The story of God’s most precious Gift in our lives
September 10, 2012
When we first discovered we were pregnant, we started exploring different options and praying about what kind of birth we wanted to have. We started looking around in the area and found a Christian homebirth midwife and after meeting her and her team and praying for a few weeks, we decided that we wanted to plan for a natural homebirth. We felt confident that with a midwife who was prayerful and cautious, and the Lord in control of our birth, that everything would be fine.
Leading
up to the day of the birth, there was so much transition and chaos that I didn’t
really have time to visualize the birth in a certain way. This turned out to be a blessing because I
have been known to build my expectations up and be disappointed when events don’t
pan out the way I expected. Up until
early July we didn’t know where we would be living when we gave birth. Then, in the weeks following, we were so busy
transitioning and moving into our new house, as well as preparing for the new
school year and being out for maternity leave, that there was little time left
for making a firm birth plan and setting expectations. In preparing for the upcoming birth, we
gathered all the essential supplies we would need including an inflatable pool,
and as the day approached, we prepared as much as possible.
On Friday,
September 7, on the way home from school I started having contractions, however
they were not painful and I wasn’t paying attention to how far apart they were. My parents were on their way down for the
weekend anyway so I was not worried about whether it was true labor or
not. As the evening progressed, I
started paying attention to the timing of them, and though they were only lasting
about 15-20 seconds, at one point they got to be about 10 minutes apart. They were different from the previous Braxton
Hicks I’d experienced because the pressure was much lower in my pelvis and I
felt the baby coming down with each contraction. I contacted my midwife and she suggested
sleeping and seeing how the night goes.
While I woke up a few times with contractions, for the most part they
stopped, however, I noticed that at that point, the baby was much lower than he
had been that morning.
All
weekend, I was having similar contractions off and on, but never consistent or
regular for more than an hour or two.
When Sunday evening came, it looked like I would be going to school the
next day and said goodbye to my parents who were planning to drive back up to
Northern Virginia on Monday afternoon. When I arrived at school, everyone was shocked
that I had come. I taught my first class
in the morning on the Real Number System, and then during my lunch break I
noticed some spotting when I went to the bathroom. After conferring with my mom and midwife, my
suspicions that I had lost my mucus plug were reinforced. This meant very little though because this
can happen as much as a couple of weeks before labor starts. I went about the rest of my teaching day,
teaching my second class and then my 40 minute content support period, during
which I found myself sitting due to some period-like cramps I was starting to
feel. When the students left I quickly
started to finish making the copies for the rest of the week and making sure
that everything would be in order in case I wasn’t going to be gone from Tuesday, however, it started to
get to a point that every few minutes I would have to stop and brace myself
because the cramps were getting quite strong.
I called my midwife again at about 2pm and she said it was possibly real
labor or false labor and to let her know if I notice them coming every 20
minutes or so consistently. When I
started writing them down, I realized they were coming about every 4 to 7
minutes, but were only lasting about 20 seconds, however, they were so
different from the other contractions I’d felt that I really started to be
suspicious that something was going on.
I had
been in touch with Gibu, who was over at the Regent Library, and we had
discussed waiting until my contract day was finished at 3:50, however, by 3:00
the contractions were getting so strong that I began to feel that it was
important that I get home. By the time I
got to the car at 3:30 I was starting to feel extremely uncomfortable and
uncommunicative during each successive contraction. Gibu was very calm and adeptly coached me to
relax and breathe through each contraction while stopping traffic to get out of
the busy school parking lot. During the
30 minute ride home each contraction got more intense and I found myself
vomiting. By the time we reached home,
the contractions were coming only a few minutes apart and I couldn’t move or
talk through them. I made it through the
front door and then had to crawl onto the floor and curl up. The contractions were coming much closer together
now, leaving me very little respite between them, and Gibu timed several at
50-60 seconds each. At that point he
called the midwife and my mom, who had been attending an afternoon meeting in
Newport News and didn’t have far to come from.
I labored
on the floor near the front door, throwing up a few more times from about 4:00
until everyone reached at 5:30 or so.
There was so much pressure in my pelvis that I couldn’t think about
moving even between contractions and just wanted to stay put. However, once others arrived, someone set up
the pool with warm water and somehow they convinced me to get in it. Laboring in the pool made a huge
difference. While the contractions were
still coming quite close together, the warm water definitely helped with the
pain. At this point, I was starting to get
tired because my contractions had been coming so close together, and was quite
upset to find out I was only 5 cm dilated.
However, within the next two contractions (somewhere around 7pm) my
water broke, bringing on stronger contractions and making me dilate much
faster. I started having contractions
with involuntary pushing, and struggled not to push during them, but to blow
them off as long as possible. Finally,
when they checked around 7:30pm, they told me I was fully dilated and could
push with the next contraction if I felt like it. I felt such relief just at the thought of
being at that point finally.
In the
days following the birth, I mentioned to someone that “we were laboring,” and
they laughed saying “Isn’t it mostly you that was doing the labouring?” The truth is absolutely not. While the work was physically going on inside
my body, I could not have done it without Gibu.
He didn’t leave my side the whole time except for a few minutes, and the
contractions that came in that time were so much harder. His steadiness and encouragement strengthened
me to allow what was happening to come.
When fear crept in to discourage and make me doubt, he was right there
to pray with me and give me confidence that my body was created for this. As hard and as tiring as it was, I know I would
have given up if it weren’t for him.
Once I
started pushing I was relieved because I thought it wouldn’t be long before I
was holding my little boy. I changed
positions several times, because the midwives suggested that it would make him
descend faster, however each successive time it got more difficult to move
because of the intense pressure of the baby’s head. Unfortunately, while the midwives could feel
his head, he was progressing slowly and my pushing seemed to be doing little
for the process. Additionally, I was
getting more and more tired. At around 9pm
it seemed that it would not take much more, however, after the next contraction
and push, I felt some more of the waters come out. My midwife said she was going to listen to
the baby on the Doppler and I knew something must be wrong. The baby’s heartbeat was strong and steady,
however, she said that while, when my waters broke they had been clear, now there
was meconium in the waters, suggesting that the baby might be feeling some
distress, and increasing risk of aspiration for the baby in birth. She
decided that it would be best if we transferred to the hospital via an
ambulance and called 9-1-1.
What
followed was the most difficult part of our labor experience. With each contraction, I had to blow off the
urge to push (if you have ever given birth, you know that is no easy task). When the ambulance arrived, they loaded me in
and allowed both Gibu and the midwife to ride along with me. It took us approximately 10 minutes to get to
the hospital, during which, the midwife kept the Doppler on the baby to monitor
his heartbeat. At no point did it seem
like he was in distress or even anxious.
I however, was extremely uncomfortable, trying to breathe through
contractions while lying on my back in a retired rickety ambulance that was
only put back into circulation because one of their newer ones was in the
repair shop. When we reached the
hospital they wheeled me into the elevator and up to a labor and delivery
room. I was then expected to get down
off the gurney and move myself to the hospital labor bed, again, not an easy
task.
Once
the nurses checked me in and set me up with the fetal heart monitor, I was left
to labor down on my own. At around 11:15pm
the new nurse from the shift change came in and helped me push through the next
several contractions. It was clear that
I had been pushing ineffectively and the nurse coached me in trying to get me
to push the right way. I was getting
more and more tired and remember thinking “I just wish they could cut me open
and get him out!” I started to doubt
that I could do it, and at around 11:30 the nurse suggested calling the doctor and
having her use the vacuum extractor. My
midwife, also concerned that I was getting so tired, encouraged me to go ahead. They called the doctor and I continued to
push with the support of my mom, Gibu, the midwife and nurse to try to bring
the baby down further while waiting for the doctor.
The
doctor arrived around 11:45 and my hopes for avoiding a September 11th
birthday for my baby were gone. The
doctor introduced herself and had me push a few more times with her. I remember thinking “Why is she making me do this,
when she knows I wanted the vacuum extractor!”
However, she also knew that I had wanted a homebirth, and that I would
have wanted to birth my baby with my own strength. At that point, I didn’t think it was
possible, but I remember my mom saying she had seen the baby’s head and the
doctor saying that I could do this and encouraging me to push through the next
few contractions. At this point she told
me to let go of Gibu (I had been clinging to him with each contraction) and
focus on pushing out the baby. This gave
Gibu the chance to run around and catch the baby as he slid out at 11:50 with the
next several pushes. Yes, there was
pain, but I was so grateful that the doctor gave me the opportunity and
encouraged me to do it on my own. Once
he was born they laid him on my chest for a few short moments while Gibu cut
the cord, and then whisked him over to the paediatrician in the room because he
wasn’t breathing and was covered in meconium.
They cleaned him up and gave him some oxygen while the OB got the
placenta out quickly (apparently I was bleeding pretty badly and she was
concerned) and stitched me up.
After
about 20-30 minutes, they finally gave me my son to hold and nurse. As I stared into his beautiful face-the
nurses were right, he has his father’s dimples and curly dark hair- I fell deep
into love. His wide eyes were a
blue-grey (since then they have darkened to brown) and staring up at me in
wonder. He turned his head at the sound
of his daddy’s voice to see the man who had been talking to him all those
months. His little fingers and toes left
me amazed and awed at the little creation that had been inside me for all those
months (I was also relieved to see he got his father’s fingernails, not my
awkwardly shaped ones).
My midwife apologized
that things didn’t happen the way we had hoped at home, but all I could think
was that the whole experience, while not what we had planned for, was guided by
God and His hand was in the whole thing from the beginning. The doctor on call (who by the way, brought a
gift for the baby) was one who values natural childbirth and actually did some
training with midwives in a previous hospital.
She had excellent bedside manner, asking me how Gibu and I had met in
the time she was massaging my uterus (a painful process important for clamping
down and preventing postpartum haemorrhage) and doing stitches. I so appreciated the way she believed in my
body’s ability to give birth to our son naturally, even when I had started to
give up. The nurses, too were very encouraging
and kind, knowing that we had originally chosen to give birth at home. One nurse even stayed on an hour and half
past her shift change to see the baby and make sure everything went well. At the end of the day, we were so grateful to
have our healthy baby boy in our arms that nothing else mattered. Yes, I feel I missed out a bit on not getting
to bond with him in the first 20 minutes of his life, but it was clear that we
needed to be in the hospital, and I am so grateful for my midwife’s wisdom and
the calm way in which she made the decision.
We are also extremely grateful that we got to labor as long as we did at
home. The whole process helped us fall
more in love with each other and I appreciate and respect him so much
more. In spite of all the nerves he had
exhibited leading up to the day, he was so calm and strong during the labor,
which was just what I needed. It brought
us so much closer as a couple because we brought this baby into the world
together. He was my partner and the only
one in the room (there were also 3 midwives and my mom) that I cared about or
noticed.
We
named our son Nathan Emmanuel because he is a gift from God. Everything about him is perfect and beautiful
and we feel so blessed every day.
Emmanuel means “God with us” and is a reminder to us of how God’s
presence has been with us through this whole last 14 months of transition from
India to the US. Not a lot has been
consistent for us, but the presence of God and his blessings in our lives have
not failed. We pray that our son would
be a blessing to others as well and would take God’s presence wherever he goes.
