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Cassidy's Birth Story By Catherine |
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Birth Stories -
Homebirth Birth Stories
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Wednesday, 14 January 2009 09:43 |
On Monday, June 28, around 3:30pm 2 days after my due date my water broke. It was so exciting because at last, we knew Cassidy Douglas was coming! I had been having Braxton Hicks contractions for the past week, and they simply continued. Finally, around 11pm labor began with the contractions getting stronger, and more regular, starting with 20 minutes apart, and getting to about 6-8 minutes apart during the night. I went outside while my husband slept, and looked up at the full moon, the wind blowing hard against me, and I saw two deer wandering around, lit up ghostly white by the moonlight.
A day went by, while the contractions got more intense and closer together. Laura, my midwife, popped over a few times, and I remained active and excited for my baby to be born. Around midnight, my husband, Brandon, and I went for a walk around the block because I had a lot of excess energy, and Laura arrived and joined us for the second block. The full moon had disappeared behind the clouds and the night was perfectly still.
As the contractions came more intensely, my husband talked to me about the baby and rubbed my back or arm, and I concentrated on pictures of babies, imagining my cervix opening and my baby coming out. I wanted to go into the hot tub, where I would birth, so first we went outside once more, and saw the moon, taking a few pictures by my day lilies, which were in bloom during that night.
The tub felt glorious, and the contractions were easy in the warm, bubbling water. We sang to a favorite CD, until I felt too hot, and wanted to get out to walk more. After walking around the house a bit, I noticed that the sun was rising, and here was daylight of my third laboring day. So I went out to pace on my patio alone, and refuel. I have a clear memory of the dew on the grass and the birds chirping as the sun poked its new beams into the sky.
When I came in, I told Laura that I felt ready to push. She examined me and found that the anterior lip of my cervix was being pinched by the baby's head and had swelled up, because the head was presenting a bit crookedly. She would need to adjust and hold the swelled lip while the head pushed past it. My hopes of a powerful pushing experience, squatting in the hot tub were far from the reality of laying just about on Laura's lap, on my couch, while she adjusted the lip internally, asking me to push, or not push for two and a half hours, while the head moved past. That was the worst part of the labor, being so physically confined to one spot, and trying to be patient when I really wanted to just have the baby.
Finally the lip was pushed back and the baby's head past it, having straightened out from the process. Laura said I was free to push the baby out, but we should go on a bed, because she thought the uterine infection risk of birthing in the hot tub too great after all this time, and internal assistance.
We went upstairs, onto our bed, and I pushed and pushed. I laid on my side to keep my blood pressure lower because of my pre-eclampsia during late pregnancy, and the toll of a long, tiring labor. I remember the hot sun coming in through the window, as Laura told me I could reach down and touch my baby's head during a contraction. It felt incredible, a warm little head with soft hair. I pushed hard for two hours, when finally, I felt him bulging in me, almost out. All of a sudden Brandon was shouting that the head was out, and to keep pushing. I felt a whoosh and an emptiness as Cassidy seemed to slip out of me. Brandon put him on my hip, and I cried out with joy, talking non-stop to my new baby. He seemed so big and like such a perfect little human. I couldn't believe he had just been part of me.
Brandon says that Laura sort of pulled him out once his head came, because his arm was up, being born with the shoulders. It turns out that his hand was up by his eye (a big red mark was there a few minutes) during the whole labor, which had caused his head to present crookedly, and the whole labor to be slower and tougher. I tore and had stitches but healed quickly.
Cassidy Douglas Phillips was born around 10:15am on Wednesday, June 30, 1999 measuring 21.5 inches and weighing 8 pounds. He was born in a slow labor- 43 hours from when my water broke, or 36 hours after regular contractions. Yet ever since then he has been anything but slow, nursing like wild right from the start, putting on a couple pounds his first few weeks, and is tremendously peaceful and happy.
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