Maya's Birth
Maya arrived May 1st and was a healthy 7lbs 2 ounces and 19 inches long! Definitely not the "big 2 weeks overdue baby" a few medical professionals made her out to be. A funny side note is practically every nurse on staff told me a story of how their children were 2 weeks overdue babies.
As many of you know I went into the hospital on 4/30 to get induced after holding the doctors off as long as possible. They started with Cervidil that broke my water, but didn't progress. Then they started pitocin the next morning which got me in active labor. My Hypnobabies techniques kept me completely calm and focused the entire time even though I was experiencing double and triple peaked pressure waves due to lovely synthetic Oxytocin.
I went to the bathroom with my husband around 2:30pm and told him that I felt someting was very very wrong and that I was having a strong feeling this baby wouldn't be arriving vaginally, but c-section. The interesting thing is I wasn't saying this under pressure from p**n, bc if so I would have been thinking about meds. It was more of a premonition I guess. A few minutes after that the nurse came in because she had been watching baby's heartrate at her station for some time and saw some concerning things. She was under stress and her heartrate was dropping irregularly (which the doctors said was NOT due to pitocin surprisingly).
Within a few minutes things were going downhill fast and the nurse had me
laying in a million different positions to try and help baby, but
when that stopped working she pressed a button and in flew about 8 people. They
ran around the room in a flurry hooking me up to oxygen, shutting off the
pitocin, flushing my body with fluids etc. I was extremely calm while all this
was happening because I knew in my heart that things would be fine after we got
past this point, but that I would have a big decision to make. After some time,
things stabilized and they told me I was over 5cm and 80% effaced, but baby
refused to drop and was still at station -3. She definitely should have dropped
since I had been in active labor for some time, but they were not sure why that
hadn't happened. They said they totally respected my decisions and my birth plan
and they could add more fluid to my uterus if I wanted to keep going or I could
choose to have a c-section now. I knew in my heart going with the c-section at
that time was the right decision to make. She was born about 30 min later and
healthy! She had meconium in her fluid which hadn't been there when my water
initially broke, so she obviously had been under some stress.
The most amazing thing for me was hearing from people afterwards how impressed and inspired they were watching me in my birthing time. I honestly felt like I had failed Hypnobabies, but everyone else thought otherwise. My nurse told me that she had no doubt in her mind that if baby had dropped I would have had made it all thr way through with no epidural. My doula told me that the entire medical staff was shocked at how calm I was and that I was a bit of a celebrity there, though I never realized it! ha A CNM (who used to do homebirths) had been assigned to me when I checked in and was rooting me on.
She told my doula that women in my situation 100 years ago would not have
made it and neither did their babies. One theory was that her head might have
been cocked just the slightest bit at a funny angle that was preventing her from
engaging in my pelvis. (One interesting thing I have noticed about Maya now that
she is here is that she likes to sleep with her right fist up under her chin
propping her head up...maybe she was doing that in the womb as well! ha) Another
interesting tidbit was that once things really got going all I wanted to use
were my cues. I didn't want to listen to the recordings at all. My peace cue was
my rock!
Hypnobabies is absolutely amazing and if and when I do get pregnant in the
future with my 2nd child, I hope to go for a VBAC using Hypnobabies again! My
story is an example of how sometimes there ARE necessary medical interventions
and how thankful I am for doctors who are there when you need them. It is a
story of how when something IS wrong your body will let you know. It is a story
of how you can actually plant a seed of change in the heart of medical
professionals and get them out of their comfort zone! Most of all, my story is
my badge of honor that I will wear proudly for the rest of my life!