When we found out I was pregnant we decided to use a midwife and have a home birth instead of doing it at the hospital. We had some concerns early on that my son might be a big baby, I’m 5’4” and my husband is 6’6” and we were both over 9 pounds when we were born, but the midwife didn’t seem that worried, even though my fundal measurements measured 3 weeks more than what I was my entire pregnancy, and he measured big at the only ultrasound we had done at 20 weeks. We did the finger prick test to test for gestational diabetes and it came back negative(so she claims..) but I gained over 30 pounds during the pregnancy(I was a little overweight for my height before I go pregnancy).

Anyways fast forward...My due date was January 23rd and I had an appointment with my midwife that day, I had told her that I was extremely sore in my pelvic area and that there was a ton of pressure down there, and she didn’t even bother to check to see if I was dilated! She just took my blood pressure and checked the baby’s heartbeat and sent me home. Well on the way home my water broke and she told me to go home rest, and to keep her updated when my contractions start and to call her when they were 6 minutes apart, lasting 1 minute and she would head my way.

The contractions started at about 5am the next morning and didn’t get to that point until about 2pm, so I called to let her know and she told me “we’ll leave here in about an hour and mosy up there to check on you”. Well fast forward 4 hours later, my contractions are now on top of each other but she didn’t get there until almost 7pm! And then she checked my dilation and told my husband to start setting up the pool and then they went into the living room and the midwives went outside and my father overheard them saying “make sure we get everything logged correctly for when she gets admitted into the hospital”...and then they didn’t come back into my room until the pool was set up, they checked my dilation again, I got in the pool and then they left to go into the living room again and slept/played on their phones/and ate. I started getting sick so I got out of the pool and decided to walk around or do something to ease the pain and try to move this along, then a couple hours went by and they checked me again and I was at a 9 so we got the pool set back up, and I had finally gotten to a 10 so I was told to start pushing, while all three midwives sat on the bed and played on their phones, (this was my first child and I had no idea what I was doing so I figured there would be a little coaching or something). After a couple hours and no baby yet I got out of the pool and they checked me again and we found out that while I was pushing my son had brought down my cervix with him and I was now dilated to an 8. So the midwife leaves the room again and they start talking. It was now around 10 am the next day, so my water had been broke for almost 48 hours and she tells us we have to go to the hospital now that we have no choice and that she was going to call ahead and let them know we were coming and give them all the information from the last two days. We were all extremely upset and I was in a lot of pain so we get in the car and go to the hospital. When we get there the midwife is no where to be found and the hospital has no idea what’s happening, she never called. We get admitted and we get the laughing gas started and my husband lets the nurse know what’s going on and how long I had been in labor, they check and I’m still dilated to an 8, and after about an hour the midwife shows up and the nurse asks her to fax over my information from the pregnancy and the labor, she says she’s going to but doesn’t. We ended up having to do an emergency c section because my sons head was crooked in the birth canal, and then we end up finding out I had a big infection and a scarred placenta so I didn’t get to do any skin to skin right after birth because they had to start us both on antibiotics. While my husband is getting ready to go into the operation room for the c section the midwife(who still hasn’t sent my information) comes up and asks him for the money for the assistant midwife and he told her to bill him for it and he will decide if he’s going to pay because he doesn’t think they did their job. And she goes on to tell him “you hired me as a consultant not for a home birth”. After we get out of the operation room she finally sends in my information, and the doctor tells us that he can’t give us an exact answer because I was never tested properly but my gestational diabetes test was done wrong and my numbers are actually high not normal, so I probably had it, and because they didn’t know going into the surgery that my iron levels were extremely low(which my midwife knew) and I ended up loosing some blood that I was going to have to get two units of blood and I wasn’t going to be able to get out of bed that day.

Now we are struggling with what we are going to do about the midwife, my husband doesn’t want to pay the assistant midwife and he even wants to go as far as suing the midwife, but I don’t know.

Do y’all think she did wrong or is this normal behavior with a home birth?

I can explain things more if need be, I just wanted to try to keep this as short as possible