My water broke at 9 pm - I was 41w3d. I could tell there was meconium and went to see my midwives - I’d been planning for an unmedicated birth at a birth center. The care there was amazing - birth classes, hour long visits, caring and knowledgeable midwives who knew and treated me like family. Anyway, I’d been only 1cm dilated that morning and without contractions we decided I should go back home to get some rest (we discussed the risks of meconium and I decided to proceed with my birth there). At home, contractions picked up right away - they were 4 minutes apart, sometimes 2, with a LOT of back pain. After an hour of trying to rest I called the birth center. I was crying and they knew I needed to go to the birth center again. There we found out I was already 5cm in just under an hour and a half since labor had started - things were moving quickly and a little abnormally. We moved to a large bed, then the swing, then the tub. My husband was giving me massages, lights were low, music on, midwives were incredibly caring. It was all I had wanted. But my contractions were intense, more than usual, because baby was in OP position which meant I was having a back labor. There was ZERO breaks in bw contractions. I’ve read that back labor is the hardest pain one can experience and really it was awful. After 5.5 hours I was at 6.5 cm but I was also panicking and unable to cope. Baby was at a -1 position and her head position was making it unlikely that she’d move down the birth canal. Midwives talked about going to the hospital. I’m so glad they did bc I was trying hard to hold on but also starting to suffer too much. So we went to the hospital, I got an epidural which only worked on one side of my body. An hour later we had to replace the epidural, which then meant the other side of the body started to feel the contractions. So 2 more hours until they adjusted the epidural and it finally worked. Overall I labored there for around 15 hours. Hospital staff were amazing and there were midwives there as well. But laboring there was very different. I couldn’t stand, had a catheter, kept nodding off. It felt more like a waiting game rather than an active engagement with labor, which made me a little sad. Of course I had less pain from contractions but also the epi made my right leg swell up and that was painful and uncomfortable. Anyway I got to 10 cm but baby never went down the canal. I pushed for 2 hours, got max dose of pitocin and nothing. Finally we found the cause - a cord around baby’s neck that was probably preventing baby to adjust her head in order to properly fit through my pelvis. After trying everything we could, c-section became an option. And then I had the only truly negative moment of my whole experience - the doctor saying I’d been giving up by doing a c-section. Doc had just met me, didn’t even know the particulars of my case (doc was surprised when midwife said baby had nuchal cord and wasn’t moving low even at 10cm doc and hours of pushing). I knew I had tried to labor as much as I could, and even though things didn’t go as planned - nothing went as planned during pregnancy either, we had a version, many other complications - I actually was proud of my choices and felt happy about my experience as a whole. But doctor’s comments made me cry. Thankfully I had a very supportive husband and the rest of the staff that all argued in my favor. I was certain of what to do and firmly told the doc so. C-section was weird, lonely, the baby’s cord was cut sooner than I wanted, I couldn’t see her when they tried to show me bc I was so sleepy from the drugs. And the worst part has been the recovery (a LOT more swelling). But ultimately it was what brought me my amazing healthy daughter born on 8-8-18 at 8.9 lbs and 21in. Doc talked to me afterwards and said her head position, size and the cord would have never let her be birthed vaginally. It was a long experience, recovery has been ongoing and different than what I wanted, but I am happy that I let my daughter stay in there as long as she wanted and that when she needed the extra push right at the end I tried everything I could to give her the best and healthiest options available. So there you go, a birth journey where kind of everything happened!

It’s funny, I keep thinking I’m happy about my labor overall, but I also cry every time I tell the story. I felt so informed and on top of my game about pregnancy and birth, but the truth is I felt a lot of fear too. The decisions were ultimately always left to me, and it’s hard coming to terms with your own inadequacies. I’d just say to future moms reading this that you need to surround yourself with the best support and team you can. Had the midwives not suggested hospital, I’d suffered a lot more unnecessarily. Had my husband not told me I could do it, I’d given up to panic and sadness. And had I not been well read about labor, I might have let that OBG convince me to push for a lot longer and then had to rush to a c-section anyway if the baby pressed on the cord.

To end it all, here is my beautiful chubby baby: