About our Homebirth
In 2005 we became the parents of 2 awesome little boys. Michael was 3 and Joseph was 18 months when they became part of our family. In October of 2007 we finally obtained guardianship of them and were able to call ourselves their “forever family.” I had gone off my Depo Provera shot (which I had been on for 5 years) taking my last shot in October of 2006 in the hopes of getting pregnant in late 2006 or 2007. We knew that guardianship of the older boys was just around the corner and I was hoping to get pregnant soon after we were granted guardianship. We were lucky enough to get pregnant with a due date of September 24, 2008.
Over the course of the first few weeks of 2008 I took 3 pregnancy tests all of which turned up negative. I was disappointed but I was also having a lot of pregnancy symptoms. So I took another test and in late January finally got the long awaited positive result. Being pregnant was really exciting. We had waited a long time to make a baby from scratch. Unfortunately I started having really bad dreams about having the baby in the hospital. They were horrible dreams where everything went wrong with the labor/delivery and then I’d top it off with a little bit of “lost baby.” Yeah, apparently I had some fears about having a baby in a hospital. I’d been trying to find a midwife in our area for years in hopes that I’d already have one lined up if I ever got pregnant. I quickly learned that what seemed like an easy enough task was going to be quite difficult due to the ridiculous laws in the state of Illinois. Midwifery in our fabulous state is illegal. After my nightmares started I was getting more desperate in my search for a different birth plan. I knew there were Certified Nurse Midwives in Champaign that I could go through but I didn’t really want a CNM or a birth in a hospital, so I kept trying. Finally, I found a posting on mothering.com looking for a midwife in central Illinois. The thread seemed to have an abrupt ending with no resolution or repeated pleas for a midwife so I PM’d the person who started the thread. She lives nearby and had actually found midwives in our area! There was great joy in my heart! I was able to set up a meeting with them and was excited to find that they were everything I was hoping for.
So at this point my homebirth was secured. I was ecstatic. But it wasn’t smooth sailing quite yet. In April we were blessed with a trip to Disney World because Jeremy had training through work that was actually on Disney property. Since I was only 4 months along, I figured we would be fine with just the boys and I cruising the parks by ourselves for the most part. Well our first day went great. The boys were really well behaved, we took breaks when we needed to, I was careful to drink a lot. All seemed well. I remember riding “It’s a Small World” and thinking that the bump and the beginning and the end of the ride was WAY too intense and that if anything could cause a miscarriage that could (and apparently my family doctor thought the same thing on her recent trip where she was also pregnant…she refused to ride it a second time). Well, the next day the boys and I went to a grocery store to stock up on food so that we weren’t spending $50 a day on breakfast. When we got out of the car I felt something wet on my leg so I started to try and figure out what it was when blood started gushing out of me. It was really scary. No one prepares you for this. I was in a city that I don’t know and I have my 2 little boys with me. They’re watching blood pour out of their mommy. I had to remain calm. Michael asked me if I was all right and I told him that I was but that we needed to be praying for the baby. I called Jeremy who, by the grace of God, answered his phone. Concierge gave me directions on how to get to a hospital and they put Jeremy in a cab. He beat me there.
At the hospital, everyone there was amazing. I could not have asked for a kinder more compassionate staff. The first nurse that I saw asked me why I hadn’t gotten a pad and was amazed to hear that my bleeding had only been going on for less than 30 minutes. My shoes were slippery because of all the blood pooled up in them. The ER Doc I saw told me that it was probably placenta previa and sent me for an ultrasound. The ultrasound showed that the baby was doing just fine and that I didn’t have placenta previa. I’d worried for hours about having a c-section. My dream of a beautiful birth was shattered but now it was brought back to life. My heart started beating again and I could breathe once more.
We were sent back to our hotel with instructions to take it easy….very easy. That put quite a damper on our vacation but Jeremy and the boys were troopers about the whole ordeal. After a few days the bleeding stopped and I had no more complications for the rest of the pregnancy. I did go see a CNM for another follow up ultrasound. It was a horrid experience but we did find out that we were having a BOY! Exactly as I had hoped.
We spent the next few months educating our boys (and myself!) on what to expect at the birth and what to expect with a new baby in the house. We also had frequent visits with our midwives which I always looked forward to.
About a week before my due date I started having back pain. I’m really good at attributing all labor related pain to something other than labor. This is a stron theme throughout the labor and birth. I just assumed that it was because the baby was so heavy. I could hardly sit for very long and I was finally getting incredibly uncomfortable.
On the 22nd of September, I had an appointment with one of the midwives. I was disappointed to find out that the baby’s head wasn’t engaged. I had hoped that it was. I wasn’t showing any signs of labor either so we parted thinking we’d be seeing one another the next week.
The next day I had bloody show in the late afternoon. A quick search on the internet said that it could be another week before I had a baby. I didn’t get my hopes up. All that evening I had intermitant labor pains. They were never very intense and they were never coming at an even pace. One could be 6 minutes apart and the next could be 20. I sent my husband to bed telling him that it would probably still be a while. I believe I said “It could go on like this for days.” I’m so wise. Around 11 or so I really needed to poop. So occasionally I would try. At midnight my water broke but I chalked it up to all the pooping. Around 4am I started getting really frustrated so I sent Jeremy to the store for hemmroid stuff and an enema. (By this point I’d decided that I had hemmroids from all the attempts to poop.) By 6:45 I decided that nothing was going to work so I called the midwife for advice. She’s a very wise woman. She assured me that she would come and help me with “a really deep enema.” The whole time she was thinking that I was in labor and had been pushing for the last 8 hours. When she got here around 9 we went into the bathroom so that she could give me the enema. I was shocked when she said to me something like “Nicki, now I thought this might be the case but I can see the baby’s head.” WHAT???? Labor is supposed to be horribly painful. There’s supposed to be something called transition where I think I’m going to die and ask to be put out of my misery. I’d read all of the books and I knew what was supposed to happen. It wasn’t supposed to be this easy! The midwife asked me if I’d like to move to the bed but I felt paralyzed now that I knew I as having a baby. Well, about half an hour after the midwife got to our house we were blessed with a beautiful baby boy born right in our bathroom. His big brothers were there to watch him come out and meet him. His daddy caught him. His big brothers even cut the cord for us. It was an awesome and amazing experience.
Birth was nothing like I had ever imagined it. It was so much better that I ever could have dreamed. I think of all the things that would have been different if I would have had an OB. I think Zedekiah needed more pushing time. His hand was up by his head when he came out and I think that they wouldn’t have given me the time that I needed to get him out. I have to assume that if I was pushing for 10 hours that there’s no way that the baby would have come out in an OB’s time frame. I might have ended up with a c-section. It’s not far fetched considering how scalpel happy the OB’s around here seem to be.
Well if birth was a relatively easy and awesome experience then breastfeeding was my real challenge. I sucked at everything about breastfeeding. It was so hard. If I could have given birth to Zedekiah 5 times over again to have an easy time breastfeeding, I would have done it in a heartbeat. I just couldn’t get him to latch on. When my midwife was here she was always able to get him latched on well, but I never could. I spent hours staring at Zedekiah and crying beause I couldn’t feed him. We spent the first weeks of his life finger feeding him. After his first few days we even needed to use some of my sister’s breastmilk until I started pumping enough to feed him exclusively. I could go a whole day without ever getting him to latch on at all. I called La Leche League and they didn’t help. My best friend came over and helped me try a nipple shield. Zedekaih was able to get milk out of it but it was horribly uncomfortable. My midwife came back and helped me some more and got us on the right path again. Finally after over a month I thought we’d finally gotten the hang of it. We kept supplementing with pumped milk a couple of times a day until I thought we were doing great and stopped supplementing. That went on for a week when I discovered that he’d lost a little weight. In a time where he should have gained we’d lost. I was devastated. We were back to supplementing. I was chained to the breastpump again. I sat there with my infant in my lap and a machine on my breasts. I cried endlessly. Why was something I wanted to bad so impossibly hard for me? After all these struggles our midwife suggested trying an SNS and that seemed to do the trick. The week before Thanksgiving we finally got going on our own. There was joy in my heart. Breastfeeding was still hard. We could only do one position, the football hold, but we were nursing.
Somewhere in there we battled thrush too. We tried eliminating all yeast, gluten, sugar, and joy from our diet. I started taking probiotics and Zedekiah did too. I treated myself for a yeast infection even though I didn’t think I had one. I washed my nipples with vinegar and then switched Grapefruit Seed Extract. I washed everything religiously. Still the yeast raged on. It was excruciating to nurse. Forget that I was bad at it, at this point the pain was enough that it made me cry. My nipples actually bled into my son’s mouth. It was horrible. Finally we tried Gentian Violet and that did the trick. We ended up doing 2 rounds due to a quick reoccurance of the yeast but we seem to have finally knocked it out.
In the middle of December it all finally clicked for us. He’s steadily gaining weight. He’s a little under where he “should” be but considering all we’ve been through I’m quite happy with where he’s at. We’re even doing the cradle hold and nursing discreetly in public. I’m able to spend time with all of the kids and not just the baby. Our life is moving on. Our baby is quickly growing. Already at 3 months, he’s longer a helpless newborn. It has been so awesome to watch him grow and to see his personality emerge.
Through all this I was supported in so many ways by so many people. My husband was (and is!) amazing. He did so much in those first few weeks. I didn’t even leave our bedroom for a week. For that time and through all of our struggles Jeremy was always running errands for us and taking care of the big kids. He used most of his vacation this year to take care of me and our new baby and has had no time in the last year to recuperate. I am incredibly grateful for him. Our friends and family brought us food and helped out with the big boys. Our 2 midwives are amazing. I called one of them frequently in the first few weeks, even at crazy hours of the night, and she was always kind and so helpful and always full of ideas for the next thing I should do or try. She never gave up on me even when I had long ago given up on myself. She gave the most amazing pep talks, convincing me that I was capable of doing what was turning out to be a horribly difficult thing. I will be forever indebted to them.
I know I tricked you into coming here for a birth story and you got so much more but our struggles with breastfeeding overwhelmed every bit of his first 2 months of life. We persevered and now we are blessed but I need to tell the story of our struggles. Birth isn’t always hard and breastfeeding isn’t always easy.
If I had to write a 2000 word essay on my birth that is what it would look like.
nozwmn | 
January 5, 2009 5:19 am
Subscribe