There are a few things in life that we can fully predict or control no matter how much we try. No matter how detailed our "birth plan" is, we can not predict the time, the place, or the way a mommy or baby will respond to the experience of new life. I wish we all were able to walk away with the births that we had imagined in our minds and not the stories that many of us end up with.
Jim and I had originally chosen to go to an obstetrician and have a tradition hospital birth. After doing our research (most influential being the movie "The Business of Being Born" and book "The Thinking Woman's Guide to Better Birth")
we quickly came to see hospital birth as a slippery slope of interventions. So what we decided in Buffalo was to have a home birth in order to avoid an unnecessary c-section, being induced and asking for an epidural. Women have been giving birth naturally since the beginning of time and it would not hurt me to do the same. When we moved to Spokane, we chose to use a birthing center instead of doing an at home birth (mostly to save our beautiful hardwood floors)
Our birth plan was simple. Birth in a birthing center so that there was no hope of unnecessary interventions unless absolutely emergent. Beyond that my only two wishes were not to birth in the tub and that Jim was able to catch the baby. We didn't go to birthing classes and we didn't stress ourselves out about unnecessary details about pregnancy and birth. We each picked one book, read it, and stuck with what it had taught us. At the end of the day our theory was that birth is natural and in the moment I would know what to do even if I didn't use a certain "method".
September 14 was our official due date. I was patient for the next few days after that but by 41 weeks, I was ready for our little man to join us. With family in town, Porter decided to be stubborn and come the morning my parents had left for Seattle. As a friend said, Porter knew that he wanted to arrive with just Mommy and Daddy around. The night before Porter joined us we tried Evening Primrose Oil and Red Raspberry tea. I will not be one of those people who says those made us go into labor but they may have sped along a process that had already began.
My contractions started at 7:30 am on the twenty-fourth. I was nervous for months about what a contraction would feel like and if I would notice it. People had described it to me as intense period cramps. Never having period cramps, or Braxton Hicks, this still left me completely in the dark. Jim spent the morning at home with me and only realized that I was having contractions around 12:30 pm because I had on headphones and was accidentally making small grunting noises. I had no early labor signs so I did not want to alarm Jim if I wasn't actually in labor. I sent him to work for his afternoon meetings and went next door to my neighbor's house. She happens to be a midwife so I thought that she would be able to tell me if these contractions were real or not. She confirmed that they were indeed contractions but that she did not think I would have the baby until the following day because of how little distress I seemed to be in. However, she still spent the next few hours counting my contractions with me and distracting me with conversation. She answered last minute questions I had and filled me in on all the things that no one tells you. I am so thankful for that because otherwise there would have been several things I was not truly prepared for post-birth.
Everyone told me to go for a walk and move through the contractions because that would help (I'm calling bullshit on that). I tried a hot bath but that did nothing to help. I just landed in bed with my pregnancy pillow for comfort. At some point I realized I couldn't go through the pain without a hand to hold or a familiar smile so at 3:30, I texted Jim and told him that I couldn't do it alone and I needed him to come home. Jim stopped to get me Gatorade and a bouquet of flowers to look at to keep me in a positive mindset (there may have been chocolate involved but I can't remember). In reality there is very little that anyone can do to make you feel better during contractions. Jim stayed in bed with me to time my contractions and hold my hand. At this point my contractions were 2 minutes apart and a minute in length (they never got any closer than this for the rest of labor) but I was able to sleep between them. Jim stayed in contact with our midwives as the contractions got more painful. I remember distinctly not wanting to be touched during this time period and even the hand I thought I wanted to hold, I absolutely did not.
Once 8 pm rolled around, it was impossible for me to sleep and we tried putting on the Blacklist as a distraction. At this point my foggy mind thought that Tylenol was some wonder drug that would numb all the pain like an epidural, so I hesitated to take it because I wanted to be able to give the midwife accurate information on how I felt. Jim talked me into taking one (and it was most definitely NOT a wonder drug). I started having the urge to push but my midwife said as a first time Mom that it was probably just my water membrane creating pressure and that I shouldn't push. I went into the bathroom and pushed, losing my mucus plug and having my bloody show. Now, I was absolutely insistent we were going to the Birth Center no matter what the midwife said. After 14 hours of contractions, I had already begun pushing against the midwife's recommendation.
The hours between 5:30 and 9:30 (when we arrived at the Birthing Center), were probably the most challenging of my whole life. Charting your contractions every few minutes for hours and hours makes you conscious of every single pain. Although you know the goal you are working towards, you don't know when the challenge ends and when the hardest parts are over. I assumed we would get to the birthing center and she would tell me that we only made it through one tradition time. The rule during transition times is that you often feel like you just want to give up and I had only had that thought once when I said to Jim "if this is the beginning of contractions, we are in for a long day". For me, the hardest part ended as soon as I was able to push. The only way I survived the drive to the Birthing Center was by continuing to push, thinking that even though I was pushing I still had plenty of time.
When the midwife examined me upon arrival she told me that I was more than ready to push (yes, I said that about an hour ago when I started pushing). I was already all the way dilated and Porter's head was only about a fingertip away from where it needed to be. Now that I was able to push, I was loving labor. I was able to joke between contractions and loved the challenge of seeing how much progress I could make with each push (must be the runner in me). Before we worked on pushing the baby out, I would have to break my water. After an hour of no progress the midwife decided this was the time to break my water. Unfortunately, I had to tell her that she had successful done this which means that she never had sight of the meconium in the membrane (which is what we've been told by nurse friends is when we should have called 911).
Shortly after my water was broke, Porter's heartbeat started to dip into the 70 and 80 range at which point it was made clear to me that there was an urgency to pushing him out. They did not know what was causing his distress, he had been fine only 10 minutes earlier. I remember the concern in both our midwife and birthing assistants voices as they told me directly with each push that I needed to get this baby out now but it was of course Jim's voice that I heard out of them all. I would later learn that Jim had seen the midwife and birthing assistant giving each other looks that spoke to the urgency of the situation without saying a word. He didn't let on to the concern but made sure to tell me I was doing a great job and that I needed to just push a little harder next time. By this time, I had tried 4 different positions to push the baby out. The position that I birthed in allowed Jim to be an active partner in the birth. Although he didn't get to catch the baby, he held me up for the final pushes that introduced Porter into this world. There is nothing more beautiful than feeling like we really did this as a family rather than Jim simply holding my hand.
I don't think there's really a description for the moments after a birth. At this point in Porter's birth story, Jim and I have completely different outtakes on what happened. I blame it on that happiness hormones. Porter arrived in this world a shade of blue that isn't often seen on humans. When you expect to hear crying but you don't even see a breathing baby within the first 90 seconds of his life, it is horrifying. Jim was cognizant of this but I was unworried, knowing we would just call a doctor and they would fix whatever was wrong need be. Once Porter was breathing, we still heard words like "respiratory distress". I can't explain the feeling of holding your baby skin-to-skin for the first time. The world seems to fall away and you know that you made this beautiful little guy out of love.
I quickly handed him over to Jim to hold skin-to-skin because frankly, there are parts of birth you just don't come prepared for and I needed a moment to collect myself. Jim's first reaction was that Porter's hands were blue. The midwife got some gloves for Porter's hands, although by this point I think we all knew that lack of warmth was not the cause of his blue hands. I tried to breastfeed Porter but he knew that his top priority was breathing and that he didn't have the lungs to eat and breath at the same time. They hooked Porter up to a machine that would tell how much oxygen he was breathing in and then keeping in his system. The number was only in the low 70s (usually an average human has a number between 90-100).
I think we felt somewhat lied to about the situation at hand. It took a period of 30 minutes to be explained what could possibly be wrong. At that point we were told that they delay sending babies to the hospital because if they are sent to the NICU they are held for a week even if there is no justification. It is possible that they would be able to keep him breathing and he would just clear up--it had happened to them before. At points during this process while they back charted, and on the way to the hospital, we were left to give oxygen to Porter. We were told that "they were not confident that their machine was working because of the numbers it was reading". Our midwife was called to a second, at-home birth, 20 minutes away while they were still trying to figure out if Porter would hold oxygen. At no point was it suggested that aspirational pneumonia was a possibility so I believe I stayed in blissful ignorance that maybe this was nothing and they just didn't have the machines and technology to help in the way that Porter needed.
I can not say enough about our birthing assistant, Brittany, who made sure that the midwife answered the questions that we had, brought us to the ER at Sacred Heart (where she also works) and talked us through what was happening. She stayed with us until the baby was fully admitted and walked us out when we went home for showers. She came back and visited us several days later with a blanket that she had made. If not for her, our experience would have been chaotic and more heartbreaking than necessary. We felt as though our midwife swung by the hospital to talk to the doctors on her way to the second delivery, not to give them the correct information but to justify that she had not done anything wrong. At this point, of course, we keep replaying in our mind what had went wrong and what wasn't handled to our liking. I will say that up until the point that Porter arrived, this was one of the most beautiful and empowering situations of my life. I've never been so proud of something that I have done.
We arrived at the emergency room exactly 2 hours after Porter was born. I have never been into an emergency room, let alone a pediatric emergency room. Within a minute, there were at least ten staff members, including several doctors, ready to help our little guy. We had answers and he had antibiotics within the hour. There are no words for going home without your baby. It is scary being sent home knowing that the problems reside in the heart and lungs, the two most necessary things for life. I don't think I knew to cry until I woke up the next morning to the perfect silence of our home rather than to the scream of a new baby. As the mother, the one who has spent 9+ months sacrificing to keep your baby safe, there is no way not to blame yourself. The "if only…" list runs through your head. I felt so guilty for waking at home the next morning while he was hooked up to countless machines, with tubes in his nose, down his throat and IVs poking into his arm. I always made Jim promise if something went wrong, it was baby before me and somehow, that protective system I felt I had set-up failed.
I wanted a natural birth and it was beautiful. Whether we were at a hospital or birthing center, we know that the result would have been the same with Porter, and don't regret our decision. I would even use a midwife again, if we choose to have another child. We've really learned the strength in our marriage this week. We were able to keep each other laughing in the NICU when we needed Porter to know that we were there, his pillars of hope and strength. We were able to go home and have honest discussions about what we felt about the day and just cry when it seemed so far from the plan we had made. We leaned on our faith and God met us with answers to each prayer, better than we would've known how to ask. Porter has made what seems like a miracle recovery. He was off of his oxygen by day 3 and off of his IV feeding tube at 5 days. There are 7, 10, and 21 day courses of antibiotics for aspirational pneumonia and we will be taking our happy, healthy boy home tomorrow after just 7 days. We will have just one follow up appointment with Cardiology for an abnormal EKG. We know that the adventure of parenting is just being, but we are glad that we were able to weather this storm.
