Story of a Home Birth - Part II: How Our Home Birth Went

Our beautiful little girl was born on a Sunday in August, five days after her expected due date.

I woke up at 2:30 in the morning on Saturday and felt like my Braxton Hicks contractions had changed into more crampy-feeling ones that were coming at regular intervals, so I got up and started timing them and they were five to eight minutes apart. So I thought I might actually be in labor finally, and went back to bed to get some rest. Later we got up and started off like a normal day and showered and cleaned up the house to be ready for the midwife. I had a good appetite and ate a pork chop for breakfast!

Periodically I was checking in with our midwife, Joey Pascarella of Sacred Journey Midwifery, on the phone. By afternoon the contractions were two to three minutes apart and getting more painful, and so Joey and her assistant Bobby ended up coming over around 3:30 in the afternoon. Joey checked me, and I was dilated to four or five centimeters.

Joey and Bobby got me into the shower sitting on the birthing ball with hot water running over me, and I stayed in the shower for what seemed like hours and hours and hours. My husband was sitting on the edge of the tub for a lot of the time rubbing my back or just trying to be there for me.

For the first couple of hours, I would yell during each contraction, saying, "Ow. Ow. Ow. OWWWWW. OWWWWWWWW." Then I came to a point where something clicked in my brain, and I said to myself, "OK, this is one very bad day, but it's just a day, and then I never have to do this again. The pain is a good thing because it's my cervix opening up, and it will help this be over faster." After that I kept saying this to myself over and over again, kind of like a mantra, and I stopped yelling during the contractions and just concentrated silently during them.

I also found myself talking to my cervix in my head during the contractions, saying, "Open, open, open ..." It was kind of funny because someone in one of my birth preparation classes had mentioned talking to their cervix and we had totally made fun of it in private afterward: "Hey there, cervix, how's it going?" But there I was talking to my cervix after all!

Eventually Bobby came in and said she thought maybe it would help if I changed position and got out of the shower and walked around to get my contraction going stronger. So I got out and put on an old tee shirt of my husband's and tried walking a bit, but I was tired and didn't feel like moving much. At some point I threw up and didn't want to eat after that, but drank a lot of water and had a few licks of honey. Eventually I was just sitting cross-legged on the couch silently concentrating through the contractions. I was so quiet during them that apparently Joey and Bobby couldn't even tell when I was having them.

It was getting later and I was so exhausted that I was starting to kind of doze off during contractions, although sometimes I would still get up and try to walk a little. Joey asked me a couple of times if I wanted her to check how far I was dilated, but I was concentrating so hard and was almost in kind of a trace, so I just kind of brushed her off and wanted to be left alone. Finally around 11pm Joey said she really wanted to check me, so I snapped out of it and said okay. So she checked me and in all that time I'd only progressed to seven centimeters.

Joey also realized that my bag of waters was still intact---we'd thought it had broken a little earlier because I had some blood and goo coming out of me. So since I was so tired and shaking and drifting off to sleep between contractions, Joey said I either needed to get some rest so that I would be able to push if this went on to 3:00 or 4:00 in the morning, or if I was okay with a small intervention she could break my bag of waters, which would probably speed things up.

I was in enough pain that I couldn't imagine sleeping or lying down, so I said to go ahead and break my waters. So she did, and she said that the baby's head immediately dropped down and I had instantly dilated to 8 centimeters. Then I had virtually no transition, because almost my next contraction was involuntary pushing. I continued to have pushing contractions for about an hour, but they were spaced fairly far apart with lots of rest in between. The whole time I was standing, bracing myself against the wall, in a slight squatting position. The pushing contractions were so powerful that I was bellowing at the top of my lungs and felt like I was roaring like a lion!

Meanwhile, my poor husband was curled up in a little ball in a chair in the corner, traumatized by watching me and not being able to help. He said it was one of the worst moments of his life! I guess because I was yelling so loud he thought I was in terrible pain, but actually I think I had so much adrenaline going through me that I don't remember it being exactly what you'd call painful at that point. More like intense and powerful.

As I was having the pushing contractions, Joey said she thought I wasn't quite giving in to them and was holding back. It was true that I was letting my body do the pushing, but wasn't adding anything of my own. So then I started adding some voluntary pushing on top of the involuntary pushing of the contractions. Our Bradley instructor had told us that when the baby was coming through the birth canal it would feel like she was "coming out the wrong hole" (i.e. like she was coming out my rear end). She was right - it did feel like that, and so I started to realize I was close to being done.

Then the baby crowned and I could reach down and feel the head! I didn't exactly feel the ring of fire but I did feel stinging as her head was born ... unfortunately that was me tearing ... so Joey said not to push, but to take it nice and slow, and during the next contraction the rest of her slid out easily.

It was just after midnight. The baby cried right away, and then Joey and Bobby led me over to the mattress and laid me down and put her in my arms, and I held her while she coughed out the fluid, and she pooped mecomium over everything ... then she nursed right away! And she almost immediately pooped again, and they were surprised because it was transition poop already ...

Her Apgars were 9 and 9, and she came out just perfect---not yoda-looking at all, no conehead, no bruises, not even vernix, just beautiful with tons of black hair. She weighed 7 lbs, 8 oz.

The placenta came out easily with one little push after about 5 minutes (although I was pretty upset about having to push again after I'd thought I was done). I was having heavy bleeding so Joey had to massage my uterus, which was really not fun at all. It turned out I had a second degree tear, so I had to get numbed with local anesthetic and stitched up, which was also not fun.

Later it turned out I developed a hematoma on my perineum (a painful bunch of bruised tissue under the skin). Although this wasn't a dangerous condition particularly, because of the hematoma I had a somewhat difficult recovery, and continued to have pain when sitting or standing for another 7 weeks after the birth.

Despite the difficult recovery, I was so grateful everything turned out as it did. I wouldn't have traded our home birth experience for anything else. Above all, I was so glad we'd been able have the birth without an epidural or other drugs, because our daughter was so alert and so incredibly healthy when she was born. She's now eleven months old, still breastfeeding, and has hardly been sick a day of her life---literally, there was one day when she had the sniffles, and other than that, not one day of illness. Joey and Bobby were so wonderful and experienced, we were able to have the birth in complete confidence that we were in capable hands, and that meant everything to us.

My husband said that his favorite part of the whole experience (despite it being the worst day of his life) was getting to go to sleep in our own bed after Joey and Bobby had cleaned up everything and left --- that first night together as a little family, him, me, and our tiny new baby. That, he said, was really something special.