

My contractions started on a Sunday night every 30-45 minutes apart. Needless to say I got very little sleep that night! By 5am, they were 4-5 minutes apart and lasting 45-60 seconds. A few hours later, they were 2 minutes apart and lasting for 90 seconds. At some point during the night, I got a migraine strength tension headache, which gradually worsened so that by the time my contractions were 2 min apart, the rest I had from that pain, was a different splitting headache pain. UGH. Based on the class we took, we thought that I was definitely in active labor. We walked across the street to our hospital with our things (yes, we were THAT close)! The Dr came in to check how dilated I was and told me I was 1 cm dilated. ONE. I felt totally deflated! They gave me the option of either being admitted and induced to move things along, or of getting a shot of morphine to get a break from the pain (of both headache AND contractions) so I could go home and sleep while my cervix tried to catch up to to my body. I took the morphine and we went home and slept all day. When we woke up early evening, the morphine was wearing off and my contractions had slowed to 7-8 min apart. We ate dinner and headed back to the hospital around 9pm when they were 60 seconds long, 4-5 min apart. Once again, we though “this is it!” When the Dr checked me this time, I was at 3cm! Not as much as I had hoped but moving in the right direction. My headache was back in full force, so I decided to get an epidural, which totally bummed me out that it wasn’t driven by labor pains! :-/

Our Doula arrived at the hospital and our goal was to try to get some rest. Pitocin® was suggested to me (which I didn’t want especially given the link to PPD) multiple times by the Dr’s so we kept asking “what are our other options?”. The first alternative option we decided because I was leaking amniotic fluid but my water hadn’t fully broken was to break my water and wait a few hours. During that wait, I had a reaction to the epidural medication that caused my blood pressure to drop dangerously low, so out of nowhere I team rushed in and put a mask on me and started doing whatever they were doing to my body. I had NO idea what was going on, no one was looking at me and there was not much talking towards me. They lowered the medication and got my blood pressure back to normal. Back to sleep I went.

I woke up 10 minutes shy of the 2 hour mark they were giving me and my Doula said that they’d be turning me to my other side when they came in and asked if I wanted to go ahead and do it. I said “sure” and she helped me shift to my other side. Again, a medical team came rushing into the room, this time started manipulating my body and had me get onto all fours. Apparently my baby’s heart rate had dropped and when they came in, they saw I had been having a contraction for the past 20 minutes. One long contraction. They gave me a shot of adrenaline to stop the contraction which unfortunately stopped ALL contractions. The Dr came in and checked my cervix and found I was still only 3cm dilated. Not good. She said we needed to start thinking about the possibility of a C-section. NOOOOO!!!! As a last ditch effort, we agreed to start Pitocin® to help restart contractions. It was Tuesday morning, September 11. They said they’d give me a couple hours but after another drop in my blood pressure and my baby’s heart rate dropping again, they rushed in and said we needed to move me quickly into surgery. I worriedly looked at my husband (who gets faint at the thought of blood) and thankfully he was already putting on the scrubs they had given them.

When we went into surgery they found the cord was wrapped around my baby’s neck and it was a short umbilical cord, (which explained why he couldn’t move down very far). My husband was asked to call out the sex (we waited to find out!) and he said it was a boy in disbelief. We were both mostly sure we were having a girl, haha. Luckily we only had one boy name - my husband’s middle name, a family name - August, so we knew exactly what his name was. He was covered in meconium which meant I got to see him for 5 seconds over the top of the sheet before they whisked him off. I tearfully told my husband to go be with him so August didn’t feel alone. He was brought back to me for about 5 minutes and put on my chest while they closed me up, and then they transferred me to a gurney and wheeled me to the recovery room while they took August to get weighed, checked and all of that (with my husband). I was alone in the recovery room for about 40 minutes after having my baby. I felt a little better knowing my husband was with August, but my vision and birth plan of skin-to-skin immediately following birth and waiting to do all of the unnecessary measurements so that we could get that time to bond never happened. About 99% of our birth plan didn’t happen actually. That was tough.

There were so many unexpected events in my childbirth that I struggled with afterwards and needed to process. The medical professionals not looking at me and talking to me first, even to say “We’ve got you,” and manipulating my body/doing things to me without eye contact or words felt violating. There I was, in an extremely vulnerable position and the importance of being talked to during something scary, was missing. My Doula had felt partially responsible for moving me so she backed off after that. She was supposed to have been supporting me AND guiding my husband on how to best support me, and I felt neither of them. There was a lot of confusion on my husband’s part about what was going on, and I needed someone, but felt very alone. I was incredibly unprepared for the C-section seeing as I was low-risk and not exhibiting any signs that might be a possibility. I had prepared so much for the vaginal birth that it felt like I had trained for months for race I never got to run. Not seeing my son actually being born left me feeling very disconnected - like I didn’t even give birth to him. And then in the recovery, I couldn’t get up at all so when August cried, I couldn’t get him, I had to wait for someone else to. When I looked at him, I did not feel that “instant love” that mothers describe feeling for their babies. There was a part of me that felt like he wasn’t mine - I didn’t recognize him. Such weird and awful feelings. The things I experienced left me feeling powerless, disconnected, violated and extremely vulnerable. I definitely started feeling the Baby Blues and thought I might be headed towards Postpartum Depression. My husband had taken a 4 month rotation within his company doing a University Recruiting roll a month before we had August that involved a lot of travel, so I was starting to freak out (as was he) about him leaving me alone for 3-4 days each week while I was recovering from surgery and trying to take care of a newborn. It was all just SO MUCH.

When I shared my story with others, the response I would typically get is “the most important thing is that you had a healthy baby” or some version of that. And while yes, I am incredibly grateful that I had a healthy baby, I wanted to scream that that wasn’t the only thing that was important. Validating the Mother’s experience, especially difficult or traumatizing experiences surrounding a child’s birth is ALSO incredibly important. We have Maternal mental health problems in our country, both during pregnancy and postpartum. (Resource) To only focus on the baby is invalidating, insensitive and can worsen how the mother’s feelings and increase isolation. In retrospect, I am incredibly grateful for the emotional work that I had done a couple of years prior (to help with health issues I was experiencing), as this work helped me identify emotions and process so much more quickly and easily than I would have been able to do in the past. I went back to my Dr whom I saw for the NET (neuro emotional technique) 2 weeks postpartum and I am 100% convinced that is why I never went fully into PPD, and why my baby blues only lasted a couple of weeks. It helped me identify and process all of the difficult emotions from my experience. Once some time had passed, I was able to find more gratitude in some parts of my experience. I felt as though my body was protecting both me and my baby by my cervix not dilating. Had I dilated more, and had my body tried to push my baby out, there are many different life threatening scenarios that could have happened for both August and me. Had I not been at a hospital with quick access to surgery when August was in distress, the outcome could have been different. There are many things to be grateful for AND that doesn’t change the fact that I still had a traumatizing birthing experience.

If you are a fellow Mama who has also had a traumatizing birthing experience, I SEE YOU. I empathize with you. Having a healthy baby does not erase a negative experience of how they came into this world. These two things can co-exist. Our body does amazing things and can also feel like a traitor. This goes for experiences during pregnancy and postpartum as well, as we struggle to find our way back to feeling like ourselves. The thing I hear the most often (and felt myself) is “I want my pre'-baby body back.” The reality of it is that we are seeing a reflection in the mirror that doesn’t look like us, and it’s an automatic reaction to think that it’s just about the extra weight. However, it goes so much deeper than that. How we feel about ourselves mentally, emotionally and physically all impact what we see in our reflection. My goal in helping other Mamas is to reconnect you to your authentic self - so you can not only look like yourself again, but holistically feel like yourself again. It is possible.

1 in 7 Moms, and 1 in 10 Dads suffer from Postpartum Depression.

If you, or someone you know is struggling postpartum with maternal or paternal mental health, please visit Postpartum Support International.