Episode 46: A Prayer Answered: Rachel’s Story
Episode 46 SN: A Prayer Answered: Rachel’s story
Pregnancy, both physically and emotionally, is a personally transformative event no matter what else is going on in the pregnant person’s life. The context in which you are experiencing this pregnancy, be it calm or dramatic, can add to the challenge. Today’s guest experienced flux in both her extended family, her immediate family, and the medical community she was a part of. While she successfully had six children, five of the births involved emergencies, and her third pregnancy, the focus of today’s conversation, was seeded with issues from the very start. Despite the many tricky elements of this pregnancy and birth, my guest (and eventually her daughter) persevere and create something beautiful: a beautiful baby who grows up to have a beautiful life.
Poet and essayist, Rachel Neve-Midbar’s collection Salaam of Birds won the 2018 Patricia Bibby First Book Award (available here) She is also the author of the chapbook, What the Light Reveals (here). Rachel’s is a current PhD candidate at The University of Southern California where her research concerns menstruation in contemporary poetry. You can read her own menstrual memoir essay “Traveling the Red Road” here. More at rachelnevemidbar.com.
atrial septal defect
Audio Transcript
Paulette: Hi welcome to war stories from the womb
I’m you host Paulette Kamenecka. I’m an economist and a writer and the mother of two girls.
Pregnancy, both physically and emotionally, is a personally transformative event no matter what else is going on in the pregnant person’s life. The context in which you are experiencing this pregnancy, be it calm or dramatic, can add to the challenge. Today’s guest experienced flux in both her extended family, her immediate family, and the medical community she was a part of. While she successfully had six children, five of the births involved emergencies, and her third pregnancy, the focus of today’s conversation, was seeded with issues from the very start. Despite the many tricky elements of this pregnancy and birth, my guest (and eventually her daughter) persevere and create something beautiful: a beautiful baby who grows up to have a beautiful life.
Let’s get to this inspiring story.
P: welcome to the podcast. Thanks so much for coming. Why don’t you tell us your name and where you’re from?
Rachel: My name is Rachel Neve Midbar, I believe living in a Druze village in Israel Cosmosphere right outside of Haifa. And they’ve been living in Israel. off and on since 1983. And originally from Westport, Connecticut.
P: Uh, wow. Wow. That’s very cool. And I know from the writing that you sent me that you have six kids.
R: Yes, six six children. Six pregnancies six birth six living children. Lucky Yeah.
P: So so lucky. I was gonna say otherwise known in the wider world as a lucky duck. And from the piece that I read, it looked like your first pregnancy was pretty young. You were pretty.
R: I got married, we were 21. When we got married, we met when we were 19. And my first daughter was born. I was 22 years old.
P: So let’s just let’s talk for one second about that. So walking into this pregnancy What did you imagine pregnancy would be like?
R: Really, I think that I played with dolls till I was about 14 years old. And then I could not wait to have my first child. I was raised in a pretty abusive home and caring for the dolls nurturing them was my way of nurturing myself. And I missed it very much in those in between years, when there wasn’t dolls and there wasn’t babies, but I naturally assumed that I was the Born earth mother that I would squat and a child would arise like that it would be so easy. And I was shocked that my body didn’t didn’t have it easy. All of my births except for one were emergencies.
P: Wow
R: They were either in operating rooms about to get into the operating room. The epidural already in or already after, like hours and hours of transition labor, going to going to C section. So I had three vaginal births and three C sections. But only one was what I would might term and easy birth. It wasn’t that the doctor was very in control was just him and me in the room and he was very in control like you know, sort of yelling at me. Breathe, stop. Open stop you want if you don’t behave you’re gonna get a tear. You know, like
P: that sounds like an oddly aggressive coach, but it sounds like it worked.
R: I mean, I wonder if I’d had doulas if I’d had a different husband. I’d have different doctors. If I had been allowed to walk around if I if the third pregnancy that I’m going to tell you about birth my daughter was born via cesarean section if that had happened, how am I I had very big babies, but even given very big babies I wonder if I have been allowed to birth a little bit more naturally. If it would have been a little different but you never know.
P: We’re all the births in Israel.
R: All the births were in Israel.
P: Okay. I’m guessing the six kids it was easy to get pregnant.
R: I got pregnant pretty much when I wanted to.
P: Okay, so easy to get pregnant. And and I guess we’ll focus on the third pregnancy here. But generally speaking, where your pregnancy is relatively straightforward,
R: I guess I can answer yes, except for the third pregnancy, more or less straightforward. Some small issues here and there. Maybe more than others, but pretty much straightforward. The third pregnancy was really the third pregnancy was the pregnancy. I didn’t want to get pregnant. I got pregnant using birth control. But I want to tell you the whole story.
P: Okay. Yeah. So walk us through that then.
R: Okay. So I was 24 years old. I had two children, a year and a half apart two daughters after the second one was born, because we were American immigrants. And in in the early 90s, there was an enormous infiltration of Russian immigrants from the Soviet Union Soviet Union collapsed. All the refusnicks, the. Russian Jews who weren’t allowed to leave left and Israel absorbed a million and a half people.
P: wow
R: The Army hasn’t been as needy of guys like my ex husband, who were college educated American immigrants in their 20s were married with kids.
So it was known that if you had two kids, before you turn to the Israeli Government and said I’m here, then you would go in and just do four months of army service rather than serving for long periods of time. And because my ex husband had a bachelor’s degree, he was taken to be a medic, he was being trained to be a medic, and I was at home with these two small babies. Just you know, one was not you know, barely two and the other one was just you know, a little small infant and I was really actually having the time of my life. I had the car to myself everything. The only problem was that after that second delivery, it seems like perhaps a piece of skin something stayed behind. I think that the placenta didn’t come out, whole. I don’t really recall. But anyway, something was there. That every time I had my period, the periods were getting longer and longer and closer and closer together. The thing that your listeners should know is that as Orthodox Jews vaginal bleeding meant that my ex husband and I couldn’t touch each other. So he would come home, let’s say every two weeks from the army, and we were really young. And not being able to have sex was huge. It was just it was just huge. And I just seem to be what’s called in NIDA, this, you know, state of menstruating every single time that he was coming home. It was it was actually the doctor who was who was yelling at me and my second birth I went to him and he said, You need a DNC. And before he, he came to that conclusion, he put me on hormones, and he gave me a diaphragm. Rather than just putting me on the pill. I don’t know why he didn’t put me on the pill. But this was just medical. This was a this whole pregnancy was just medical malpractice from the beginning until the end. So he put me on hormones to see if he could regulate the bleeding with hormones if my hormones had gotten knocked out, because the pregnancy and then he gives me this diaphragm. But meanwhile, we didn’t have any sex. And finally after a few months of this, he said, Okay, you need to do
DNC in Israel. What they do is they put women in the hospital the night before they do them. First thing in the morning 6:30am The five women that are on the ward to go get a DNC and I know this because I later lived during their pregnancy for six months on this board.
P: Wow.
R: So the women would wake up in the morning, go boom, boom, boom, but I couldn’t do that. I didn’t have a mom or a babysitter or somebody to come in and watch these two little babies. And I think I have one of the daughters had an ear infection. So my husband got an evening out of the army. We went to the doctor’s office, his secretary held my hand. It was late at night. And he did a DNC in his office. And he gave me some
P: Wow.
R: Yeah. And it gave me some he was he was he was a real character. Because he was known in Jerusalem he was he was known. So he, he gives me a broad spectrum antibiotic, but even by the next morning, and I only realized that later when I was living on the ward and saw women just pop out of bed. After taking a little nap after their DNC and just getting up and running. I realized I was sick. We’re already the next morning and I was sick the next morning. So say that this happened on a Tuesday. We were supposed to leave that weekend to fly back to the States to be at my ex husband’s brother’s wedding. And I think it was like Thursday night, maybe two or three days later, we went into the hospital. That doctor the known doctor was not there. And so another doctor saw me and He gave did a swab and said I’m going to send this to the lab but you definitely have a uterine infection. Here’s change your antibiotic to this. So we had to cancel and he said there’s no way you’re flying. So we had to cancel the trip to America. And my ex husband then called the Israeli army who said to him, Look, if you’re getting off, if it’s a trip to America to your brother’s wedding, you have a week off. If it’s like stay home and take care of your sick wife, get her mother to do it. And you’re you have to come back to the army and that was that there was like no question.
So I called my doctor to see if he could have influence because Israel is a really small place and everybody knows somebody who can make a call and get something done. And he said over the phone you don’t have a uterine infection. This is the bossy doctor. And so he says come in. So we go into the hospital and the two doctors end up standing there in the hallway of the hospital screaming at each other. And I’m standing there, you know, here I am this. You know, very young, very young and naive woman with two small children husband in the army. And these doctors are screaming at each other and I have no idea. Take the first antibiotic, the second antibiotic. So I went home and we found through asking some people for a private doctor who did his own lab work in his apartment, who worked out of Jerusalem, a very elderly American guy who got gone to Harvard Medical School like in the 40s. And he saw me through this uterine infection took about six weeks of changing antibiotic several times.
And I was in bed the entire time with this husband in the army. It was it was a very, it was very difficult. And at the end, he said to me, he said, Rahel, you’re cured, you’re better, but don’t have sex yet. And here we were, you know, again, whether, you know, right, the young 20s wanting to just sleep with each other. We got home and we were kind of very frustrated because we I felt better and I was better and it was we just wanted to be together. And so we call the doctor back and he said, Alright, look you can have sex, but just be superduper gentle, like, No, you know, no acrobatics, I was like super gentle sex and we were like fine. I put in this diaphragm that the doctor had given me and we and we are together and the next morning I get up and go to the bathroom, and the diaphragm just falls out into the toilet. And it’s like, oh great
P: that’s a bad sign.
R: It’s just what I need. So I call up the private doctor. And he said come in and I’ll give you a shot a morning after shot. So we run right away to his house. He she gives me a shot. I spent the whole night throwing from my greatest work. And then you know, my husband had finished the army by then we were supposed to go to visit the family that we didn’t make it to the wedding so we get on the flight we go to America, and when I’m in America I missed my period. And I take a home pregnancy test and I realize that I have gotten pregnant
Then what happens is the story that I wrote about in the essay that where in my pregnancy was not there was not okay. I didn’t it didn’t wasn’t sitting right. There was like something how it wasn’t like sitting in the right place, and I could feel this tugging. And I was exhausted, which is not surprising to have three kids in three years and my mother in law was getting more and more and more frustrated with me because she was trying to clean for Passover which is like this big. Turning the house over and all the leavened bread, and I was kind of in the way with me and my children. The kids were sleeping in we were all three, all four of us sleeping in a little room in the attic, the attic stairs. Were very steep I was carrying these two little ones up and down his attic stairs. My ex husband had just gotten his first job and he had to fly to Chicago because it was with options trading firm that had an office in in Jerusalem, but their main office was in Chicago. And he said to me, can you just go down to the end of the block and pick up my dry cleaning? And so I put the kids in the stroller and I went walk down to the end of the block and I’m coming back carrying this suit. It’s not and I felt total you know, like a tear. I get the kids inside I run upstairs. There’s just blood everywhere just just a huge hemorrhage. I clean up as best I can I go downstairs and I tell my mother in law
P: Okay. Wait, let’s go a little slower here. This is This is terrifying, right? I must be very painful when you feel a tear.
R: It was it was very painful. It was very scary. But my ex husband was he was not okay. He was he was undiagnosed manic depressive with schizoid affect. I mean he was just and life with him was very tough. And by this time we’ve been married for for four years at this point. And I and I grew up in this house where you really had to take care of yourself. when my mother I told my mother in law I was pregnant. She said what do you need this for? I was like, Well, you know what?
P: is She not orthodox?
R: Yes. Yeah,
P: so isn’t she on the on the baby team.
R: My oldest daughter just went to visit them. They’re in their 90s they’re living in Jerusalem now. And they live right here. Their youngest daughter had has eight kids and each other her kids is having kids and all the other kids that have settled in June, summer all around her. And my daughter said that she sat there in their house for a couple of hours visiting them and just grandchildren great grandchildren were running in and out. Getting a lollipop getting a kiss getting you know, trying to run to the store for your grandma, you know, like so, you know. She is on the baby thing. I think that she I think that she justifiably thought that my ex husband and I had enough on our plate.
P: Okay,
R: that life was hard. Enough. I just got through this illness. And I don’t think she liked either of us very much. I you know, if you don’t say that, what do you need to score? I mean, like unless you really don’t like somebody. Now that I’m divorced, I don’t speak to them anymore. I mean, if that speaks to the kind of relationship we had and my ex husband has completely, he lives with a 60 year old man living with his parents. So
P: it seems like a strange thing to say no matter what, especially in an orthodox household where there’s so much celebration
R: it was it. It was a terrible thing to say the other terrible thing was that when I came to her and said I’ve just had a hemorrhage. I need to go to the hospital. She said, Well, your your your father in law won’t be home until nine o’clock. And I have this little I had I had a 12 year old sister in law that was in the house. And man my two kids. Well, you know, we’re in Queens, New York, what’s called a baby center, right? It’s not like that doesn’t you know, it’s not like you can’t call
P: you are out on a farm. Yeah,
R: right. You know, it’s a medical emergency. What is this like wait for three hours to go to the hospital like
P: I read that and I thought I must be misunderstanding what she’s saying here because hemorrhage does not equal hang out. Right?
R: No, but for her and what was I going to do? Yeah. And also it wasn’t like she said, Go lay down. I’ll go over with your kids. I had to feed them and get them bathed and into bed and then my father in law, mosied in then at 9pm. And we got the car. And she tells me, she worked at NYU Medical Center. And so she said to me, I’m not going to take you to the hospital here in Queens. We’re going to go into Manhattan to the better hospital and I was like, Listen, lady, wherever. Get there, and I was scared to death because my ex husband was very he was very, very, very hard on me. And I knew that if I lost a pregnancy it would have just been a really bad thing in our marriage. Okay, like I would have probably possibly lost the marriage. I’m I think if I hadn’t had that pregnancy hadn’t lasted the way it did. I don’t think we would have stayed together at that point, I think, because I didn’t want to get pregnant. I wanted I needed that break. I wanted to go back to school. I wanted to do a lot of things. And that was already starting to occur to me so I think that I was pushed, you know, getting ready to push on.
So we get to the hospital and NYU Medical Center is like I felt like I had been dropped into the jungles of Nicaragua. The place was packed. Everyone was screaming the bed that they put me on was broken. The floor was covered with blood that there was a female doctor came over to examine me the examination was very perfunctory, very harsh. It was painful. And she said to me, your cervix is closed and I said okay, what does that mean? And she said, well, either you’ve expelled the pregnancy. And if your cervix just closed right back up again, or you haven’t the babies died, but you haven’t expelled it yet. I’ll come out sometime tonight. Or you’re still pregnant and I so I knew that my cervix didn’t just close up again. I just had two babies.
P: Yeah,
R: that that wasn’t that wasn’t wasn’t you know, just asking me Did you see anything in the toilet or anything and I hadn’t,
P: how far along are you at this point?
R: 10 weeks. 10 weeks pregnant? And I had all my children in Israel. I lived on that ward for six months. I watched women come in with excessive vomiting and get a bed overnight, an infusion and an ultrasound. There. Why didn’t I have an ultrasound? Why didn’t somebody give me a blood test? So easy to see if you’re still pregnant or not. They sent me home and we made i They made an appointment for me in Manhattan to get a private ultrasound. The next day was St. Patrick’s Day. Travel with by with a car service because my mother in law was like That’s it. She’s trying to go in the car service the next day to get back into Manhattan. Drink like a half a gallon of water. Get in front of the ultrasound and then I think I and then the office closed and I had to sit on the on the sidewalk in Manhattan and watch the revelers go by for like two hours until my mother in law got into Manhattan to pick me up. Because I was told that I was supposed to be in bed. I supposed to be in bed rest. So I come home the baby’s alive. There’s a placental tear. The ultrasound was like some special machine they blew her up really big and she was like dancing. It was it was this thing that she has done the My daughter is 33 years old today. She has cerebral palsy. And throughout her life she does that. She says something or or does something or succeeds at something in a way that’s so surprising and full of energy in life. She just always like brings me back around. But that was like the first time that she did that. You know, she’s just this exquisite, full color, baby, just vertical and dancing around. It was incredible to see
and there was a tear on the placenta so they told me to stay in bed for two days. And then I could get up and walk around, which was also bad advice. My in laws got got together I went home I got into bed. My ex husband came home from Chicago and they took my loss took him aside and said look, the big holidays coming and your grandparents are coming and your brother and his wife and all their kids are coming. We don’t really have room for you guys. You guys are this is just too much trouble. So here’s $1,000 and go back to Israel and have your Passover there.
P: Wow.
R: I have to say I don’t think that I had a civil word with my mother in law ever again. After that. There was you know, no matter what happened between us. This was like this. The anger that I still carry today that you would do that to any human being
P: right.
R: Tell this tell the other brother to stay home. Tell them you know, double up everybody’s beds. Yeah, but make room for the woman who just had a hemorrhage. So within three days, let’s say three or four days of this happening. I’m on a plane. And the only plane you can get to get into is from from America, Israel before Passover is a very difficult thing. Everybody’s going to Israel for Passover. So we got a flight to Orly and then we got a flight out of de gaulle. And it was Sunday so we had to take two babies, two big suitcases and get out of the plane out of the airport into a taxi into another airport and onto another plane.
P: Rahel, this does not sound like bedrest.
R: No no, no, exactly. So, we we got home we spent one night in our house and then we went to a hotel and we stayed in a hotel for the week of Passover when that was over. We went back to our apartment. And that weekend I started to feel contractions and I said to my to my ex husband I said you know I think by then I’m like, in in week 1314. I said I’m really I think I’m feeling contractions. He said no, you’re like in the beginning of her pregnancy. I said no, no, my son is getting hard. It’s hard. It’s tensing up. It’s getting round. This is a contraction. So we go back to the private doctor, right the one who helped me through and he said you’re absolutely having contractions, your cervix is dilated. He did not have a good enough ultrasound machine to see exactly what was going on. Nobody did here in Israel. Nobody did. Nobody had that technology to be able to see exactly what was going on and nobody really loved and he gave me some medicines take it home but he told me you need to be off your feet. You cannot pick up your kids. You can’t do anything. Well, that lasted like Not at all. My mother came but by the time my mother came within two days of my mother getting there I had to keep he put me in the hospital. He put me in the hospital. I was in my 14th week of pregnancy and I stayed there until the beginning of my ninth month
P: and he put you in there so that he could so he could ensure that your bed resting.
R: I couldn’t I couldn’t not be out of bed. As soon as I got into the hospital. I went under the auspices, not of the private doctor who had the ability to work in that hospital. But the person who was the head of the hospital was the mean doctor who had given me the other wrong size diaphragm. So I right. I was his patients in the hospital. Okay, the other doctor could come visit me to look at my records. And stuff. And what when I had the intersection that the the very smart older doctor had gone and looked at my file and said that the swab that had been taken that night had been lifted out of my file. So we knew that the the meanish doctor was up to up to up to tricks. So the older doctor was going to keep an eye on me he had he had the ability to work in the hospital, but he didn’t want to take over from this other guy because it would have also been bad for me so they kept me in the hospital. I was in a bed where my head was near the floor. My feet were in the air. There’s a word there’s a name for it. And I was allowed out of bed to go to the bathroom. To take a shower a quick shower every couple of days. And once a week to go down to the end of the hall to talk to my little girls on on the phone. Remember, I have two babies at home
P: What let’s talk about this for a second. The tilted upside down does not sound comfortable and to some degree a tear in part of the placenta. it makes sense to some degree to say don’t move and maybe that will heal but do they give you any extended description of why bed rest is going to help you with this
R: All they knew was I was having contractions and they played with my medication. So there was a suppository that they would give me at night that made me sleepy. There was sometimes the pills that the the older doctor had given me those pills that they gave me to take, but most of the time I hadn’t. I had almost all the time I had infusions that was giving me this muscle relaxing medicine and that kept me pregnant.
P: So they’re just trying to stop the preterm labor. That’s what
R; they just tried to stop the preterm labor. That medicine makes your the your resting heart rate 120 beats a minute which pushes a lot of blood to the baby. And usually what they would what they told me and Israelis are so much fun. They all are very they’re very verbal. They I was told that the person who laid in my bed before me the baby, their baby died. I was told that Udipar babies because the name of the drug was up to Udipar. Babies are very big. I was very I was carrying very big. I was for the first time in years having all the rest I needed. I had no if you can imagine this is 1988. But he was born October 88. I had no computer no phone, no radio, no TV. No telephone next to my bed.
P: Yeah.
R: Okay. I’m in a birthing hospital at Women’s Hospital in the center of Jerusalem. And I sat in a room and watch the clouds go for six months. It was very boring. My ex husband refused to bring me magazines and books but other people did. I got visited by any everyone I ever knew. I got to see my kids a little bit not very much. And we had various babysitters taking care of them. Finally my ex husband’s cousin who had kids the same age to took my two kids in and that that was the first time that they were based and fair. There was like a few months there that they were just like abandoned children. And they got through you know, we got we got through. In the beginning of my ninth month. The doctor came into my room and said, Okay, now you can get up we’re gonna take you off the medicine. Laying upside down was uncomfortable in the beginning, but after that I got used to it if you laid me in regular bed it felt uncomfortable, right because it was so long.
P: yeah
R: And then when I got up to walk around the first time, I was super dizzy. I was surprised that I didn’t faint. I mean, it was really hard to get up and actually like leave the hospital leave the ward. They so they said to me get up and you know, walk around, stop all the drugs. And because anytime in your ninth month you can give birth and there was a nun, a Christian woman who had come in she was a midwife, and she was doing a stent in the hospital. And she examined me and she said, your baby’s not big. Your belly is filled with liquid. Now I wasn’t bleeding. There, no blood was coming out of me. But it seems at the end. What happened was that tear never healed.
P: Wow.
R: It never healed and I was bleeding into my uterus, the entire pregnancy. So I got up and I’m walking around and everything and I stopped taking these drugs that are putting giving, making my heart rate so high. My in laws come to Jerusalem to spend the Sukkah holiday the full holiday. And so they’re with us for Yom Kippur. There were this for I’m not sure I don’t remember Rosh Hashanah, but they were with us for Yom Kippur and they were with us for circus and sometimes around circus. My mother in law says to me, you know, Rachel you don’t. He’s like, you know, like, you know, the baby or the baby making you uncomfortable? Which was an odd question. Just an odd question to pull out of the sky.
And believe me, I just wanted to not think about anything too much at that point, right. I’m 25 years old. I just want to have this baby and get on with my life. But when she said it, I started to think you know, wow, it’s true. I’m really not feeling the baby moving. So they took my two older daughters and they sent us back to our apartment to have a night alone. And I got into our bathtub. And I was playing with my stomach and the baby wasn’t really reacting. So we went to the hospital, and they get a monitor and they said the baby’s sleeping. And my doctor came in and told me to go home. And around that time, there was a hospital in Tel Aviv called Assuta some financial room with another person, or there was some help find that dislike position. There’s a 4040 minute drive between one city and the next. So they moved their practices into the hospital in Jerusalem where I had stayed and they were seeing their, their their patients they’re giving, letting their patients deliver there. And when I came back in the My doctor told me keep coming in for a monitor. When I came back in the next day, one of these doctors saw me and he said, You need a cesarean section. And he put me in a bed overnight. In fact, he put me back in the same bed where I had been for six months.
P: oh, Wow.
R: I got up in the next morning my doctor came in. This is the mean this is the doctor who right had been had been very commanding and demanding during my birth. He came in and said go home. And I said well what about with the other doctor? He says no, no, you know and I heard you know with my La leche training my you know, all of that like all that you know, right? Breathe through all your all your deliveries and don’t ever take a you know, so it’s just an aspirin. I heard Oh, a doctor just wants to give me since you know it’s gonna give me a bunch of tests and a C section. So I ran home and we went in every night to get a monitor and every monitor the baby was asleep and
P: we don’t think this is weird at some point.
R: About five days and again, my doctor wasn’t there and another Assumpta doctor saw me and said this monitor doesn’t look okay. Let come into this room and he put me on he laid me down. He put on an ultrasound machine. And he started to zap my belly with little electric thing. Okay, like a taser. Okay, but I’m sure much less electricity. He was zapping me and trying to wake her up. And she’s kept on sleeping. And he said, Listen, you really need to get this baby out of you. Like now. And my doctor came in and said, Rachel, go home, and come back in tomorrow for another monitor. And I said, Well, why don’t you go over and talk to that other guy? He seems to think that I need a cesarean section.
So they the two of them talk to each other and he comes up to me and he says, Okay, we are going to admit you now. We want you to go home to sleep come in tomorrow morning first thing we are going to do labor. I said okay, we go home to sleep. The whole night of like feeling contractions we come in the next morning, the we go into a delivery room and while there went to get the suppositories to induce labor, my ex husband and the the midwife suggests all births in Israel are midwife births and the midwives do all the birthing unless there’s a reason for a doctor to come in. So the midwife is going to do is going to put in the induction and both of them are saying to me, it’s going to be a really long day you’re going to have a really long day. It’s going to be a long birth induction is really hard. You need to eat something so because they asked me to I took a little tiny, itty bitty piece of bread. And she goes she puts her hand in and she says where’s the baby’s head and I said the baby is breech. The baby has been breach the entire pregnancy. I’ve been seen by everyone your doctors, like no one ever talked to each other. She said you cannot deliver a vaginal birth with a baby who is breech. And I was like okay, so they put me in a bed. And then the doctor comes in and he goes and he sits down in the bed next to me. He says all along, I knew you needed a C section. And I said okay, Bozo that’s great. So I said let’s go to C section he says because you eight we can’t give you a C section. Until a number of hours have gone by. So you have to wait until three o’clock in the afternoon.
I said okay, but there’s a doctor who this guy had insisted was at my first two births. And he was the head of neonatology and the shard set of hospital which is another Jerusalem hospital. And I said, everything else equal. I want that guy in the hospital when my daughter is born. And he said, we didn’t even know that she was a daughter at that point, but maybe four and he’s and he said, Well, you know what, Professor Adelson, the neonatologist, his son is having a bar mitzvah this afternoon. So you’re gonna just have to deal with whoever’s in the hospital. And I’m like, okay, just get the baby out of me. So they put me in a recovery room off the operating suites. Right this is a women’s hospital. They’re not doing operations all day long.
So they just put me in this empty room. On a bed where the copy someone went and got me a copy of the Jerusalem Post. And I’m not a big news but I’m sitting on this bed and they did put an infusion in my arm. And one of the other midwives come in an American woman. Now you can imagine I lived in this very small hospital for six months. Everybody knows me knows my story. So she comes in and she had like this like fakie smile on and she says, Rachel, what are you doing here? And I said, you know, Regina, I’m starting. I’m waiting to have such and such but you know, I’m feeling contractions. Maybe I’ll still be able to deliver naturally right? That whole
P: Yeah,
R: mentality to never have a C section. And she said, why don’t we get you on a fetal heart monitor and see what’s going on. So she hooked me up to the fetal heart monitor and turns it on, and the baby’s heartbeat, like within 30 seconds of it going on the baby’s heartbeat drops and doesn’t come back up. So that was it. My daughter died right at that moment. And so she puts out some alarm. Next thing I know, they’re like, you know, 40 people surrounding me surrounding my bed, they get an oxygen mask on me they put the infusion of Hi my ex husband by the way had left after I had the piece of bread and before the midwife realized that the baby was breech. My husband went to get the car fixed. So he had been gone home. He had been gone the whole morning and he walked in exactly at that moment.
They take me into the operating room. They’re tying down my arms. They’re cutting off my clothes and Professor Adelman, the shartizedik neonatologist walks into the room. He puts his hands on either side of my head. And he said I was going to invite your husband and he looks worse than you do. So just give us peace and just give us a few minutes and we’re going to take care of you. And then they put me to sleep. I woke up later, unwilling to hear any bad news because he came to he came to talk to me and I and I he said Your daughter was born with an Apgar of one and I think he was being generous. And I and I just answered him. What was it five minutes later? I wouldn’t. I wouldn’t hear that she hadn’t survived or that there was any bad news at all. And so he left I was after C section. So I was stuck in my bed. This professor Adelman stayed with her that whole night. My ex husband went out to the bigger Hadassah hospitals and got blood for her she had two blood transfusions that night. And that he saved her life. He missed his son’s Bar Mitzvah and saved my daughter’s life.
We were in the hospital for about five days after that. After three days, I think she came out of there just had her in a in an incubator, but I don’t think for any more other reason than to monitor she was about eight pounds. Maybe seven and a half pounds eight pounds. So she wasn’t under sized she was just didn’t have enough oxygen in her blood. Before I left the hospital. Professor Adelman explained to me that her blood oxygen level was on the line between two too low and safe, like right on the line and that we should take her every couple of weeks to the pediatrician. You know that thing that they do when they open up the babies? You know, they check their arms? Yeah, they push the baby’s knees up and then open up their hips.
P:
R: Yeah, but all of that is to feel that the baby has normal, a normal normal tone in their muscles, muscles and bones. And a kid with brain damage won’t. And by the time she was three months old, they felt it we got her you know the first ultrasounds and MRIs and we got her into occupational therapy and physical therapy right when she was really small. And today she’s a 33 year old woman there. She has a certain kind of cerebral palsy. Called nonverbal learning disorders. It’s right hemisphere damage, which basically means that she’s incredibly smart. She can read any book, she can learn any language. She has an incredible memory. And then there’s a whole lot of stuff that she just completely can’t do, like put a car between two lines in a parking space or even to know which foot shoe goes on with which foot without trying. She lives in an assisted living facility right near here. And she’s doing really, really well and she’s a she’s a great, she’s a great lady.
P: That’s an amazing story. And I am so moved by that doctor’s efforts to save her.
R: Yeah. I wish that there had been a book better ultrasound machine and they could have looked and seen that there that care was there the whole time. But even that, even if they had what would we have done differently? And it wasn’t as if there weren’t the people came to me when I was pregnant and said, How? Just get up I think my mother came one at one point and said just go home and take care of your kids. And if you lose this baby, you lose this baby like why are you holding on so tight? I was terrified at the idea and while I was laying in that bed, I had a rolling tape in my head, please God, if this baby has to have something wrong, that it should be physical and not intellectual and that the baby should be able to enjoy your world. That was my prayer. And I just had it on, you know, constant rewind right? In my brain, even when I was talking to people and whatever was going on. I just was constantly constantly had that prayer. And it’s interesting that she she always went to regular school she wasn’t in special ed, she she happens to be an incredibly brilliant person. She can’t survive on her own like, you know, living in an apartment. Whoever she marries, she won’t be able they won’t you know they’ll need all kinds of special support. But she’s a brilliant like is really brilliant. Woman with a very wry sense of humor. This incredible vocabulary, this great desire to know she’s very into politics. She likes the news. She’s She just she just has her a great need to know so much and it’s so much follows what I asked for so I’ve always told her she is my she’s my class in my believing might she’s my you know, like reassurance and belief in a higher power. Because you know that was that that prayer was answered.
P: Yeah, that’s amazing. And so, five days later you leave the hospital and you come home and it’s just….
R: He said you have to do days that I’m giving you back for kids and yeah, and it was just get on with it. My mother in law showed up in the hospital and decided that my daughter should be called Bhatia. My mother in law had a cousin who had polio and her name was Basha Devorah and Basha is kind of the Yiddish way of saying Battia but him means daughter of God and it is known in the Bible is the name of the daughter of Pharaoh in Egypt who took Moses out of the river. Her name was Battia here, and about two or three months after she was born, I went to a wedding and she was in a carrier on my chest. I had a teacher, a teacher who taught me Hebrew Bible, right, a Torah teacher, a very holy woman in Jerusalem, and she was at the wedding and she came up to me and she said, Oh, this is the baby who you worked so hard for.
And I said, Yes, this is the baby and I, you know, showed her the baby and, and she said, What did you name her? And I said, you know, I really wanted to name her NESEA which would have been God’s miracle. A name that by the way, my kids absolutely hate. And every time I tell this story, they’re like, Oh, please, if you’d call her NESEA we would have like killed you. I said, I wanted to call her NESEA and my mother in law I mean, you can imagine how angry I, I am to this day, right? Could I maybe had I stayed for Passover, I would have healed. So the teacher goes into the sort of meditation. She goes into this meditation and she says, you know, if you had called her NESEA God’s miracle, it would have been is if God did one miracle for this person, and then was kind of done. She said, but by calling her Battia, by calling her daughter of God, you know that God will keep doing miracles for her over and over and over again. And that’s really how her her life has gone. Their stories even more miraculous than the one I just don’t feel about the life of bots yet is a very wonderful, it’s a wonderful thing that that had that she survived. She’s just this amazing person
P: that is an amazing ending to this pregnancy and so joyful that she’s doing so well and has had such a full life and continues to have a full life. I’m wondering after that pregnancy, how do we get a fourth.
R: She was in nursery school, and the Rabbi of our town, his his daughter invited us over for a playdate and at that play date she told me she said something like, people like you shouldn’t have more kids. And I was like, why not? Why would you say something like this to me? And then if you recall back in the beginning, I I told you that my kids were my feeling right so having a baby, but not having them every year and a half.
P: yeah, yeah Yeah,
R: so shimmy was born three and a half years after Bhatia. I wanted to have a son and he was a son. And three years later, no, four years later, we had another daughter Kayla, and then three years after she was born, we had son mayor and Mayor was born 1999 I think I would have continued. I had more kids except there was a second intifada. And we went for a few years to live in America and that kind of put the kibosh on having more kids. So
P: I was thinking that your experience with your daughter is pretty scary and hard on you and hard on your family with the bed rest and so to walk back into pregnancy, I just wonder how many of those fears you bring with you about like what if I
R: all of them there at one point I thought I was having a really contractions with shimmy. And I went back to the same hospital that that women’s hospital and nobody would talk to me nobody would touch me. We really considered suing the head of the hospital. But it was known in Jerusalem that this guy was manipulative. They had all kinds of friends on the inside, even with judges and other people, that he was an influencer that he was and that he wasn’t only now practicing on me.
We decided to put our energies into taking care of the baby and getting her all the therapies and whatever else she needed. When I was pregnant with Jimmy, I went back in the hospital one night, nobody would talk to me. And that’s when I went to the second doctor, the one who swabbed me was working by then in a different an old little religious hospital in the center, another area of Jerusalum and that’s where I gave birth to the to the last three was their shimmy. First of all was 10 pounds.
P: Wow.
R: And he was a VBAC in the operating room after they had put in the app. When they went to put in the epidural. I had a contraction and I had been in transition labor with contractions coming every minute for four hours. And when they put that needle in and breathing through the whole thing, and then they put that needle in right when I had a contraction, I let out the biggest scream. And the baby came down enough that he was vaccum extracted.
P: Oh wow.
R: And in the operating room. The next day on the ward. People were like did you hear that woman screaming and I was just like
P: not i Yeah, well good. I’m glad that it was a different road for the rest of them. It is a I had a challenging first pregnancy and then I there’s a lot of consternation at my house about would we walk into another pregnancy after having so much trouble the first time and we did like you we did, but that was a that was a hard step to take and my family who had been really supportive, was super mad that I got pregnant again and ended up being supportive in the end, but the trauma and the difficulty of all the things you went through in that third pregnancy I have a kind of lingering effect.
R: when I was at the end of my ninth with shimmy, and my ex husband was called to do his reserve duty in the army. And I said to him No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. This time you told the army No, no, no, you’re not going. If he had gone and then was called home, that would have been fine. But because he told them no. The next several times that he did reserve duty he got like the worst duty that you could possibly have in the worst areas. And every time he would come home and say you see see what because I was just a little bit of a wreck. Absolutely.
P: it is like a leap after having that kind of experience to go back into it and have another one but it’s fabulous that your other three nobody else encountered those issues.
R: No, it was there was there was something wrong. I mean, remember I got pregnant using a diaphragm that didn’t fit. Yeah, I got I had had a morning after pill. Yep. When the pregnancy attached itself it didn’t attach itself well. And the only reason Battia survived is because she is the most tenacious person I’ve ever met in my entire life.
P: I like that consistency from 10 weeks when you see her the ultrasound to 33. Right. Very cool.
R: I’m gonna I’m gonna leave you with just a very brief story. She is in seventh grade. We’re living in America. I’m working for a hedge fund. The hedge fund manager is one of the real big, brilliant Wall Street guys totally under the radar. Most of the money that he’s trading his own and we are for people trading $600 billion and he has a big interest in medical devices because his father’s a doctor in a well visit. Battia’s heartbeat is heard and right after we got to America and she was having so much trouble because here in Israel, it’s really easy to streamline the special needs kid and in America. It’s so much more difficult, especially in the Jewish world.
So we get to a well visit and the doctor hears her heartbeat and says I hear something wrong. And she gets hysterical and I said don’t worry about it. Your father has a heart murmur all his family don’t even think about it. That spring I go to Him and ask Him to fill out forms for her to go to summer camp. And he says Did you ever take her to the cardiologist? And I said no. And so we make the appointment of the cardiologist. I can’t go you’re not you know, for people managing $600 million. You show up at 730 You leave at 530 in the afternoon. And you do not move from your desk. So my ex husband took her to the cardiologist and he came to pick me up and he was like crying and he said Bhatia has a hole in her heart. About 25% of people like the baby’s head is open here. That the heart is open and it doesn’t 100% Close. It’s called an arterial septic defect. Well that day at the hedge fund the boss had come over to me and said these are the kind of companies we like to look at that you should keep your eyes open for and it was like in the middle of the afternoon like 233 o’clock and I was really tired. So I just started to go through and I opened up the first company in the file, and I opened up and it’s this company that had made a medical device. It used to be that you had to have open heart surgery and crack the chest, open the entire heart sew up the middle and then put it all back together again. This guy had come up with a going in through an artery in the groin. snaking a laparoscopic tube into the heart with a little camera on it. Take a picture that measures exactly the size of the home. And then they have like a whole box of like these little umbrellas, the close they take the tube out the screw on the right side Sunbrella they sneak it back in and right between a heartbeat they put the umbrella through open it and unscrew it and pull the laparoscopic tube out and the umbrella material creates heart muscle to be just to grow.
P: holy crap…wow
R: so that afternoon I’m watching this little video of how there’s an operation that afternoon while by the neurologist I’m watching this video of this new thing that had just been developed. There are only two doctors in the United States doing this procedure on children, the guy who developed it and he’s in New York and the guy at Children’s Hospital in Boston. So we call we go to the doctor I had great insurance. I worked with a hedge fund. We go to we call this doctor I said yeah, I’m working at this particular hedge fund and he says Oh Can we roll out the red carpet for you because it was my boss that gave all the money to develop this. This thing now that they do it everywhere today. Okay, but there then it was brand new. And I get in the car my husband’s crying Battia has a hole in our heart. I’m like it’s no big deal. They have these like little umbrellas. So you can imagine I thought to myself afterwards, you know she went through the surgery. She was overnight at Columbia Presbyterian. She’s back at school two days. Later.
P: Yeah.
R: And if you can imagine, I thought to myself, I must really God must really love me. Who does that for a mother. Like gives him the information first?
P: I agree. I agree. All I could think was daughter of God. Right. So well named. That’s it. That’s amazing. And I’m glad that was fixed.
Thank you for sharing your amazing story.
R: thank you for having me This was really wonderful.
P: As suggested at the front end, Rachel’s is a story of resilience and toughness…to manage the infection after the second pregnancy, the hemorrhage during the third pregnancy, the placental tear, the months of bedrest, the uncertainty around the timing of the birth, and then the C section seems like a steep uphill climb…to manage all of that at a pretty young age, and then to have three more children–I think of it as a story of unvarnished strength that includes both heroism, kindness and medical intrigue…thanks so much to Rachel for sharing it…and thank you for listening.
Episode 45: Babies that began with a Dream: Julia’s Story
Episode 45 SN: Babies that Started with a Dream: Julia’s story
Pregnancy involves massive changes and for some of us, one of the first hurdles is overcoming issues that have developed in our bodies that make getting pregnant and being pregnant difficult. On the road to becoming pregnant, today’s guest learned that she had endometriosis, an issue that she’d painfully lived with for years without a diagnosis, and which required surgery before a pregnancy could develop…and after the first child, the number of physical obstacles seemed to grow more numerous–more endo, a bit older, a shorter menstrual cycle, a medical community that was suggesting that pregnancy was unlikely again…but today’s guest’s story should remind us to never bet against mother nature…
You can find Julia’s writing here
You can find links relevant to Dr. Jessica Drummond:
Outsmart Endo Website: www.outsmartendo.com
Schedule a Strategy Session with Dr Drummond: https://outsmartendo.myshopify.com/products/initial-consultation-call
We also set up a 10% off coupon for folks who listen to your podcast and want to set up a strategy session with Jessica.
CODE: WARRIOR10
Type 1 diabetes and male fertility
https://www.diabetesincontrol.com/the-effect-of-type-1-diabetes-on-male-fertility/
Chemical pregnancy
Audio Transcript:
Paulettte: Hi welcome to war stories from the womb. I’m your host, Paulette Kamenecka. I’m an economist and a writer and the mother of two girls.
Pregnancy involves massive changes and for some of us, one of the first hurdles is overcoming issues that have developed in our bodies that make getting pregnant and being pregnant difficult. On the road to becoming pregnant, today’s guest learned that she had endometriosis, an issue that she’d painfully lived with for years without a diagnosis, and which required surgery before a pregnancy could develop…and after the first child, the number of physical obstacles seemed to grow more numerous–more endo, a bit older, a shorter menstrual cycle, a medical community that was suggesting that pregnancy was unlikely again…but today’s guest’s story should remind us to never bet against mother nature…
I am also including the insights of a functional nutrition and integrative women’s health expert, the founder and CEO of women’s health initiative who focuses on endometriosis
let’s get to this inspiring story.
Hi Thanks so much for coming on the show. Can you introduce yourself and tell us where you’re from?
Julia: I’m Julia Motyka. I’m from Western New York. I’m from Binghamton. I’ve lived in New York City for quite a long time. So
P: that’s nice. Let’s talk about family. Do you have siblings?
J: I do. I do. I have a younger brother who is about four and a half years younger than I am. And then I have what I like to call my adult onset family. My mom remarried when I was in my 20s Until I wound up with four additional step siblings. But we have a unique relationship because we didn’t grow up together. We kind of pal around at the holidays and have this kind of regard for one another as kind of slowly chosen family. But but my my deepest sibling relationship is with my my biological brothers
P: and coming from that setting. Did you think oh, I’m definitely gonna have a family.
J: Gosh, you know, I mean, it was a complicated journey for me. My family history was sort of thorny as a child because my my parents are wonderful and complicated. And I’m a product of an early divorce couple. It was a very acrimonious divorce. And both of my parents went through sort of long road towards becoming who they are now, in some ways, much changed from when I was a kid. And so when I was in my teens and early 20s, I wasn’t sure that actually having a child in any way particularly a biological child was going to be right for me. I also have an illustrious history of mental illness in my family on both sides, and have been a primary caretaker to my father, who was sick in my late teens for a while. So there was a period of time for me where I looked around and I said, you know, maybe this genetic line doesn’t need to continue. Maybe we’re okay. It’s okay to just finish it here. And I wasn’t sure that I needed to do any more caretaking to be honest. But there was a moment or a series of moments, I suppose in my early 30s I was partnered with my current husband. And he really deeply wanted children. And I felt wasn’t a sense of negativity around it, but I felt profound ambivalence. And I started to really consider why that was the case and unpack my own family history and sort of intergenerational legacies of mental health challenges and I started to have these dreams of a little girl. Big, big dark blue eyes and like a mop of curly dark hair, and the dreams were very strong. She was always about 18 months or so. And I would always wake up and feel like the imprint of a body on my body.
P: Wow.
J: And if they came every it was like it was over the course of over a year I would have some sort of instrument. And then one night I had one of those dreams and I woke up in the morning and she’s with me all day. Like my little silent passenger. She’s my constant companion. And I from time to time would work as an audiobook narrator so I was recording a book a day, and I was in the studio. And I was about halfway through my session and she vanished. The film doesn’t disappeared. Whoever she was, she was gone. And for the first time, I felt this enormous space of regret open up inside my body, and I thought oh, I don’t attempt to become a mother somehow I will regret this. I will regret it. In a way that I hadn’t experienced before. And I wasn’t sure yet at that time, how motherhood would come and how we would proceed but I knew it was something that I wanted to watch for and so we did. And so that’s already
P: that’s amazing to have a feeling of pre regret.
J:Yeah, it was really it was like it was like advanced regret. Congratulation. It’s like, you know, I’m that deeply Jewish. Regret in advance.
P: I see you I see you and I’m applauding. That’s well done.
J: Very good. Thank you. It’s like it’s a show it’s a special show.
P: So when you guys decided to get pregnant, what are you imagining pregnancy will
be like,
J: you know, to be honest. I always assume, hahaha. That it would be like falling off a log. I was like, you know, I’m healthy. I’m like, I’ve been practicing yoga. I’ve got I’m really aware of my pelvis. I’ve got a Kundalini I know what it was like and like, it’s like I’m I’m available to myself. And I like to think of myself as being very physically aware. And so I was like, it’s gonna be great. And if it didn’t, wasn’t great, it wasn’t easy. And it started to take us quite some time. And initially, sort of like, wow, that’s just the right baby’s gonna come. I got very woowoo about the whole thing. That all came from a dream so why not?
And then it was almost two years after we decided to start trying to have a baby, that we ultimately decided to see a fertility specialist. Now again, you know, Pride goes and all of that. So I and my husband both assumed that it would be an issue of his because he’s a lifelong type one diabetic. And so we were like, well, you know, with many type one diabetic men sperm count can be an issue there. There are all kinds of complications that come with that particular chronic illness. And so we both thought, probably that may be the case.
P: so, Real quick here. type one diabetes is an autoimmune condition that affects someone’s ability to produce insulin and you’ll want insulin to help move sugar from your blood into your cells. Without it you leave too much. sugar in the blood and not with the cells which is required for energy. Having this condition can affect the process of sperm development in men and sperm require a lot of energyto be good swimmers, and this insulin issue affects their ability to do that.
J: And lo and behold, we both got checked out so I’ll go to I’ll get checked out to why not. And they did a vaginal ultrasound that was wonderful. In New York City that we went to, and within about 45 seconds, finishing the obstetrician went, Oh, well, there’s your problem. I have Excuse me. We have a you have a huge endometrioma eclipse in your left ovary and I and I had never heard that term before. What what is that? What do you mean to describe an endometrium? It’s technically but it’s really just a sort of a stack of layered endometrial tissue of uterine tissue that has grown outside of the uterus. And he said, well, that we’re gonna have to remove that. And he said, Do you have endometriosis? And I said, Not to my knowledge. And he said, Well, you intend to have extreme pain with your period. I burst into tears.
Now, the backstory of that is that I had gone to multiple doctors for decades, with unexplained extreme pain during menstruation. I had sciatic pain I developed nerve pain in my back, I would have to sit down in the aisle of the drug store in the middle of a cramp. In order to not lose control of my legs. Sometimes I had a really severe pain, but it had been dismissed and dismissed and dismissed to the point that I just stopped mentioned. And kind of forgotten about it completely. Just kind of was living with this debilitating pain every month. And so when asked about, Oh, I’m so aware of my body and yet decided to numb myself to this incredibly important piece of physical information that I received month after month, because everyone outside my body had told me it was nothing.
P: we are lucky to have the founder and CEO of integrative Women’s Health Institute on our show, Dr. Drummond, thanks so much for coming on. So why don’t you tell us about your training and your institute?
Dr. Drummond: Sure. So I started my career a little over 20 years ago, my initial training is as a physical therapist, and I practiced you know, pretty direct hospital and clinic physical therapy for many years more recently got a doctorate in Clinical Nutrition, and also became a board certified health coach and about, like 12 years ago, started the integrative Women’s Health Institute as a training school for my colleagues to learn about functional nutrition in women’s health and we also have a flagship Women’s Health Coach certification, which is the only health coaching certification that has that third party Board approval in the world that focuses on women’s health. And so I’ve been doing that for quite some time now and I also maintain health coaching and clinical nutrition practice around pelvic pain and endometriosis.
P: So let’s start with some basic stuff. Can you define for everyone what endometriosis is?
Dr. Drummond: Yes, endometriosis is a disease process where you’ll have these lesions that are made of tissue that is very similar to although not exactly the same as the tissue that lives the inside of the uterus, and that’s called clinical terms, the endometrium, which is where it got the name used to be thought that these lesions were a consequence. of what’s known as retrograde menstruation, meaning that the menstruation was are going into the body instead of out of the body, and that the endometrial tissue was growing and kind of forced growing outside of the uterus. But that theory has been pretty strongly disproven in the last decade or so. And it’s not fully known sort of where these lesions come from, if you will, but there is a genetic component to about 10% of people with uteruses around the world have endometriosis. And about 9% of fetuses, female fetuses or fetuses with uteruses have endometriosis at birth. So these lesions exists in about that 10% of the female population throughout life so there’s absolutely a genetic component, but there’s also an inflammatory and very likely autoimmune component. So it’s a multifactorial disease in terms of how it’s expressed. And it’s tricky because there’s staging of this disease in terms of extensiveness throughout the body and severity of the lesions, but that doesn’t very well correlate with symptoms. So people can have a lot of endometriosis everywhere and have very little symptoms. They may not even know they have it unless they’re struggling with infertility or they just simply may never know they have it. And others cannot, you know, maybe when the surgeon goes in to remove the lesions, doesn’t see a lot of lesions, but a person can still have real severe symptoms.
P: had they done a vaginal ultrasound before the last
J: time I had gone to the to the OBGYN specifically for pain. They did do a vaginal ultrasound there were no endometrial like at that time. So I don’t necessarily fault the doctors that didn’t know what to look for or how to look. But I do have a large finger wag for the the kind of culture of women medicine that has spent so much time pretending it doesn’t exist. Just that
P: Well The dismissal is so frustrating.
J: Yeah, it was it was just it. I mean, I was told repeatedly, right? Well, you probably just have a low pain threshold. Some women just have more painful periods. And I’ve been moving because I’m slight build. I’m tall and I sort of i It’s not that I present the trail. I’m quite strong, but I presented really, I suppose. And so people would look at me here about my painting. Now this is probably just a look, she probably the truth was I was in horrible, horrible, horrible pain. And I will say that on a pain scale, right? This is the reason we have a subjective pain scale because it shouldn’t matter if my seven on the pay scale is your tooth. I’m still at a seven. And it’s not for anyone else to judge what that seven does or doesn’t mean about my strength. It means nothing. You know, so the basis for their statements I take issue with
P: I brought this issue of dismissing pain to Dr. Drummond: maybe we could talk about why it’s so hard to diagnose exactly or why women’s pain is being dismissed and whether that’s like a larger cultural thing or something specific to endometriosis.
Dr. Drummond: Yeah, so that’s absolutely a larger cultural thing that women’s pain is just generally dismissed. In fact, the word hysteria essentially comes from someone you know you’re crazy if you have a uterus, right? That’s Mr. His means uterus and Latin. And it sort of points to how women are perceived in general when it comes to pain. This is significantly worse in women of color which is problematic the patient you’re talking about right now is her experience around it’s normal to have painful periods you’re fine you’re probably this sensitive to pain we don’t see anything is extremely common as an initial response and fact even now, so I’ve been doing this for just over 20 years, and it used to be 15 years diagnosis when I first started, and now it’s still pretty bad. It’s 12 years to diagnosis.
J: Ultimately, right upon receiving the diagnosis, good undergo a surgery and then for hours, it’s usually about a 30 to 45 minutes surgery, and mine took four hours. It turned out that I had five endometrium between five and seven centimeters in size. And they eclipsed one of my ovaries one was attached to my bowel one was attached to the outside of the uterus and they were everywhere for my pelvis. I also had two small fibroids and I had scar tissue that was so profound that it was completely burying and occluding one of my fallopian tubes.
P: It’s great that there are things you can do to put endometriosis at bay like surgery, I brought this question about efficacy to Dr. Drummond. So Julia had surgery to remove her endometriosis, and I’m wondering wonted like the tissue lining of the uterus grow back.
Dr. Drummond: Maybe it depends on a couple of factors. So when I first started doing this, the kind of surgery that was done was called unit was called ablation surgery where they would like burn off the lesions.
Fortunately, while this is still done, but it shouldn’t be if your surgeon says they’re going to do ablation, and out of that office, so what you want is excision surgery where they actually cut out the lesions in the same way that cancer sort of cut out and the better of it is cut out the roots. Now there are times there’s a kind of endometriosis called Deep infiltrating endometriosis that again, cutting it out is key, but sometimes that’s not fully possible, sometimes even with great excision surgery. Just like with great cancer surgery, it grows back sometimes sometimes the surgeon just missed an area where maybe they didn’t see it. It was too small and it grew in another place. And sometimes they just didn’t see it yet and it grows in another place. So but what I would say is that in the first half of my career, I commonly saw people who had 15 endometriosis surgeries like just a surgery every year and they just kept going and burning it off trying again, you know, now I work primarily, you know, my clients and patients primarily see excision surgeons I even either see them after before and after, ideally, if they have surgery, which isn’t always appropriate varies, but a lot of the time it is and that you know, I might see someone with a maximum of maybe three surgeries in the lifetime, but it’s much much more common to see just one surgery.
J: So I finished the surgery, and I was told that even with the surgery, our odds of becoming pregnant naturally were relatively. I was 35 at the time and I remember kind of lying my bed in the in the week after the surgery, sort of it you know that semi lucid but I was sort of taking my my pain medication and sleeping a lot and I was thinking a lot about the women in my family who I referenced before who had struggled mightily with mental illness and and I had this sort of strange experience where I felt like they had kind of like I had cleared a pathway. And it was as though one of the kind of historic pain of the women in my family has kind of been excised along with these sort of lumps of tissue. And so I wonder what would what would happen and at the same time, we went to an adoption fair and we started foster care paperwork and I said, Listen, however your child, you are welcome. And we decided to do four rounds of aid and insemination, four rounds of IUI
P: let me say one thing here about the doctors predictions? Who would prefer a world in which the doctor said well, we have our averages. On average, women are 35 and have endometriosis and the husband has diabetes on average. It is harder for those couples. We do not have a crystal ball and we cannot predict what will happen in your case. So we can give you the average and then you can make your own conclusion but to say you will have a hard time frustrating right because those all words have effect right? So
J: yeah, yeah. Well and it creates a situation in which you feel like you’re kind of living out a preordained path, right like, oh, we will have a hard time we this will not work or and I wonder for how many couples or how many, how many people seeking to become parents. That’s the end of the story. Because they take that word, and go okay, well, I guess we tried that of canoeing on their own path in your own way. So for us, I didn’t feel ready to completely let go of the idea of biological motherhood, but I also felt that was important to kind of look at it as I’m a firm believer that there are many, many, many ways of becoming a parent in this life. And you get absolutely the right child, no matter whose body they have originally come out of. So we went to the adoption fair and started I went to the first foster meeting and started reading all the paperwork. Meanwhile, we did our second IUI attempt. And about five days after that attempts, I kind of had this feeling of like, I wonder feels a little I just feel a little something. And I thought you know, don’t delay.
But lo and behold, about a week after we started our foster care paperwork, I turned up pregnant. And after all the difficulties in becoming pregnant and in finding our way toward pregnancy my pregnancy with my first child was really just juicy. It was a good a really peaceful time in my life that I had profound nausea. I was not it was not so fun at different moments, but it was an uncomplicated pregnancy. We decided not to from the sex of the child, but we didn’t know who we were going to get through this common. We have picked out a name for her for the baby and for on and on and on. Everybody thought it was a boy, the girl who improved and then the day before her due date. I went into labor and I went into back labor and had really like a 36 hour saga of of childbirth
P: before you get to the birthing. Let’s talk for a second about what you thought it would be.
J: Oh, yeah. No, I pregnancy I actually thought that my pregnancy would feel weird to me if that makes sense. Because it’s such a strange thing that happens in the body. But what I ultimately wound up feeling was was it felt very, very natural to me to be pregnant with my first child. The second child has a different story. So that was intense. But the first child I was like this was I was I was designed. I felt really easy in my body. I’m the kind of person who I always have 12 different things happening. I do a lot of different things in my life. And I like it that way because my mind tends to function best when I have a lot of different things spinning in the air around me during the pregnancy. It was one of the first times in my adult life where there was nowhere else I wanted to be. There was nothing else I wanted to do. I was content to just be in that moment growing that baby. It was a profoundly peaceful time.
I really didn’t expect that it would feel that way to me. So when it came time to have the baby to birth then I went into it actually thinking it would feel easy. If no birthing I had like I had been like sitting on my birthing ball and bouncing and moving my pelvis and I’ve gone to prenatal yoga and I was like I was really I was ready. I pelvis is ripe, it’s blossoming flowers. Great. And then the labor actually began really awful. Because we were we were set up spine to spine. And it was very tough. There was a there was a lot of vomiting. There was a lot of labor began really fast. Slow back down. I had a really supportive birth team. My husband was deeply supportive. I had a doula who I treasure who really had that was a seasoned person in the birth world and was able to kind of help continue to shepherd me through the challenging moments and my obstetrician was also remarkable was was deeply patient and present with me and ultimately manually dilated my cervix a few times and in the sort of the continued hope of avoiding a cesarean which we ultimately did a voice which had been my hope so it had I had planned for an unmedicated birth at a birthing center and we wound up at about our 32 transferring to labor and delivery so that I could receive an epidural.
Ultimately, interestingly enough, the epidural was what allowed my body to relax enough to let the baby down. So the baby was was born vaginally after 30 Almost exactly 36 hours like 36 hours and 10 minutes. And she as she was coming out of my body, the doctor said and I because I had the epidural I’m very present for this time. She said wow, that’s a lot of hair that the baby has and I kind of laughed and sometimes I wonder who she is who they are. We didn’t know the shoe yet. As the baby was being born, my doctor said hey, we get your baby and helped me kind of move the child onto my chest. And there was this big mark of black hair. Turned curly almost immediately. And these huge dark blue eyes looking up at me
P: goosebumps! Goosebumps! Wow oh my god,
J: and so the baby and my dreams had always been named as me and of course no that is a child thing. And she always had to be she waited for him, which I’ve always been really grateful for because it says special gift for me to get to be her mom. And then we thought that was it. We thought we toyed with the idea of a second child. You know, I had been told once I started menstruating again, it was sort of the definitive pronouncements as the medical industry here. I had been told by several doctors that that the year after I started menstruating again, was the most fertile window in which I could become pregnant and after that year, it would probably become difficult or you know, if not fully improbable. So about 14 months after I had Esme I started menstruating we were like okay, let’s do this. Let’s make this happen. And nevermind that I didn’t feel ready. Nevermind, nevermind that my child didn’t feel it. None of us were ready to do it. But we decided to go ahead and try and very quickly. It turned out that my left fallopian tube had occluded again, that it was no lot that nothing could pass to one side. You know, I was 3738 something like that. I don’t remember anymore now, but I was getting older.
P: it’s occluded…It’s because of endometriosis. Is that what’s going on? Okay.
J: Yeah, I mean it had been buried in scar tissue and even though they again there was no scar tissue evidence if the tube is so small I mean if you consider consider like Angel Hair Pasta right I mean, teeny tiny. And so it doesn’t take a lot of pressure to clamp it down.
P: This is starting to sound like a design for all of us.
J: Really, I mean, you would think given how long the the human race has managed to survive that those tubes would be a little more resilient and maybe they are I guess maybe if you consider the other things they undergo. But a scar tissue is not an easy thing.
P: I interviewed a reproductive endocrinologist and she said something like fallopian tubes if you look at them the wrong way. Just they collapse. So I feel like you’re our assessment here. is validated by someone who has seen them.
J: Yeah, that’s really thank you. That’s useful to know.
You know, we talked about it and at the time, my husband was really in favor of pursuing IVF which we were told had, we had about a 20% shot at a baby with IVF and I sat with that idea for a while and I have friends for whom IVF have been extraordinary, who have beautiful families I have absolutely I champion it. I think if it’s the right choice for you. It is a fabulous choice. It was not the right choice for me. I had a lot of anxiety. I’ve had some hormonal imbalances in the past, and I just didn’t feel I didn’t feel good about making that choice for my for my own health. And I already had one child that I needed to be present for. And so I decided not to do that. And it was an extremely challenging time in my marriage. I think my partner my husband felt at the time that I was kind of that it was it was sort of my way or the highway in a certain sense and and it was being my body it was and that was very hard for him to feel he had no agency and also hard for me to feel that my body was somehow secondary or not. Well, my feelings around my body were not valid because they they negated something for him. It felt like and until we let it go. He traveled a lot. I worked a lot I spent time with our daughter. We kind of found our way back to each other.
And then fast forwarding to the spring of 2020 where we all we all know what happens in the spring of 2020. And my little family of three left the city as we were privileged to be able to do and then time in a country house for about seven months. And a couple of months into that time. My daughter started talking about wanting to have a baby I very famously she and I had a conversation. She was just about to turn four and she said I want a baby baby sister. So you never know but she said how could we get one and I said well, you know some people have a baby. Daddy has to give put something inside of the mommy. I sort of got like a about it. I tried to be clear without being too detailed because you She wouldn’t have been interested anyway, was a pause. And she looked at me and said, So you and daddy would have to do something together. Give me something and I Yes. I said, I didn’t don’t see that happening. Well, you never know. There are other ways you know, maybe some people adopt a baby and then for days after we talked about adoption, she wandered around the house like slapping her hands together and rubbing them together going. Now we’ve just got to find that baby. We’ve got to find that baby. How are we going to do it? We’re really be looking around.
And so my husband and I, in some ways, because she was so deeply he started talking about adopting a child in the midst of that time. I mean, I haven’t really told this story line up this way before. It’s a bit of a saga I’m discovering. In the midst of that time, I discovered that I have one of the linchpins of disorders, which basically means that I have several cancers that I am genetically predisposed to. I have a genetic anomaly. My mother has it. My brother does not and I do as well as my mom. And it comes with up to 48% chance of uterine cancer and a 30 some odd chance of colon cancer. There’s some gnarly ones in there. The uterine cancer issue was particularly concerning to me because my endometriosis, right? Uterine cancer is actually cancer of the uterine tissue is cancer of endometrial tissue. And so given that mine grows all over my body felt like a problem.
P: yeah, that feels threatening
J: yes, it feels threatening…So I received the diagnosis. Not really threatening, it felt like why why roll the dice in that way. And when when there’s a part of my body that I can potentially just remove and remove therefore remove the threat or largest so I started to plan for a hysterectomy. And I currently you know, I was at this time I was 14 was the summer before I was turning 41. And my menstrual cycle was only 22 days long. And my one fallopian tube was occluded. I was starting to have more severe pain again with each cycle. And I thought we know the baby maybe better to let this go now let them be all girl off into the sunset or a little party or something. So I was in the midst of making that plan and starting to identify you know, with COVID When were they going to do start elective surgeries what who did I want to do this and talking to my OBGYN who I like, like and trust and in the midst of that I missed my period and I thought that’s weird because I my periods come close together but they don’t I don’t. Initially I had done a lot of head standing in my yoga practice and I also an intermittent yoga teacher. So I’ve been teaching inversion practice that week. And it’s like well, sometimes when I’m upside down a lot, you can alter my menstrual cycle a little it must just be head standing in my trades doesn’t come like four days that I just never missed. I never miss it. It’s never it’s never been a skipped. I’ve never I’ve never been willing to skip through periods. And so four days and I thought gosh, stress, hard years pandemic you know, maybe it’s perimenopause, maybe I’m just going into menopause early.
And then two nights later, I woke up at three in the morning. I thought God I want a bowl of cereal. And I and I went I lay in bed. I thought to myself Is it possible that I could be pregnant? I did the math and listen, I don’t know about your house. That’s the pandemic was not a sexy time. Not was not like, wasn’t like let’s get it odd. No, there was really like one opportunity that month and it happens to fall. Technically after I should have ovulated even on my shortened cycle. But I did the math and I guess conceivable it’s possible, but come on. It’s so unlikely and so I didn’t even tell I didn’t tell my husband I was like I can’t open up this can of worms again. I can’t I can’t pain that we went I can’t do it. We won’t survive it. And there’s nowhere for us to go. We can’t like…we’re trapped in this house together. And so, made up a story about needing plastic bins. Like I need to buy bins, I need to go buy bins and he said, you know, middle of a pandemic Can’t you just order those on Amazon and I was like no, no I need to see them. I need to go to I need to go to Staples. See the bins. I got in our little car and I drove to Staples and I bought some beer and I didn’t see and then I pocketed a home pregnancy and I purchased that she didn’t steal it but I took home a home and just to be clear,
I got home and I woke up at like 5am for a bowl of cereal and to pee and lo and behold it showed up positive and I looked at it and I thought well you know it’s going to be a chemical pregnancy it’s going to be ectopic there’s there’s just no way but I did at that time share with my husband I said you know I woke them up. I poked him he sleeps with if we put earplugs and earplugs and a face mask. He sleeps like he’s at a spa. And so I let you jab him hard to get them to wake up. So I’m shaking him and he pulls the mask off and takes the thing out of his ears. And he looks at me like what your problem was that I have to tell you something. And he looked at me like what could you possibly have to say a 515 in the morning? And I said I’m pregnant. And he just started laughing hysterically. And then he looked at me and he said shut up and we started and we just sat there staring at each other for a few minutes. And then we decided we would tell no one because it was probably not viable. drove into New York City and had had kind of done all of our resident testing and quarantining on a way to see our our respective parents so that our daughter could see her grandparents for the first time in a while. And I was dropped off at my doctor’s office secretly, so that I could be checked. And lo and behold, I my OB even said, she says, you know, the odds of this being viable are very low. And if it was like, I know, she said, we’re talking needle in a haystack. And I said, I know that no one’s getting your hopes. And she’s
P: Let me ask you a question, been so confusing you know, you have all these issues that should stymie your ability to get pregnant. All those things. This little guy, this little zygote has made it past all those barriers. So why do we think the pregnancy won’t last?
J: Well, we didn’t know yet that he had, because there are two ways in which the pregnancy could have shown a positive and been non viable, right. Initially, the pregnancy could have been a topic it could have been outside of the uterus, which given the state of my fallopian tube was was not unlikely necessarily, and it could have been chemical which given my age was also a possibility. So until we did the ultrasound to check and see that there was actually somebody cooking in there. There were still there were still a couple of variables that left it uncertain.
P: so I didn’t know what the chemical pregnancy wasn’t having a look at. According to the Cleveland Clinic. It’s basically a pregnancy that ends before five weeks, and embryo forms and might even embed in the uterine lining, sending out speaking of HCG, the hormone that indicates a pregnancy is present HomeKit but for whatever reason, the embryo stops growing and ends in a miscarriage. It’s referred to as chemical because the HCG was the only sign of its existence. It’s too early to see it on an ultrasound. You will be more likely to run into one of these types of pregnancies if you’re doing IVF because we’re being monitored so closely.
P: I wonder if your cereal test is also a factor here. Would a chemical pregnancy make you have
a craving?
J: I don’t know. I don’t know. You know, that’s an interesting, that’s an interesting question. And to be honest, in those early days of the pregnancy, I was so convinced that it was on that it was not going to be viable. That I didn’t. I didn’t question I didn’t look to the positive because I was so I think afraid of having my heart broken. So I didn’t I just didn’t even entertain it. I was like, There’s no way. This is unlikely. What whatever. And I was I was wrong. Right? So we did the vaginal ultrasound and it showed a very healthy, early embryo sort of little little back of baby and a little sack of placenta embedded very helpfully in the uterine wall. And my OBGYN looked at me and she smiles and she said, she said if you’ve been back in two weeks, and we’ll check the heartbeat, she said this looks really good so far. Is that includes your heartbeat in two weeks. Chances are April, we’ll have a baby.
P: Wow,
J: baby is someone who really wanted to be here. And I said yes. So two weeks later we checked there was in fact a heartbeat. And off I went into the pregnancy now to ask her about the first pregnancy. I will say that the second pregnancy my expectation had been that it would be very similar. I’m going to feel peaceful, I’m going to feel grounded and good. My body is going to feel good. I felt like like shit on a stick. I felt really bad. For the whole pregnancy. I felt miserable. I felt conflicted and I felt anxious and I felt tired. And I had kind of gotten into a space where I was peaceful as the mother of one child and who am I to look like a miracle look at a miracle in the eye and that really messed up my life here baby. But he that I felt what i felt like i The time had passed and I had moved on and I was doing all of these other things. I didn’t want to go back into the sort of deep absorption of a new baby and I really cherished and still cherish the deep relationship my daughter and I have and I don’t know that I want a triad here. I really like that we are a dyad that’s important and something right about it. And then I had a series of pregnancy complications I had unexplained bleeding at around 11 weeks turns out to be something called a sub chorionic hematoma, which is basically just a pocket of blood inside the uterus that lends itself out. And if it is often not threatening to the baby, it doesn’t always resolve but it required almost six weeks of bed rest and having listened to another of your podcasts, I know that bedrest can go on for a whole lot longer. But I shudder to think about to be honest, but it just kind of everything added to the feeling of unease and anxiety that I had.
When we did an ultrasound in the midst of all of the bleeding the baby was was doing actual little backflips. And so he was fine. He was imperturbable good to be unflappable, it’ll be a really it’s a swimming around. What’s this other liquid who cares? So, six weeks on bed rest, under a pelvic rest. I could do like movements that really was meant to stay chill. And then it resolved and I did ultimately have a home birth with the second baby.
We talked a lot because of COVID. Initially we talked about what the different issues were in a hospital. Birth setting. And so my OBGYN who had delivered my first she was actually she no longer delivered babies. But she said, you know, listen, if you were a person who chose to have a home birth, I might be willing to make a special guest appearance.
P: Wow.
J: And come on over. So, so we found a midwife that I that we really responded to that also knew my doctor, we worked with the doula that the three of them all knew each other. And so when the day came, it was sort of like the inverse of the first pregnancy and birth. The pregnancy with my first was so easy, and the birth was such a challenge. And with the second baby’s birth, the pregnancy was so challenging and so filled with anxiety and doubt, and fear and concern and confusion, the sort of reinvention of myself as mother of two as opposed to Mother of One which doesn’t feel like a profound change. On paper, but it’s in my body it felt in women that felt like I was being asked to dimensionalize in a new way that I didn’t even know existed. And I didn’t feel I had the capacity. I just didn’t know how to do it, but the book itself beautiful. Birth, I went into labor has like five in the morning. It was slow and gentle. Gentle enough that three hours later, I walked my daughter to school, and we would stop every eight or nine minutes and I have a contraction, and then we keep going and she knew that my mom was coming if my mom picked her up at school with baby day. And so we said okay, I gave her a big hug the goodbye is that I don’t know if a baby date yet. But if a baby get up mom would call my mom. You’ll see Mark at the underscore. That is me. And apparently when my mother arrived just in time to pick her up at school. My mom arrived when she got there and Esme was about 30 feet away, coming out the front door of the school and saw my mother and shouted at the top of her lungs, “it’s baby day!!!!”
P: that’s appropriate
J: but it was just it was a truly gentle labor. So I labored on my own. My husband was there and then he was setting up the birthing pool and kind of doing all of the doing all of the things that that I was ultimately so grateful that he did he was making sure that everything was set up for safe and we had just moved putting up curtains so I didn’t have to give birth to all of Manhattan Avenue. getting everything ready. Sort of like the neighbors. I really didn’t know we were going to be your neighbors. Welcome. But I kept having this experience where I would feel the baby drop off. And I would be like, Oh, this is when I threw up last time. This is when my body didn’t know what to do last time. But this baby was positioned differently. I was older. I had done it before. And this time I knew how to let go into the birth process and kind of lean toward it as opposed to pushing against it. So we I think it was about 15 hours of labor start to finish and two hours of really active into transition and then 15 minutes of pushing and he came out in the water, happy and peaceful and ready to go. And yeah, it was it was a remarkable visit. And there was this moment where my doula and my doctor and my midwife were all there and you were to the midwife had two assistants. I’m surrounded by five women. And there was a chorus around me, they all you know, this, the contraction would come and I would just hear the word breathe. And they were all like echoing like a little chorus around me to breathing. Breathe a baby down. Breathe the baby down. And you know, my husband had his hands on my back and it just it felt this sort of was almost like a meditation of strong sensation moving the baby out of my body and the second child born or you know, until he became really determined otherwise until he lets me know something else. Okay, and my daughter is dark she isn’t she has my eye color there now dark green and she has like thick curly hair. And it’s like intense. And my other child has strawberry blonde hair and crystal blue eyes and greets the world of like, hey, like happy to be here. Thanks for inviting me to the party.
P: Everyone wants a surfer…good work
J: work. Listen, it’s great. I’m thrilled. He’s gonna He’s gonna get with a smile but she gets a sledgehammer you know, life’s good for him. He arrived and and has been a little light beam that has been to be one in April this year. So I am now that he is almost one I’ve been told in terms of my other conditions, you know, basically that I can nurse him for as long as I wish to and will wait until I get a little closer to natural menopause and then likely I will go ahead and have a hysterectomy in order to curb the likelihood of uterine cancer emerging on the later side. And in the meantime, of having biannual pelvic ultrasound and an annual colonoscopy which is a real delight and you know, taking care to check in as much as I can with my body and do everything I can to keep it healthy.
P: That’s amazing. I don’t know whether to say you should run out and buy a lottery ticket or if your son is the lottery ticket. Someone’s going on some kind of magic though and how does Esme like her brother
J: You know, I asked her the other night we went up for our first mommy daughter dinner. In the beginning of the pandemic. We went to a restaurant and she and I were sitting there by ourselves together. used to do all the time and we never do now and we’re sitting there and she’s eating spaghetti and meatballs. And I looked at her leaning cause of me. How is it having a brother? What do you think about that? What is it like for you to be an older sibling with the cause, very thoughtful for a moment and I was like oh, here it comes. She’s gonna send me some tomatoes. Oh like him. I was like Okay she does she likes him. He likes us. World the earth and for her for him. And I think she really excited by the prospect of having a sort of a comrade in our compatriots.
P: that’s an amazing story to have all this success despite the predictions that you were given at the onset.
J: Yeah, I mean, I think it’s that my story is a real testament to not letting the barbarians get you down right like don’t if you have a sense that that you their journey is not over or not what what you’re being told that it must be listened to that thing, right? It’s that that no path is preordained, despite what the medical field might like to say largely right because they don’t want to get it wrong. And it’s easier to say no than to say yes
P: Yeah managing expectations is a big game. So we talked in the beginning before we started taping about your writing about this. Do you want to talk a little bit about that?
J: Sure. I mean, I you know, it’s very much a work in progress right now. The pieces that I’ve published have largely actually been sort of tangentially related to my parenthood. I write a lot right now about a whole different stories in my life. I know I mentioned at the beginning that caretaker for my father and so I’ve written a lot about the transformation in that relationship. My dad has had HIV and AIDS for a very, very long time, and I was his primary caretaker. In the 1980s for quite a while, and he’s very, very sick. So I’ve written a lot about my parenthood, as reflected through the lens of having gone on that journey with him. And then I’m just starting to come back to some work about my own journey toward parenthood. And fertility and what it was to decide to become a mother with the legacy of mental illness that that exists in my family and also the physical challenges that presented themselves along the way. Those are works in progress and forthcoming.
P: Well, you can give me links to your website and I’ll put it in the show so people can find your writing.
J: Yeah, we love that.
P: Thanks so much for coming on the show.
J: Such a pleasure. I’m so happy to have this conversation.
P: To get to Julia for sharing her story of overcoming the process of becoming someone’s parent requires so much flexibility, the ability to withstand physical challenges, and willingness to manage uncertainty. It’s a miracle any of us are here. As mentioned previously, you can check out the extended show notes at war stories from the room.com and there you’ll find links to all the things we talked about, including Julia’s writing, and ways to take a look at Dr. drumlins Integrative Health Practice. Thank you for listening. If you like this episode, feel totally free to share it with friends to Like and Subscribe.
Thanks also Dr. Drummond. She and I have a longer conversation about endometriosis than is shared in the body of this episode. One thing I asked her is how people could potentially get a diagnosis more quickly, and I’m including her answer as a coder to this episode. So just after the music ends, you can hear her answer. Keep listening. We’ll be back soon. With another inspiring story
P: is there any advice you can give to women to help them get a diagnosis faster? Is there anything they can do to present more clearly to whoever they bring the issue to?
Dr. Drummond: Yeah, that’s a great question. I think it goes a little bit back to when you were talking about in this case, the woman had a vaginal ultrasound, and in endometrial the moon was found. Here’s the tricky part about that. That if someone is if there is evidence of endometriosis on imaging, someone actually can see it that shows that that’s a diagnosis. of endometriosis. The problem is, is that not seeing it on imaging does not rule it out. The only way to truly make a diagnosis of endometriosis is by a skilled laparoscopic surgery which I highly recommend being done by a person who specializes in endometriosis or pelvic pain or at least minimally minimally invasive gynecologic surgeries. So not your kind of OB GYN who is, you know, three endo surgeries a month or a year. But someone who does this this is their whole job because it’s as complex, as good cancer surgery.
So you want someone who really knows what they’re looking for because sometimes these lesions can be missed, especially if they’re not in the most common places. So back to your question about how to kind of drive this diagnosis forward. So just because something is not seen on imaging or there are no abnormal biomarkers, blood markers, things like that. Doesn’t mean a person doesn’t have endometriosis. So if you still have symptoms, keep pushing the issue. A few things that might be valuable to test in the bloodwork would be just chronic inflammation markers, things like CRP but also ca 125. The markers of increased risk of ovarian cancer can be valuable. But really, it’s more of a symptomatic diagnosis. So if your story is something like huh the women in my family all kind of said things like Welcome to womanhood. You have your period this get used to it, it’s gonna be bad, you know, that’s a red flag and the history of infertility especially because generations before didn’t really talk about it. In this comfortable away, you know, that’s a red flag. Any any other woman, you know, cousin and sister, mother, grandmother, whoever had surgery for endometriosis or had early hysterectomy. That’s a red flag. The challenges is that I’ve seen two things in sort of a family history story. One is that person you know, the family just didn’t talk about it much there. There’s you know, there was a lot there’s a lot of shame around any kind of problem with menstrual health. So it was either not talked about or it was normalized that everyone in his family has bad periods. Or I see kind of from the more the sort of less conservative, will you say like pressive crunchier natural medicine. It you might hear stories like oh, you know, this pain is part of the like, process of your body expelling the toxins or something like that. Also, not accurate but a different take on it. So that kind of family history is a big red flag almost all of my patients, there’s something the family history, they just maybe didn’t know about it and then the second thing is that really intense periods that disrupted middle school, high school trying to, you know, play during the softball championships and just white knuckling the whole thing being in the nurse’s office throwing up passing out one of the doctors who is a brilliant endo surgeon up in Massachusetts he has the because it kind of like the signal that someone probably has I know if you ever found yourself sitting on a bathroom floor in a school with like your chin on the toilet just trying to like, cool down. That’s a big red flag.
P: Yeah, Julia Julia mentioned that she during her periods, she just collapsed like the CVS because she you know, walking further
Dr. Drummond: pain down the leg. Yeah, a big one. Because of the nerves involved, but also that vasovagal response that kind of autonomic nervous system sweating, passing out needing to kind of lay down in the girls bathroom, putting your head on a cold, toilet or anything else. Those are all big red flags. And to me, there’s no reason that should happen. So a few other things that can lead to that degree of discomfort or variances for example, which can be seen on ultrasound. So if if that’s not the issue, or if someone is treating that well with nutrition and supplementation, and they’re still, you know, their hormone tests look normal and all of that. That’s where I’m really looking for that index of suspicion and the final thing that tends to overlap is digestive issues. So I certainly wouldn’t skate back, skate past that. So I think the faster we can educate these, you know, middle school health teachers, middle school nurses, that’s where we’re going to make inroads because that’s where it first presents. And most of my patients get really good. You know, like this patient you’re talking about at tolerating pain and powering through it. And they just stopped bringing it up after a while. And that’s the problem. So by the time they’re old enough to like, see, you know, let’s say they actually are seeing a gynecologist who even knows to look for this, which more and more of them do but you know, you might be 22 years old. You’ve had it since you were 1112. You just forget about you don’t bring it up anymore, because, you know, it’s been dismissed. So many times.
P: Yeah, you’ve been told us nothing. So it’s hard to think to bring it up. Yeah. Okay, that’s helpful.
Episode 44: Ditch the Birth Plan, Plan for the 4th Trimester: Sunni’s story
Episode 44SN: Ditch the Birth Plan, Plan for the Fourth Trimester: Sunni’s Story
Many people enter the long road to parenthood stuffed with different stories about what the process will be like: how long it will take to get pregnant, what growing another human inside your body will feel like, how the birth will unfold. And these stories come from everywhere: your childhood, family experiences, books, and media…today’s guest originally thought she wouldn’t have children, which may have shaped what stories she took in and which she avoided…and then she had a change of heart. and with this change came some next level planning–not so much for the pregnancy or birth, chock full of their own surprises, but for what came after: the fourth trimester and the new role of mother. She wisely borrowed traditions from a variety of sources that offered the kinds of support she anticipated needing, and made for a lovely transition to parenthood.
Sunni’s most useful books during pregnancy:
Here’s links to the books that I found the most useful during pregnancy.
The 4th Trimester
The Natural Pregnancy Book (Blessingway is on page 138)
Connect with Geeta Aurora here
National Ayurvedic Medical Association
Restless leg syndrome
https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/restless-legs-syndrome/symptoms-causes/syc-20377168
Audio Transcript:
Paulette: Hi Welcome to War Stories from the Womb. I’m your host, Paulette Kamenecka. I’m an economist and a writer, and the mother of two girls.
Many people enter the long road to parenthood stuffed with different stories about what the process will be like: how long it will take to get pregnant, what growing another human inside your body will feel like, how the birth will unfold. And these stories come from everywhere: your childhood, family experiences, books, and media…today’s guest originally thought she wouldn’t have children, which may have shaped what stories she took in and which she avoided…and then she had a change of heart. and with this change came some next level planning–not so much for the pregnancy or birth, chock full of their own surprises, but for what came after: the fourth trimester and the new role of mother. She wisely borrowed traditions from a variety of sources that offered the kinds of support she anticipated needing, and made for a lovely transition to parenthood.
One of the traditions she leaned on was ayurveda–and we are lucky today to get insights from an amazing ayurvedic practitioner about ways to care for your body in pregnancy and in the fourth trimester..
I learned a lot from my guest today–let’s get to her inspiring story.
P: Hi, thanks so much for coming on the show. Can you introduce yourself and tell us where you’re from?
Sunni: Sure. My name is Sunni and my last name is Von Mutious. And I was born in Orlando, Florida. And that’s where I live right now.
P: Oh, wow. Nice. Well, thanks so much for coming on the show and we’re here to talk about families, you know, starting our own families but also the family that you came from. Do you have siblings?
S: I do. I have one biological brother. I have another older brother that was like a foster brother that’s been around for a long time. And then I have a what I call a pseudo sister. So it’s a girl, now a woman. We were raised together, known each other since birth. And really the best way to describe them is like a sister because we had a very similar childhood experience because we want each other so long. So I’m blessed with lots of different types of siblings.
P: That’s awesome. Coming from that context, did you did that set a seed in you to say I want to have a family myself?
S: Oh, hell no. Quite the opposite.I always wanted to adopt lots of kids and like we I wanted to bring home all of like the ragtag kids. That didn’t have anywhere else to go. So it was very much not in my life map to have a child of my own up until very, very recently.
P: How was that switch flipped?
S: The short version is I decided to enter into romantic relationship with my best friend of 25 years. And they really wanted to be a dad. And the more we talked about it, the more I was open to that conversation. And then I’m pretty like woowoo spiritual. There was this like meditation experience where a soul was like I choose you, you and them will be the perfect hosts for my life. Can I please come through you? I was like, Well, man, every time I tell the universe, no, it doesn’t work out so well. So between my partner and the universe, I was like, Fine, I’ll be a vessel. I will I will let a human come through me. So that was a really big shift though. For me. That was not something I ever dreamed of really doing.
P: That sounds dramatic. What was your perception of pregnancy walking into it?
S: I really didn’t have much of a relationship to it. Like it was something that other people did. Not something that I really expected my body to do. So my approach was very scientific. I’m a data gather. And so I read lots of books and like, the whole time I was very interested in what scientifically was happening like, oh, this week, I’m making teeth and this week I’m making a placenta like that was kind of my relationship to it. Because I didn’t have one going into it.
P: That’s super interesting that you had like an like intellectual connection to it more than an emotional one. Before you get there, but I’m wondering if that changed once you became pregnant just because so many things are going on in your body. beyond your control that can shift our feelings about it. Did you did you get pregnant easily?
S: I did fairly. I’m a little older. And so there was some concerns and I had a miscarriage in the past. So we were like not quite sure. But in the end, it was less than six months. So I like took off the IUD and just kind of were like we’re going to give it a year and six months in. It happened. So I think that’s pretty easy for my understanding of people to experience.
P: I think it’s super smart that you guys said we’ll give it a year because most people myself included are like I’ll give it five minutes. Now that we’re not trying to stop it. Obviously, I’ll be pregnant because that’s how it works. Which you know, I did not at all we needed all kinds of people, all kinds of medical people involved in our process. But a year is a good way to have perspective. So you’re already you’re already knocking it out of park here. This is something set up well and what was your first trimester like?
S: My first trimester was was not really wasn’t bad. I didn’t have a lot of the typical symptoms. My experience of morning sickness was just kind of feeling like shaky and queasy I didn’t have some of the extreme symptoms that people did. So it was really like a data gathering time for me and like physically in my body being like, are we sure nothing’s happening yet? Are we sure? Is this really is this really a thing? Right? And then of course the first so we found out the first pregnancy test was two days after we went into lockdown from COVID in March of 2020. And that was like one of those faint lines and because of the pandemic and because we were being pretty lax about things like we’re just gonna wait till next month, and see if the cycle comes back and we’ll take more pregnancy tests. So the first doctor’s visit was like most doctors offices weren’t even open, right? That’s the phase of the pandemic. We were in. And so like the first ultrasound and like seeing a little blob, and like that was the moment I think that I was like, Okay, this is really happening. It is not just faulty Dollar Store sticks or whatever the case may be. So it wasn’t really until the second trimester that physical symptoms started kicking in and I started to really I think, emotionally connect to what was happening. The first trimester was still kind of a very analytical, and there was a lot happening in the world
P: Yeah, experience so a lot to distract you for sure. And I remember being surprised that you could go 12 weeks and nobody on the outside could see what was going on. There’s no physical evidence, other than totally, right, right. Though f
S: For me, one of the big things was my boobs got bigger and kind of like sensitive in a weird tingly way. And I was like, this is new. This is new. This is some physical evidence, but other than that, like my body didn’t really change. I didn’t have a lot of symptoms. I was really hungry and tired but the whole world is going through this like massive global events, like is it pregnancy or is it like trauma? Right? Yeah, yeah. It was a little confusing to be sure.
P: Yeah. Wow. So did you get to go to regular office visits for your second trimester?
S: No, no, I never did. I’m also immune compromised some high risk because I’m a little older and I’ve been compromised and then add them add in a pandemic. So I had a midwife. And my midwife either came to our home or we went to, to her home basically for visits so I did get in person visits, but I never went to a doctor’s office.
P: good lord, this seems stressful to layer on the pandemic and immune compromised and now pregnant and,
S: and geriatric with the air quotes, right, that whole thing? It was it was a lot, but quite a few of those variables were known, going into right I knew going into it that I was immune compromised, and that I was going to be considered geriatric, like I knew those things. So the pandemic was really the only unknown factor for us.
P: Well, let me ask you a question. Even if you are if you have immune issues going into this, do they think pregnancy is going to complicate that or what if
S: there was a slight risk that my body would treat the baby as a foreign object?
P: Can I ask you Is it autoimmune?
S: no. I have a rare form a rare genetic mutation of Epstein Barr Virus so it’s always present in my body and my body responds hyper active actively to infections or foreign objects which we weren’t entirely sure because it’s such a rare genetic mutation of this disease. There’s not really studies or evidence of what happens for pregnancy. Is that a foreign body a beta, or is it considered part of my body? And so we weren’t really sure how it’s gonna play out in the first trimester was really that like we’ll see. And in the end, it was fine. It’s probably honestly better, that there was a pandemic going on to distract me that I wasn’t going to regular doctor’s visits. I think if the world had been like, quote, normal, they would have been a lot more hyper focused on that but because there was so much distracting everyone it was just kind of like pushed to the background. And that was probably honestly better for my stress level and the baby in the end. Yes.
P: Agreed. You know, with my second one, I used to kid around about her cortisol bath, when I would go to the, to the doctor’s office. Yeah, I only kidding around with that, because I didn’t quite understand what the consequence of that was slightly less funny. When oops, turns out that’s serious, but so I’m glad that that that was kind of pressed down for you a little bit.
S: Yeah.
P: And then how would you want to talk about the third trimester or what the birth is going to look like? Or?
S: Yeah, sure. The the third trimester was the hardest for me. I ended up having really bad heartburn. And restless leg syndrome, which I always kind of poo pooed is like, I never had experienced personally what that felt like, but it was really hard to sleep. I felt like I wanted to crawl out of my own skin.
P: RLS
S: And when I finally got comfortable, it was usually laying flat and then the heartburn would you know, so I didn’t sleep a whole lot in that last trimester it was it was a little bit uncomfortable. That was the only time I really had physical discomfort during the pregnancy and my intention, our goals, we were warned by our doula or midwife not to have a plan, right, because birth never goes to plan. But our goal was to have a home birth. And so my partner had like all the supplies gathered, they’d worked out this great system for keeping the water warm because I was due in December and even in Florida, it gets cold in December. So how do we keep warm water in the house and we had it all worked out. And then my water broke five weeks early, which put me at premie and then between high risk and all the things so my midwife was not able to deliver we ended up having to go to the hospital. But
P: slow down a little bit here on tickets to that day. What are you doing when your water breaks?
S: Sleeping?
P: Oh, is it at night?
S: I was the morning so here’s the fun part. I was we had a blessing way. Are you familiar with a blessing? Well, so a blessing way is kind of the opposite of a baby shower and that the focus is on the mom. So it’s blessing the mother into the right or the ritual of becoming a mother. And so I gathered a bunch of my female friends and
P: I want to pause here to say this is yeah, yes. And I don’t know why I’ve never heard of it. Keep talking and then we’ll right. It’s such a good idea.
S: I think so too. And it was it because it wasn’t something I had planned in my life. Right. It felt significant to put some ritual around it right. So I had a baby shower with my partner and we did it online. It was really cute. And it worked out really well. It was fun. But this was the blessing way this was like my ritual of stepping into motherhood. And I found it in a book.
P: Does it come from a religious tradition?
S: Not necessarily. There’s so there’s a pagan tradition around that but I don’t know that it’s I don’t know that it’s necessarily linked. Okay. Yeah.
P: blessing made me think it was religious
S: probably. I mean, for me, I’m pretty well most spiritual, so I definitely include it with some spirituality. But I don’t know that it has to.
P: That’s super cool. So what does that look like?
S: For me, I had one of my other woowoo spiritual friends hosted and I was like, I just want to feel loved on and given support. Like that’s all I care about. You go figure out what that looks like for me. And so what she did is I friends from all over the world. And there’s a pandemic so she put mason jars in a circle, and asked all of my friends what their favorite flower was and put a flower in the jar to represent my friends that couldn’t be there. And then I had friends locally that could and everybody offered me advice and what they could offer as support. So like you can count on me to bring you food you can count on me to that you can count on me to come live on the baby when you’re feeling frustrated.
And we did a little ritual with some yarn that was supposed to like represent the umbilical cord and how everyone was connected to my pregnancy until the baby was born. So we all wrapped it around our wrist and then passed the ball of yarn wrapped around her wrist passed until we were all connected. And the idea was that you do cut the ties and you tie it onto your wrist. So every woman who attended had a yarn bracelet and they were supposed to cut it off when the baby was born, and when she know it. 24 hours later, my water broke. So they didn’t even have to wear that yarn bracelet for very long. They blessed the baby right out of me.
P: This is amazing. I want to get to the birth but I’m stuck on how amazing an idea this is. So if you find the book that it’s in, let me know because I’ll link to it. Because it’s I’ve never heard of it before. I obviously don’t get out much because this is a idea.
S: So I will I will find the book and send you a link.
P: Okay, thank you so you are up in the morning and you know that your water has broken or is it dramatic?
S: I was in bed. So the blessing was on Saturday. I slept in on Sunday and my brother and his wife were over painting our nursery, this adorable woodland scene and so I was supposed to get out of the house because of the fumes. Of the paint. So I was sleeping in and I was gonna sneak out the back door for the day. And I get woken up thinking I’d wet the bed. And I’m thinking like the baby’s on my bladder. How embarrassing how gross whatever I get up and go to the bathroom which is 10 feet from the bed and it keeps going right to the goal water break it keeps waking out so I’m like standing in the shower without my phone and our house is quite long and my partner’s at the other end helping paint. And so I’m like yelling how nobody can hear me so I had to waddle back, find my phone make a big mess. And I’ll never forget the look on my partner’s face. They walk in and I’m like take a deep breath it’s all gonna be fine. It’s not like the movies. We have time. He’s like what it’s like my water broke in his face. He’s a black man and I swear he turned pure white. Like his whole face. It was like something out of a movie. It was hilarious. But yeah, that was that was how it all started.
P: But also you have a lot of presence to becoming someone else. When you’re on the brink of birth. I feel like I’m packing up just listening to the story. So can you just go to the hospital in the pandemic or how does that work?
S: So, some part of me must have had an intuition that this might have happened because the last midwife visit and the last appointment we’d had with our doula I had said like all of our conversation has been about the home birth like I feel like Murphy’s law is that if we’re not prepared, it’s going to happen. So I would like to be prepared just in case we have to go to the hospital. What should we know? And so they had talked us through what to put in a go bag we had talked about which hospital would be ideal in case of an emergency transfer and like would that still be the case if if we had to go for the entire thing? So we had some of that knowledge? So yes, you can just go to the hospital our midwife called ahead to say we were coming in to give my files over. We actually were I was so great. I’m still eternally grateful. The hospital we went to has a midwife program. And the midwife who was on duty for days while I was there was part of the same midwife training that my midwife had gone through, so they knew each other had a relationship. So there was I gave I gave permission for them to communicate through the entire event. And so they knew I was coming. They were like, you know, I did the whole assess, see if I’m dilated, I wasn’t dilated at all, but my water had definitely broke. And so they admitted me, and I had to make the tough decision of what two humans I would take. That’s all they allowed at that time. So I couldn’t have my mom there. I chose to have my Doula there instead. And that was so i My water broke around 1045 is when I woke up, I was admitted by 2pm and I ended up being in labor for about 28-30 hours.
P: So once your water broke did your labor start naturally or they had to did not?
S: Yeah, they, they were so generous in honoring my wishes. I think mainly because of that personal connection. It was such a blessing. And my Doula happened to know a lot of a staff at the hospital too. But I really wanted to avoid any medical intervention if possible. And so they agreed to let me labor naturally, for 12 hours. That was their comfort level. And so after 12 hours, I only dilated a couple of centimeters and they ended up introducing Pitocin to help speed things up. And they actually were getting very close to they were starting to have conversations of like they might have to do a C section. We might have to do something more dramatic. When my body finally was like Alright, fine. We’ll kick into high gear. So yeah,
P: wow. I realized like on the ground, it’s not moving super fast but it sounds pretty fast.
S: It in a moment it was like that weird duality right of like holy crap I’m in the hospital. We did not really plan for this. I did not envision this so I’m trying really hard to make it feel as safe and comfortable as possible. So like, we got permission we brought like LED candles and I set up I plan on having an altar and I had like a slideshow of trees I wanted to watch while I was in the water to feel grounded. And so we set up an iPad with my slideshow and we had music going and we were infusing oils like doing whatever we could to make it feel more home like and it was it was awesome because every time a nurse came in, they would come in like all stress from whatever they’ve just been dealing with. And they walk into this space that’s got music going and oils and they’re like, Oh, this is different and they would have them relax. And so at the one time everything’s going really quickly and like oh my gosh, I’m about to have a human but at the other I had really awesome support systems and helping to be present and in the moment and the piece that I haven’t mentioned yet that’s pretty critical to this whole story is I have a condition where my brain does not register a fight or flight response to pain.
So I don’t register pain as a oh crap when we get out of this situation. So like I shattered a knee at one point and walked on it for miles because they didn’t realize how bad the injury was. So for me labor is a very different experience because most women would be freaking out with the contractions and I was just like, hey, I I feel like I’m a little gassy is that a contraction? So I think that allowed me to be a lot more present. And grounded, which isn’t always a good thing, right pain. Pain has a purpose in our bodies. But in this case, particular scenario, it was helpful.
P: It seems like it would be helpful because most women say I have two kids but both of them were C sections. So I didn’t and the first one I did not have a contraction. I felt like I was going to a business meeting when she was coming her on her birthday. But what a lot of women say for the second one I had contractions and it’s so intense, that it’s hard not to feel scared and to make your body tense awaiting the next one, which seems counterproductive. It seems like all the all the Hypno birthing and all that stuff is to make you calm in the moment. So in this scenario, it seems like it’s actually beneficial because you’re not tightening all your muscles when you get a contraction because that’s not the path, right?
S: Yeah, my Hypno birthing. my Doula did do some hypnosis type stuff. But it was more in the vein of getting in touch with my body and being really focused on what the muscles were doing so that I could help encourage things because my natural response was not to do that. I didn’t I don’t respond that way. So it was more of like getting in touch with the pain or the discomfort to help versus resisting it. So it’s a very different sort of MO that we had to have for me.
P: So could you feel it at all?
S: Oh, yeah. There’s a point right like and I feel like period cramps. I’ll feel discomfort for that. Right internal pain. I feel a little bit of discomfort extra like being punched in needles and stuff don’t faze me at all. But yeah, I felt the Ring of Fire. I felt like the pressure it was it was the way I describe it. My friends who have gone through an unmedicated birth say that like it feels much more uncomfortable than like pain when I talk about it for them. They’re like something was being ripped out of my body. And I was like, something needs to get out. Like I’m holding something back and I need to release so it was a different experience but I felt it at the end for sure. I did a lot of low groaning a lot of low groaning
P: and that’s supposed to help you manage the pain or help your body move in the right way.
S: My understanding is that when we scream high in our register, it’s engaging like our upper upper muscles and it engages a fear response but when we grow it pushes our diaphragm down and it engages kind of more of our like, animalistic instincts, which is what you need when giving birth. So I had been encouraged to do that. And that was what my body wanted to do. Like I did not have to remind myself not to scream, I groaned naturally and loudly without any encouragement.
P: Okay, good. And then you said you were in labor for 28 hours. That’s a long time
S: That’s from the time the time my water broke to the time the kid was born was 30
hours.
P: Wow. Was the birth only attended by a midwife?
S: Oh, no, there was a whole hospital staff there. It was just instead of having OB is it’s a midwifery option. So I had midwives instead of obese, but I had nurses they were coming in checking. Because I was at five weeks. We hadn’t yet done the strappy test. And so we had to decide whether or not to do and I fill in all of that fun stuff. And there was a point where the baby’s heart rate would get elevated when I had a contraction. So there was concerns they were monitoring, Matt. So all night long, people were coming in and taking my vitals and all that fun stuff, typical hospital stuff, but it wasn’t until the next afternoon that the action started.
P: And then how long for the birth.
S: I went from five centimeters to birth in less than an hour.
P: Wow.
S: Yeah. When I was ready when that baby was ready it was like were happening because I still had like the hospital like mesh undies on and I was like it’s a ring of fire and they’re like it can’t be you’re not there yet you only six centimeters. And my Doula was like I think you should check and I took the the cut the underwear off me like there’s
P: I’m glad you were validated. Yes,
S: right. Yes, I was.
P: And so your baby is running. It sounds like 35 weeks. And are they what so what happens once the baby is born? Do you get to hold him or her or how does that go?
S: Yeah, so the plan for home birth was to put the baby on my chest and try to latch by the way you know the dreamy stuff. So it did as much of that as they could. So they promised to delay cord cutting as long as they were allowed in the hospital which was five minutes they weren’t my partner cut the cord. So they put the baby on my chest. And this was a funny moment too. Because I’m white and my partner’s black. I was having a hard time visualizing the baby and so it kept becoming a purple Muppet in my head. And when the baby came out, they actually were purple and I was super excited by this. I was like oh my gosh, they really are purple and everybody in the room thought that was hilarious because I’m, you know, dopey at that point. But yeah, the baby was on my chest for maybe three or four minutes they cut the cord, but because the baby was premie their left long did not want to operate the way it should and they were hearing some distress and so they took the baby off to the NICU just to make sure everything was okay and then I went into distress my placenta was completely shredded. And so I lost two liters of blood with them trying to do manual retrieval, and then they eventually took me off to an emergency DNC.
P: Wow. Do they think that’s related to the early birth? Like there was some issue with the placenta?
S: They never really mean there’s no way to know for sure. The assumption afterwards is that that that’s what caused the water to break is that there was some distress in my body. But it’s certainly a blessing in disguise in that if I had had a home birth, I would have had an emergency transfer and because of how quickly I lost blood, there is a high chance that I might have not made it to the hospital. So it worked out well in my case, but that homebirth didn’t happen. And then I was in a hospital where they couldn’t respond quickly. So and the baby had the cord around their neck, not not in like a the midwife could have handled it but that was part of what was delaying the labor is that the baby that’s why there was distress in a reduced heartbeat every time the baby tried to move down into the birth canal. The cord would tighten around their neck. So
P: yeah, that makes sense. So did you you was the baby born without an epidural? It sounds like oh yeah, no I know medical intervention. They give you some kind of medication for the DNC.
S: I’m assuming they tried manual retrieval for about 45 minutes and my body stopped responding. I started shaking and going into like a shutdown. And so then they decided they needed to put me under full anesthesia and they were prepared to do a hysterectomy. And so I had asked the it was a chief OB was who did my surgery and I told them I really don’t want to be cut if it can be avoided and I really don’t want to lose any organs if it can be avoided. I would rather risk of infection if there’s a possibility. It’s like Alright, I got it. And he did it by all me. I mean, they said it was the longest DNC that ever done they had to re up my anesthesia because they stayed in so long, but they in the end, were able to get the placenta through a DNC which is uterine scraping.
P: Yeah.
S: And they never did have to cut me open which I was really grateful for because I wanted to avoid that. So
P; No kidding. Yeah. Do they say why it took so long?
S: It was because the the because the placenta was shredded and we kept the placenta because I was one of those that wanted to freeze dry it and consume it. It looks like a pile of ground meat. It was like a pile of ground beef is what it looked like. And normally it looks almost like a jellyfish heart.
P: Yeah, yeah. No, this slab it is like a big brown slam right right
S: no, not mine so there was embedded in the wall of my uterus. So they had like they had been really sprayed it to get it all out and it was really in there. I guess. My kid was born. With bruised palms and feet base their feet. They think it’s because they’ve been kicking so much that they were part of what shredded the placenta tall really long and they think the baby’s movement was part of what destroyed the placenta.
P: Wow. And how old is the baby at now?
S: 15 months?
P: Is he or she a fighter Walker around her running around?
S: Oh yeah, we use gender neutral pronouns for that. Their name is Alex and yes, they are 15 months and they are already running and climbing and very, very active. They’ve been standing and trying to walk since like seven eight months. And when I started walking at nine months, so yes, very, very active little baby.
P: That’s so funny. Our first one did not walk till she was like 17 months and the second the second one started walking 15 months and we’ve created an Olypian…we have an olympic something
S: a part of me is a little envious of that experience though. Because imagining like the you know, the kids been walking for about six months now. So imagining what parenting would be like if I’d had a stationary baby a little bit longer. There’s a little envy there.
P: Well, you know it goes both ways, right? Both. Both of the kids could be stationary because they talked really early. And so they’re just ordering us around.
S: So you might get has no word yet. Not a single word yet. Months.
P: It seems like it seems like they don’t need any words because they can go get themselves right.
S: That’s pretty much they walk us to the highchair endpoint. Right so yeah,
P: God that’s awesome. I can’t believe they’re walking so early. Wow. Although I like that it’s consistent with the in utero behavior.
S: It is it really is. They were a kicker. We have videos of my belly that look insane. They were they were a kicker and a mover and so in fact, they were breech, they were actually laying horizontal instead of vertical.
P: Wow,
S: that was another concern about my labor starting so early is that we hadn’t yet confirmed with the midwife that the baby had shifted, but they kept moving around in a different position. So there was a little concern they’d be in the wrong position for birth. So they they worked it out. They got head down. But yeah, they were a big kicker and mover in utero, and they’re very much that way now in real life.
P: So were they in the NICU for long?
S: No, only for three nights.
P: Oh, great. That is short,
S: yeah. And so they sorted the lung issue and then you’re good to go.
Yeah, they just needed to use a bag to help him sleep. And they were fine. They did some preventative antibiotics, which I requested that they stop. And they were like a percent and a half out of the comfort zone for jaundice. And so they only reason they even kept them. The second and third night was to do some UV treatments, and they wanted to keep them a little longer. But we asked to bring the baby home. We felt like the sun could do the same thing as the UV lights. And in the end, that was fine. They they thrived but they didn’t want to keep them a little longer.
P: And how long are you in the in the hospital after your experience?
S: That got really tricky because they kept wanting to assess my pain and to see if my uterus was contracting and maybe there was more placenta in there, but because I don’t register it and because it’s a hospital. I had different staff all the time. And so they would know that I don’t feel pain. So it was like a It was exhausting. And so finally, we opted to have me discharged and to heal at home. Because I was I felt like I was using all my healing energy to explain to the staff the situation. So I was in for two nights. They offered to keep me until the baby was discharged but I wanted to go home. So I was in the hospital for two nights. And they they wanted to do a blood transfusion. But that’s also a tricky thing with my immune issue whether or not my body will reject antibodies and somebody else’s blood. So in the end, we just did iron and I did some natural remedies to help replace the last blood. But I was pretty shaky and out of it for a couple of weeks after that procedure.
P: yeah that’s Didn’t you say two liters of blood? That’s a lot.
S: Yeah, I lost.
P: Your body only has five. so
S: yeah, it was a lot of blood loss. It was scary.
P: It’s totally scary and the other scary thing is it is really fast, right? It has to be And now everyone’s like, you’re right. Everyone else is great.
S: I’m good. I mean, we’re so with me. My uterus is I don’t know the right words. It’s dropped a little bit. So my uterus and my cervix are a little lower than they would like, and we’re still not sure if that will ever heal itself. So that’s something that I’m currently monitoring, but it’s not impacting my life on a daily basis. It’s just something I’m aware of and working to heal. If I wanted to have more babies, which I don’t I was one and done right. So never really planned on the first one. They would do some things to help, you know, surgically to help help it along. But since I don’t actually want to use my uterus again, it’s more of a wait and see game and the baby is totally fine. They hit all of their milestones on track for their birth date, because when babies are born preemie, I did not notice. So when babies are born preemie you track from their due date because the preemie time is time they were intended to be in utero. Now milestones start from the birth, the due date, Alex tracked from their birth date. So they hit all the milestones on track the day they were born, which is technically ahead, so they ended up thriving, really worked out fine for us.
P: That’s awesome. So talk a little bit about fourth trimester because now you’re home without your blog, and you’re you have this active baby. I’m hoping that Alex slept through the night relatively early.
S: Not at all. Not at all. But that was okay, because we had put an enormous amount of thoughtfulness into the fourth trimester during the second and third trimester. So I had been working with an Ayurvedic specialist.
P: here’s a little more information about ayurveda
Geeta Aurora
S: I had planned a specific diet to encourage my body to heal and my milk to come in I had recruited my parents with very specific requests for jobs they were going to do to help support us people from my blessingway had offered to do specific things to help support us. My partner and I had both taken off the first three months, which got a little tricky because it happened early, but we worked it out and so my partner was home for the entire fourth trimester. So the baby did not sleep through the night the baby got up every other hour for the first four months of their life. But we had so much support, and so little responsibilities other than like nurturing this new life that it really wasn’t a hugely stressful and impactful thing because we had set ourselves up to be present with us. We have the space to do that.
P: Okay, Sunni, so explain to me how someone who has not been planning to have a baby knows to do this for the fourth trimester
S: books. I read lots of books.
P: I don’t know whether I was unwilling to commit to a fourth trimester before I got there. Or I’m not sure what but not I none of that. I didn’t see any of that. In my experience. That seems amazing.
S: I’m also I mean I am I will be 40 in a couple of months, right? So I was 3738 going through all of this a little older. I’m I’m professionally I teach self awareness and spirituality. I’m in school to be a minister. So I’ve done a lot of work to be connected to myself and my true nature and what I need, and my partner and I work a lot on communication in our relationship we’re polyamorous that’s a really important element of having a healthy relationship is open communication. So I think all of those things really supported me through the pregnancy process and being able to see ahead to what I might need to feel supported. And the fact that the other thing before me really honest, polite is because I didn’t want to do this, right. I was like, if I’m gonna do it, I want all of the support. I want all of the help. I have no ego in asking for help because I’m not the type of woman that wants to be a mommy mom. That was never in my DNA or my my thoughts about it. So I didn’t have any like preconceived notions of like the baby’s gonna come home and I’m going to be able to be supermom and do everything. I was like, I don’t I don’t even necessarily like the idea of being the mom to a baby. So I don’t have an ego in it
P: I’m going to pause you right there though. I did not plan to be a mommy mommy. But it would never even occurred to me to ask for all that help. Like I feel like I’ve been culturally indoctrinated to not expect or ask or I wouldn’t. I mean, it doesn’t occur to me until we’re talking now like, oh, that’s how it’s done.
S: Well, I think that’s where the IRA VEDA came in really helpful because I are Veda is Eastern tradition that started in India. And in India, most women don’t leave the house for 45 days, the mother in law and the mother take care of the pregnant postpartum woman, and they take care of the baby so the mother can focus on healing, that’s the tradition. And so I think having exposure to other traditions and what’s normalized in other countries is helpful too. Because like it’s a very sort of American slash Western thing. To think that we have to do it on our own.
P: Oh, the independence thing is so dumb.
S: Yes. Agree. Huge, right. It’s so indoctrinated from such a young age.
P: Yeah, that’s amazing. That’s a really good blueprint for other people to follow. Because it’s so smart to set all that stuff up ahead of time.
S: Yeah, and the Ayurvedic practitioner had sent recipes and herbs and like really unexplained to my, my mom and my partner, were going to take care of the food for me. And so they had a session where Vedic practitioner who explained these foods are really nourishing, they’re going to help the uterine wall heal, they’re going to help replenish blood loss. They’re going to help with iron and for the breast milk to develop, so they understood so when I came home with certain ailments, they knew what types of meals to prepare for me to help encourage that.
So it’s like a whole system
P: so two things Thing Number one is I am also on the Ayurvedic train and have done a bunch of punch of karma and done all kinds of treatments and, but not before I had kids, so I wouldn’t have taken advantage of it that way. But the other thing that’s amazing about it is I feel like Western medicine. treats the fourth trimester like Goodbye and good luck. Yes. And there’s no discussion of the nutrition you will need to heal. That’s not a part of the conversation. But it’s so important. So amazing that you had that already set up. Yeah. In your experience, right. Yes.
Unknown Speaker 6:53
It was especially valuable for me because I had so many things that needed healing. And it’s so important, right? Like no judgment against the moms were like, I want the sushi. The second I can’t want the burger or the milkshake, the second the baby’s born. And if once you get that like adrenaline rush and that fix of the food that you’re craving emotionally, if you can focus on the food your body needs versus the food, your mouth or your emotions want, it can make such a drastic difference in how your body heals and how your postpartum depression does or doesn’t develop, and how much you can connect to your baby and your ability to breastfeed. If that’s important to you. Like I could tell such a huge difference that there was like a couple of weeks in there. I got really stubborn and you know, very human about it. I was like I want pizza hut and I want sushi and I want them and I would feel so crummy and suddenly the postpartum depression would start to sneak in and if I was able to pivot back to a diet that I knew was nourishing my body, all of those symptoms would diminish almost immediately. It was really amazing the direct connection between my nourishment and my mental health and my physical well being.
P: That’s amazing
S: and now there’s like a whole different relationship to the fourth trimester in that culture. I think it’s 40 or 45 days of healing and focus on nourishment. It’s, it’s, again, I think it’s a cultural thing for us, especially,
P: for sure, and I’ve heard it also in like, you know, in China, there’s a lot there’s some name for that for the fourth trimester. It’s different that’s like a woman’s feet shouldn’t touch the ground. You know, a mother’s Mother’s Day shouldn’t touch the ground or something. The absolute genius.
S: Yeah, it also helps to with this with the community, right like I made it very clear to the people closest to us going into the third trimester that we were creating this fourth trimester bubble, and so I don’t think I don’t think I think this is a true statement. Never once did I have to say, No, you can’t come see the baby. Please don’t come over the I didn’t have to deal with any of that. Nobody expected to come over and see the baby and to be in our space until after that fourth trimester was open, especially when the middle of a pandemic. So people would come over and drop off food and be like, if you’re up to it, can you bring the baby to the window, but they were so generous about it like only if you’re awake and whatever. So like I didn’t have to do any of that extra emotional, heavy lifting to create a safe space that a lot of moms have to negotiate. Like I feel guilty because my aunt wants to come over the mother in law wants to come over. Like we had set all of that up in advance. And I’m so grateful because especially those first few weeks of me having that blood loss I didn’t have the energy. Yeah, and having them be in the space would have been so much more exhausting for me. So like that was another huge element for us of creating that fourth trimester. So intentionally. Was the the ease it gave us to not have to have difficult conversations in the moment.
P: Yeah, that’s awesome. That’s awesome. So let me ask you a tricky question. Looking back now do you have advice for your younger self?
S: I think I love this question. I think now looking back for me, and my personality and my dynamic. The amount of data that I gathered was a coping mechanism. And it was useful and I’m glad that I had it but I think It distracted me from the emotional connection to the fact that like, this human that I’m growing is going to be my child, my progeny, I have a relationship with them. It wasn’t until like the third trimester that I started really cluing into the fact that they could hear my voice and that my heartbeat was going to be comforting to them. Because I basically read ahead the next trimester so it wasn’t until I was like in the third trimester reading about bringing the baby home that I was like, oh, like just turning my heartbeats gonna be comforting to them. What what that must be like to be in my belly and then come out as big bad world and be away from my heartbeat. And I kind of like I would tell myself to create space, and do more journaling and more meditation and more like self work to be present with the experience. In addition to the exploration of the science, I think that’s something I missed out on a little bit.
P: Yeah, I feel like the intellectualizing makes sense, given the whirlwind around you and all that but that is interesting advice for yourself. You have done it differently. Well, thank you so much for sharing your amazing story.
S: Absolutely. Thanks for having thanks for having me. I think the more stories we hear the easier this is for us to process our own. So I appreciate that.
Episode 43: A Birth that leads to a Rebirth: Starr’s story
Episode 43 SN: A Birth that leads to a Rebirth: Starr’s Story
Pregnancy can invite a million different kinds of challenges. For some women, it’s a physical trial. There are real limits on what our bodies can do. It certainly was for me for some all the massive changes that happen internally and externally can cause distress. And for some women, like today’s guest, part of the challenge is how pregnancy can affect relationships. She had lots of challenges with the baby’s father at the time, which forced her to navigate the very real question of whether or not to bring a baby into a relationship that wasn’t fully settled. Adding to this already tough situation, she had to figure this all out amidst the gnarly set of restrictions required of women having babies during the pandemic. Ultimately, through her own perseverance, she manages to birth both a baby and a whole new family context for herself.
If you want to connect with Starr or read her work, you can find it here, or find her on Twitter @_starrdavis
Abortion pill
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/health-medicine/science-behind-abortion-pill-180963762/
Gender of fetus
https://www.science.org/content/article/why-women-s-bodies-abort-males-during-tough-times
https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fped.2019.00022/full
Audio Transcript
Paulette: Hi, welcome to war stories from the womb. I’m your host, Paulette Kamenecka. I’m an economist and a writer and a mother of two girls. Pregnancy can invite a million different kinds of challenges. For some women, it’s a physical trial. There are real limits on what our bodies can do. It certainly was for me for some all the massive changes that happen internally and externally can cause distress. And for some women, like today’s guest, part of the challenge is how pregnancy can affect relationships. She had lots of challenges with the baby’s father at the time, which forced her to navigate the very real question of whether or not to bring a baby into a relationship that wasn’t fully settled. Adding to this already tough situation, she had to figure this all out amidst the gnarly set of restrictions required of women having babies during the pandemic. Ultimately, through her own perseverance, she manages to birth both a baby and a whole new family context for herself.
Let’s get to her inspiring story.
Hi, thanks so much for coming on the show. Can you tell us your name and where you’re from?
Starr: Yes, my name is Starr Davis. I’m from Columbus, Ohio.
P: Nice. So Starr, Do you have siblings?
S: I do. I have two sisters and I am the middle child.
P: kind of a lucky duck, Two sisters.
S: Yeah.
P: Did you as a kid always think you were gonna have kids of your own?
S: Yeah, I did. Yeah. I we played with Barbie dolls and baby dolls a lot. So it I guess it was always an understanding that in a weird way, that’s what we were going to do when we were older.
P: That’s cute. Is that your baby right now?
S: Um, yes, my sister has we don’t know anything
P: we don’t know anything about her yet. And already she sounds cute. Before you got pregnant. What did you imagine pregnancy to be like?
S: Oh, I thought pregnancy would be loving. I thought it would be one of those things where I would be surrounded by my family. Never expected pregnancy to be a lonely process. And I always thought pregnancy was a process that everyone who loves you, I mean, they’re there. They should be pregnant too. Like we’re all you know, kind of in it together type of thing. So I thought there would be more love and adoration and respect, which that’s a weird word that I just decided to use. So I guess that’s a
P: Starr, this is a very high bar.
S: Yeah, I thought it would be respectful. Yeah. And in loving and peaceful. Yeah, that’s what I thought.
P: Alrighty, well, then we’ll get into it. So so. Did you get pregnant easily?
S: Yes, it did.
P: Good.
S: No problems there.
P: And you found out was like a home kit. Is that how you? You were?
S: I found out with $1 test that I bought at a bodega when I was living in the Bronx. So I did the traditional peeing on a stick because I was officially two days of missing my menstrual cycle.
P: Wow, that’s pretty good.
S: Yeah.
P: And then what was your first trimester like?
S: Horrible. My child’s dad is a one night stand. So from the time I realized I was pregnant, I told him I was pregnant. And then getting to the end of that first trimester I had already experienced multiple roller coasters of emotions when I first found out I was pregnant, I immediately felt like, you know, hey, I’m 29 I think it’s about time for my karma to catch up with me. So maybe this is the time you know, and when I told my child’s dad that I was pregnant he was also very excited. And that also brought me some ease. So I went, Oh, okay, we’re having a baby. About a week later, he started to show me some really possessive, controlling narcissistic tendencies. He would call me about 30 times a day. If I didn’t answer he would call me a bitch or any other type of crude name. cussed me out. Tell me to abort the baby. Tell me you know, just say horrible things to me. And this is just, if I didn’t answer the phone. So
P: this is already really unfortunate, in part because respect was on your list. And I feel like yeah, it’s an early casualty. Good Lord. And like way, way too stressful when you’re trying to be pregnant.
S: Very….so it was a you know, I’m two weeks into being pregnant and I went from I’m ready to have you know, I’m ready to accept my fate of being pregnant to I’m ready to go to the abortion clinic.
P: Wow. Yeah.
S: Which I did. I did. And my first trimester i i went to the abortion clinic, I decided that I didn’t want to be a mother to a child with a narcissistic father. I didn’t want that type of family dynamic and I tried to make that decision. And that decision rejected that decision. Because when I did take the abortion pill, it did not work.
P: Oh, that’s interesting. So I feel like I have read that it has to be taken early, right? It’s like six weeks. Or something.
So that hazy recollection of six weeks is a dated in reference. Apparently back in 2000. The pills were first authorized by the FDA. It had to be taken before seven weeks, but since 2016, that window has been expanded to before 10 weeks. And the abortion pill is actually pills plural, two different kinds. One to break down the uterine lining, and the second type to get the uterus to expel its contents. According to Planned Parenthood, if you take the pills between nine and 10 weeks, it’s 93% effective, and it’s between 94 and 98% effective if it’s taken by eight weeks.
S; I was six weeks.
P: Oh wow. And it just didn’t work.
S: It didn’t take my body. It’s almost like it wasn’t even in my system. That is exactly how the doctors described it,
P: that the pills did not have any effect because what it didn’t recognize the pregnancy or the pregnancy was too young or
S: it just didn’t recognize it. They act to give if I wanted a second pill and I went nah. Oh, whoever this is, I’m already afraid of them. And maybe he will be too you know, because this seems like a force to be reckoned with.
P: I like it when the very earliest signs bear out in the end. So I’m excited to hear how this ends
S: absolutely
P: . But also like you are very much kind of going with the flow already, which is I feel like that’s pregnancy one on one and you’re killing it so far.
S: I try my best
P: Were you nauseous at all are like how am I?
S: Yeah, they gave me hormonal pills. I wish I remembered the name of them but they gave me a set of pills to kind of trick my body back into believing it was pregnant because there was still this. This insinuation that I did take an abortion pill.
P: Yeah, yeah
S: so they didn’t want me to miscarry. If I was now deciding to go to term. So now I’m kind of doped up on pregnancy hormones. And that kick starts everything. So I don’t think I could keep anything down besides bananas. That was about it. Banana just, it was horrible. I lost a lot of weight
P: I was gonna say I bet now you cannot look at a banana. There’s no
S: Oh, yeah, it took me forever to understand why, you know, it was the banana you know, like pregnancy. The food it kind of strips you of everything you love, like food wise.
P: Yep.
S: So I’m just like, dang, like, throwing up so much. There’s so many things I can’t even look at anymore.
P: I bet, Good lord. So once you cross 12 weeks is that a bit a little bit or because of the hormones is still bad or has like a date in
S: it did. So I could I stopped using those hormones at 12 weeks and I get my ultrasound and there is a full little fetus in there. And I knew right away. It was a girl. They they of course couldn’t tell me that but I told them that I knew it was a girl and the doctor they asked me well how do you know that and I said she outlived an abortion pill like that. I don’t think a guy is gonna. Ain’t nobody got that type. of strength to me but a woman. So
P: well, also girl fetuses are much stronger than boys geniuses just in terms of survival. Right. So that was a good bet you made there.
S: Yeah.
P: So Starr’s suspicion is borne out by numerous studies that show that male fetuses are more vulnerable to miscarriage than females. In fact, in a 2019 article in frontiers in pediatrics, the author reports that there’s a 30% increased risk of spontaneous abortions for male fetuses with normal chromosomes. It looks like this is especially true in challenging times. While you’d expect that the same number of boys and girls are born each year, when epidemiologists look at the sex ratio from births during war years for example, it’s always the case that there are more girls born than boys.
So is the rest of the pregnancy smooth sailing now that we’ve crossed this threshold or what what happens?
S: It’s actually started to show some light at the end of the tunnel I re contacted the narcissist and I said, you know, this baby wants to be here. And if you want to be a part of you know this ride, you’re more than welcome, but I can’t give into the narcissism. And you know, I I’ve never been with a narcissist, and I was pregnant and I was in New York and I was alone and what else was I supposed to do but give in and he started to become this extremel…the opposite of what he was in the beginning. He was very sweet to me. He was kind of the excessive calling stopped. You know, he’s, he’s giving me all of these fantasy scenarios. Like, don’t you want to live here with me in Texas where I can take care of you when hold your hair back when you’re throwing up and give you feet massages? And I’m like, wow, you know, yeah, that’s what I actually imagine pregnancy to be. But I’m in New York and we went back and forth about whether I should be in New York, you know, alone through my pregnancy and versus being in the wide open range of Texas. So, at at 12 weeks at the end of my third trimester, I decided that if my body kept this baby through everything, I had been through reaching my second trimester, I would move to Texas, and that is what I did.
P: Wow. Oh my god, this is a this baby is very powerful. Alrighty. So now we relocated to Texas. So now we have to find doctors and that whole thing there and how does all that go?
S: It goes terrible. I get there and I’m holding my fat cat in one hand my humungous cat from from New York, and then I got my luggage in my other hand, and you know, the heat just immediately makes me nauseous. So the first thing to when I step off the plane is throw up you know, of course you know, Welcome to Texas. My I find out that this guy who was whispering all these sweet nothings to me is living out of his car. So that’s so now I’m pregnant with a cat living in a car with a one night stand for for a few days, right and
P: he failed to mention the car.
S: He failed to mention he had no place to live.
P: That is yeah, that’s not that’s not ideal. So So do we stay in Texas or how does this
stay in Texas?
S: I get an apartment. And I go on the hunt for a doctor and no doctor in Texas wanted to take me as a patient. They told me I was too far long by this time I was about nearing five months pregnant. And doctors will tell me I was too far. A lot of them had patients and then I had one doctor tell me I can’t take another COVID COVID baby right now. Like I have, you know 10 Like already 10 patients like I can’t take another one of you right now. And that was the first time where I felt almost like put into this weird pregnant box where I’m like, Oh, I’m this type of pregnant person. Like because I got pregnant. Now for out of all these years, I’m a COVID. Baby like I have a COVID baby like, and no one wants us. It was really horrible. to kind of go through that sort of medical rejection.
P: That’s so confusing to me I don’t understand too far along to follow Him for what? You’re the same way to appointments while you were in your first trimester.
S: Absolutely. It seems like they want to be a part of that initial journey. And coming in, in the middle part, it seems feels unfair. And I guess in a sense, I understand that but it’s also like, hey, just I just want to bring a healthy baby into the world. I mean, were they going to help me get her here or not?
P: Yeah. Oh, yeah. So you eventually found someone I’m hoping
S: I did. I found someone very sweet, very thorough. At the Houston Methodist Hospital. In Sugarland, Texas. That’s where I had my daughter. So second trimester was all of me facing the reality of my decisions. I jumped ship. I left New York, right when New Yorkers are never supposed to leave New York. I mean, just because times get a little hard doesn’t mean you leave New York City. But I had I felt I had to add Yeah, my second trimester was really just dealing with the shock really, of leaving New York and knowing that, okay, I’m not just going through a major life event. I am now going through two major life events.
P: Yeah,
S: back to back, which immediately led to me being diagnosed with anti partum in my second trimester
P: antipartum Depression. Yes, yeah. Yeah. Well, that sounds hard, but it sounds like maybe you’re getting help for it.
S: Oh, yeah, absolutely. I’ve gotten lots of help. Even during my pregnancy, I started seeing a therapist. I was still able to eat foods. But I was getting sick in the car. I had lots of motion sickness, and I had sickness from the heat. The heat in Texas kind of like sucked all my pregnant energy where you only got like, a shred of that anyways, so it just like sucked it out of me and the doctor goes, Oh, yeah, you know, this is Texas. You You have to drink like a gallon of water a day to stay hydrated especially because you’re pregnant and I go a gallon of water a day. There is no way I can drink that much water like that is ridiculous. But I do try. I do try. But for some reason I was severely addicted to oranges.
P: Oh, that’s interesting. More on your fruit journey here.
S: Fruit was my friend and my second trimester. Fruit was God like if Eden is a place. It’s it. That was it for me and my second trimester. Oh, maybe in my mind right fruit was that it was it was it was making me happy. It’s what I wanted. And in a sense, I think it I like the way my doctor put it. It’s what your baby wants.
P: Yeah.
S: And it made me feel some weird connection. Like, I’m giving my child something already that they want and that’s kind of cool and gratifying. So yes, I was on a fruit addiction which is a good addiction. I guess to have while you’re pregnant.
P: I agree. Yeah. So take us to the delivery. How do you know today’s the day and how does that all go?
S: Yeah, well, the delivery. Mind you this is the pandemic so
P: is it pre vaccines or post vaccines?
S: This is pre This is pre vaccine, so the doctor tells me only one person can be there. That’s the most horrible news I’ve ever heard in my life. And of course that one person has to be this narcissist who has gotten worse throughout my whole pregnancy. I wanted my mom there so bad. And there was this reality that she was just never going to be there. I almost felt like the pandemic was for me and in the lens of a pregnant woman. I thought I was going to be sheltering in place and quarantining for probably half my kid’s life. Like I did you know, the talk and what you would hear on the news and how people were just wording things. It was like I was going to live in a box with my child and this narcissist. For who knows when because the doctor goes, the baby can’t be around anyone. You can’t be around anyone. You’re going to go home.
So my third trimester was very hard and even, you know, talking with my child’s dad about that strong yearning I had for my mother to be present was a very traumatic for me, he told me that my child will see my family whenever he felt his whatever he decided it would be time and I said, Well, when will that be? And he says, I’ll I don’t know. I’ll tell you when I feel comfortable. And in my mind, I knew that was probably never so when we were deciding on my induction because we decided that I would be induced. I kept trying to push it as far back as possible to see if this guy would change his mind about my mother being present or about my family being present, but I knew that was never going to happen.
So my daughter was due on December the fifth and I told my obg I told her that I was ready to have the baby on November the 30th. And my daughter was born on December 1,
P: so why Uh, why are they making plans to induce
S: they do not want you at the hospital at all. And that was just the reality. If you were a person that was nervous to do a home birth, they’d rather you be induced as early as 38 weeks to just get the baby out of you to go back home.
P: And that doesn’t mean C section, right? It just means just starting labor
S: Yep, that means just starting labor, breaking your water and getting getting it going.
P: So before you’re introduced to this idea, did you have a vision of your birth I know you mentioned having your family around. So I too, was picturing your whole family. Kind of around the bed your two sisters and your mom and other than that, was there any you know, did you did you want a home birth?
S: No, I never was at the home. I never wanted a home birth. I only wanted my family.
P: Okay, so you go in November 30 to be induced and how does that go?
S: I hope people believe me when I say this. The pain I felt from not having my family present was the only pain I felt. I did not have contractions. I did not have any pain when I was induced. But I had pain. And I’m sorry to get emotional about it. But there was pain but it wasn’t physical. There was lots of pain.
P: Don’t Don’t apologize. This sounds like I mean, it’s like anyone else who comes in with a birth plan. Like you have for a long time. Imagined your family around you. So to have to give that up. In this wacky pandemic scenario seems like it would be very upsetting. A really hard thing to go through.
S: Well, what people don’t realize is we didn’t get a traditional pregnancy during the pandemic that was literally stripped from us that just tore the it tore that apart and it made it impossible even to be the case. So, you know, it’s not like my mother could just barge through the hospital door, she would be stopped. You know, like that reality was painful. It was painful.
And the interesting thing is I just kept looking at the door almost like, she’s just gonna bust in here. You know, I got a wild mom. You know, she’s one of those parents where it’s like, I don’t care about any of that. I’m coming. And I was I was waiting. I was waiting for that that moment. My mom is you know, she’s not perfect, but there are moments a parent just won’t miss.
P: Yeah,
S: I was almost certain that she wasn’t going to miss that. And when when it hit me that it just she was going to miss it. I kind of didn’t really care what my body was. Going was going through and it good enough my body almost gave Cut me some slack. It felt like you know, my body in a way was just accepting the labor. I contract it very soon. I can tracted. Well, you know my daughter there was no complications with their heart or anything. When they asked me if I wanted an epidural. I did say yes. And my doctor was like, but you seem okay. And I said I am okay, but I don’t want to not be okay.
P: Yeah, yeah, yeah
S: So I’m going to ask for it. Anyways. So we get the epidural and the doctor says I’m ready to push you know soon after, and right away soon after I they were getting me ready to push and I leaned over to my narcissist ex and I go, can you call my mom so she can be on the phone and he goes No. Why are you asking this? And you’re, we’re about to have a child. So of course I don’t want to argue with this guy. But my heart is just like exploding in my chest. And I do what women do. I put it behind me.
P: Yeah,
S: and I Oh, baby first. This later. I pushed one good hard time. And my daughter comes out with one push.
P: I feel like she is amazing already and doing a lot to help us move along through this pregnancy and delivery. Yeah, she’s got sticking power and apparently she can read a room and understands that if her mom needs her now her mom needs her now.
S: Yeah, absolutely. She’s. She’s my warrior baby.
P: So that sounds fairly straightforward. It sounds like it wasn’t what you were hoping for, but physically it was okay.
S: Yes, physically, I was fine. Soon after that emptiness hit me like a ton of bricks. Because well, one I already felt empty. And now I’m empty.
P: Yeah. Yeah.
S: So that was just horrible for me. I almost missed that closeness, because she was kind of keeping me together in a physical sense of hope, having something to hold on to. And now that there was energy in holding on to her like I got to pick her up and I got to go like this instead of just going like this. That was painful. And immediately the doctor came in because I’m crying hysterically. Probably about an hour after I gave birth. I was crying hysterically where I couldn’t stop. And she’s asking me what’s wrong. And she does something that probably was really intricate. She acts if he could step out of the room. And she says, Do you need to call someone? And I called my sister to let her know that I had my baby. So So grateful.
P: Yeah, that is amazing for the doctor to read the situation so well and remove the eX and make that family connection that you were looking for possible.
S: It was the highlight of my pregnancy experience. It truly was. It was just such a small gesture but I was just so happy to be seen by somebody. I was so happy to be seen. So I’m very close with that doctor and you know, I have went back to tell her how much that moment meant to me. So
P: would you would you say now that you’re you’re extremely sad sadness, you know, in that moment was missing your family?
S: Yes.
P: And once you get to talk to your sister to that resolve or you still have a lot of feelings and a lot of hormones and
S: Oh yeah, it just kind of got worse. I just wanted to be home with my baby. And I just wanted to parade her around my family. I wanted to be back in a familiar environment. Because when you bring a child home, everything’s already new.
P: Yeah.
S: And it was like that. I just hated it. I hated that. I have this new experience. And there’s nothing familiar around me in this new in this new skin that I’m in and communicating that is I mean, just forget about it. There was no way I can communicate postpartum, like I couldn’t communicate that.
P: So you’re in Ohio. Now. Is that where your family is?
S: Yes, this is where my family is.
P: Okay. So so it’s it’s hard, especially during the pandemic, where it’s not before vaccines, you can’t really fly anywhere you especially to a pregnant mom with a new baby, right? You can’t get on a plane and I’m assuming Ohio to somewhere in Texas is too far to drive.
S: Yes, about a whole day. Yeah. 24 hours.
P: So how do we get to a reunion?
S: The abuse continued with my ex and the abuse was trickling down to my daughter who is just an infant. He began to yell at her and he began to have abusive tendencies towards the baby. When I saw that the baby was then in danger. I almost felt as if whoever I was, before I got pregnant, walked into the room, because something in me just woke up and went, I have to get us out of here. He ended up spraining his ankle playing basketball one day, and this is when my daughter was two months old. I took him to the hospital. I and I called a ride and I we went straight to the airport. I left everything behind and we left Texas with our lives. And I got right back here to my family who have since helped me restore my whole life back.
P: I’m so glad to hear it. Thank God that you kind of found yourself and got out of there.
S: Absolutely. And I didn’t care about all of that. We I mean I had my mask on. She was covered up. We were fine. We got back home and I’m just realizing I had lost 30 pounds. I’m in this frail state. My skin is discolored. You know but the baby’s perfect. And, and I got I got myself back. I got myself back together. So if someone were to ask me if I would do it all over again, I can’t answer that. But I will say it was quite the journey.
Great disappointments as you first mentioned about my expectations of pregnancy being very high. But one thing that I actually will say that I enjoyed about my pregnancy was that it gave me a sense of I noticed this gonna sound weird but almost like individualism. For a while I felt really powerful knowing I’m doing something that a lot of people on this earth can’t really do all the time. I’m carrying life.
P: Yeah,
S: and I feel a little bit immortal. Like for a second here. Like I feel really special to be like doing this on this earth right now. And if I if I am to become pregnant again in the future, I would I would definitely hold that that fact near to me that it’s a gift on its own by itself. And even if I was to walk through it alone, I think I would almost embrace that the next time along live next time around because it would be at least I would be free to do it my way.
P: Right? Right. Yeah. Although the first time you know nothing, right. So
S: Oh yeah.
P: It’s very hard. It’s very hard to navigate it that way. One thing you mentioned when we talked before is that one thing is you’re writing a memoir, so I’d like to hear about that. It sounds like it deals with pregnancy and a bunch of other issues. Do you want to tell us a little bit about that?
S: Yeah, so my memoir is called Hustle and it is about my life as a daughter of a mother who did whatever it took to raise me and my two sisters, and it is also about my father who had been incarcerated for over 11 years. And being a product of, of strength and also a product of abandonment, and also a product of my environment, which wasn’t the best but I’m aligning the things that I’ve come from, with the things that I am now through a lens of being a mother now to my own child, and just kind of putting the pieces the pieces together.
And part of my story talks about sex work talks about how I had a promiscuous past, it talks about how I learned how to do things that are unmoral you know, invaluable, you know, people will look down on me for some of the things that I’ve done to survive, but how it’s almost like, carved out this sense of self as at the same time and it’s almost put me in a bracket with with men. You know, I tell people all the time my mom was my dad and my mom at the same time. Never in my life did I want to be a single parent because I used to feel sorry for my mom having to to be both people. And now I’m here with the same assignment. And it’s terrifying and unfair. But I’m aware that stories change so
P: also it’s not exactly the same circumstance, right? So
S: no, it’s not. And the first thing my mother said, when I got back, she grabbed me by my face and she goes, You are not me. That’s what she said to me
P: true. And helpful.
S: Yes, very helpful. Love her.
P: So the other thing you wrote about is generational trauma stories of your mother and grandmother.
S: Yeah, my grandmother had a stillbirth. And my grandmother also dated, you know, narcissistic men. Same with my mother dating having a history of dating narcissistic men. And these are, you know, my grandmother, you know, dating in the 60s and the 70s. These are men who had came back from the war and men who just didn’t have it all together. Same with my mom. You know, she’s been kind of a magnet towards men who are battling with addictions. My mother battled with an addiction crack addiction for years. So I’m kind of talking about how I’ve done everything to kind of skirt this.
I went off to school I went to New York, I did all these amazing things, but it’s almost like I’m still linked to a lot of this as well. I bumped into a narcissist, man, I fallen in love with men who are addicts and I’ve never understood how these people are finding me in the midst of my success. You know, I always thought success puts you on a pedestal away from all of that. But no, they find you like come in. They they snagged you up somehow. So a lot of a lot of these essays in my memoir are linking to to that and in trying to gain some sense of understanding how to, to break those. Those patterns, those norms.
P: Some of those things live in you in ways that you can’t really get your hands around. I could totally see why you would imagine. As long as I’m successful, I’ll know step away from those things. But if you don’t fully have control over the ways that those important messages were transmitted to you, it’s really hard to be aware kind of in the right way.
S: Yes.
P: Oh, that seems like a learning process.
S: Absolutely. And it’s been a hard one, but I’ve enjoyed the journey.
P: That’s awesome. So looking back now, is there any advice you would have given to younger Starr when she started this journey?
S: Yeah, I would tell her, keep going. And don’t be afraid of whatever that the end result looks like. Don’t try to control it. Don’t try to dictate it. Don’t try to follow a script. Just go to follow one foot after another. Just keep going.
P: Yeah, that’s good advice and how old you is your daughter now.
S: My daughter my warrior baby is 14 months healthy, stronger than an ox. Still Still scaring me every day. But just like I said, like yes, she’s She’s scary. Yeah, she’s, she packs a lot of strength. And yeah, she’s She packs a lot of strength.
P: She is her mother’s daughter.
S: Oh, I would hope so. But
P: what were her tricks and 14 months? ,
S: right now she loves books. She’s getting to that stage where she’s just handing me things to let let me know what she wants. And usually they’re all books that she’ll just go Huh, huh? So it’s really cute. I’m loving that she’s also really sneaky. And sneaky in a way that is making me wonder, Is she trying to outsmart me or is she just being a baby? She’s learned how to get some of the childproof locks off of the cabinets and I’m like, how did she figure out how to do that? And once she realizes it, she’ll kind of look back at me and smile, and it’s like, she’s not even afraid. She got caught. It’s almost like she wants me to know. I’m doing this. You know, I did it. Mom, you know, just so you know.
P: That is so cute. And it’s a little bit like you’re gonna have to try harder mom. Like, I got this. This is nothing.
S: Yes, but at the same time, she’s becoming more loving. She wants to be held more. And it’s interesting because as a baby, I held her all the time, but she also was learning how to sleep by herself and things like that. And now she just hates it. She just, she loves to be on me. She loves to be near me. She likes to copy me she likes to read when I read. She likes to sit on my lap at the computer when I’m on the computer. She wants to sit with me. When I watch TV. So I’m really getting into the bonding now and it’s this is beautiful. I love it. I hope it lasts forever, but I know probably well.
P: Yeah, that sounds adorable. I would I would appreciate every second because that sounds like a very cute place to be if we want to find your writing. Can you direct us where to look?
S: Yes, I have a website starrdavis.com. Most links to my writing is there. Also my social media outlets. I post a lot of my work that gets published online on Twitter. So my Twitter is@_starrdavis. And of course my book will be forthcoming soon. So we’re in the in the fun stages of doing some pitching so we’ll see what happens throughout this year but I’m excited to be healed enough to write it because I needed some time. You know, of course with the incarcerated Dad, it’s been some years kind of mending the holes in our relationship and even with my mom, we’ve had to go through our own thing too, but I’m in a healed place with the both of them and I’m really glad that we’re in a better place and it’s a real healing for everybody, not just me to be talking about some hard things.
P: yes, this is a good place to be in as a parent.
S: Yes, absolutely.
P: Awesome. Well, thank you so much for sharing your story. I totally appreciate it.
S: Thank you for offering to hear it I’m excited and I hope it can be used for whoever might need to hear it. for themselves.
P: For many of us, pregnancy is much harder physically than we anticipated, especially with the first pregnancy, where the transformation of your body in ways you can’t control feels like one surprise after another…but Starr’s experience really highlights the fact that while all of these physical changes are going on–life is still very much happening–in all different kinds of contexts–through jobs and moves, and with partners who aren’t necessarily making any of it easier. It is an enormous undertaking to grow another person…and the process tests each and every one of us…that little girl that we could hear on and off in the background will learn, if she doesn’t know already, how lucky she is to have such a strong mother…thanks again to Starr for sharing her story. I will put the links to starr’s website and her twitter handle in the show notes, which you can find at warstoriesfromthewomb.com….thanks for listening. If you liked today’s episode, feel free to like and subscribe.
We’ll be back soon with another story of overcoming
Episode 42: Anything But Restful, A Bedrest Story: Aileen
Episode 42 SN: Anything But Restful, a Bedrest Story: Aileen
If there’s one thing I can relate to directly, it’s the story of a high risk pregnancy. But the pregnancy that my guest encountered was something I have no first hand knowledge of: she ran into an issue that threatened a premature birth, which caused her doctor to prescribe bedrest–for five months, 150 days for anyone who is counting–of being horizontal, she was more or less plucked out of normal circulation and we talk about what that was like and how she managed it, in the midst of also juggling a move from brooklyn to a farm, which in part means a move from an apartment to a 100 year old farmhouse, and everything that comes with this dramatic change…
You can find more about Aileen and her work at her website www.aileenweintraub.com
Here is the amazon link to Knocked Down: A High Risk Memoir
And here is the link for signed pre-orders
Fibroids
https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/uterine-fibroids/symptoms-causes/syc-20354288https://www.uclahealth.org/fibroids/what-are-fibroids
https://my.clevelandclinic.org/health/diseases/9130-uterine-fibroids
size of the uterus
Bedrest article by Dr. Mazaki-Tovi (et al.)
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0198949
Audio Transcript
Paulette: Hi Welcome to War Stories from the Womb. I’m your host Paulette Kamenecka. I’m an economist and a writer, and the mother of two girls. If there’s one thing I can relate to directly, it’s the story of a high risk pregnancy. But the pregnancy that my guest encountered was something I have no first hand knowledge of: she ran into an issue that threatened a premature birth, which caused her doctor to prescribe bedrest–for five months, 150 days for anyone who is counting–of being horizontal, she was more or less plucked out of normal circulation and we talk about what that was like and how she managed it, in the midst of also juggling a move from brooklyn to a farm, which in part means a move from an apartment to a 100 year old farmhouse, and everything that comes with this dramatic change…
I also included a conversation with a researcher and professor of obstetrics and gynecology from Tel Aviv who, with colleagues, recently published some groundbreaking research on bedrest. He is incredibly interesting, and I regret that the recording quality from our conversation is not perfect–but I think you’ll want to hear what he has to say…
So let’s get to this inspiring story.
P: Hi, thanks so much for coming on the show. Can you introduce yourself and tell us where you’re from?
Aileen: Hi, my name is Aileen Weintraub and I’m from Brooklyn, New York. And I moved to the Hudson Valley about 20 years ago. And that’s where my story really starts.
P: Alieen. Thanks so much for coming on the show and I’m excited to hear the story because I read your book Knocked Down, which was awesome. I’m assuming not all the bits made it into the book. So I’m excited to hear the details straight from you. Do you have any siblings?
A: Yes, I have one older brother, who is still in Brooklyn with my family. And we have a great relationship. We didn’t always have a great relationship and actually, my experience with my pregnancy really brought us together.
P: Wow, that’s nice.
A: Yeah.
P: And did having a brother or growing up in your family create a desire you to have a family of your own?
A: Yes, absolutely. So I grew up in a conservative Jewish community. And the emphasis was on family. And I was really born and bred to have a big family. I was taught how to be a good wife, a good mother from a very young age and I wanted a lot of children. And so when I became pregnant and ended up on bedrest and had all these complications, it kind of changed my plans in a big way. And so that was really hard to, to take in and live with.
P: Okay, so that’s totally interesting. So when you were thinking of a big family, were you thinking of like six kids?
A: Exactly. That was the number I had in my head that I was gonna have six kids. I was gonna be like Mary Poppins is going to be amazing. They were all going to just surround me. And you know, the birds would sing when I got up in the morning and it was it was a total fantasy, and obviously it didn’t work out that way. And and that was a lot to come to terms with
P: like you are I have imagined a big family. Not I wasn’t so ambitious for six. Although when I see families like that, I’m like,lucky. So does that mean that you walked into pregnancy, imagining it would be easy?
A: Yes. So by the time I became pregnant, most of my friends already were on their second, third kid. And I just assumed I would get pregnant and have an easy pregnancy and just start popping out kids and, you know, maybe work maybe work part time and that would just be my role for a long time. That’s really what I wanted. And it was shocking to me. And so it was a big disappointment when I was faced with all these complications and realized that that wasn’t going to happen for me.
P: Okay, so let’s walk into this. Was it easy to get pregnant?
A: Yes, it was very easy to get pregnant. And there’s actually a very funny story, which I I talk about a little in my book. It was New Year’s Eve, and my husband had the flu. And he was he was so sick, but you know, we were still newlyweds. So we didn’t even wait we got married. And really, this is the plan. Let’s start right away. And so it’s new year’s eve and I was ovulating. And I was like, Listen, this is it. And, you know, and it was super easy on me. And I got pregnant immediately. And so
P: wow.
A: I thought that was a great omen. And the first few months were typical. I had morning sickness, but nothing I couldn’t deal with. Yeah, that was a little surprising for my husband, you know, he would cook dinner and I would I would be like you’re cooking fish you can’t cook fish in this house. And so that was a learning curve for him. But other than a little things that you you would expect everything was completely fine. And then one day we were walking in New York City we were just strolling It was a beautiful spring day. And suddenly, I felt this pain in my lower belly.
P: wait, how far along are we here?
A: Right so I was four months along. Okay. And we were planning to go to a baby event where they showcase different baby products and, and things like that interview information, pamphlets. And that was the thing I was so into, like all these baby books and I was prepared. I was going in prepared and I was reading everything, researching all the safest products and it was all happening that day. Suddenly I have this pain and I don’t know what to do. So we decided to pack it up and go home. I call the doctor and of course you don’t get to speak to your doctor. You speak to the nurse if you’re lucky. And she kind of dismissed my symptoms. And said your probably find everybody experiences like cramping and things like that. And she wasn’t really taking me seriously but I was also kind of relieved because that’s what I wanted to hear.
P: Totally. Yeah.
A: And it was getting worse and worse and I happen to have had my appointment the next evening anyway, just my regular exam. And I’m assuming that everything’s going to be fine. You know, even though this pain is persisting. As we go into the exam, it’s later in the day. It’s almost evening I think I might have been the last appointment and you can see the doctor looked carried and rushed and wanted to get out of there.
P: Yeah, that’s a bad sign.
A: And I wanted to get out of there too. We had plans to go to this cute little restaurant on the water in Kingston. And all of a sudden, the energy in the room changes she’s saying something, I can’t even process what she’s saying. But I look at my husband’s face and I see the look on his face, and then it all kind of comes together. And I’m being rushed into an emergency sonogram and it turns out that I’ve three huge fibroids in my uterus
P: Okay, so here’s a quick primer on fibroids. If you aren’t familiar with them, uterine fibroids are non cancerous growths of the uterus, thing grow inside the walls or inside the main cavity or outside of yours. Many women have fibroids and don’t know about them because they might not cause any symptoms at all. Researchers from UCLA estimate that 70 to 80% of women will have them in their lifetime and are more likely in your 30s and 40s. And right around menopause. It can be a variety of sizes. To give a sense of dimension here and to maintain consistency with a fruit theme that will emerge later in the episode. At the end of the first trimester, the uterus is the size of a grapefruit and it grows to the size of about a watermelon by the third trimester. fibroids can be the size of a pea or a much bigger mass. So size and placement and the number you have may determine if you run into trouble with them or not. And for the magic question, we have no answer. We don’t know what causes their development
A: and one is pressing on my cervix, causing early effacement. And she basically says to me, you’ll be lucky if your baby makes it to 24 weeks.
P: Good Lord. Oh my God,
A: it was so shocking, because just the day before everything was fine, and we were horrified
P: so let me ask you something ex post. So my fibroids or anything like that, but I also got very direct and not positive news from the OBS. And in retrospect, I understand it as they’re managing my expectations. How do you feel about that kind of response to now do you still think it’s not appropriate or what do you think of it? Now?
A: that’s a really good question, because I think it’s important for doctors to manage expectations. But I also think there’s a way to do it, where you’re not putting so much fear and anxiety into the person you’re talking to.
P: Yeah,
A: who’s already feeling so emotional. So raw and so vulnerable. And I think there’s a balance
P: Yeah, you’re right. The other thing that helped me to process that kind of thing is to remember that my doctor is a person and just like me get’s nervous about stuff and Dr. Raven freaking out and unfortunately she entirely sure that with you.
A: Right, exactly. And you can tell she was already tired and but that’s not an excuse when you’re delivering bad news. You have to have some sense of professionalism and, and she was she was professional and she was a good doctor. I don’t want to say that she wasn’t doing a good job. It was just very overwhelming in that moment. And I’m not one who needs things sugarcoat it, I left information. I understand the doctors job is to be a doctor give me the best care the doctors job isn’t to be a therapist. But the healthcare community I feel like is especially when it comes to women’s health and maternal health has a long way to go. The way they speak to women, the way they speak about women’s bodies and the terms they use. So for example, the word incompetent cervix,
P: yeah,
A: is so offensive to begin with
P: agreed.
A: What it does is it puts shame on the woman before they even understand what’s going on. Yeah, my left feeling I had caused this. Yeah. You’re basically saying there is a part of you that is incompetent.
P: Yeah, yeah. Yeah.
A: And they’re these terms are outdated. There’s terms like hustle uterus, geriatric pregnancy. All these terms should be retired and we need to change the dialogue on that.
P: I totally agree. I’m maybe in the shownotes or at the end of the episode, we’ll try to rebrand incompetent cervix. You and I right here. Make it happen. Well, that’s a terrifying prognosis. And then she send you home or what do you do with that?
A: so the next day she had sent me to a specialist. I can see and the specialist basically confirmed what she had said but made it sound a little less tragic. So he did the job of saying okay, you know, we’ve got this going to go on bed rest for five months. And we’ll see how it goes. And hearing that bedrest for five months to just expect a woman to check out of life. Almost half a year to become basically an incubator is a big thing to expect. And it shouldn’t be something that is done lightly and at the time, almost a million women a year were put on bed rest. We are lucky to
P: When I started to research the issue of bedrest, I came upon an article published in 2018 published by a group of doctors out of the Sackler School of Medicine in Tel Aviv and they used a brilliant technique to really get at the heart of what bedrest does and doesn’t do and we are lucky enough to talk to one of the paper’s authors: have Dr. Misaki Toby on the show a Professor of Obstetrics and Gynecology, and a researcher who has investigated the efficacy of bedrest for a variety of outcomes. Dr. Mazaki Toby, thanks so much for coming on.
Dr. Mazaki Tovi: Thank you very much for the time. Thank you for having me.
P: the Idea for bedrest came up in the 1830s I can’t remember what that said you know what, what instigated that idea,
Dr. MT: the root of the to do and the the initiative for this bill was actually came from orthopedic issues. We’ll come to think about it. It’s it’s it’s a logic if you broke a leg, somebody that you will not have you’ll have a bedrest and will not put a stress on your broken leg. And then obviously, it was extended to other disciplines in medicine. And another thing that I must say that actually may facilitate the use of bedrest in obstetrics is the fact that 100% of the population is women. So, yes, I must say that well, my my feeling is that if you have to prescribe that was for women and to men and that can be a manifestation of prejudice against women because you said okay, usually, you know, the other spouse in the provider. and the women you know, they should be at home to begin with, so if you’ve discovered bedrest then you didn’t have given harm too much. So my feeling is that said that we’re dealing with women with actually made the dependences so to speak of this treatment to set rates a little bit easier.
P: That’s a whole lot of outdated there. That’s a whole lot.
Dr. MT: Absolutely.
A: and now finally, I’m starting to read a few articles and journals here and there about how doctors are prescribing it a little less, but it’s still very prevalent. And I think we don’t take into account not only the physical aspects of what it means to be on bedrest. The mental load that it’s putting on a person who has to lay there for five months and give up their autonomy. Their finances have to shift their career and that’s another place that the healthcare community can step up and provide resources. I’m not an expert, so I would never ever advise somebody not to listen to their doctor, but I would advise them to do some research and really think about advocating for themselves and making sure that they understand what’s expected and what’s not. And why.
P: and I think what we should be doing is pressing the research community. I mean, the doctor I spoke with yesterday said, part of the reason we do that is because we just don’t know and it’s such a vulnerable period. We want to be as cautious as we can. But there’s all kinds of measurable consequences of bedrest, and we don’t want to works also the way you say it, to say to a woman, okay, now you’re going to leave your job or whatever you’re doing and your family down for five months is crazy.
A: exactly they’re you’re not taking into account that goes along with invest. It’s kind of like the stock app. Oh, we don’t know. What’s wrong with you. We don’t know how to fix it. Yep. All we can offer. And more research really needs to be done and more money needs to be put into research on bed resting women.
P: Consistent with what Aileen is saying, we do need more research on bedrest, and although Dr. Mazaki Tovi’s study focused on preterm labor, and not on the specific issue that brought Aileen to bedrest, he has a lot to teach us.. Dr. Mazaki-Tovi, can you actually define bedrest? I’ve talked to a couple of obese about it. And maybe doctors mean different things when they say bedrest.
Absolutely and this is one of the difficult this therapeutic measures is exactly what do you mean by by bed rest. For some it means only that doing the work. Others is just decrease, you know the household it is for others is just practically to be a bit weird. And so there is a lot of confusion about it. And actually this so called therapeutic visual is ill defined. So the poor woman don’t exactly know what they have to do.
P: Yeah, I’m assuming that there are multiple reasons for bed rest. Why doctors prescribe bed rest?
Dr. MT: Yes, actually. The so called bed was has numerous indication it looks different than it was to prevent discourage twins. Or triplets. Also had an abortion, placenta previa. Sure, it seems that bedrest for many, many physicians and healthcare providers will seem like a silver bullet like medical therapeutic measure,that can prevent all complications indication of pregnancy and the tourists is actually the other way around.
P: So why don’t you tell us a little bit about your study on bed rest and what makes it so unique and so important in the literature on bed rest?
Dr. MT: I will say that the implicit argument bedrest is that you won’t increase your level of activity, then you will harm your pregnancy and you will harm your baby. Nothing can be further from truth. I meet a lot of high risk pregnant women, and I noticed that almost all of them had a self belief guilt, about doing too much physical activity. And this is because of this activity that nothing has happened to him with preterm labor or bleeding will discourage and so on and so forth. And that encouraged us to conduct a study in which we try to quantify the level of activity so until now, activity was not objectively quantified, that means if a physician prescribed to you a bedrest then you know exactly what does it mean and actually there is no way we can follow up and see whether or not you are indeed in bed rest.
So what we decided to do is to try to objectively quantify it and we did it by pedometer, a special device that can count the number of steps that you do a day. And we give this device to pregnant women with extremely high risk for preterm labor and we ask them to wear it for at least one week, including one weekend. It wasn’t them actually use it for two weeks or more. And one important thing that I have to do to remind you that didn’t have access to the data and also dependents women have access to the data. So we are completely blinded. How many steps each and every woman took during the study. And what we found was actually amazing, but what’s surprising I must say, found that more steps you’ve taken the the lesser risk for preterm labor. So it’s counterintuitive.
P: Yeah,
Dr. MT: so don’t do that we’re bedridden, and it takes to actually deliver earlier. So not only is not helpful can be dangerous. So we found out that if you do approximately like 4000 steps a day, that’s fine, to be no harm.
P: One thing that’s so interesting about your study is when you said you’re objectively quantifying activity, what I understand that to mean is that other studies are basically asking women to self report how much did you walk around but then I’m guessing that happens with like a survey to say a lot a little not much. Which is a super hard thing to keep track of right it’s it’s not even a
DrMT: that was the initiative. For the study, we try to quantify. We thought about the load how we how can you quantify physical activity, because as you mentioned correctly, until the study, they will only questionnaire that the dependent living had to to fill in, usually days and weeks and months. After the pregnancy and you know there is a recall bias, you don’t think that you remember what you did when you didn’t do is obviously some activities like swimming, so on were less unreported. So we decided to have a very, very objective way to measure the activity in the book actually uniqueness of the study.
P: That’s amazing. That was such a good idea. The other thing that makes you think when when I read your paper was, Oh, we don’t really understand what causes preterm labor. So it’s weird to think if you lay down it won’t happen.
Dr. MT: Absolutely. You’re absolutely correct. You know, if you if you ask the leading individual that investigate preterm labor understand that preterm labor would actually syndrome. So, you can have preterm labor because you have problems with the service and you can you may have become able to cause a problem with the uterus or with the placenta. Because you’re having to triplets. It’s all because you’re having an infection. And the idea that one solution will solve all these problems scientifically is absolutely ridiculous.
A: I Think there’s a scene in my book where I actually Google bedrest and research and there are no studies at that time where there’s so few studies but so I started just researching like, stupid studies just to see what people are actually studying. Right. And so there’s a line in my book that says, Oh, well, we now know that spider man isn’t real because someone put time and money into researching, but these bed resting women who cares about them, they’re not as important and that’s really what needs to change.
P: Yeah, I mean, your story is a good one to spotlight many things that should absolutely be known or studied at this point that are not….but let’s focus on your particular story: so you’re told you have to go on bed rest and what what actually happens.
A: So it’s really interesting because now I live in the Hudson Valley and New to the Hudson Valley. I just recently moved from Brooklyn to my husband’s rickety old farmhouse that’s possibly haunted. In the middle of nowhere, and he has just bought a power equipment business, and actually the timing couldn’t have been worse. The day we got home from the specialist was the day he signed the papers of ownership.
P: Wow,
A: this and he had to go like he’s like he dropped me off. We ate lunch and he’s like, I have this business now. I gotta get the keys and, and that just plunged us into chaos. And we had all these plans that I worked at the business, I would be part of it. I was still doing freelancing. We were financially struggling just because we invested all our money but we had a plan and that plan just fell apart and I didn’t have a support system, my whole community was in Brooklyn. So that day, I’m alone in the house. And I’m about to get into bed and I’m like, Am I really going to do this and I pull back the sheets and I was like what let’s think about this for a minute and it was a really hard decision. Especially for someone who wasn’t used to staying put for so long.
P: Are you still in pain? Or how’s that going?
A: So I was in pain for a very long time and then it would kind of come and go for a while because your uterus ships. And so sometimes there’ll be a lot of pressure. Sometimes there will be less pressure, but I was always incredibly uncomfortable. And as I’m bed resting, my body is continuing to fail my muscles start to atrophy. I develop hip dysplasia. So even if I want to walk can’t walk my hips freeze up. I develop gestational diabetes, and I have to prick myself with a needle five times a day.
P: Oh, that’s so terrible.
A: Just one thing after another.
P: I brought a question about the physical toll of bedrest to Dr. MT. So one specific issue that Aileen dealt with was hip dysplasia. Can you kind of walk us through why that would be a consequence of bed rest?
Dr. MT: Well, absolutely. You know, when you are bedridden the I mean, you have to understand that that was prescribed by the physician. So as far as we were concerned, this is this is the a theraputic measurement like taking a pill or taking the short women will do missing dependency to be successful. And the will of the women to help the dependency successful is absolutely see the dramatic power. In fact I this is the most powerful thing I ever made. So they’re very devoted to dependency are committed to dependency and then we’ll do that and then we’ll come to bed with someone will just lie down all day that not integrate only, you know only only for photonic period. Yes and nothing more. That can be disastrous for the for the musculoskeletal system, it because it can cause dysplasia and also decrease the intensity of the bones and decrease the frequency of the muscle tone and all the thing can definitely happen from just lying in bed all day
A: And theres also a scene in in the book you know, we’re in bed and I’m not getting very many visitors I did have one or two people come and bring lunch or a scone and that was life saving one of my friends actually brought me the happy days DVD at the time and and it was the most beautiful gift like just hours and hours of Happy Days. And but other than that I was really alone. You know, my mother was still working at the time. She hadn’t retired yet, and she would come up from the city and she was my saving grace and her relationship just blossomed during that time and I learned to appreciate her and all she was doing and all she had done for me that I never really understood when she came up to visit and we would talk about so many things we would talk about marriage and how hard it was to be married and understand each other especially during difficult times. She cleans she would cook she was really my savior.
P: Yeah, parenting has taught me so much about my mom that makes me appreciate all these things I look at differently now.
A: Right? All of a sudden my mother was one of the smartest people in the world.
P: That’s awesome. Yeah. So beggars sounds unbelievably hard, especially in this context where you’re away from everyone and your husband’s gone and you’re just alone in the house with the ghosts all day, right? Is there any magic? How did you get through it?
A: How did I get through it? I get through it one day at a time and actually one of the things that helped me get through it was writing about it. You know, I’m a writer, and suddenly I couldn’t spend a lot of time writing. I couldn’t balance the laptop laying down. I was in too much pain. And so I began writing these little journals about my day and trying to find humor in my day. Even though things were so hard because I really feel like even when there’s so much trauma, if you can find a little joy or something a little ironic or little funny, really helps you get through and so I started writing these one or two paragraph journals, and I emailed them to my brother or my friend just as kind of a connection. And that was really when my book was born. Those were the seeds from my book and from those journals. Years later I went back and read them and each chapter was basically from a journal.
P: That’s very cool. I will say that the medical experience provides a lot of absurdity. So there’s it’s right there’s things that I think people in medicine experience daily which are new to civilians like us when we go in. I feel like there’s a there’s a pretty wide divide between those two things which can sometimes be entertaining unintentionally.
A: Absolutely. And I’ve had so many doctors because out my practice, had this rule that you had to see every doctor in the practice because you didn’t know who’s going to be on call. So you wanted to know them all. And each doctor would tell me something different.
P: Yeah.
A: And give me some different directives. And it was driving me bananas because I was able to do this. Well, this doctor said that and we’re saying this. And so I finally decided to say I need to have one doctor. And that’s how I started to advocate for myself along the way. So instead of just accepting the diagnosis, accepting everything, people were telling me I hit the brakes on that I began to empower myself. Okay, I am in control of my body and I’m going to have a say in how this goes what happens to my body and so I picked one doctor, who I felt was a really good surgeon who I had a good rapport with, and that definitely made things go a lot more smoothly.
P: Okay, good. Good. And Are they checking you every week? Or what’s the schedule like?
A: That was the only time I got to be released from my bed rest sentence was to go to the doctor so I didn’t even mind it so much. And I would go every two weeks, either to the specialist or to my doctor. There was always an appointment to go to. And you know, then there was the gestational diabetes appointment, which was in a lab where I had to stay for I think was three hours because I failed the first test and then they give you a second testing and drink this awful fluid and they take your blood every hour. I can’t remember exactly, but there was a lot of blood being drawn. And those were really the only times I left the house.
P: Yeah, so I can see how they became special.
A: It’s very sad as special..
P: as forms of escape.
P: The one saving grace before that was that my husband would come home for five minutes with a milkshake every day, and then I would get to see his beautiful face. He was so busy. And half the time he would come home and the phone would be propped up to his ear and he just kind of dropped it for me and he didn’t have any time at all. The lady used to know exactly what time he was going to be there and just have it on the counter. So you have to waste a single minute, but it was so important to me that milkshake. It was the connection I really needed during the day. And then when I got diabetes, it was really hard and I began to have to deal with prenatal depression, prenatal anxiety. That was a whole other experience I had no plan for
P: Yeah, that seems unbelievably hard.
P: As Aileen suggests, bedrest can be really mentally taxing, an issue that Dr. Mazaki Tovi addresses.
Aileen was slotted into bedrest because her cervix was opening prematurely. But I’m guessing that this only happens thanks to a complicated series of signalling, so she was saying that her doctors prescribed bedrest because they didn’t have a better way to manage those problems and it probably wouldn’t make the problem worse.
Dr. MT: Exactly. So actually, this is a very common misconception because Okay, so if you go to a physician or healthcare provider will describe bandwidth. The idea is that, okay, if it won’t help will hurt. Again, this is a this is a huge mistake, because bedrest is a tremendous toll from the woman It has physical toll, like dramatic emotional impact of talking about stress, and depression and feeling of of course, about all the economic importance, and all those things that are actually affecting them dramatically without providing help.. Tragedy of this treatment.
P: bedrest does seem like a sentence, right? I think people who don’t experience it and from the outside might say, Oh, it’s so nice. You can watch TV or do what you want. And that’s fine, probably for like two days. And then
A: and I think people understand that now much more with the pandemic.
P: yeah, totally.
A: I wrote this piece for the Washington Post about how bed rest prepared me for this pandemic. What I had to do every day is self care. And it was really just starting to appreciate small things that you don’t notice. So for example, I began to realize that there were these birds that would come every day at noon and circle the yard. They were the same birds every day and this was their territory. And I had never noticed that before. I began to appreciating the smell of the lilacs on the tree outside on my deck. You know, there was a tree right by my deck. So there were small things that I started to really notice. And so that was a little bit of a saving grace and growing experience for me.
P: yeah I can imagine coming from Brooklyn, moving to a rural area, and being on bedrest is a pretty dramatic slowdown. I’m assuming life in Brooklyn is much faster
A: than it was terrifying. So out of my comfort zone living in an old farmhouse to begin with, yeah, and then not to be able to leave that farmhouse. No to see people was so hard for me because in Brooklyn, you walk outside your door, and you see people and there’s a hustle and bustle
At one point by marriage really just starts to crumble under the strain. There’s such a financial strain. We’re trying to renovate the house for the baby. There’s the house has been renovated in probably almost 100 years
P: Oh Good Lord,
A: it was my husband’s family’s farm. There were so many ridiculous things that you can’t even imagine going on his house, and we were having a baby we needed to kind of get up to speed. At one point. Things got so bad. I had to leave. And I went back to Brooklyn and I stayed with my mom and just being in her apartment in Brooklyn and smelling the food from the neighbors and hearing the sirens and the traffic and the kids playing outside. It was so cathartic and my friends came to visit and we talked about things other than pregnancy and other than bedrest and that made me feel whole again.
P: Yeah. That’s, that’s true. Now that you mentioned that I can see how your world has shrunk to this. You know bed that you’re on. You don’t have reminders in that new house of kind of your life before pregnancy,
A: right. And the other thing is this house because it was a family farmhouse. There were so many memories in it that weren’t mine.
P: Yeah.
A: so the paintings on the wall, the furniture, none of that was ours. And it was really like being in a stranger’s house and we were trying to make it our own. And we knew it would take time, but we had a plan and then the plan kind of fell apart.
P: Yeah, yeah, it sounds like you’re relieved or bed rest at some point. How does that happen?
A: I wasn’t relieved of bed rest, at the very end I was given an hour a day to be right, who’s like parole like you get an hour a day to be out in the world. And now I’m nine months pregnant, and I can barely walk and now I’m afraid to go out. I’m depressed I have anxiety. I am petrified How did they expect me to just pick up my life and start over so then I was able to
P: wait so let’s talk about that a little bit what happens about appointment and because that does seem like they so don’t understand what your life is like on bedrest to say like, oh, we put you on pause, but now we’ll hit play.
A: Right You know, I was seeing a specialist and I was seeing my OBGYN. They didn’t always agree. The specialist said at some point, I’m not sure you need to be on bedrest. And my OBGYN was like let’s hold up on that you’re doing really well. So why mess with it now you’re almost at the finish line. And I kind of agreed with that. And I had so much fear that I was gonna mess it up. Yeah, do something and be responsible for something going wrong. So I was like, Well, you’re right. This is working.
P: What’s the way forward?
What do we do now? Now that we have a sense that but rest is not the answer. What what do you do?
Dr. MT: Well, it’s extremely hard because you know, discovering business is actually entrenched into the DNA of the medical system. It’s extremely, extremely hard to take it out. But I would start with just approaching the women is complication of pregnancy and let them know that they cannot hurt the pregnancy. They don’t. Any complication that happened in pregnancy is not because of the woman is not because they work too much or the rain, or the babies or the client service. It has nothing to do with the complication of pregnancy. First and foremost, and this is more important to be from educating the medical staff is to educate women and let them know that they are not guilty of anything, this is the most important thing. The other thing is to educate and change in the perception of the asker and that unfortunately will take at least a decade or so. More and more studies that we did are coming in hopefully that will change the indications in the in the widespread use of bedrest and the therapeutic measures, but unfortunately I must say that will take place a decade.
A: So I was like your right. away, we still inside my body. So that’s where my baby needs to stay right now. And so I’m going to keep doing what I’m doing. So my OBGYN said well, you can have an hour a day. Right? That helped with my mental health. A lot
P: And what WHAT WAS THAT based on? Why did they change their their mind? To some degree?
A: They didn’t really share that with me so much.
P: Oh, wow.
A: That’s the thing. Like it’s like you are a magician like one day. This is what I’m supposed to do one day, this is what I’m supposed to do. And there were no clear answers. But my feeling is that I had made it far enough along the same for me to start adding in more activity. I was past the danger zone
P: and how are you feeling now emotionally about that? Because I imagine some amount of pressure has lifted so that in this point if the baby is born from that day on, we think there’ll be okay.
A: In my book, you’ll see that it’s broken up by week. Each chapter is a different week. As I check off the weeks I feel safer that my baby will make it and survive and live and that’s my one and only goal on bedrest is to keep this baby alive. So I’m checking off weeks and I actually start watching morning show with produce Pete who talks about vegetables and he tells you what the week vegetable is and what’s in season. I’m like if I can only get to Apple season when my baby supposed to be born. And that’s what I was basing it on fruit and vegetable
P: that gives us a sense of state of mind. Okay, and then do you make it to 40 weeks or how do you how far do you make it
A: I do you make it to 40 weeks?
P: Wow.
A: And that was really shocking to me because all I can think was that moment when my doctor said you will be lucky if your baby makes it till 24 weeks and to make it to 40 Weeks was amazing. I went into the doctor’s office and all of a sudden they’re saying maybe late, like prepare for being late. And I’m like what are you talking about?
P: Oh, by the way, you have triplets we forgot to mention.
A: Exactly. I’m like so then I started to really question the whole medical community, like, how could I go from being on bedrest Because he thought I was gonna give birth any second to not giving birth for another three, three weeks.
P: So that is so now that we’ve had this conversation that puts in context for me that first scary phrase, and they should never give you a date. They may say like you may go too early because your cervix is a face to say 24 weeks now seems nuts because how would you know how would you know the you know magic?
A: And that’s what I learned is that doctors don’t always know as much as we think they know or want them to know. And that’s okay. They don’t always have the answers and there isn’t the research. I don’t put the blame on doctors at all for that. It’s just how that information is communicated.
P: I totally agree. And actually the way I picked doctors is if they say they don’t know something, I think you’re the doctor for me. I want to hear you. I want to hear you don’t know, right? I don’t I don’t expect you to know everything and I want us to be honest about the boundary.
A: Absolutely.
P: You want to feel totally different if that first doctor had said, I don’t know how this is gonna go. But your cervix is facing too much and we’re gonna have to like change up what we’re doing.
A: Right. Well, these are my concerns. Right? Right.
P: So I can’t believe you’re going to be late. Take us to the day that baby is born like how do you know today’s the day? Are you late? How does that all go?
A: This is actually very funny story. It’s four o’clock in the morning. I wake up and I’m wide open and I feel this kind of swirly feeling. And that’s the best I can explain it and it’s just like a feeling I’ve never had before I don’t have any pain. I just feel swirly. I can’t go back to sleep. I finally kind of doze off a little my husband gets up goes to work. And I spend the day watching movies and taking baths.
P: feeling swirly the whole time
A: the swirling starts to change into excruciating back pain. Wow. And goes now I’ve been on bed rest for five months. I’ve had so many aches and pains. There was one point in this whole experience where my fibroids start shrinking. The pain from that was so excruciating. I didn’t know how I was going to get through it. So I just assumed that this was just another pain that I had to work through. My doctor told me I was going to be late and I’m not feeling any contractions and so the whole day passes like this and they’re getting worse and worse these pains in my back. Finally my husband comes home later in the evening. And at one point I think the pain is so bad I end up on the floor.
P: Oh Wow,
A: I kind of have this idea that maybe I should check in with my Doula who I hired to advise me and she says to me, it sounds like you’re in pre labor. And so I take your word for it. And I’ve tried to pretend nothing’s happening, but I I just can’t get off the floor now. And my husband’s preoccupied. He’s on the phone. He’s doing all this work stuff. And my Doula happened to be at a party that day when I called her that evening and so I didn’t want to bother her again. And this is something women do right. Like they’re they could be having a medical emergency but they don’t want to upset anybody else, or help themselves by imposing on somebody. How do I say I’m going to call my doctor and the doctor was like, to come in and I was like, No, it’s kind of late, I don’t really want to…. And Doctor is insisting and I’m like, What is wrong with you? This is good. There’s no reason for me to come in and just giving you a heads up. So finally, the doctor says, Tell me the hospitals. Let’s just take a look.
So now everyone knows something that I have yet to discover for myself. And we’re trying to get out the door and I can’t get out the door because the pain is so bad. Every time we start to leave I have to get on the floor. And at one point the dog gets so upset with me. The dog is pawing at my face kind of woke me. Why is everyone acting so strange? I just have some back pain with my husband kind of herds me to the car, and he’s like you just gonna take the bag we packed and I’m like, don’t be ridiculous. We’ll be home in an hour. I didn’t just in case I finally get into the backseat. I can’t even get into the front seat. And laying down in the back of this car and we’re going over the Kingston Rhinecliff bridge and my husband says to me, Listen, I don’t want you to be upset, but I have something to tell you. And I’m like, what could you possibly have to say right now that would upset me.
And he says just listen to my thoughts on this. I think you might be in labor. I’ve been timing you and it seems like maybe you’re having some contractions. And then I think about it for a minute and I’m like, wow, this is the moment I’ve been waiting for. Since I was a four year old child in Brooklyn learning how to swaddle my Holly Hobbie doll. This is it. This is happening. So we get to the Birthing Center, which is absolutely beautiful. It’s attached to the hospital, but it’s like a little house with a beautiful porch. And by this time, I think I could let my Doula know that we’re heading over to the hospital and she meets me in the parking lot. And she’s like I want you to breathe and want me to take a deep grounding breath and I basically push her aside and say, lady, I don’t have time for this I gotta get to the hospital. So so that’s how it started. That was that was how I finally acknowledged that this was finally happening.
P: I remember asking people, What do contractions feel like? And every single person said, Oh, you’ll know and also back Labor’s not what you expect are not what I would expect. I wouldn’t know what to do with that either.
A: Absolutely. And no one told me anything about back labor but didn’t have a single traditional contraction. Yeah, it was it was hard. It was very painful. And they said that the reason that I was in Back labor was because of my fibroids. I don’t know if that was true. I didn’t really have time to research it in the moment but they said your this is because of your fibroids that you’re not having traditional contractions.
P: wow so when you get to the birthing center, are you imagining a vaginal delivery or where are we on the delivery
A: right? So did you happen and I obviously don’t want to give away the whole story for my book, but the doctors had gone back and forth about that quite a few times whether I was going to have a plan C section because of the fibroids, whether I could deliver vaginally and pretty much towards the end of my pregnancy. They switched it up and said you can deliver vaginally and I wasn’t at all prepared for that. Because I had been planning on a C section, okay. And so that’s what I was going for, and I was going for that for 36 hours.
P: Oh my God.
A: And so here I am in the hospital, 36 hours of labor, and I’ve been in bed for five months. And now I’m going to have a baby on a sleep deficit.
P: I was gonna say you must be like Looney Tunes at this point. Right? That’s
A: And it’s so ironic. I spent five months in bed and now I’m having this baby completely exhausted.
P: Yeah.
A: I will never catch up from this. And it took a long time to catch up.
P: before you encountered any trouble with your pregnancy. Had you imagined no waterbirth or angels with harps coming just from by your ears or like what was your picture of what delivery be like
A: I had planned to be in a hospital with a doula from the start. We hired the doula before there were any issues. We had checked out the birthing center. It was really a comfortable homey place attached to a hospital so it was the perfect ideal place to give birth and I did I did get to give birth there luckily.
P: Oh Good, good. And that was a success. I’m imagining.
A: Yes. So we’re in labor for 36 hours. They have a birthing tub. We’re trying everything. And most of this time up until 25 hours I’m doing this without any drugs. And I finally call it and say Listen, I need some relief. And so they gave me all sorts of different things at various points. And now we’re an hour maybe 34 and the doctor says you’re nine centimeters dilated. I just had some sort of cocktail. I don’t know if it’s an epidural and I don’t even know what they’re giving me at this point. But I can’t feel anything. And the doctor says I can kind of push that last meter for you. So you can start pushing but I don’t think you can. I think you’re exhausted and I think that your baby’s heart rate is climbing and we need to get this baby out now. I was like I can push. She’s like you can’t push. And I was like no no I can push and she was like, Man, I’m things and she was right there. I couldn’t feel a thing. There was no way I was pushing but in my mind, I felt like I could reel this baby out of my body.
P: Well you willed it in. Also, like are you appreciating the irony of like, we’re worried your cervix will pop open at any moment and now you’re like at nine and it’s not
A: and the baby will come out babies like and I think honestly I’m it’s been so much time and energy holding this baby in.
P: Yeah,
A: that in truth it was hard for me to let go and understand that it was okay to give birth and they will be in for a C section and everything went pretty smoothly from there and I had a beautiful baby boy
P: such a great ending. And how old is the baby now?
A: Well, let me start by saying that it took a very long time to process this story and to write it took even longer. My son is 15 now so
P: awesome. It does take a long time to process this is a good long runway now that you’ve had this time to process it. Is there anything you would have told young Aileen into this process that would help her
A: I try to think of it. What would I tell a woman on bedrest? Yeah and what I would say is the most important thing is to say this is your body and you need to advocate for yourself and make sure you are heard and do your own research and that no matter what happens You’re a strong woman and you will get through this because I didn’t know any of that at the time.
P: Yeah, yeah. There’s no test like this test right? It is like physical and emotional and in pressing in ways that nothing else is.
A: Right. And I think that what is important to understand is when you go on bed rest it’s not just laying down for five months and reading some book, Your whole life changes and that’s important to know and to be prepared for continued steps and also to acknowledge your emotions and feelings and know that they’re real and that you have a right to feel those things and that there are people you can talk to about it. And you should reach out for help. And I had felt so much shame that I had somehow caused this that embarrassed by my fibroids by my incompetent cervix. I didn’t know if I could talk to anybody about it. And I think that would have made a big difference if I felt more supported in that way.
P: It does sound like you’re toughing it out by yourself in in a space that you shouldn’t be alone. And it’s such good advice to tell other women that having more support around you can make a difference. It’s challenging to be pregnant and it’s hard to live in a body that’s not always compliant. All you can do is adjust when things don’t go as planned–and you made major adjustments to see this pregnancy through, and in the end your body cooperated with that… To honor the pledge i made at the beginning of our conversation, I am thinking about enthusiastic cervix instead of incompetent cervix, but we can we can work on that and your book is called knock down. Is there a subtitle?
A: Yes, it’s called knock down a high risk memoir and it is available for pre order now it is out on March 1 wherever books are sold for signed copies if someone would like to order from rough draft barn books is an amazing indie bookstore in Kingston, New York and the link is on their website. And they’re fantastic. Anyone is local to Kingston. I suggest you go visit them the bread the coffee they want most amazing books. It’s one of my favorite places.
P: I will put a link to that in the show notes and this sounds like the perfect book for many people but if you are on bed rest and wondering if you are alone in this might pick up knock down
A: I think this is a book for women who’ve had children for bed resting women and for Gen X women and any woman really who wants to hear a funny story about a very serious topic. And I think that this is something that most people can relate to. There are also aspects of growing up in a Jewish community growing up in Brooklyn dealing with trauma marriage, so there’s something for everybody in this book.
P: that sounds awesome So those when I read it and thought it was great, it’s really emotional, which I think is a hard thing to communicate as a writer and I think that like I will remember this book. This will stay with me because it I definitely felt it
A: thanks so much.
P: Thanks so much for sharing it. Thanks so much for coming on the show and good luck.
A: Thank you so much for having me this was a great conversation.
P: I want to again thank Dr. Mazaki Tovi for taking the time to come on the show and talk about his research. I think one important take away from his work is that if you are prescribed bedrest it’s a good idea to talk very specifically about what that means in your own case…and thanks also to Aileen for sharing her story and her book. I will put links in the show notes to the research on bedrest and to the bookstores that Aileen mentioned. I hope you enjoyed this episode. Feel free to subscribe to the show and share it with friends.
We’ll be back soon with another story of overcoming