Episode 34 : Learn to Love the Birth you Had: Katie
Episode 34 SN: Learn to Love the Birth you Had: Katie
We all come to pregnancy and birth with ideas about what these transformative events will be like. Some ideas come from our own family experience and some from broader cultural influences. But discussions around the more challenging details of these experiences rarely get articulated, leaving a space for our own imagination to conjure pretty much whatever it wants. And this expectation will be matched to the actual experience in real time, coloring how we step into parenthood. Like most of us, today’s guest had some surprises at birth, which were trickier to manage in part because they contradicted her closely held expectations around what birth would be…but with time and more experience, and the opportunity to have the birth she’d once dreamed about, she ultimately learned to appreciate each birth in it’s own right.
Site of umbilical cord insertion
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4055645/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5718132/
https://bmcpregnancychildbirth.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12884-021-03703-x
Weight distribution by gestational age
https://www.medigraphic.com/pdfs/medicreview/mrw-2015/mrw151f.pdf
Uterine massage after delivery
https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/158274262.pdf
APGAR
https://medlineplus.gov/ency/article/003402.htm
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.
We all come to pregnancy and birth with ideas about what these transformative events will be like. Some ideas come from our own family experience and some from broader cultural influences. But discussions around the more challenging details of these experiences rarely get articulated, leaving a space for our own imagination to conjure pretty much whatever it wants. And this expectation will be matched to the actual experience in real time, coloring how we step into parenthood. Like most of us, today’s guest had some surprises at birth, which were trickier to manage in part because they contradicted her closely held expectations around what birth would be…but with time and more experience, and the opportunity to have the birth she’d once dreamed about, she ultimately learned to appreciate each birth in it’s own right.
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?
Katie: Yeah, my name is Katie Tikkun, and I am from Salt Lake City, Utah.
P: Oh nice. So let’s talk a little about pregnancy, before you ever got pregnant, I’m assuming you had some idea of what it would be like what were you imagining,
K: I had a very unique experience I think growing up, because I’m the sixth of 10 children.
P: Wow.
K: Yes, and I was homeschooled so for my four younger brothers. I really saw a lot of, You know what my mom went through what postpartum was, was like, what having a new baby was like, and so me and my sister have talked about how a lot of our friends in terms of like having a new baby, are really blindsided like oh my goodness and overwhelmed like, I didn’t know it would be like this right it’s just constant demanding I can’t do anything but care for this baby, but we knew that, you know, we were like, Okay, I’m gonna do nothing but care for a baby for at least six months, you know,
P: yeah,
K: and we had that expectation going in. But even with that, I would say, My mom was definitely not a sharer in personal things around like what pregnancy and delivery was really like. And so I think I, I knew that I wanted to go into it, like, and be triumphant, you know, if that makes sense. I’m like, I got this I can conquer this. And so in terms of postpartum I think I had a better idea of what that experience would be like but the personal struggles and such. I knew there would be some, but I didn’t know what to expect exactly, you know,
P: God that is a real window into what it looks like and I think most people, most people don’t have the nitty gritty on what pregnancy will feel like and deliveries feels like a shrouded secret, and, on the one hand I feel like people often say like well we don’t want to scare anyone, but it is you know like 90% of people get pregnant again at some point of their life so I feel like it’s not really serving us to hide that part of the story.
K: Yeah.
P: So did you get pregnant easily the first time.
K: Yeah, it wasn’t much of a struggle. It took longer than I wanted it to, but there wasn’t, it was only about four or five months until it wasn’t as hard it’s time as I know some people have,
P: I imagined the first time you have unprotected sex, you’d be pregnant. Did you have that feeling as well,
K: especially because I’d had, like, my, my sister and my mom talked about how easily they got pregnant, I was kind of expecting that and so yes there was definitely like some disappointment and I was like Okay, is it, you know, I’m checking those pregnancy I’m like I’m one day late. I’m gonna take a pregnancy test you know and like, so it was definitely like a lot of anticipation and disappointment every month that way, I think personally I didn’t just trust my body very much with that process like, it’s just not time yet.
P: Good, good. And how was, how was that first pregnancy.
K: Pretty good. I mean, it’s funny, I, I felt guilty, a lot for my pregnancy, and, and it’s honestly something I have had to work through in lots of areas of my life is just like, I felt like I had it really easy, because I didn’t really get morning sick, I didn’t get really huge really fast. It seemed really really easy. And so from that perspective I was like, Well, I’m just kind of going about life, you know mostly normal and, you know, I was really tired and I had to pee a lot and you know all those sorts of things, I didn’t follow a lot of cliches I had heard and so I was like, Well, I guess it’s not that big a deal for me you know it’s funny how, even if you don’t meet the bad cliches, sometimes that’s still a struggle for you right, you know,
P: yeah I think so normal. There’s no honor in the struggle, it just is and I think like, you know, if you had that part’s easy. That is awesome because being a parent is really challenging and so take your wins. Right, yes. So I’m glad that went well and then did you do want to take us to delivery you happened during the nine months or
K: when we did our ultrasound, we found out that my cord was attached a little differently, so usually the umbilical cord will connect directly into the placenta and instead it kind of went into the wall of the uterus and kind of climbed up towards the placenta, which happens sometimes. And depending on you know different factors can make you a little bit higher risk.
P: So the umbilical cord attaches the fetus to the placenta and this attachment is really important because the placenta is the source of nutrition and oxygen, a cord attached to the middle of the placenta is considered, quote unquote, normal, it looks like scientists don’t know exactly why cord attachment, might not be in the center, but risk factors include age of the mother, if she’s over 35 smoking status, and if this is a first pregnancy, among other reasons. The site in which the umbilical cord attaches to the placenta can be really important for fetal growth and development. In particular, it can affect birth weight, it might generate a low birth weight, it can affect the timing of delivery, it might lead to preterm birth, and it can affect the mode of delivery, so it’s associated with emergency C sections, because there are a bunch of different factors that might affect the site of cord insertion, It might cause problems for the developing fetus or it might not, and whether it’s a problem or not, maybe related to the underlying cause of the off center placement.
K: Thankfully I wasn’t super high risk, but it was something we needed to watch and just kind of look at and and that sort of thing so that was a little, you know, one of those moments where it’s like okay, everyone’s seen this isn’t that big of a deal, but they’re still bringing it up and all those questions and wondering and everything, and then my water broke when I was 37 and a half weeks. And
P: was it it wasn’t like a Hollywood moment or you were just,
K: no, I was like, I almost thought that I was like, Okay, we want the gruesome details here. Yeah, I almost thought that it was like, maybe like peeing myself a little bit I was like, because it was just this tiny tiny little bit but it like wasn’t stopping, and I went almost all day and I was like I don’t even know what’s going on with me right now. And I was like how to pad and I was like, This is really weird. Again, like when you think water breaking you think, oh it was this big guy like gush thing and it was not it was more like a little leak. And so
P: I feel like I’ve heard that before and that oftentimes people aren’t sure, and when they call the hospital, the hospital people say, are you sure you’re not just seeing her, and you know no one really knows so yes there, yeah.
K:So for my birth plan with this. I’ve gone through midwife and birth center. probably not surprising knowing I grew up homeschooled and all the stuff I was like, wanting to go, all natural and like, keep it super, you know, meditative and I had really got this image in my mind of just this really like, zen, relaxing, like spiritual experience type birth and delivery, and, and I had this image that I have what I wanted. And when I talked to my midwife and like I think something’s going on and she’s like yeah your water definitely broke, and she’s like, I can’t deliver outside of a hospital when you’re five weeks early. So I was like okay and that’s, you know, that’s when that image just started to crumble.
P: Two quick questions. One is, did you attend your sister’s birth. No. So had you been to anybody’s birth before
K: I had never seen an actual delivery before I had watched, I think it was called the business of being born that was like my only experience to like action because they actually showed films of what deliveries were like, that was really my only exposure.
P: Okay, so this idea has just come from, you know your environment or your upbringing or you’re just, that’s what that’s where that came from. Okay, so that’s disappointing that the midwife says it can’t be done here in the birthing center.
K; Yeah,
P: can she go with you to the hospital.
K: She did, she couldn’t deliver in the hospital, but she did, you know, go with me to answer questions and kind of get that support took on a bit more of a doula role, but we ended up in the hospital, I hadn’t had the…
P: the strep B test
K: Yes, the strep B And so, because I have results on that yet. I had to be on antibiotics, the whole time so here I was, I want no drugs I want no needles I want no no and here I am like attached to an IV drip of antibiotics and like that this big monitor thing strapped to my belly for the contractions and I didn’t even go into labor right away like my water had broken and they, they really tried to get me to take some Pitocin. And, and to, to really induce that labor and that like high risk, infection, I was grateful that I have really decided that I wanted. I knew that my grandma and my mom had had terrible reactions to Pitocin. And so I was like, we’re not doing that we’re going to try pressure points and we’re going to try getting me moving around we’re going to give it at least an hour or two in the hospital of trying, before we go that route, and I’m really glad I did because my labor started up in you know, five minutes or so, and and we’re able to get things going, and ended up being, I think it was all told, maybe 15 hours of labor, honestly that was probably the thing that surprised me the most was like the sleep deprivation, on my brain, especially because it was like evening when we started.
P: Yeah
K: and so I was, you know pretty much awake for two and a half days almost, the mental fog, You know I, especially again back to that vision that I had, like, I you know I want to be present and like meditating and like all this stuff and I was like, I’m exhausted and I’m brain dead and I’m struggling to like really function here, it just wasn’t that that was one aspect I just wasn’t anticipating
P: that kind of makes sense if you imagine, I bet your sleep was not ideal in the third trimester because you’re big and uncomfortable and yeah. So then to go into this marathon thing that’s both emotional and physical for that many hours… laboring that long is is hard work.
K: Yeah, It’s a lot.
P: Yeah, that makes sense so was the delivery was just attended by doctors and it was, although it was not what you anticipated it was relatively smooth for that context.
K: Yeah, it was relatively smooth, even though my son was five weeks early, he seemed okay in the end…I was laying on the table, pushing, and I had a nurse midwife in the hospital, who was delivering. And my other two words I was able to not do lying on my back on a table and oh my goodness, if you can possibly avoid it, do not deliver on your back, it is the worst thing ever you want gravity on your side on this one, it was hard and uncomfortable and if I were to name the overall emotion of that experience to, you know the pushing of the delivery would be frustration, honestly, it was mostly just like, let’s just do this already and why is this so hard and unroot, I’m ready. We’re all ready, let’s just get this done and like almost that impatience, right.
P:Yeah.
K:On top of all the exhaustion and everything else.
P:And then we’re guessing since you’re not excited about medication that there’s no epidural.
K: No, I was, I mean, that’s like a whole other story. But yeah, I didn’t I knew I didn’t want to do an epidural,
P: wait, what’s what’s the story of the epidural.
K: Honestly, I think it’s, it’s a lot just kind of my upbringing of being pressing natural paths more than conventional doctors, and my mom’s experiences of she’d had some epidurals and some not. And she’s like, it’s not worth the big needle was always her story it was like it’s not worth that big freakin needle it’s freaky and. And so, Me going so I was like, Yeah, that sounds like kind of awful, and personally I believe that that I wanted to be there for my baby, because they were going through this experience, and I wanted to go through this experience with them I didn’t want to opt out of it because the. I know this can be a little controversial but personally I was just like, I want to just to own this and have this experience and not feel given to fear around this experience.
P: That’s amazing. I remember being terrified halfway through my pregnancy. How on earth is this baby coming out, I don’t understand the physics. I understand that it has happened and that’s the only reason I’m here but now that I’m in, it seems like it’s not gonna work. So I have to confess. My only knowledge about homeschooling is that those are the kids that will win the National Spelling Bee. So when you say oh, you know the homeschooling thing like so. It’s why it sounds like it’s not only do they win the National Spelling Bee but it comes with all these other things. So the other things are like, you don’t pursue conventional medicine or
K: Well, I would say that if, if a person chooses to homeschool, then they kind of like sidestep convention and culture to a degree. And once you’ve taken that one first step outside the box, it’s really easy to explore all sorts of other outside the box ideas. So, I think, you know, homeschoolers can be all across the board in terms of what they do or don’t do, but it’s common for them to do other fringe things like fringe medicine or fringe, you know beliefs or fringe, you know, whatever it is, just, just because once you make that leap, it’s really easy to continue. Okay,
P: that’s a good description. Okay, yeah. So, once this baby is born, because he’s early do they put them on your chest or you don’t have that.
K: I got him on my chest for maybe three seconds. I got to, you know, rub his head and go oh my goodness I have a baby, and then he was gone for. I don’t even know how long felt like at least an hour. They made me sit up like they cleaned everything up and they made me sit up and I ate, and like I showered and then they put me in a wheelchair and I finally got it felt like forever before I got to go see him and when I did go see him. He had cords and needles and things and like I was definitely not the experience I wanted to have as grateful as I am for you know that health care and making sure we were both safe. It was just really hard to let go of that
P: That sounds hard was he kind of big enough.
K: He was big enough, he was five pounds
P: Oh…
K: four ounces.
P: Yeah that’s a great size.
K: He was big enough, and today, and really he was fine, they kept him in NICU for like seven hours for observation to be safe, and we spent the night at the hospital and then we got to go home the next day.
P: That’s like a drive by, that’s fantastic for that early that’s great. Wow.
K: Yeah,
P: I mean, how did you feel after the birth, do you feel okay
K: I recovered pretty quickly. I was so angry, they kind of pushed on my stomach to get blood clots and I clean things out, didn’t know that was going to happen was extremely uncomfortable. I didn’t do that with my other two births, and it was fine and great.
P: currently postpartum hemorrhage is the number one cause of maternal mortality and delivery. To prevent this doctors want to be more proactive in the third stage of lever after the placenta is delivered. They can either administer oxytocin to induce contractions of the uterus and prevent blood loss, or they can perform uterine massage. It looks like the jury’s still out on whether the massage method is effective, but it also looks like one of the risk factors for postpartum hemorrhage is marginal insertion of a umbilical cord, so maybe that played a role.
K: but For the most part my bleeding was was pretty minimal. I healed up pretty quick, they did stitch me a little. but even as the, the nurse midwife was doing, she’s like, this isn’t a huge deal but I’m just going to stick to just in case. Pretty simple, pretty easy. I think for the most part, my recovery on that. My recovery with all of my births have been pretty quick and easy.
P: good
K: Again, charitably, but I feel like my, my body seems to just kind of get pregnancy, pretty well, my pregnancies aren’t too bad. My, my deliveries are pretty comfortable. Well, as much as deliveries, my postpartum is pretty quick, but
P: so do you go home triumphant, or how are you feeling when you get home.
K: Honestly when I get home. It’s definitely mixed, cuz again lost that experience, but I’ve got my baby and we’re good. And honestly, like, I think, I wanted to move into like this, this magical, I’m a mother, which means I’m kind of saintly and like everything’s great and you know a little bit of those kind of like everything’s gonna be rainbows and butterflies and I don’t know, there’s definitely some of that going on of idealizing. And then when it’s like I’m changing diapers and feeding a baby and trying to go about the rest of my life and it was, it was interesting for me because, again, as I said before, I’ve heard lots of moms say how overwhelmed and surprised they were about how much effort, a baby took. I almost had the opposite experience I think because growing up in such a large family, with so many kids there’s so much going on, it was like almost boring like yes I’ve got this baby to take care of. But then, it almost felt like I wanted to hurry up and have like a whole family, if that makes sense.
P: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah I mean 10 Kids sounds like a lot of great chaos in the best way and so it’s I’m sure with one you’re like this is it.
K: Yes, yes, I’ve told other people before it’s like it really took me three kids to feel like I even like really had a family like the family dynamic that I was at least kind of used to, you know, chaos to count as a family.
P: Yeah, yeah, that’s true. I hope your husband’s from a big family too.
K: Yeah, yeah, there’s, there’s six in his family.
P: Okay good, so he’s on a similar plane of this Yes. Good. Yes, so how long till we get pregnant again.
K: So it was about two and a half years. I mean, my kids are just over two and a half years apart so would have been about two years. That time, I got a positive pregnancy test. The next day my period started so
P: that’s a bummer
K:. Yeah. Medically speaking, they don’t consider that a miscarriage because you aren’t really like far enough along, but that was definitely when I started to miss trust my body and be like, Okay, what just happened. Yeah and so I, I started to go see some naturopaths and nutritionists and be like, let’s double check everything make sure everything’s going well because my mom again she had 10 children, but she had more miscarriages than she had children.
P: Oh wow.
K: Yes. And so, I didn’t want that to happen
P: in your mom’s case do they ever figure out what the issue was,
K: yeah, she had her hormonal imbalances that I believe she had not enough estrogen or too much estrogen, I’m not sure I think it’s not enough estrogen, and so she was able to kind of supplement and do better. But, again, I think it was a lot just like healthcare at that time versus healthcare at this time, I won’t go forever.
P: But at least the story in your head may have been one where, if this is an issue I can I can fix it, like my mother.
K: Yeah, yeah, and that’s, that’s definitely my default mindset is like, Okay, how do I fix like jumping in and like, let’s fix this problem there’s problem, okay let’s just throw everything at it, we can get it fixed, but so when I did finally get pregnant, I was like, Okay, Now I’ve got to finally have this dream, and the pregnancy on that one was really good. Honestly, I it’s probably the pregnancy I remember the least, was just pretty good, pretty direct for me,
P: are you by like it’s a little more challenging because now you have a baby or we’re so far below the threshold of chaos that that doesn’t register
K: it’s still pretty low, below the threshold for me in terms of chaos. But the exhaustion factor was tricky. Thankfully, my oldest be very self entertaining at times. And so a lot of times I see what’s you know too, and so I’d like kind of lock us in his bedroom and I would lay down on the floor and I would sleep while he played, and it would just kind of like it worked okay. but yeah it was it was pretty good. And so, I, the other birth center because we moved and was working with another midwife and was super excited, and I was like okay I’ve done this before. I got this now…40 weeks, he was like right on schedule and wake up three or four in the morning, and like contractions and like okay I should sleep everyone tells you you should like sleep while you can right because it’s like so really mild contractions. I should go back to sleep. And I totally can’t go back to sleep. I’m like you know all excited like my brains are running and so I’m like okay, I’m kind of restless, so I get up out of bed and I go onto our couch and like tried to kind of sleep and rest on our couch, and my husband comes out, he’s like, what’s going on, and, like, it’s just a little contraction, it’s okay, you just go back to sleep, it’s like, well how I can’t sleep so he, he’s like I’ll just get a head start on my workday because he, he works from home and so he gets out his computer and you know it’s like 4am and we’re just both sitting there going, nothing’s really happening, we’re here waiting. And I ended up being in labor. All that day, and pretty much all night. I think he was delivered at like 2am the next day. So again, the exhaustion factor. And I was really getting really frustrated like why is this taking so long
P: wait so when did you go into the birthing center and did your water break.
K: Yeah, so, so I went in and got checked around like 10 or 11am I think some sometime later in the morning, and I’m like, well nothing, you know, nothing’s really happening and with the birth center that says they’re not a hospital, they don’t let you just like check in and just stay for forever, they’re like, so we went in they checked how I was dilated and I was only like only like three centimeters in like I was barely anything and I was like, oh why, and like you know, go home, just keep going and it’ll be great. Let us know when things pick up.
And so I think I went in and got checked like twice that day, and things were just taking forever, and then we finally went and stayed around like 1130 or midnight, one thing, you know, the labor really started picking up contractions were getting more regular I delivered in the tub at this big huge Jacuzzi tub. The Birth Center is great. I deliver the baby comes up they lay the baby on my chest. And I’m like, You know, we did it. And I’m holding my baby and it took me like five or 10 seconds and I’m like, shouldn’t he be breathing, and the midwife just scoops that baby off my chest again and takes him to a breathing table she starts pumping his air and starts working with him and starts, and everything, and I’m sitting there.It almost feels petty to say like, frustrated that it happened again but really it was just like a heartbroken that this happened again. And that I didn’t have my baby. I just went through all this, just to hold my baby.
P: Yeah, yeah
K: and My poor husband had been holding me, and the afterbirth starts and I’m in this tub and the whole tub goes red, and my husband freaks out because I’m like I like collapse down in the tub goes red and he’s like she’s bleeding out he totally had like this moment of oh no what just happened. But I was fine. It was just normal after birth and I had that baby on that table for Several minutes, called an ambulance, were only a few minutes from the hospital, to call the ambulance she
P: did she get him breathing or the baby he
K: she eventually got him breathing. Okay, I forget what it’s called but there’s like that, number of points that they do on the avatar yeah yeah the app car. Um, and he was like a three year low. Yeah, when he was. And it took about, almost 10 minutes to get him up to, like, seven.
P: so just to get some context here the app offers a test given to newborns to see how they whether they transition from fetus to newborn. It was developed in 1952 by Dr. Virginia car, and the test includes five measurements, heart rate, respiratory effort, muscle tone, reflex irritability and color, and each measurement is given a value from zero to two, so the total score ranges from zero to 10 with higher scores, indicating a better physical condition. A low Apgar score is commonly defined as less than four and that’s associated with an increased risk of neonatal death among infants born after 37 weeks.
K; And so she eventually got him there. She got him breathing. One of the other midwives mentioned that, after the fact when we were talking about she’s like, I think it was a huge blessing that you had. Becky that midwife. She has a gift for helping babies breath.
P: oh wow
K: And yeah and so I just felt like it was just really special. And so he was having trouble breathing. He had fluid in his lungs, the ambulance showed up, it wasn’t super dramatic because he was breathing at that point he was okay, but the ambulance showed up. They checked him out, they put him in. They drove off with my baby. And
P: that seems a little traumatic.
K: It was so hard, so hard. And so my midwife continued to care for me. We cleaned up. My husband again this was like three in the morning, thankfully, my, my two year old is was with my sister and, and I was good there. Thankfully, but we slept for maybe three or four hours at the birth center, and then drove over to the hospital. And again, I mean this is after like, you know, being awake for more than 24 hours and like a couple hours of rest and hobbling into NICU and doctors like he’ll be fine. He’s doing pretty good. I just need to make sure we keep him on oxygen and he ended up being under bilirubin lights for a little while, he ended up being in NICU for a week, mostly because they wanted to keep him on antibiotics to prevent infection in the lungs because he had the fluid in his lungs and they didn’t want it to get infected.
P: Do they say why that happened or how common it is or.
K: They said it’s fairly common for the most part, the NICU nurses were really great. First, Nurse though. She was very much the stereotype for me of like the old warhorse type, nurse, and she insisted I couldn’t touch him, especially, again, being tired, upset and angry and sad and all of this, I’m like, why can’t I touch him and she’s like well it startles them and it disrupts them makes it hard for them like I couldn’t just hold my baby and I was so upset. And the worst part about that week of NICU was that I was not checked into the hospital, and I had to leave every night. Yeah. Every night I had to go home without my baby.
P: Yeah,
K: that first night. I mean home sitting around the table. Me and my husband and my two year old, just sitting there going, where’s my baby.
P: Yeah,
K: you know, it was just so, so hollow and especially something that I had to really, really process and work through for years. After this delivery this says my hardest one, was that I believe very strongly importance of that can be starting that connection with your baby right off you know that that bond that is created through that birth process, and it feels like that was interrupted really made me feel like the whole relationship with my baby was shattered. And as much as I could, like, cognitively say, Oh that’s fine you know we’ve got all these other opportunities and we can fix this and it’s all, you know, this isn’t, you know unfixable, but emotionally, to me it just felt so unfixable like it was just damaged that would that would never be undone. And it wasn’t helps when going to breastfeed because I had breast fed my first and everything and so I told the hospital, please don’t bottle feed until we’ve established breastfeeding that’s like, pretty standard thing to say, and they’ll ask you about come in the next day again after leaving that night and I, I’d have to pump to make sure my milk was coming in, while he was, wasn’t there. So I was waking up to pump so I still basically didn’t sleep well that first week still, but I came in the next day, and the nurse who was on duty all night. Like, I think he was hungry all night he cried all night, because I think he was hungry or they had put in a feeding tube, and she’s like We fed him but I don’t think he was full enough. And so He just cried all night hungry, and that broke my heart so bad that my poor baby was sitting there hungry. And I was like, I just made me so much more angry with the whole situation and just all like, it was one of the hardest weeks of my entire life. It was so hard.
P: It sounds super hard and it is again in part it is like you have this image in your head of what its gonna look like and you got, you know 95% of it, or whatever 90% of it. So to have it kind of wrenched away at the last minute, as a surprise in a way that you didn’t expect in a rate I mean, I’m sure in your wildest dreams you weren’t. He made it 40 weeks right you’re probably gonna go home with this baby, so many things were overturned and last minute. And because my guess is they thought your baby was healthy, the whole way through, you’re not thinking of this care that he’s getting in the NICU as critical or whatever it was,
K: especially because I kept getting feedback from all the nurses, oh he’s, he, you know, it took him a day to be above his birth weight, you know like he’s just eating and he’s growing and he’s doing all these things, they kept talking about how perfect and wonderful he was and he was just fine, but they’re like, oh, but we need to make sure he keeps on the antibiotics for a whole week, it was just like, it just felt so arbitrary and so frustrating and so like, Yes, I’m grateful that you’re keeping us all healthy seriously like. It was so hard. It was so hard and frustrating.
P: Oh that sounds really hard, I’m sorry.
K: Thank you, it was, it was a lot for me. And the last day they, they’re like, You know what, let’s just skip his last dose of antibiotics, and he can, he can go home now. So we finally like, he didn’t even fit in newborn clothes anymore. So, now, especially after my premature firstborn who was in like preemie clothes for like a month. This he was just tiny. And it was just funny, like, Oh, he’s just so big and chunky and he was, he was great, and finally got home and I’m almost convinced now that you should just pump. If you don’t have to pump because that was the best milk supply I’ve ever had when I was pumping regularly and consistently that first week, gave me great milk supply.
P: and How was the two year old like his new brother.
K: Oh they, they’re fine, they’re happy, but it was like, the longer it went the rougher things got, you know, and like
P: I think it takes, I think it takes the first one a minute to figure out the new baby staying,
K: yes. But it wasn’t too bad. No, it never got too awful as I remember. So, eight months later, my period started up again I was like, that’s, that’s, that was a really weird period, they always say you know when your period starts again it can be a little different and shorter or longer or whatever. I was like, Well, that was weird. And another month goes by, I’m like, I’m like a week or two late oh well and when it starts again it can be really irregular I’m like wrong. And so I took a pregnancy test well okay I’m pregnant. Again, with the nine month old. Yeah, it was, it was great I mean we’re planning on having more kids and stuff so it was fine. It was just like, oh well this was not exactly the timeline we had in mind, and especially after my previous birth, it was very like, okay, I can do this again, it actually turned out that that like little period. Definitely not a period it was implantation bleeding. And so, that hadn’t happened, I don’t know how long I would have gone pregnant without realizing I was pregnant because I was not looking for it. Thankfully we got an early ultrasound that clued us into that and, and let me know that I was further along than I was.
P: That’s a gentle slide into pregnancy.
K: Yes, yes. So that was interesting being pregnant with a nine month and honestly I think. I think the hardest thing about that was that my eight month old ceased being the baby.
P: yeah
K: Oh, you know, like and I kind of feel bad for that poor middle child. I was surprised how just being pregnant prevented me from really like engaging with him is like my youngest and my infant and like it was just different after that, like knowing that I had another one on the way,
P: you can be pregnant and breastfeed, that’s fine.
K: I hear it’s different for everybody. I lasted to maybe like four months along. Five months along.
P: that seems like alot.
K: It is a lot for your body to try and do both at the same time, although I hear there are women who tandem feed their newborns and their toddlers and I’m like, Yeah, that was an interesting journey bring especially like bringing my two and a half, almost three year old, and my eight month old, to all my appointments and everything and like juggling all that and my big belly and I had braces at that point, As an adult, I’m small and petite and look pretty young and I was like I totally look like a teen mom, pregnant and tiny baby and braces and anyways a little funny, but felt like a spectacle anywhere I went my pregnancies are pretty straightforward, you know, tiredness, And that was probably the biggest thing for me actually is. I didn’t get huge necessarily you know by comparatively, but my ligaments. One thing people didn’t really me into was like, how the ligaments that hold up your uterus and your pregnant belly, get strained and stressed and below to enter like, oh my goodness they hurt so bad trying to move around again hauling children and stuff was like it was a lot of strain on those, and, and then I know that that one I had, you know, some magnesium deficiencies so I got this bad Charley horses and just like tension and stuff and sleeping was awful, especially when it’s like you’re waking up with a nursing baby when you’re pregnant,
P: that seems physically confusing.
K: yes, that’s good way of putting it. Yeah, yeah, the pregnancy was again pretty straightforward. We get to it. And I’m 40 weeks and baby really happens and I’m 41 weeks and nothing really happened.
I have a few contractions, I’m getting contractions like almost every day, I was like okay. He ended up being 10 days late, so I was like,
P: Wow
K:yeah, I’m like nine days late and I’m like, really I get serious about, like, what’s going on here. And personally, in hindsight I really think I was like, emotionally crossing my legs, and just being like, I’m not ready for this, I don’t want to do this again, I can’t do this again. And I think there was, there was sort of a sort of subconscious procrastination there that anxiety of this is going to happen again and I’ve got this big idea you know this this big vision, again that this is the thing that I want that’s going to make everything perfect and wonderful and my relationships with my kids will be perfect because this birth was perfect because you know like all of these things just tied to this outcome of, I just want this and I need this and I have to have this and I’m never going to get it. Again, I finally go into labor, it’s another full day, just trying to get things in place, the baby lined up and get things moving. And I’ll tell you I was, I was having like an anxiety issue. The whole time I was just so on the verge of tears of just going. I’m just scared that this isn’t gonna work out again, I’m just scared of not that something terrible life threatening would happen but something like, I’m going to be hurt and disappointed and sad again.
P: Okay, before you get to this birth, let me ask the question, your kids are kind of close together so it’s our and, Obviously, child wrangling at that age is an all encompassing endeavor and so it’s hard to have much time for reflection, because you’re literally feeding someone or changing someone or whatever it while you’re pregnant with your third if you have any moment where you say okay the first two didn’t go as I planned but we’re happy. The kids are great, we’re connected, it sounds like not that much of that is going on yet.
K: No, no, that’s, that’s a really good point is that no I didn’t. I was so much, as you said, like, in the thick of all of it.
P: Yeah,
K: I didn’t have that, that moment to just step back and be like, You know what, It’s all good. I think part because part of me. Me wanted to just look at that of the events of those, you know that hard week in NICU and you know those hard deliveries and those moments and look at those and go, Yeah, those were terrible and I didn’t like that. Rather than looking at that, you know, The where we are now and it’s okay it’s all okay and we’re fine and we’re good and we’re fixing it and we’re moving on, and I think honestly, I think, part of me wasn’t moving on. I think part, I think there was that opportunity for me to have moved on and I could have moved on and and have done more and I think part of me was still stuck on those in that resentment and frustration and anger of. I didn’t get what I wanted. It’s especially hard. And like, when I say it that way is like, I didn’t get what I wanted sounds a little like spoiled and entitled and whatever, but it’s like, it’s hard to recognize that when it’s like it was a good thing to want good
P: I’m going to put could have moved on in quotes because, yes, yes, you could have moved on, if you weren’t doing 150,000 things, right. You were sitting around eating bonbons you were, yes. The thing is I can see that you’re, I can see that it’s so upsetting and I’m thinking, put the kids rightly or wrongly, but now take us there it’s 10 days late, but now you’re laboring like so it’s understandable that you’re anxious about this.
K: Yeah, and and I’m taking, I’m taking a long time the same way I have before and like things aren’t lined up great and, and I’m going okay, go to the birth center. And I’m laboring, it’s like, midnight or early you know later or something, and I’m in the shower, delivering, they have this huge shower in the birth center, and my husband, bless him, he’s been helping me this whole time, super dedicated and trying to do pressure points and relieve tension and stuff, most of my Labor’s, he’s had to do counter pressure on my back and my hips, basically holding me together so the baby can come out without breaking, what it feels like. And so he’s holding me and he’s got me in this funky position because it’s what I where I need them to be and he’s trying to hold me up while I’m kind of squatting and delivering this baby and the baby’s heart rate started to drop and we’d been at this for a while and I’ve been pushing for, I don’t even I don’t know how long but it was longer than the midwife wanted me to be pushing, and the baby’s heart rate was dropping and the baby’s heart rate was dropping with each contraction, and my midwife was like okay, Katie. Next, push you are delivering this baby. This baby is coming out. You go and, and the baby comes out, and I have my baby, and she puts him up on my chest, I get to hold my baby. He stays. And I get to hold my baby and he’s there, and my husband is there, and we have just this moment of here we are, we did it. And it was, it was great.
But was it worth the anger and frustration and disappointment and grief of missing out on the previous times. I wasn’t too sure. And it was really interesting for me to sit there and go, Okay, this just happened, like like we did it, we succeeded. And it’s not. I’m still the same person, and we’re still in real life, and I still have to go home and feed this baby and change this baby and, and it was a little, it was almost a letdown, like it was great, but it was almost letdown, because I had for so many years and so many experiences and so many times sat there going. Oh, I couldn’t get this perfect experience. Oh, but I didn’t get this perfect experience, and as hard as those other experiences were. I really think that, like there was this realization for me of I put myself through a little more than I needed to, you know, I’ve just Yes I did, like, like you said, it’s like, but what about everything else being fine the babies are beautiful. The babies are there and, and you’re, you’re moving on with life and it was kind of that, that made me realize just like I wasn’t letting myself move on.
I’m so grateful that I got to finally have the birth experience that I had envisioned and wanted, but it was a little bit of a wake up call for me to go, that’s not the most important thing, it’s great and it’s wonderful. It’s not the most important thing, and that there’s so much else that matters, you know, you get another, hopefully, 18 years you know with these kids, and you get so many more opportunities, and so much more potential to create amazing experiences with them. And as significant as birth is and can be. Don’t let it ruin everything else. Don’t let it set you up in a pattern of being frustrated and disappointed.
P: Yeah, it’s hard to compete with an ideal Right,
K: exactly.
P: So they’re all make sense but also what a great lesson in for parenting right it’s, you’re gonna need that forever, so I feel like it was hard earned, but but useful.
K: Yeah, definitely. Because that’s what I really learned like with my middle son who’s in NICU and I felt like I’d abandoned him and it was like so hard and I lost on so much on the connection with them, because of that experience. It was a hard wake up call for me when I realized I needed to still believe I could have any relationship I wanted with him, I don’t have to let that keep me from having any kind of special amazing, wonderful relationship I want to have with him.
P: Yeah, I’m gonna take this opportunity to edit your self talk and say, abandoned him in the NICU, what are you they’re kicking you out every day, you don’t really have a choice. There’s no, I know how terrible it is to leave a kid in the NICU but that is the bargain you make right you will feel alive and I will get out of your way. Yeah, it’s the whole thing is hard right it’s, it’s harder than it looks.
K: Yeah. Amen.
P: So how old are the kids now.
K: My oldest is now seven, and my middle son is four, and my youngest is three.
P: Oh lovely God that’s fun.
K: Yeah, it’s a lot to have three little boys.
P; I bet, I bet, are they all doing the same thing because the three year old wants to do it the seven year old does and,
K: yeah, pretty much, I mean, it’s usually like the the three year old decides to sneak into the raisins and when everybody’s eating the raisins are all over the whole kitchen before I can even blink. But yeah,
P: good ,that sounds, that sounds very fun and I’m guessing that you have already kind of shared this but if there’s something you could go tell your younger self, what would you tell her
K: something like, except that she didn’t love it. And just, just learn to love what you have and don’t be so set on what you want, that it breaks you.
P: Yeah, that’s great advice. That’s great advice because this whole process is so filled with surprises.
K: Yeah, no matter what right,
P: I’m wondering if your mom or your sister. Your sister has kids, right. And were they at all helpful, they have a similar idea in their head of like this sort of riches look like or.
K: I would say that they definitely inspired me in terms of one team, You know natural births and things, but that there’s also, you know, the nuance of relationship that that makes it, is this something we talk about is this something we don’t talk about like, I think there are definitely holes there that we could have talked better about it and more thoroughly and more openly than we did.
P: Yeah, yeah, I don’t think I had any of those conversations with my mom..I’m one of four, and so it was fairly surprising and I have friends who had kids before me, but it still was not, you know, it wasn’t very detailed so you kind of go in there with whatever’s in your own head.
K: Yep.
P: Well your yours is an amazing story because, you know, there’s so much learning, and now it sounds like you’re at least approaching the level of chaos you’re hoping for.
K: Yeah, we’re getting there. I’m actually expecting my fourth so
P: Oh nice…Congratulations. When you do me good that’s a good time to give birth right, even in Utah, is it. is it spring there in May.
K: Sometimes a little bit.
P: Okay, fingers crossed.
K: Yeah, thanks.
P: Well good luck and thank you so much for coming on the show and sharing your story.
K: Thank you so much. I hope that helps a lot of moms out there.
P: Thanks so much to Katie for sharing her story. Her three very different births provide a really clear example of the power of expectation to shape experience. I am hopeful that as more people share their experiences of pregnancy and birth, we all walk toward this transformative event as if it were a trip, a trip to a place we’ve never been–something that’s exciting and will change our lives, something that will likely have ups and downs (because no trip that long is entirely smooth and without surprises), and importantly, it will be an experience full of episodes that we can’t predict and that may well teach us about ourselves
Thanks for listening. Feel free to like and subscribe, or better yet, leave us a review–which helps other people find the show
We’ll be back soon with another inspiring story
Episode 33: The Hard Limits of Control Over your Own Body: Melissa’s story
Episode 33 SN: The Hard Limits of Control Over your Own Body: Melissa’s story
Today’s guest walked into pregnancy with reservations. She’d done a fair amount of research, as is her way, and understood that pregnancy, birth and postpartum were potentially a more difficult undertaking than movie depictions suggested. Despite her avid preparation, she was, like most of us, taken by surprise. She had to manage a hemorrhage during a miscarriage, and a birth experience that both tested her physical limits and her emotional resources, as her newborn required some experimental medical help. A few years out from these experiences, she can look back and appreciate all that she went through and what she learned from the experience, and revel in the joy of her energetic toddler.
LH
https://medlineplus.gov/lab-tests/luteinizing-hormone-lh-levels-test/
https://proovtest.com/blogs/blog/will-an-ovulation-test-be-positive-if-i-m-pregnant
Hypothermia for brain injury in neonates
https://www.nature.com/articles/pr2016198.pdf?origin=ppub
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. Today’s guest walked into pregnancy with reservations. She’d done a fair amount of research, as is her way and understood that pregnancy, birth and postpartum were potentially a more difficult undertaking than movie depictions suggested. Despite her avid preparation, she was like most of us, taken by surprise, she had to manage a hemorrhage during a miscarriage and a birth experience that both tested her physical limits and her emotional resources as her newborn requires an experimental medical help. A few years out from these experiences, she can look back and appreciate all that she went through and what she learned from this experience and revel in the joy of her energetic toddler. After a conversation, I went back into the interview to include some medical details and to get the insights of a fantastic OB and a pediatric critical care doctor.
Let’s get to this inspiring story.
Hi, thanks so much for coming on the show, can you tell us your name and where you’re from.
Melissa: Yeah, my name is Melissa Tamara, I’m from Salt Lake City, Utah, in the United States.
P: Cool. Let’s talk pregnancy. How many kids do you have.
M: Yeah, so I have one daughter who’s biological and then I have a nine year old stepson.
P: Okay. It sounds like you have child experience with your stepson, so we’ll get to that. But, before you got pregnant with your daughter. What did you think pregnancy be like,
M: That’s funny because I literally thought it was gonna be hell. And it was.
P: wow… you’re like the first one to nail it, so why did you think it’d be hell.
M: me as a person, I’m very much like a data driven individual. I will do research at friggin nauseum, to try to understand what I’m getting myself into, before I get there, just because I really like to make as many educated decisions in my life as I can. kids was one of those funny things in my life where I was a bit ambiguous about it, like, kind of, If I could get pregnant okay cool if I couldn’t get pregnant. Okay cool, like, it just didn’t have a huge tie to it, but I married a Latino man. And he obviously has a child already, and so he was very like, I want more children and I kind of was just like, alright, well if you feel passionately about it then. I’m just kind of along for the ride, but I have friends who’ve had children before I did. Some of them loved pregnancy, some of them hated pregnancy and so I feel like I got a good amount of stories beforehand, related to like what pregnancy is like it did a lot of research when, you know, we were getting closer to a place where it’s like, okay, we should start thinking about having kids, and a lot of research on that. Lots of horror stories literally everywhere, and so I felt like I had a decent understanding as much as one can before
P: Yeah,
M: get pregnant, right. I don’t know that I knew the extent of how bad Mine would be, but I knew that it wasn’t going to be fly but
P: okay so was it easy to get pregnant
M: I was, I’ve been on birth control probably since I was like 14 or 15. So and, to be completely fair I’ll be 27 this year so I am very young, and got pregnant, pretty young as, like, the world standards go. So, I was on birth control, starting in about 15 ish and was on birth control, up through when my husband and I decided that we were ready to start having children. It took me probably four months to regulate and kind of come off of birth control, and then I got pregnant. Oh, not a huge amount of time as the first pregnancy goes, but I was 11 weeks along. When I lost that pregnancy.
P: Oh wow.
M: Yeah So, total for us to conceive my daughter. It took about a year from when I got off birth control when we started actively trying to update to when I got pregnant with my now daughter. So, you know, not a terribly long time but you know there were obviously some hiccups along the way.
P: The miscariage must have been a surprise
M: Yeah, yeah. It’s one of those weird things where, I should also mention, I think bodybuilding before, which, you know, no in hindsight, like when you have a miscarriage, there, there’s no way unless the baby’s like really far along, and they can do an autopsy, they, they can’t really tell you like what happened if you have a miscarriage in the first trimester, so they just kind of attributed it to like, oh, there’s just some genetic thing that happened in the body was like nope, not working, so I was a bodybuilder is very low in weight going into trying to get pregnant, which I tend to think may have caused some problems. It also is possible I guess it could have been, birth control or it could have been any number of things right.
P: so I’ve heard this before, in cases where people are ultra athletes like Melissa, that they sometimes have trouble getting pregnant or staying pregnant, so I took this question to an OB.
Hi Dr Matityahu and thanks so much for coming on the show.
Dr. Matityahu: Thanks for having me. I love being on your show.
P: What’s the relationship between body fat and menstrual cycle and pregnancy, how does that all work.
Dr. Matityahu: So, there’s a fair amount of evidence out there about really low body weight and body fat and how it can impact our ability to regulate well need to be ovulating well to pregnant to conceive, and the fat in our body converts to hormones. So the, our body fat has a lot of impact in the whole cycle of creating estrogen in allowing us to ovulate.
M: So, got pregnant, was really excited about it and immediately gained, like, a whole bunch of weight, which now obviously looking back, I’m like, Oh yeah, it’s because my body was like, we don’t have enough weight to like sustain this pregnancy, right. So I gained a bunch of weight, I wasn’t nauseous at all which I came as a surprise to me there were a lot of things that I’m like oh this isn’t as bad as, as I thought it would be, which who knows that could have been a sign right that things weren’t right, but had about, I think it was maybe, I think I was just before 11 weeks. When I started spotting and right before that I had this weird feeling of like Something’s just not something’s not right. Like I’m almost 12 weeks at this point like things just don’t, I don’t feel pregnant, it was that thing of like, I just don’t feel like I’m pregnant, which in your first trimester, obviously like that can happen, right, like there are times where anxiety kicks in and you’re like I’m not pregnant anymore and you freak out. But for me, I had this just this gut feeling of like something’s not right.
It was a Monday morning, and I woke up, I started spotting, and I remember being hysterical. I remember being in the kitchen with my husband, bawling just hysterically because I knew, I knew I was having a miscarriage, it was just like the combination of things, I knew what to look for as far as like this was different than implantation bleeding which I did have in the very beginning stages. This was different, and so I told him, like we need to go to the emergency room because I was freaking out. He, he’s like, no, no, it’s fine. I’m sure everything’s fine. You need to calm down, go to work, Call the OB GYN when you know they open at 9. So I went to work, of course I’m a blubbering mess, I can’t get any work done for the first hour I call my OB GYN have me come in.
My husband had to go to work, that morning and so I could not be at that appointment, and when I got that appointment they told me that they couldn’t find a heartbeat. And so, to go through that and go through that alone to you know.
P: yeah, yeah
M: It’s one of those things that, in my adult life. It was a huge shift, I went from being an ambiguous about being a mother to all of a sudden, like, Oh, my God. Like I didn’t realize how much I wanted to be pregnant and to be a mom and to do all the things right. And I remember the conversation that my OB GYN had with me, and she had to walk through all the things of like, this is not your fault. This is not something that you did, there’s no real reason for this to happen, so don’t internalize it, but that’s a nice fun thing to say to somebody like but the nice thing you’re like oh yeah don’t internalize it and then you’re like, great. I’m gonna go and cry. So, they then you know present you with three options of, you can have a DNC, which is where they physically remove everything, and a lot of times your sedated for that. They allow you to have a pill like a Cytotec where you met you know you insert the medication, or you can basically just wait for nature to take its course, so I didn’t like the idea of nature taking its course can last up to like four weeks, And I didn’t know what I was getting into, so I was like, I’m not going to go that route, but I also didn’t like the idea of having to like schedule this surgery this like minorly invasive surgery, so I was like, just give me the pills. Luckily, you know, when I told my bosses, I was able to take, you know funeral leave is what they gave it to me as to handle this problem, and basically pass all the tissue and deal with the emotional stuff that was going on and kind of all the things I was very fortunate in that respect, I know people don’t always have that where they like to just keep going, which is crazy to me.
P: It is crazy, and I’m impressed with your bosses for kind of calling it what it is, right, that’s impressive thing to do, and I’m so sorry you went through that, it’s so hard at the cusp of the second trimester.
M: Yeah,
P: but I’ve think heard all kinds of numbers tossed around about how frequent miscarriages and it’s obviously, we have miscarriage too, as someone who has had one, you know, there are many people who don’t realize they’re miscarrying so how could you count it accurately. But if you knew it was you know one and for you, it may be easier to not internalize it, because that’s just, you know, you roll the dice and that’s what happens, but But it’s hard not to not to take some ownership of it, given that it’s in your body.
M: right. our whole instinct is like around protecting this life, not to get like too primitive or whatever but if you get to like caveman thought processes is like that’s what you do as a woman, it’s like in your nature to bear children and care for those children and bring them up to be humans and so I think that when you have a miscarriage, there’s just this primitive instinct of like how do I prevent this moving forward, like how can I fix this. And so immediately your, your brain starts going into like overdrive of like, I’ve been drinking coffee like maybe I should, I need to give up caffeine oh I had a glass of wine before I knew I was pregnant maybe that did something like, just all the things. And it’s, it’s traumatic There are some people that I’ve talked to that seem to handle it better than others but for me, it, it was traumatic. And we ended up having complications with the actual tissue like coming out, it didn’t all come out and so when I went back to my one week appointment where they like check to make sure that everything’s fine that everything’s gone. I assume you’re fine with like some graphic described
P: yeah yeah yeah blood and guts are welcome.
M: So, so you know they have the lawn right now, but the wind up in there to poke around and make sure everything’s gone.
P: If you’re unfamiliar with it, the ones that Melissa is talking about is, interventional ultrasound.
M: And so she has his wand up there, which we thought this appointment was going to be just super standard so my husband ended up getting called into work and he had to go. Luckily, a friend of mine when I told her that my husband was not going to be able to be there she insisted that she come, which in hindsight, I’m really thankful for, but anyway so I’m in this office. She’s got this one up there, and my friend is standing here next to me and she says, it looks like not all the tissue came out, it’s not a ton but it’ll probably shed here in a couple of days, we should probably make you another appointment to like double check that it goes away, like okay no problem, you pulls the wand out and immediately. Like, I hear. Just like splashing all over the floor, and I’m like, plus I can’t see what’s happening. And so immediately she’s, you know, she springs into action and starts yelling out the door to get nurses to come in with some big long needle full of stuff and she goes, it looks like you’re hemorrhaging I have to basically scrape this tissue out and cauterize whatever’s causing this like immense bleed and you know I see blood like spattered up on the walls and it was so crazy, so this nurse comes in and she has to numb my uterus, I remember shaking so badly like just, I’m assuming from adrenaline, they’re doing a DNC and they numbed everything up. And so I’m awake, and they’re doing this DNC inside of this like doctor’s room in a clinic, it was so bonkers to me to go through that and oh my gosh like I never would have thought that something like a miscarriage, would result in this crazy chain of events, you know with miscarriages, especially because people don’t talk about them a ton, I don’t think people realize that like, there can be a complication there, there are things that go on when you have a miscarriage that can be very challenging and very traumatic and you know all these things so that was like traumatic event number, like, two at this point. So,
P: good Lord, I’m really sorry about that, that sounds very difficult given that you research everything, like the shock on top of it to be like What on earth is going on like I’ve never even heard of this, it’s sort of amazing, I had no idea that they could address it in a clinic. did you need a blood transfusion do they make you stay there, like how do they handle it, so they
M: they made me stay for a little while to make sure that like everything, stabilize but it happens so quickly and I tell you, when I set up after everything was like over and done with, because they had to give me water and you know something, to try to like everything now look like somebody had been murdered in this room. It was, it was so crazy and I think that I just looking back at it now and like I definitely was just like, yep okay I guess we’re doing this like you just like shut off.
P: Yeah,
M: and my OB GYN is really great. She’s, she’s female and she’s and she’s a mother too so I think she just hasn’t this extra like nurturing piece of her, but she didn’t tell me like how much blood she bought like she didn’t tell me really anything, even while it was happening, she was like, alright, we’re just gonna do this thing real quick. Okay quick pinch like don’t worry about it like was very, calm, through the whole thing. So, it sounded bad but I have no idea like how bad it really was from a medical perspective, I just know that like, they had to bring me water and you know they had to like bring people in to clean up the mess while I was waiting and it was like a whole, it was a whole thing but yeah, I didn’t know that they could do that either I didn’t know that they could do just like DNC procedure in such al rushed fashion where you’re like a wait time for
P: Dr. Matityahu, likely most of us have heard of a hemorrhage during birth but I’ve never heard about a hemorrhage during miscarriage what’s going on there
Dr. Matityahu: with the medication that we give to help pass all the tissue and the medication, let people know, yes, anticipate heavy bleeding, but then it should, within a few hours, decrease and fade and if not come to the emergency room because sometimes with the medication, not all of the pregnancy tissue in the placental tissue detach completely from the uterus and anytime there’s even a fragment of tissue left behind stuck inside of the wall or stuck onto the wall of the uterus, the uterus wants to rinse it out, doesn’t want it there and so how does the uterus, integrates out that tissue it bleeds, and contracts, bleeds and contracts and that they can’t pass that tissue, it just keeps getting in contracting to rinse the tissue out is why some women will then need even after the medication will need to go in and get a DNC meaning we go in and DNC is dilate and curate meaning we dilate open the cervix and we take this little scraper and just kind of scrape tissue off the walls of the uterus. So what it sounds like happened is she probably started passing some tissue, for whatever reason, there was something stuck inside of the uterus and when that happens, women will just bleed and hemorrhage. It’s not pretty, and it’s an emergency situation. And so when that happens, whether you’re in the office or in the emergency room, that the only option is to go in and scrape out the uterus, on the spot because the woman will not stop bleeding and hemorrhaging. Till the tissue is scraped off from the inside of the uterus.
P: I think Melissa was pretty surprised by how much blood there was can you try to walk us through what happened there.
Dr. Matityahu: So the inside lining of the uterus is really vascular it’s just plush full of blood vessels. Every month we have our period and the lining gets thick bleeds out because get sick and bleeds out. And so that’s like sort of very controlled bleeding but when you’re pregnant. What happens is there’s placental tissue that is embedding into the lining of the uterus and brings in an additional blood supply. So, the blood vessels inside the uterus get bigger get.
P: Yeah,
Dr. Matityahu: nice and juicy and start going into the placental tissue, because it wants to supply them. And then, when there’s a miscarriage and everything comes out when there’s all these open blood vessels in this big juicy blood supply that’s in there that bleeds, especially if there’s a piece that’s stuck in there then it is even more to rinse it out
M: but I guess, you know I mean maybe it’s just this area while you’re awake, sort of like, well, yeah, although.
P: Although this seems a lot more DIY. Yeah, you will then I’ve had a DNC and they knock me out and, you know, I woke up later in recovery, You know it definitely looks like surgery. so thank God that they addressed it really quickly, but now. Now what’s your thought process for like you know what I’m gonna try this again.
M: Yeah, so obviously after that, it’s again almost like this primitive thing where it was like I unlocked this piece of myself that didn’t really exist before where I was like, Okay, I recognize that this didn’t work the first time around, but I now really want this for myself, versus the first time I got pregnant, it was like, Okay, here we are. It took a long time for everything to stabilize afterwards which I’m sure probably happened to you too, but I remember researching, so much to try to figure out like how long is it gonna take for me to get pregnant again, like I remember looking like every day I was so stressed out about it, so I bought this armband and measure my basal body temperature I was testing ovulation, every day, like I was in it, I was in all the fertility things. It took four months, from, you know where we were having sex all the time just alone. Yeah, I don’t know, I had no idea how to like, deal with ovulation, I ended up doing so much research about the body temperatures and the spike that happened and like all the things, so I’m doing all this research we’re having sex all the time, nothing is happening. I remember feeling so defeated. Maybe this just isn’t really in the cards for me like maybe this is just not meant to be. And so,
P: although let me stop you right there for one second. Yeah, we all have this expectation that as soon as you have sex, you will be pregnant. Now that you look back, four months is not super long. But I also had trouble getting pregnant and every month you get the negative pregnancy tests, you’re like, okay, so apparently I can’t do this like, there’s no, but it’s a bummer that we all come to this with this idea that as soon as you try to be pregnant and so if you’re not pregnant, something’s wrong.
M: Right, well and husband got a girl pregnant in high school. So, with that knowledge as well as like, is it like had an accident. And so I think that, you know that plays into it as well. It’s a lot it’s a lot of like mental stress to go through this process, regardless of whether you have a miscarriage or not, like, even those four months I was like I’m gonna shoot myself in the eye like this crazy Android like strap myself out we’ve had a couple of months where I thought I’d get pregnant and didn’t get pregnant, and my ovulation was all wacky, and it was the first week of April where I was just like, I’m exhausted. I need a break. A break from sex, I need a break from everything, and I just want to relax, and that’s the week we got pregnant, we had sex one time that whole week, just happened to be like a day or two before I ovulated. Had no idea. And it just happened. And so, it’s one of those funny things where it’s like you have no control over anything is like the whole story of pregnancy and birth right, you just don’t have control your body like you think you do.
P: Yeah, I can imagine, especially for a bodybuilder where you’re probably for years doing all these things in a way that suggests you have control over your body.
M: Yeah absolutely and I’m a control freak, the most anal retentive you could possibly be as a human, that would be me, and I’m a ball of anxiety, this whole process, I’m like, this is the this is the test of my lifetime, like this is just crazy. And at the time I was 23 or 24. So, I’m young but my parents had a hard time getting pregnant, it took them 10 years.
P: Wow.
M: So, with all an IVF and the whole shebang. Funny enough, they actually got pregnant with both me and my brother when they were not doing IVF. So it’s funny how.
P: Yeah, yeah
M: you really control it all
P: so this time did you feel pregnant when you got pregnant.
M: Yeah, so when I got pregnant immediately my boobs hurt so bad, so funny enough, because I was like tracking my ovulation, and I was pregnant on the stick. I didn’t know that I was pregnant, and so I’m tracking my ovulation. After this, this one week where we kind of had like a hiatus where we just had sex, like the one time. And so back to tracking my ovulation, all of a sudden I get a positive LH surge,
P: what Melissa is talking about here, LH is luteinizing hormone which rises just before ovulation, an increase in LH triggers the release of an egg from the ovary, which is important because this is the sign that you’re coming up with your fertile window. The time when an egg can be fertilized,
M: so I’m like, Yes, perfect. Okay, great. So, I’m testing it and then it’s like, day four of me peeing on this stick and getting a positive LH, and then day five of me getting this and I’m like, you’re not supposed to ovulate for five days what’s happening right now, so then I look it up online and it’s like, oh, it can mean that you’re pregnant, because sometimes it will catch that hormone, and it mistakes it so.
P: So here, let’s just talk about what can happen, your ovulation kit tests for LH to identify the fertile window, but it can mistake, LH for another hormone called HCG which is released by an embryo after implantation, although they have totally different functions, LH and HCG have really similar structures and some ovulation tests can’t distinguish between the two.
M: I took a pregnancy test. And I’m pregnant. I was like, oh my god, like,
P: that’s awesome.
M: When did this happen. I think I was maybe three weeks along so like, really really early. Yeah, so, obviously, then all of a sudden these emotions of like, it’s still really early it’s possible we can have another miscarriage, and of course, you can’t go to get an ultrasound until you’re like, between six and eight weeks or something like that. So now I have to wait, right, so now I have to practice more patience, of like, hey, is this gonna stick. We don’t even know. Am I even really pregnant I tested multiple times like over the next couple of weeks, to make sure, so at about four or five weeks that’s when my boobs started hurting, and then at six weeks, I started getting morning sickness. So,
P: triumph!
M: I know I was like, I never thought I’d be so excited to be sick but I was like, if I throw up today, it means I’m still pregnant, every day, and I did and I throw up every day for like 16 weeks. So it’s funny because, like I’d brush my teeth, and the brushing of my teeth would make me throw up and so was this funny little reminder that like you are still pregnant.
P: Yeah,
M: you know, like these things that don’t normally make you throw up or still making you throw up, or if you’re really hungry it makes you nauseous, which, you know it’s not normally the case like I can usually not eat until lunch and be fine, but in the morning I wake up, but I’d be so hungry that I’d vomit. So that was this, this nice little thing of like a breath of fresh air, like we have morning sickness, things are good, we didn’t have this before so after you pass the morning sickness phase, then there’s occasionally times where you’re like the babies don’t move in. So there’s that.
P: The second trimester is quiet, more or less.
M: Yeah, so the second trimester was not too bad, I stopped throwing up like I said around 16 weeks so I have probably a solid weeks where I was just like cutely pregnant and like kind of uncomfortable, people always say things like, Oh, the second trimester like it’s fine, I’m like, I don’t know about you but I’m waking up three to four times a night to pee and that’s not fine for me.
P: Yeah, yeah,
M: It’s not fun.
P: Are you are you enjoying it at all. Are you still like,
M: No, for me, I get so cranky if I don’t get sleep, and like waking up several times a night. It’s frustrating because you’re uncomfortable, you can’t sleep well and when you’re not sleeping well, it just, It just kind of sucks, go through the second trimester, things are relatively quiet, just regular normal uncomfortable being pregnant stuff
I’m a small individual, my daughter 30 weeks ended up dislocating for my ribs, because
P: Oh my God,
M: she was really kicky, like all the time, always moving, which got really nicely for me. Luckily not during the middle of the night, which was nice but you’re very kicky I have tons of videos on my phone of her like she’d have the hiccups or she you know she’d be super crazy in the womb which is very indicative of her personality, now she’s absolutely bonkers like a ball of energy. And so, so at one point she picked out for my ribs, and my OB GYN was like, oh, go to the emergency room and get an x ray because I think she cracked your ribs.
P: Oh Wow,
M: so. So, to the emergency room, they did not give me an x ray, they gave me a lot of unnecessary things. Monday, I had a chiropractor appointment to go to the chiropractor appointment, and I tell him I’m having this insane pain and I can’t even sit down, like I had to lay down because I’m so it was so painful. He checks it and he goes oh yeah four of your ribs are dislocated, I was like, okay, so he puts them back then while I’m there. And then, as the muscle relaxer and was able to like resume my normal life, but just so crazy.
P: Yeah, that is crazy. He so once, once he readjusted, which I’m assuming is not comfortable. Then it’s back to normal though, and you feel better
M: back to normal, so we didn’t have any other issues with that. Everything went fine throughout the rest of the third trimester, and then, you know, went into labor naturally and and
P: so tell me about that day, like what were you doing, how did it happen. Did you know it was Labor
M: so that Day, so that day, it was funny because the day before I thought my water had broke. My husband and I had sex. Like, I think, 24 or 48 hours before. And, you know, because we’re trying to like, yeah, things moving, and so I wake up one morning, this was December, I think the 22nd December 22 I wake up and immediately I have, like, this gush of water, like wasn’t a, it was more than normal, but wasn’t like a whole bag of the water popped somewhere in the middle of that. So, I don’t think too much of it on my. Okay this is strange, but maybe it’s fine. What I said something to my husband. Later that day, he’s like, You should call the doctor, so I did. They track everything and they’re like, Nope, it’s fine, like everything’s fine, water levels look fine bag still seems to be intact. I was dilated to like a two, at that point, so still not in labor but like things were moving like
P: are we at 40 weeks now where are we,
M: yeah yeah, so this was 39 and a half or so. I literally gave birth the day before my due date. So I was wow, I think partially because we knew the exact date that I got pregnant so easier for us to pinpoint things but on the 22nd at night. I lay down to go to bed, and it like I’m having these weird pain, it felt like I just ate something that maybe didn’t agree with me, I’m having this really painful gas bubble, give it an hour away. So after about an hour. This keeps going, and it started to get more regular and so that’s what I like this labor, I start tracking it, and consistently every five minutes, I’m having this pain, you know, progressively getting worse as the night goes on so I’m transferring between taking bathes and, you know, getting in the shower and coming back out and all of these things, my husband is sleeping through all of this, I think it was like five or six o’clock in the morning, and these are now, like two minutes apart,
P: Oh wow,
M: okay, at five or six o’clock in the morning, I wake them up and I’m like hey I’m in labor like we need to go. We need to go. And he’s like, Are you sure because we had just gone to the hospital like a day and a half or two days before. Yeah, so I’ve been in labor for like six hours. I’m tracking it, we’re two minutes apart if you don’t get your ass out of bed, like I’m leaving you. Like, we need to go. And because the hospital we were going to was 45 minutes away.
P: Oh wow,
M: I may have waited too long as he’s getting ready, I’m calling my doula and I was planning on doing a water birth with a midwife at our university hospital, so we go. I’m basically yelling the entire way there because I’m in a lot of pain at this point and they’re like every half, two minutes they were right on top of each other. When we were almost to the hospital, we were probably 10 minutes away from the hospital, and my husband had to pull over, so I could throw up on the side of the road. I remember this so vividly because I was having traction, and pulling up at the same time so it was screaming. On the side of the road, and it was, it was so hard I’ve never that was like the hardest, it’s ever been for me to throw up because your body’s like doing all these different things so are we get to the hospital, we get checked in, they checked me and I’m at five centimeters so they admit me, and everything’s fine, we get to a point where we’re back in labor and delivery and we’re in a room that has like a tub in it. I think it was like 9am At this point, I’m in the tub and I’m like trying to labor in the tub. But the problem is that the tub that they provided was super narrow couldn’t get comfortable, and the it was almost making the labor worse because I was so uncomfortable in this tub.
We’d been in the hospital for like two hours, since they first admitted us and checked me the first time, so I was like can you track me again because I’m throwing up regularly at this point, and they won’t let me have any water and like all these things. I’m like, can you check me because I feel like I feel like I’m at like a seven or an eight like I’m dying. And so they checked me and they’re like, you’re still at a five. They’re like, Oh my god. So I felt like maybe it’s just because I’m not relaxed, but at this point I was like, I don’t think I can do this if I’m still at a five after two hours of this, let’s just do the epidural, they give me the epidural at, like, 11, and after they give me the epidural I dialated to a nine and a half, my daughter was sunny side up so you know the wrong direction
P: i feel like this question should come with a diagram but how does the baby being sunny side up, affect the delivery.
Dr. Matityahu: Definitely when the face is down, it’s a much easier, smoother delivery, because of the way the baby’s head can flex and then come through the birth canal so when the baby is Sunny Side Up meaning, the baby is facing straight up, it can’t bend its neck forward and curve out of the birth canal so easily. And so it’s not impossible to deliver a baby that’s face up, but it’s much more challenging, I mean the baby needs a lot more room to come out because it can’t fold and maneuver as well as when it’s facing down.
P: And they were saying that I was, I wasn’t dilated to attend yet, because, at last little like clap of whatever caught on something, and they tried to let it happen on its own, they popped my water. When they popped my water they were like, oh it’s clear and then all of a sudden they were like, Oh there’s meconium. So then all these people come in and I might pay. Are we having a C section, and they were like, no, no, we’re gonna, we’re gonna wait just a second and see how things go because it was clear at first, and we think that what happened is when we popped it maybe that like triggered meconium so we don’t necessarily think that she failed it because it was clear when we first popped in. So they were like, we just have these people here in case. All of this goes on at like 6pm is when I started pushing and pushing them, pushing them, pushing for four hours I push
P: Oh my god.
M: Yeah, really long line. I even ended up about halfway through after like two and a half hours I was like, this isn’t it happening, like when, let me stand up like let me use the squat bar or whatever, and will gravity we’ll let gravity like I’ll pull this out so numb from the waist down, and I’m holding myself up, um you know having a contraction, and so my husband and my mom on one side and then his mom and the doula on the other side, holding my legs up, cuz I can’t stand on them, so we’re pushing them, pushing you did that for another hour and a half by like they were like, right, she’s not moving past that zero station that hip bone.
P: Yeah.
M: And so, what we can do is we can give you an episiotomy. Or we can just go straight to the C section. They were like if we do get the episiotomy, we still may have to do the C section. So the way they explained it to me, was like we just think that her head is too big for your pelvis, and it’s not coming past that bone so we can do the episiotomy and try to Suction her out. And you know, so they’re explaining this and I’m like, I’m not going to end up with two surgeries, it sounds like what you’re describing the episiotomy, it won’t do anything because it’s a soft tissue. Yeah. So I’m like, that’s not going to change the bone structure, let’s just skip and do and I was exhausted, so I’m like the baby wasn’t super stable at this point. So Mike, let’s just go straight to the C section. They’re like, they come in and they give me this higher dose of whatever to numb you from the top down. So this more intense epidural. So they give this to me and they start rolling me back. Well, with both with both my first epidural and with this epidural, my blood pressure tanked, both times difference was that the second epidural, that I had, I was so exhausted I’ve been up for 24 hours have been pushing for four, so I passed out. I don’t really remember getting back to the operating room. My husband tells me that I coded So they called the code blue
P: oh shit
P: so when Melissa got the epidural her blood pressure went too low, what’s going on there.
Dr. Matityahu: So a lot of times with epidural. What it will do is it relaxes us so much that it makes a lot of our blood vessels dilate and it completely drops our blood pressure, so that’s a pretty common side effect of any epidural, which is why, before we give women epidurals we usually give them a liter of IV fluid to really beef up how much fluid is inside the blood vessels so when the blood vessels dilate with the epidural, it doesn’t bottom them out and tank their blood pressure, it sounds like. Her blood pressure went so low that passed out
in the labor room when we call a code, there’s different levels of code and it allows us to bring in people needed one code is the moms delivering the babies coming out in the baby’s not doing well, so not only the OB team and the respiratory team will come but also the pediatric team. There’s other codes where it’s just for the mom, I mean if somebody passes out you, you’ll call a code because you just want all hands on deck in case things get worse,
M: he could not go back, because they were like dropping or whatever skis in just the room that we were in where I was laboring, I remember coming to in the operating room. They’re like, Oh, can okay she’s awake hey can you feel this they’re like poking my stomach with a knife and make sure everything’s fine and I’m like, I don’t feel it. So then they’re cutting me open, they bring my husband in, and they pull the baby out and I remember kind of like coming in and out of consciousness, this whole time and I’m shaking uncontrollably. At this point I was like, super cold shaking uncontrollably, and I felt like I had to vomit, so I had like this bag right here we’re growing up into, and I’m like trying to keep myself awake. So, my husband’s right there, nobody’s telling me anything, so they get the baby out really quickly, and I don’t hear crying, and I just remember like, as I’m coming in and out I kept thinking to myself like, why isn’t the baby crying. Why isn’t being fine. I couldn’t even ask, like I couldn’t ask them what was going on because I just kept like I could fall asleep and wait wait, what’s going on and then, you know,
P: yeah,
M: this weird thing where I just I had no, I had no energy. I remember hearing this voice every time I’d like fall asleep I thought I was falling asleep, and be like, You selfish b-word like you. you need to wake up like your baby’s not crying, ask them why. Ask them why the baby’s not crying, you’re over here trying to take a nap like wake up when they pull the baby out. My daughter had been without oxygen for a full minute. So they had to resuscitate her. So they take my daughter to the NICU and my husband went with. So he tells me at this point, like they, the baby had to be resuscitated and is now going to the NICU, so I’m gonna go with the baby. And so I’m like okay, whatever. So, as they’re like stitching me up, and, you know, shaking uncontrollably and nauseous and this blanket keeps like falling off of me, and so I’m freezing my butt off, and I still have no idea what’s going on. It felt like I was getting stitched forever. It felt like an eternity, because I, I still wasn’t like 100%. There, I felt so tired, felt so tired, were like kept going in and out. And so finally, they’re done, and they’re getting ready to take me out at night. Finally, ask them like what’s going on with the baby. And they’re like, she’s fine. She’s stable, she’s with her husband like don’t worry about it. So at this point, I remember falling asleep as they’d be back to my hospital room after I gave myself some time to sleep. They explained to me. She is now in a medically induced coma. It’s like a medically induced hyperthermia where they drop your internal body temperature down really low and then attempt to keep your brain from swelling, so they’re like, we’re trying this, this method it’s technically experimental for children we use it on adults but we’re doing this, your husband signed off on it like, you know this, what’s going on,
P: doctor matityahu suggested I take these next set of questions to Dr. David Kornfield the director of the Center for Excellence in poner biology and the Department of Pediatrics at Stanford, thanks so much for coming on the show Dr Cornfield.
Dr. Cornfield: My pleasure, thanks for having me I appreciate the opportunity to help people understand a little bit more about what goes on in this critical neonatal time period.
P: Why does, why does it stop and oxygen lead to brain injury in particular.
Dr. Cornfield: All of us are absolutely contingent upon having oxygen in our bloodstream, and absolutely contingent upon having oxygen going to our brains at every moment, and there’s no cell in the body that is more dependent on the presence of oxygen at all points than the brain. So, the in the absence of oxygen, a whole cascade of injurious phenomena unfold in the neurons of the brain that can lead to significant damage, and it’s true in babies, just as it’s true in adults, but in babies that time period between being in the womb, and moving on to air breathing life is critical, and the changes that happen from a cardiovascular perspective, are really without precedent. Give it a moment of consideration. Just a moment, think what happens in those few moments. Normally, a baby’s born. Blood flow does not go to the lungs in utero. The first few breaths of life, there is this dramatic change so that 100% or even more, I could explain how I get that gets to the lungs, and all of a sudden that placental circulation is cut off, and all the responsibility for oxygenating the blood is subsumed by the lungs, that were just moments ago completely filled with amniotic fluid. It is a remarkable transition in context of that oxygen has to get into the bloodstream. And sometimes, for many reasons, especially those who have been pregnant and now mothers, understand, that is a fraught time interval.
P: Melissa said that because her daughter suffered this oxygen deprivation that she had to put in a temperature induced coma, could you tell us a little bit about how that works.
Dr. Cornfield: the term for this injury is hypoxic ischemic encephalopathy. So it’s an injury to the brain that’s due to hypoxia, which is low oxygen in the bloodstream and ischemia which means a compromise or no blood flow to the brain as well, where there’s not enough oxygen going to the brain for some period of time. There is a whole cascade of events that unfold, at the cellular level, and that really leads to injuries of the cells that comprise the brain, neuronal injury unfolds really, over the course of many hours. And one way to sort of interrupt that cascade of events is by decreasing metabolic demand. And by cooling the brain. And there’s really very solid data in the neonatal world that the sooner you can institute brain cooling or total body cooling, after the injury, the more likely you are, or one is to mitigate the extent of the neuronal injury. So time is critical at that point, most centers, really, place a high premium on getting it done within six hours, the data in animals are really suggested instituting hyperthermia within three hours is better still. And usually this sort of temperature that people shoot for is somewhere, depending on whether they do the whole baby or just the head somewhere around 33 and a half degrees centigrade.
P: for Those of us shamelessly wedded to Fahrenheit that’s about 92 degrees Fahrenheit,
Dr. Cornfield: thirty seven degrees centigrade is the normal temperature, the 98.6 range. I also want your listeners to recognize it’s not an unheard of phenomenon to do this, but not as common as one might think. So the data are about two in 1000, infants have this hypoxic ischemic encephalopathy, which is by no mean an insubstantial number, but it’s also not to be taken as an overwhelming number of children who are afflicted with this problem
M: at this point I finally get to go see her. She’s got all these things all over her head, because they’re monitoring procedures, and she’s hooked up to all these tubes and stuff and she’s not awake and the whole time I was in the hospital I feel like I was numb, or it’s just like, this is just what it is….And so at that point my maternal instincts kick in and I’m like, All right, time to pump to get the milk stimulated because it’ll have the baby so do this and pumping all the time, to give them milk that they can give to her. So I do this and we’re getting the milk put together and after three days, they finally are bringing her body temperature back up, we can finally hold her at this point, and it was just so crazy so she was in the NICU for eight days after, and you know when they slowly had to bring her back to some semblance of normalcy where she’s eating normally where she, you know latched on to breastfeeding, where they made sure she’s having bowl movements there there are no residual stuff like she had to have an MRI, to make sure there was no brain damage and we’re very fortunate because everything. Everything’s been fine she’s now almost two and a half. And we’ve had incredible support from the hospital, because we did this experimental thing, we got two years continued checkups and things with them and with specialists over there that was no cost to us. All of these things so you know, a really traumatic.
P: Good Lord. wait all this medical attention was focused on her because she had been deprived of oxygen for a little while.
M: Yes, yeah. Okay, so, because they had to resuscitate her. They were really worried about 10 potential brain damage that that could have caused. We got all this additional medical attention.
P: I get that in that circumstance you don’t feel like you have a lot of choices, but I can’t even imagine how many people you have helped by doing that. Right, so that they get experienced with the process they understand how it works better. I wonder if it will be the standard of care at some point.
M: And it’s the standard of care for adults. So when they explained it to us, you know, it was nice because I said you know, it works in adults, this, this is a common practice for brain injury patients, We, we do this for a couple of days here, we’ll give you the MRI, and we’ll check everything and we’ll monitor her really closely. So we felt really confident going in to that, it made sense to us and you know it’s an added bonus, that if that research leads to being able to help other people, not experience, you know brain damage in their children, then that’s a win win situation because it worked for us. She has no signs of any long term brain damage, and has had just the best care. As a result, so, you know, it’s been, it’s been really great.
P: That is amazing. My firstborn did not have a brain issue but she had a super rare life threatening heart issue, she had open heart surgery the day after she was born. But I am much farther back in the line than you are in your line. So as someone who has benefited from people like you who were brave enough to take that step, I thank you from all of us. I’m going to speak on everyone’s behalf and say thank you for all of us, that is amazing, and what she into now.
M: She loves learning so she’s in like a, it’s an at home preschool right but she’s only two and a half but she knows all of her ABC she can counsel 13 Like
P: wow
M: she does how incredible things are I’m like, no two year old should be doing this but she learned so quickly, and I’m just so happy that that’s something we could put behind us and my husband and I are talking about trying again at the end of this year, and you know it’s taken it’s taken a lot of work to get to a place where I feel comfortable doing that because of how traumatic it was there was a lot of therapy involved afterwards of nightmares all the time with my child dying or being taken for me, that it required a lot of work to move past those things and be able to feel comfortable moving forward with another child.
P: All that makes sense right this is unbelievably traumatic experience, what do you think you’ve learned from this first experience that you’ll use for the second.
M: So, I think the biggest takeaway here is just that I’m, I’m not in control. And while I think I knew that to an extent, the first time around I knew that there was nothing I could do about it. It’s different now because I went into it like with a birth plan and like all the floofy fun feel good things like yeah I’m in control of my birth story and it’s like, no, you’re not. We’re just along for the ride and you have to enjoy what it is for what it is right now.
P: I think that’s a great message and I think probably as you found the idea of having no control and the feeling of having no control or to kind of different things but, but now you know what the feeling is so it will be easier to do and I know you run a management company. So, being out of control doesn’t seem like it’s on your daily agenda.
M: No, I manage, I manage online businesses for entrepreneurs all over the place, and so I am used to being in control and not being in control was, it was a lot, I’m better for it as much as it really sucked at the time.
P: Yep,
M: I’m a better person for it. So,
P: Melissa, thanks so much for coming on and sharing your amazing story your, I will revel in your triumph all day.
M: I’m So glad if it can bring you some joy and some happiness and some strength. For that, I appreciate you letting me share it.
P: Thanks again to Dr. Matityahu for sharing insights about how our bodies work and giving us a doctor’s perspective on labor, and thanks also to Dr. Cornfield for sharing some details about the delicacy of the newborn period, highlighting all the complicated mechanical changes that happen to the baby at birth, and walking us through the current approach for managing a possible brain injury for a newborn. Thanks also to Melissa for sharing her story, filled with resilience. It’s fantastic to imagine her two year old, running around–a ball of energy, bearing no evidence of her tricky birth
Thanks for listening…we’ll be back soon with another story of overcoming
Episode 32 SN: When the Fourth Trimester is a Bear: Laura’s story
Today’s guest had to reexamine her expectations at various points in the process of growing her family. She enjoyed a relatively straightforward pregnancy, but had real fears of what the birth would be like. Importantly, both births were totally successful, but they didn’t necessarily progress the way she imagined they would. The real challenge for her came after the birth: in the fourth trimester. The monumental change of going from being a part of a couple, just two adults, to caring for a newborn was a pretty staggering life change, and the first time around it came with postpartum anxiety. Ultimately she used her experiences to shape her new career path: she’s become a postpartum coach, using all her hard earned lessons to help other women navigate this tricky time.
To find Laura online, you can check her postpartum work out at:
https://www.facebook.com/Motherhood-Mentoring-100434231871954
Preeclampsia diagnosis
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. I came to pregnancy with my own set of expectations about how things might go, and had to abandon them very early in the process, when I had a hard time getting pregnant.
Today’s guest also had to reexamine her expectations, but much later in the process. She enjoyed a relatively straightforward pregnancy. She brought fears of what the birth would be like to the experience, and while, in the end, it went well, the births didn’t necessarily progress the way she imagined they would. The real challenge for her came after the birth: in the fourth trimester. The monumental change of going from being a part of a couple, just two adults, to caring for a newborn was a pretty staggering life change, and the first time around it came with postpartum anxiety. Ultimately she used her experiences to shape her new career path: she’s become a postpartum coach, using all her hard earned lessons to help other women navigate this tricky time.
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.
Laura: Yeah, I’m Laura Spencer, I’m from coming Georgia just north of Atlanta.
P: Oh wow.
L: Yeah.
P: So Laura, tell us a little bit about yourself. Do you have siblings.
L: I do, yes I have a younger sister she’s four years younger than me, and we have been super close. Ever since she was born, when she was younger, I was like, a little mommy, and as we have become adults, she is just my go to person for every thing, like she and I are just on the same wavelenght our souls, we’re just connected
P: that’s awesome
L: you know, it really is, because I know that a lot of people don’t have that kind of relationship with their sibling. And so I feel very very blessed and thankful to be able to call her my absolute best friend.
P: That’s lovely.
So let’s talk about pregnancy. Before you ever got pregnant. What did you think it would be like,
L: oh gosh, I think I thought it was weird and this is so funny that I’m having this conversation with you today, because one of our really good family friends we just met up with them yesterday, and their daughter is 20 and she’s getting married in July. You know, I just had my second son in February, and so she’s like kind of scared of babies. And she’s like, I’m gonna adopt a 10 year old. And I was like, I remember saying that when I was about your age too, because it is part of our culture, but it’s also not, it’s kind of like separate and silent from our culture is just kind of like, oh, let’s admire the pregnant lady, but from afar, you know, and not like actually learn about the experiences from young on, to be able to really be prepared for what’s to come. So I would say I was similar to her. That’s why I shared that story, you know, I don’t know that I want to have to go through and it wasn’t even really the pregnancy part is more like the birth part.
P: Yeah,
L: imagining a human child coming out of your vagina, that’s kind of scary when you’ve never been around it before you’ve never actually seen someone do it before except for what’s in mainstream media, which is complete BS. So
P: well, I think that’s where all of us get that picture right it’s like it is, you’re pregnant and it’s easy and you, you know, go to the hospital and 10 minutes later you have a baby.
L: Right. Yes, exactly. And then all is well, and your body, you know, goes back to normal.
P: Yeah,
L: I’m using air quote area, like the next week. Yeah. And so when you have a baby and look at your body the next day and you look like you’re still five months pregnant.
P: Yeah,
L: we’re like, um, wait a second. The baby’s out. Pregnancy wise, I wasn’t really sure what to expect but I can definitely tell you I was terrified of birth.
P: Yeah, that seems that seems legit. So did you get pregnant easily
L: pretty easily. Yeah, my, my husband I was our first, we tried for a couple months, I remember using ovulation tests, and that was just awful. I hated it because it was so stressful. Some people love it for me, it was, it just added an extra layer of stress to it. I spoke to my doctor about it and she’s like, just do every other day. Like when you know that you’re ovulating just do it every other day. And that was, that’s how we ended up getting pregnant, so I think we tried for total like three months, so month three egg. Yeah, it was my first yeah I mean, for me it seemed like, Oh we were trying but then I know so many people who struggle with infertility and take years to get pregnant and, gosh, the mental game of just a couple months I can’t, you know, I really feel for those people who are struggling with infertility,
P: well but also this is another good point right that images that you will get pregnant the first time you try.
L: Exactly, yes, you’re right. I feel like it often happens to the people who are like, not again. Someone with my second son, my husband and I, we just got pregnant, like, we’re really trying. I was just like, Um Hey, pregnant. And I feel like it happens when you least expect it sometimes.
P: Yeah. So how was that first pregnancy
L: first trimester, was tough with my first, you know, had some morning sickness and more like all day, nausea, gagging and dry heaving is more like what I had.
P: Yeah, That’s hard, what so what do you have any like tricks to kind of live with it or
L: I remember one of my, one of my husband’s friends she recommended a certain type of ginger ale. It’s called Red Rock, I think it’s like really potent ginger ale and then there’s little ginger candies called Gin-gins ones love those. And then the preggie pops those worked pretty well too, for me, and then I also did for a couple weeks I think you can do a combination of vitamin B six and unisom. This is not. Yes, this is do not listen to this and just go ahead and do it please ask your doctor about this first. But yeah, you can do a combo of vitamin B six in unisom, and take that before bed and then that seemed to help me for a little while, too, but yeah the nausea, the smells like smells really got to me.
P: Does that abate after the first trimester.
L: Yes, for me it did. Yeah, and then second trimester was great. Most of third trimester was great to till I got towards the very end and then it just I mean, it just gets uncomfortable, you know.
P: So take us to the day of the birth like how do you know, today’s the day and did you make it to 40 weeks and,
L: yeah, so I knew that the day was the day because I had to be induced by blood pressure started spiking, I went in for a checkup around 38 weeks, and my blood pressure had been high, and that was kind of a consistent trend that had been going on for the past week, two weeks and so they sent me over to hospital.
P: did you have the high blood pressure before you’re pregnant or no just at the end of pregnancy
L: just the end of my pregnancy. Yep, it started probably about week 37 I don’t know exactly what caused it, but I do know that I was working as a teacher at the time and I was also holding the leadership position, the time in which I had my baby with. I had him in March and so it’s a pretty stressful time in the school year. And so, you know, I was always rushing to appointments and I was always just not super stressed but definitely had a higher level of stress and so that could have played a part in it.
P: Could you feel the high blood pressure or no, you just got to the clinic and they told you.
L: No, it didn’t feel like anything. Yeah. And, yeah, like my body didn’t feel any, any different. So it was it was a little bit surprising I think and that’s it kind of messed with me a little bit I guess because I didn’t feel it so like is this really happening, so I’ve gone to the hospital for some testing and ended up getting my blood pressure down they sent me home for the weekend. went for a follow up appointment the next Monday and it was so high. And so that’s when the doctor was like I think we need to go ahead and move forward with induction, and by that time I was 38 weeks and five days,
P: and had you imagine like a lot of Earth with, you know, people with trumpets…
L: good question, I hadn’t, I did not plan a water birth for my first because the hospital that I was planning to birth that did not allow that. I was planning on, you know, being able to labor at home and be kind of like in my own element and honestly I think at that point like that was a Monday, I had to go in that evening for induction, I literally packed my hospital bag that day so like I was in denial that I was going to need to be induced I was in denial that like, I was about to have a baby. So that’s kind of how I went into having a baby and so then it ended up kind of rocking my world, but as far as, you know what I pictured, I can’t say that I necessarily like had an exact idea of birth. I went into it knowing, I wanted to do my absolute best to not have an epidural, I just did not want it. my husband knew I didn’t want it. And I also really wanted to not have a cesarean birth, my mom had an emergency so Syrian with me that just kind of left some scars with me.
P: yeah. Well that all sounds scary and it’s like not according to your plan and, and, yeah, as you say, which I think is totally normal and most of us grow up with like you’re afraid of the birth. I remember halfway through my pregnancy thinking like this baby is too big to get out it’s intended escape room, Like I don’t know how this is gonna work, so it makes sense to have all those feelings and then, because you’re not having contractions and, you know laboring at home for 12 hours like you don’t really get the mental space to prepare for, like, Okay, what’s next. So if you’re with you. This is stressful.
L: Yeah and then the whole induction process to was it Luckily, my husband was there with me for the whole time and, and he was distracting you know like, so it wasn’t like we were sitting there waiting, but and I think that they did kind of forewarn me that it could take a little while, and it did you know I was induced on a Monday night and didn’t have my son until Wednesday afternoon. So I think that that’s something too that people don’t necessarily aren’t necessarily prepared for is that induction. If you’re not really I think I was maybe a centimeter dilated. So I had a good little ways to go.
P: So, when they put you on was really put you on Pitocin and they give you some help in the cervix and all that,
L: they did so when I went in that first night they, they did serve Adele, which is a cervix softener. And the next day they, they put me on Pitocin for almost the entire day, and nothing really progressed I honestly don’t really remember that day because it wasn’t super painful, and then they did another cervadil that night, and then the following morning they put me on Pitocin again, and, and then that that did it kicked in, to active labor,
P: and What was that like, would it feel like
L: I remember They had me on the fetal monitors and I was in bed and my water broke and I was like, pretty sure my water just broke something funny happened I feel like I just felt like a little bubble burst, almost. So they’re like, Oh, yep, your water broke and then after that, it was like, go time. And things really, really, they went pretty fast and furious, and luckily I had the midwife on call who really was familiar with my birth plan. Well, I didn’t really have a birth plan but just like some of my, my really deepest desires in preparing I did know how much being in water can help. And so they had tubs, they don’t allow water birth but they have tubs and showers and so I was like, I want to be in the water and so she that and that’s not necessarily something that often happens with when you’re on Pitocin and you’ve got an IV and, you know, all those things, but she was willing to let me do it. And so I was very thankful for that. So I was in the tub for a little while laboring and that was helpful, and then man once transition got there I was like, who I don’t know about this.
P: Yeah. So did you get an epidural or how did that, did you avoid the C section.
L: Yes I did, avoid the C section, I got out of the tub and things things were things were tough, and I didn’t really at that point is when I felt, probably most unprepared for what was what was happening. And looking back on it, I’m like, Man, that probably would have been the point of having a doula to help me with positioning because I got out of the tub and I was, you know starting to get exhausted. And so I’m like, I just want to lay down, but like laying down is literally the worst thing you can do especially when you’re at that the end of active labor you’re transitioning,
P: is it the worst thing you can do because it’s uncomfortable or because it will stop labor,
L: just because it’s probably most like the most uncomfortable position you can be in. Yeah, yeah, I did labor in the bed for a while, my midwife, did some amazing counter pressure on my legs which I was after she left I was like hubby, get on it, like, this is your job now. And at that point too, I was like alright let’s, we can ask my mom to come in because I, We had set a boundary with her and said, you know, we just want to be just the two of us, if we asked you to come in, then you can come in.
So at that point we asked her to come in, and I think it was just like, too intense, she was just like, just get the epidural just do it just get, you know, make it go away kind of thing. And so I opted to get a dose of fentanyl. And honestly, they were like alright we’re giving it to you, and five minutes later I was like, Are you, are you sure. Can I have another one, because I don’t think that works. So that was a little bit disappointing, but I didn’t really let it get to me and then finally I was, I asked for an epidural, and so they started prepping me for an epidural I got some IV fluids, and the anesthesiologist walked in, and he’s like, All right, Go time, and they had, how, like how do we get off the bed switch positions kind of stand up to get prepped for it. And as soon as I got off the bed I felt the baby just moved down my birth canal and then, like I started feeling urges to push, and I just looked at the nurse and I was like, you know, I’m kind of making grunting noises and she’s like, are you pushing. I was like, yeah, and she’s like stop pushing I’m like I can’t but my body is like doing it, you know. And so, you know, I just remember like I was hunched over my husband completely naked, and the anesthesiologist who walked in I remember just like looking up at him probably like with a deer in headlights like there’s no way that I can sit back down on this table for you to do this, and sit still for you right now. And so, the nurse looked at me because she saw my face and she’s like, Do you still want an epidural and I was like, nope. She’s like, What do you want and I was like, I want the midwife to come in here and check me because it’s time. And so she did, she came in she checked me it was 10 centimeters like let’s go. So, yeah, my son was born without an epidural.
P: Wow. And
L: yeah,
P: did you push for a while or
L: he was pretty close, I think I pushed for maybe like 30 or 45 minutes. Looking back after I’ve done more research. So with all this my, my first birth and postpartum experience it’s led me to my new career path, which is postpartum coach and childbirth educator
P: cool
L: and so through all of this education that I have continued through all this knowledge that I’ve continued to require realize that the way in which I pushed him was probably not the most productive way of doing it because I can remember just my face and my eyes feeling really swollen and so I ended up doing what’s called Purple pushing that was, that was kind of tough it’s very strenuous, because you have people yelling at you to push, instead of just like, listen to your body and when you feel the urge to push then push which is, you know, a little bit more helpful….you don’t burst blood vessels in your eyes when, when you do that instead. This is something else that I have learned and what I like to communicate to my prenatal clients is that there’s so much that you can know and you’re like, you’re not going to be able to know it all and so at some point, you have to be okay with not knowing, and be okay with trusting yourself to make the best decision for you in the moment.
For me, the best decision was listening to my midwife, pushing the way that I did my son came out, I went with it, right. So, sometimes when we then look back on it, we’re like, oh, I don’t know how I feel about it and so it’s that, you know, processing it and saying maybe I could do something differently next time, but knowing that you did your best, and knowing to just offer yourself compassion and love in that moment for, for doing your best with with what you had.
P; Yeah, So that sounds ultimately successful.
L; Yeah
P: blood pressure comes down after you leave the hospital.
L: Oh, that’s a great question. No, it did not. In fact, it stayed elevated for a couple of weeks, actually, and again going back to your other question about if I felt different. I really didn’t, and you know I would get blood pressure readings that were like, 170 over 110. And, you know like crazy high blood pressure, but I wasn’t feeling any sort of symptoms along with it,
P: did they ever call it preeclampsia or it was just hypertension or were they,
L: it was really it was just hypertension because I never had, like, the proteins that went along with preeclampsia.
P: I just want to quickly note here that the criterion to diagnose preeclampsia, or there’s a moving target. As scientists and doctors learn more about the condition, they have changed the ways in which it’s identified so it used to be that the diagnosis was based on high blood pressure and protein in the urine, but now you can get that preeclampsia diagnosis without the protein in the urine component, if other things show up in the bloodwork or if you have a headache or a pain in your abdomen on the right side. So just keep an eye out for that.
L; But I know that that was why they were really encouraging the induction, because you know I can remember sitting in the doctor’s office and he’s like, it is ultimately your decision, but I would highly recommend going ahead with induction because you’re just going to get sicker, like I remember him saying that. And to me, again because I hadn’t felt any symptoms with it. I was like well, I mean I don’t feel sick right now so that that was a tough thing to also reconcile I’m saying how sick, can i get how sick Am I willing to get to, to avoid induction, you know what I mean. And so that was something to that after, after the whole experience that I had to go back and reconcile because I’m like, you know, maybe I could have gone a couple more days and I would have gone into labor naturally. You know, I have no idea, and I won’t ever know, and but again, that’s just something that you have to say, You know what I made the best decision for with what I had
P: if you do any research about preeclampsia. Oh, you absolutely made the right choice because you want to avoid that at all costs so
L; well and yeah, I know.
P: So that, kudos to you for making that hard choice because I think there is a disconnect when you can’t feel it, to say like, yeah, what do you got, what exactly is going on here because, in part because of pregnancy you feel so much right yeah, and yes, a little kick and move and so, so, but he didn’t give you like blood pressure medication it just went down on its own.
L: No, it did okay, yes. Yeah, so I, I went in for a checkup, about a week or so after having him. And because like it was still elevated, but it wasn’t high enough for them to say, we need to put you on blood pressure medication they really just keep monitoring it and if it goes back up, then we might need to consider medication, but it didn’t end up doing that and it stayed down and
P: good okay good, so that’s being managed and then, new, new baby comes home and how baby comes home, how’s that.
L: Oh. Can I curse. Okay. Can I curse?
P: yes you can
L: It was just a complete mindfuck, and just, I tell people that I felt like I got hit by bus. And I think that that was probably partially the sleep deprivation. Yeah, but, like, having going from simply taking care of yourself and nurturing your marriage to having a tiny fully dependent, human, leaving you 24-7 and having your world changed from revolving solely around you to revolving around keeping this infant child alive. It was a lot.
P: Yeah, it’s a dramatic change right it’s a
L: completely dramatic and nothing can prepare you for it. Again, this is something that is inspired me to become a postpartum coach because while nothing can prepare you for it. the way that our society is now set up is completely not supportive of new moms, especially in that fourth trimester, we are left alone. There’s the saying that takes a village to raise a child. Literally, it does because in those first three months, you need so much outside support, but the way that we now live separately from each other, it really, it doesn’t warrant that luckily my mom is very involved, and so she did stay with us for about a week after we had the baby, but once she went back then it was just me and my husband for a week, and he had only had off for two weeks and so I was left alone with a two week old.
P: Yeah,
L: and it was my first and I was like, it was insane, and then after that, you know, breastfeeding was hard, I watched one breastfeeding video of like how to get the baby to latch. Before I had him, and I knew I needed help, but I was in such a, I was in such a mental state that like literally just trying to figure out who to ask help from was overwhelming.
P: Yeah. that’s fair
L:. So I now with new moms, I’m like, go ahead and research lactation consultants in your area, know who they are, so that way you know like you have someone to reach out to my son had issues with latch and also again with the dramatic change. I was like, I don’t want to say I was unwilling but it was just like, oh my god you want to eat again, like, Can I sleep, you know, and so I would try and stretch it out as long as I could just try and like, get some extra sleep you know like, even another 15 minutes. And so I think that by the time that I would end up start feeding him, he would just be angry, and then he had already had issues latching and then it was extra hard, so we were using a nipple shield by like week four or five, I was exclusively pumping because he would just not even latch at all.
We got back to it and we ended up nursing for 15 months, but I really had to fight through it and sometimes I look back on that and I’m like, did I sacrifice my mental health, for, for nursing.
P: Yeah,
L: because I probably did the weirdest thing happened to me around, probably week three, or four, I started getting kind of like a rash on my thighs. and I just thought maybe it was from like having the Boppy constantly on me that maybe it was like heat rash or something, and it spread down my legs like kind of the inside of my legs like spread up on my stomach around my stretch marks. And then around my, my boobs, and I’m like, Why in the world and it was so itchy. And so I did some research and the closest thing that it that it came to was the PUPPS rash, so I don’t know if you’ve heard of,
P: Np, what’s that,
L: basically it’s a rash that usually happens to pregnant women in their third trimester if they’re going to get it. And so because it’s most common during pregnancy. You know, I called my doctor about it I’m like I think that this is what it is, and they’re like, No, that’s not it. And like, I didn’t even go in I just call it was like I have this rash and I’m like, oh you know it’s just hormones.
It ended up going away, but like, having to deal with sitting there holding your kid, while like your boob itches your stomach issues your leg itches, and feeding him, and then, like, trying to wrap your mind round like actually taking care of yourself, and taking care of baby, it was just like one more thing to have to take care of myself after going through weeks of changing my own diapers along with my, my child’s diapers,
P: yeah, yeah, that sounds like, that sounds like too much, but it sounds like it was a lot.
L: It was a lot.
P: I remember feeling like it was a lot to have to feed myself, I was like, How is this possible, why do I
L: can you please just be okay with me laying you down for five minutes so I can eat too. Yeah,
P: yeah, well so it sounds like you have another, you guys eased into something more manageable.
L: I probably went back to work. I ended up developing postpartum anxiety. So that took months to really, I identify and come to terms with, and then get help for, and by that time it had been, you know, kind of stewing in our marriage and so we really did have a really tough time my son’s first year, both of us, you know, kind of individually and then together as a married unit, that’s just one more thing that has inspired me to, to help women through that time because I think it’s something else you, again, going back to mainstream media you see women going to the hospital, have a baby look deeply into their husband’s eyes, you know, it’s this magical moment. We’re going to be this beautiful family, and then you flash forward a couple months and it’s like everything is beautiful and lovely and. And that’s not how things are.
P: Does it just make you laugh to hear. We’re gonna have a baby to save the marriage.
L: Oh god.
P: Oh, yeah, hard to imagine how that works right.
L: Yeah, and I’ve done again because I take some of this, you know, I take my full experience to what I offered to to the women that I work with, and one thing that I’ve learned through my research is that one in five couples will separate in the first year of baby’s life.
P: Yeah, it’s hard. It’s really hard. Yeah,
L: which is really interesting because one in five women suffer from postpartum depression, or a postpartum mood disorder, and honestly that statistic is probably higher those are women who actually end up reporting it, I see a bit
P: it’s probably more common. Yeah,
L: for sure because again we’re, we, we tend to hold those kinds of things in questioning whether or not we’re normal or if we admit it. Does that mean that I’m a bad mom and all of those things all those thoughts swirl around in our head and end up making that whole experience just even crazier.
P: I’ve talked to so many people who say, I didn’t realize I have postpartum depression or anxiety either until the second birth, or until many years later and I wonder if they have in their mind, this image that this should be fabulous and I should be loving every minute. So, it’s just me, right, which is not the case.
L: Okay. And I think too, you know I was just thinking about this the other day so I’m so glad that you said that, you know, my son had some latching issues right like we had some, some breastfeeding issues, but like, he wasn’t colicky, he was a happy baby. He was a pretty easy baby. Things were pretty good. You know, we’re financially stable, and I think that for a lot of women it’s that I should be grateful, I should feel this way, I should I should I should, and we should all over ourselves, and end up just spiraling, because we’re trying to convince ourselves to be better be happier be whatever. And we just can’t.
P: Yeah,
L: and we need support, but then again we’re like well I should be able to do this, I had a baby, I decided to have a baby. I should be able to do this. And the reality is that, well, yes, you absolutely can. You have the power to do it, but gosh there’s so much power and asking for help.
P: Yeah, yeah. Yeah, that’s a great point and a really useful thing to hear because I think postpartum depression is so common and anxiety is so common that it would make sense to have a much better developed network kind of around you.
L: Yeah, no period.
P: Yeah, well I’m glad you guys made it through that point and then was it hard to decide to have another or that point you were saying,
L: we, we didn’t know I mean we knew that we wanted at least two. Yeah, but when the day we found out we were pregnant with my second, we literally looked at each other and we were both like, we probably could have waited another year like we really we weren’t ready to start planning on it, and you know at that point was you it was this past June, that we found out we probably found out on father’s day that we were pregnant, you know, so we’re still living in a COVID world, and at that point too I had made the decision to not go back to my teaching job. This upcoming school year. And so there were a lot of outside transitions happening, you know things happening that we really wanted to get a little bit more accustomed to, before bringing a new baby in but he was like nope I’m, I’m coming, I’m making an entrance, we just ended up having to make it work.
P: So what was that pregnancy easier did you go through the exact same kind of route of the first one, or was it unique.
L: No, I’d say honestly it was maybe even a little bit easier, just because I knew what to expect.
P: Yeah.
L: The only thing that was different and a little bit more difficult was that I was exhausted, especially my first trimester that the exhaustion really hit me. And I would just sleep. And my husband was fabulous and he has taken our toddler under his wing and luckily he is such a daddy’s boy, so he doesn’t mind it at all, sometimes doesn’t even notice that mommy isn’t around because he’s like all about Daddy, the cooler. I guess cooler thing about being pregnant. The second time around was involving my toddler in it. And so like when my belly really started showing we would talked to him a lot about his brother, you know there’s baby in there there’s brother, and this is that he’s developing his language as well. And since he’s repeating us and we decided on a name because we ended up doing a gender reveal with this, this pregnancy, and so we, we talked to him a lot about his brother so as soon as his brother came, he knew exactly who he was, and there were no question that it was really really lovely and then credible thing was that like, he literally came out of my belly and then is now an actual baby. And my toddler didn’t question it at all. I was like, Yep, this is Sutton. Here he is. So that was really really cool.
P: How was your blood pressure for the second one,
L: do we were really fine, I didn’t have to be induced I ended up going into labor naturally which was different, you know, and I had I had expectations, this is the hard thing about birthing for a second time, is that, with the first time you have. You have no idea what to expect. The second time you have an experience to relate it to, but really you shouldn’t because every experience is unique.
P: Yeah,
L: but it’s really hard and I was in my head, almost the entire time just trying to almost like set a timeline for myself of like, okay, like basically when is this going to be over. So I ended up laboring at home for almost 24 hours, and then finally I was just like, we have to go into the hospital because I know that we have to be there. And I think that that kind of mental block, honestly was kind of stalling my labor a little bit, so
P: do they do they take you when you came. I found
L: Yes, yes, they did were in triage for a couple hours because I had to have a COVID test, so that was obviously different as well. You know the whole experience of like going to the hospital in labor like that, that was all first time experience for me, we hadn’t done that with my first and again I think that there was an element of fear there for me. Maybe not fear but just like anxiety is like, again the unknown.
P: So I had a similar to you and that my first one was a planned C section because I had all issues, and the second one I had planned another C section but she came early. And I remember going to the hospital thinking, is this how people do it This is nuts. Yeah, the baby decides and all of a sudden, like,
L: yeah, yeah,
P: that felt sort of crazy to me but that’s how everyone does it right.
L: Yeah, it is how we all do it, and you know what is really crazy so I was lucky in that I was able to take a couple weeks off around my due date and so I was just home, but so many women in our country don’t and I feel like that is a fear of like, am I gonna go into labor at work. Yep. Yeah and I have friends who live outside the US, and they’re like, you know, like, around 36/37 weeks, we start getting our maternity leave and then they have maternity leave for at least three months, if not six, yeah, it’s just like, oh so you don’t even have to worry about your fear of going into labor at work unless your baby’s like premature, right, you know, right. Anyway, yeah, this one, my son decided to come at 40 Almost 41 weeks. So that was different. I, you know carried him for almost two weeks longer than my first, and then again like the mental waiting game or just like is today going to be the day.
P: Yeah,
L: it’s pretty tiring, but, you know, so once we got to the hospital, things did progress a little bit more, and I did plan for a water birth with this child we’ve switched hospitals to a hospital that allows them, but I had to wait for a little while to get into the pool. Before I had actually, you know dilated enough, and because of his position I ended up having more back labor with him and so it was, it was tough. It was a hard labor, the harder part was until I have gotten to like transition, like when you get into transition and you’re doing it without drugs. You just go to this complete other world, really like you have no idea what’s going on around you, you, you know, like when you’re in active labor you’re having those really hard contractions in between those contractions and even during those contractions, you’re still kind of aware of what’s going on around you. Like I remember shushing, the nurse that was in there with us because I’m like, laying on the bed because I had to get fetal monitoring so with this time around to you I didn’t, I wasn’t hooked up to an IV, I can freely move as much as I want to.
This nurse just like talked every time she came in about something she had a story to tell and I’m sitting there like writhing on the bed, and I just put, like, just shut up, please like, Have some respect for the woman in here in pain, and shut up. That was interesting as well that felt really good to just like get that out, you know the other thing too, I just went through like a whole range of emotions with, with this one, I did have a doula you know, obviously I’m surrounded by nurses and my midwife, but they’re all focused on my physical health and recovery. Right, I need someone there that’s specifically there for my comfort for my emotional well being,
once we finally got into our laboring room after triage, I just wanted to get in the shower, but the water in our hospital room wouldn’t get hot. And so, she, she got it warm enough for me and then we get into the bathroom and I get in the shower, and there’s just this draft of air and so I can literally remember just standing in the shower just shivering and contracting, and it was just so disappointing and so she got me out. She wrapped me in like a warm sheet. And I just looked at her, I was like, I think I need to cry and she’s like, just let it out and I just like wailed I mean I just wailed, and that was not something I did my first is not something that I antcipated and I’m like why am I having this kind of emotional release you know like I’m not upset about having a baby, now looking at is like, just like that disappointment in the moment and also just like when is it going to be over like I’m just so I’m ready. And I asked for an epidural again with this one and it’s ended up, he, he was ready to come again. And so didn’t end up having an epidural, again, and I didn’t have a waterbirth either I did end up. I labored in the birth pool for probably three or four hours, and again by that point, once I got into the tub. I just completely zoned out, and the, my favorite thing that I had this birth as well, was an iMac, I wore an iMac almost the entire time once we got into our burger and just keep it completely dark, so that way I was not distracted with what was going on, and that was lovely.
P: that’s a good idea. Did it take a lot of pushing with this one, or he was also no.
L: I kind of did, but I also kind of listened to my body a little bit more. And what’s really funny is I looked at my doula. I was about nine and a half centimeters, and the midwife had checked me and she’s like, I think you’re actually the 10. She’s actually talking to my husband, my Doula at this point because, again, I was just completely like out of it, like, let’s just get the baby out, however we can.
I had an inflamed cervical lip. That was kind of preventing a little bit of the dilation, or just kind of the general space in my cervix and I think because of that interior lip like my midwife was really really involved with kind of helping the baby out like her fingers and her hands were like all in there, kind of like stretching to make sure that the baby was coming out,
I think I pushed for like 15 minutes with him, he came out pretty, pretty quickly but his shoulder did get stuck a little bit and so again, with the positioning, that was probably the best position for the midwives to be able to kind of work with that he came out he was, he was good. We were good, I tore a lot less with him and go had to have just a couple little stitches with him and with my first I did have a decent tear I had like a second degree tear so that contributed to my recovery as well with my first, and with my second, you just kind of have that experience, and I think sometimes with our with our first we tend to push ourselves a little bit more because we haven’t been through it with my second I was like I’m going to do everything possible to stay in bed as much as I can. And so I really just set up, you know, for sleep space for him. I set up a little diaper caddy on my nightstand, and I, and I told my husband like my goal is to stay in bed as much as possible, and I’m going to need some help with other things.
P: Yeah, that sounds like a lot was learned between one and two.
L: Definitely, definitely.
P: And the fourth trimester, breastfeeding and all that was easier with the second one.
L: Yes, it has definitely been easier. Initially, it was about the same, but I knew this time around so just go ahead and get some help. So we ended up seeing a lactation consultant with him, I think he was only like a week and a half old. When we ended up going because I could tell if he was having some trouble with this latch,
I’ve learned this time around of how to almost put myself first, it sounds a little bit selfish but really it’s not I’ve learned that if I want to be my best for my boys and for my husband, I need to make sure that I’m taking care of myself too. And so that is something that I’m holding myself to more this time around as well.
P: Yeah, that sounds like a super important thing to do, especially in a, in a culture that doesn’t do it for you, right like someone that someone has to be taken care of for you. So what is your older one into now.
L: Everything He just turned to on March 13 And he loves animals, my mom watches him every Friday they have bird feeders out in their backyard, and so he’s been obsessed with birds and birdhouses. Whenever he would build something with blocks, I’d say what what did you make big birdhouse. Okay, but everything was a big birdhouse,
P: two, is a super fun age right there’s so much going on.
L: Yes. And the other thing that has been super funny he’s totally into his brother, I mean, he is not ignoring him, There hasn’t been like, Please take him back. My youngest is seven weeks old, having my husband holding the baby with the toddler around his immediate response is getting upset, you know, he’s kind of feeling jealous, like, and holy even still say now he’s like my Daddy. And I’ll say Sutton’s daddy too, and he started repeating that twos like setting study to like, you know weekend, or he would see my husband holding him and immediately say, Mommy hold him. Mommy hold him like that he please know like this is not your baby It’s mommy’s baby.
P: If you could give advice to your younger self, about this process. What do you think you would tell her.
L: Oh gosh, something that I’ve learned about myself is that I honestly probably struggled with anxiety before having a child and I just didn’t really realize it I thought it was just the way that people operate. I have very perfectionistic tendencies, I came into motherhood with this expectations, hearing the phrase, just do your best, right, just do your best to me when I hear that I interpret that as do it perfectly, like that’s just the way that my brain registers that there is no. Do your best and leave some margin for error. It’s like your best should be perfection. So, if I could go back and I’m still working on this, but this is something that I’ve definitely identified in myself that I hadn’t before that I ended up bringing into my motherhood experience that I think ultimately really led to my postpartum anxiety I was trying to do everything the best that I could and again pushing myself to do it perfectly pushing myself do better, you know, it could be better, I’m not doing a good enough I’m failing, you know, all these things and all these thoughts that were screaming in my head and so my advice to my younger self would be to go ahead and heal from that perfectionism.
P: Yeah, that’s a hard thing to carry.
L: Yeah, yeah
P: that’s good advice. you mentioned that you do postpartum clients services so how can people find you for that.
L: Sure, yeah. Right now you can find me on Facebook, I have a Facebook page, motherhood mentoring, and I also have a Facebook group called motherhood mentoring, you can find me on Instagram at motherhood mentoring but I’m definitely more active on Facebook right now. I helped my clients kind of overcome their overwhelm and anxiety of having to do things the right way, you know, kind of overcoming that perfectionism of motherhood.
P: that sounds awesome. Thank you for sharing your story today.
L: Thank you for giving me the space to do so.
P: Thanks again to Laura for sharing her story. I think her experience highlights the fact that it’s helpful to walk into this transformative period with limited expectations–so much change is afoot and we have real limits on the degree to which we can control any outcomes…If you want to find more about Laura and her postpartum mentoring work, you can find her links in the show notes, available on the warstories from the womb website.
Thanks for listening
We’ll be back soon with another story of overcoming
Episode 32: When the Fourth Trimester is a Bear: Laura’s story
Episode 31: The Learning Curve of Pregnancy & Birth: Ashley
Episode 31SN: The Learning Curve of Pregnancy & Birth: Ashley
Today’s guest used to be a bodybuilder and is now a trainer and the owner of a fitness center and the mother of two kids. I think she’d describe herself as a woman who likes a challenge, and that’s probably a good way to step into the role of becoming someone’s mother.. Different circumstances required her to overcome challenges presented at each step of this process–she originally had trouble getting pregnant, she had a traumatic experience with miscarriage which ramped up her anxiety during the pregnancy that followed, she wrangled with postpartum depression–and each experience taught her something valuable that she was able to use, and from which she grow and developed into a stronger, better version of herself.
Ways to Find Ashley & her Fitness Center and Videos
Facebook page for Heal & Seal https://www.facebook.com/HealandSeal
Facebook page for for mom+me strong https://www.facebook.com/mommestrongllc
To Follow Ashley, go to https://www.facebook.com/ashley.heyl
Rh incompatibility and RhoGAM
https://www.healthline.com/health/pregnancy/rhogam-shot#cost
https://www.acog.org/womens-health/faqs/the-rh-factor-how-it-can-affect-your-pregnancy
https://www.verywellfamily.com/can-being-rh-negative-cause-a-miscarriage-2371474
Low body fat and infertility
https://academic.oup.com/humrep/article-abstract/2/6/521/639220
https://www.mdpi.com/2227-9059/7/1/5/htm
Exercise during pregnancy
https://www.acog.org/womens-health/faqs/exercise-during-pregnancy
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4622376/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6527310/
Autoimmune disease and pregnancy
https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fendo.2019.00265/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 the mother of two girls. Becoming the mother of these two girls was no easy feat…my body was reluctant to cooperate with the grand plan in my head at many points in this process….
This is true also for Today’s guest. She used to be a bodybuilder and is now a trainer and the owner of a fitness center and the mother of two kids. I think she’d describe herself as a woman who likes a challenge, and that’s probably a good way to step into the role of becoming someone’s mother.. Different circumstances required her to overcome challenges presented at each step of this process–she originally had trouble getting pregnant, she had a traumatic experience with miscarriage which ramped up her anxiety during the pregnancy that followed, she wrangled with postpartum depression–and each experience taught her something valuable that she was able to use, and from which she grow and developed into a stronger, better version of herself.
After we spoke I went back into the conversation and added some details about medical issues that came up. I also had the opportunity to get the insights of a really well spoken therapist about postpartum depression and the heavy burden of expectation that is still a regrettably stubborn feature of pregnancy and motherhood.
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.
Ashley: Yes, thank you for having me, my name is Ashley Kates, I live in Lexington, South Carolina, I am a mother to two and I actually own a fitness studio called mommy strong specifically tailored towards women and postpartum women.
P: Cool, so we’ll get into that, but before we get there, let’s talk about the kids. Before you got pregnant, you probably had some idea about what pregnancy would be like, what were you imagining.
A: I think it’s probably what everyone assumes and I think motherhood was the same way for me is you see what videos and movies and such tell you, pregnancy is going to be like it’s glorious. It’s beautiful. You see your friends get pregnant, you see their beautiful maternity pictures. You think it’s nothing but rainbows and butterflies, people don’t talk about the pain, they don’t talk about prenatal depression prenatal anxiety, and you know the physical discomfort the symptoms that I personally do help women with now like the pelvic pain, the vaginal pain the abdominal back pain, stuff like that, I thought it was just like rainbows and butterflies, and they’re just gonna be beautiful and joyful the entire time.
P: Yeah, that seems to be a universal theme right that’s, that’s basically the story we’re fed for sure.
A: Yeah.
P: So, before you got pregnant the first time was it easy.
A: No, my husband and I tried for over two years to get pregnant. We then got pregnant, lost the pregnancy, the baby had passed around seven weeks but I carried the baby until the baby was about 10 weeks, and then I miscarried it or bled the baby out I guess you would say which that is a whole nother thing to talk about is the little information regarding miscarriage and what that looks like for women.
P: Yeah,
A: I was very lucky and grateful that the very next period, I concede my now five and a half year old.
P: Wait, so listen for a second with the miscarriage if you don’t mind. Did you go see the doctor and that’s how you found out, how did that come to pass.
A: So this is a great story, I actually have my very first appointment and they do an ultrasound and I come from what I would consider the more crunchy community, and they’re very on one extreme and they can be in very anti medicine, even things like ultrasound and so it was already sort of like a conflict of emotional interest for me but we went in, and it’s transvaginall, so you’re half naked laying there and the woman was doing and she said I’m sorry, I’m not detecting a heartbeat. My husband and I were like okay well what does that mean, like maybe it’s too early, and I kind of sat there and I’m sobbing and she’s got the wand up me and takes it out eventually she leaves us in there for about a half an hour, they move us to another room, leading us through a back hallway. And the doctor comes in multiple people came in asking me the same question we were there for over an hour and a half,
P: wow
A: said your baby has passed, it’s pretty clear. We can do a DNC right now, and just get it over with for you and us. It’s our first pregnancy, it taken us two years to conceive, we wanted to give our baby a chance maybe I wasn’t as far along as they had a single bed and read stories of that so we gave it a few weeks, I had a horrible experience with the nurse she ended up calling me a few days later and telling me because I was RH negative, if I didn’t get the RhoGAM shot right then and there, I’d probably never have a successful pregnancy, I would have miscarriages for the rest of my life.
P: Okay, to give some context to this discussion, the issue is Rh incompatibility which is a complication of pregnancy that evolves if the mother and baby have different Rh factors in their blood. What’s Rh factor? There’s a marker on red blood cells called Rh factor, and it can be positive if the marker is present, or negative if it’s not, roughly 18% of the population is Rh negative. This issue only arises if the mother’s RH negative baby is Rh positive. That’s the situation Ashley has. If you have this mismatch between baby and mother, you only get a negative outcome if some of the baby’s Rh positive blood gets into the mother’s RH negative bloodstream which can happen for a whole bunch of reasons including a birth during abortion or miscarriage, if the baby’s blood does get into it’s mother’s circulation. The mother’s immune cells view Rh positive blood as foreign and develop antibodies to attack these blood cells, which can wreak all kinds of havoc for the baby,
this mismatch won’t necessarily affect the first baby because it takes some time for the immune system to develop antibodies, but it could affect the health of later pregnancies, if those involve a baby who’s Rh positive. The good news is that there’s a fix for this, you can desensitize the mother’s blood, so there’s no immune system reaction by giving her a shot called rogram.
A: It was terrible
P: Good lord, oh my God,
A: it was terrible. The whole experience was devastating. It was I, you could say it was traumatizing.
P: Yes you could oh my god, I’m so sorry that you guys went through that
I’ve spoken before with a fantastic therapist, Rebecca Sheree from family tree wellness, about the challenges of navigating a miscarriage. And here’s what she had to say well we talked about Ashley’s experience
Rebecca: when you get pregnant, everything kind of opens up, right, we call it the portal in our work here. Family tree wellness because it just cracks you wide open. This whole experience of getting pregnant, trying to get pregnant, grief and loss also really cracks you wide open, you get more raw right and that’s a biological component where mom has to be open in order to connect and attach with her baby. And the flip side of that is that it also lets everything else in too right it’s sort of like you’re kind of porous and we don’t want to cut that off, right, right, we need that openness and I’d even go as far as to say that we need that openness throughout our lives, just so happens that this is when it really comes to fruition. So, it seems like that portal kind of cracked open with her getting pregnant that first time, it’s, it’s a really hard situation and it deserves a lot of warmth and kindness, and the ability to talk about it with somebody who really can listen and be curious with you.
P: So after the nurse calls you do call a doctor and say is this true or what happened.
A: I mean, here’s the thing, anyone who tries to scare you into anything is lying to you. I didn’t appreciate that. And in the back of my head, I didn’t really believe that was true but it did put fear in me that I was doing something to cause my body not to be fertile and this is coming off of two years of infertility, I gave it a little bit of breathing room, but I didn’t leave it for very long. I was more angry that she was that unemotionally intelligent,
P: yeah. Yeah, agreed. And let me ask you another question because we had a hard time getting pregnant too and after a year with no success. We went to the OB for health, he didn’t do that because you’re on the crunchy train.
A: Ah, so. To put it bluntly, I think my husband’s ego was more in the way he didn’t get checked and just kind of believed that it was meant to happen, it was going to happen and I’m just goes by and then you just don’t know all of a sudden two years is gone and there we are,
P: That seems like to me from my experience like you guys are amazing for for going that long because it’s so frustrating every month when it doesn’t work out right so I mean I remember the pile of negative pregnancy tests. So you know I just, I’m impressed that you guys could
like be hopeful.
A: Also I was a national level finger competitor, so I don’t know if you’re familiar with like bodybuilding and stuff. I had competed for about five years, and there when I was at my lowest body fat I was around 10% I stopped ovulating. So we just assumed that my body was trying to figure out how to have a cycle.
P: Just a quick note here, I looked up the relationship between body fat and fertility and a hard time finding papers to talk about body fat and infertility when body fat is too low, but I did find an article from 1987 That said that a person required 17% body fat to maintain a period, and 22% to have quote reproductive ability and the issue seems to be that body fat affects centers of the brain and the ovaries that produce all the hormones that you’ll need for fertility to happen.
A: It was inconsistent that first year that we tried some days would be 30 days. Some days 26 Some days 35 And then that second year it was pretty consistent it was every 29 days almost to the day to the hour. I think we were just
P: that make sense. Yeah,
A: like, take time. My body’s just recovering from five years of that.
P: Yeah, that makes sense. So, you keep trying, despite what this nurse says, and you do get pregnant. Mm hmm. That’s awesome. That’s a happy day in your house I’m guessing
A: it was scary actually I refused to take a test for a few days and my husband forced me to buy the test and to take it because I was afraid I wasn’t emotionally ready to go through. Same thing, but at the same time, I was so emotionally broken from losing our baby. I needed that to feel that life again.
P: Yeah, yeah, that makes sense. So, was the first trimester is just scary or how did you manage that.
A: It was terrifying. Yeah, really excited, but I always had the clock, the qualifier like I’m excited but let’s wait and see. I feel good but, you know, and every time I would go away as you know symptoms come and go, I would you know have crying fits and just freak out I didn’t tell people like I told with my first pregnancy and then we went to the first ultrasound my parents actually drove up from Louisiana, it’s like a 13 hour drive and they just want to be here no matter what the outcome is you, and it was wonderful and there was a little paper just, you know, floating around in there,
P: that’s exciting and very nice, but super nice for your parents to be supportive and to be there, and probably exciting for them right
A: it was their first leaving grandbaby
P: Yeah, yeah.
So how was that pregnancy, once you hit 12 weeks were you more comfortable,
A: I would say for the most part, I sort of let go and just trusted that this was meant to be. I remember I’m a Christian, by the way I remember being in the shower right before my husband forced me to take the test like crying, calling out to God like, why did you do this to me, why is this happening to us, you know, and he said very clearly, Have faith in me, because I have faith in you, you’re going to be pregnant again and it’s going to work, and so I just was like repeated that to myself over and over and over and over again,
P: that sounds like a good way to manage your stress was the rest of your pregnancy look
like.
A: It was really simple, I was very fortunate that I didn’t have any, I mean I had mild nausea here and there, but nothing like women experience. I was working at a chiropractic office I was getting adjusted so I didn’t really I didn’t have any physical pains whatsoever. I stopped exercising so that’s one thing that was very different is because of the, you know, the hormone history of the competition. I wanted to minimize anything in my body that could affect her health. My daughter’s health.
P: when Ashley says she avoided exercise during pregnancy, she’s reacting to her very specific experience with bodybuilding which led to very low body fat and messed with her hormones. I just want to note that the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists recommends moderate intensity aerobic exercise like brisk walking, because it may decrease the risk of gestational diabetes preeclampsia and cesarean delivery
A: it was really simple, really simple, really healthy I had no issues whatsoever I had wonderful cravings like everybody else, but, you know,
P: that sounds great and now take us to the birth, how do you know, today’s the day. How does that unfold.
A: Okay so this is where some of that, like crunchiness comes in so when I had the miscarriage, as I shared with you. You know, it’s, it’s not a it’s not a part of the lifestyle to get the ultrasound, but I needed that to feel confident that my baby was okay, I’d rather know than not know. So we got the regular ultrasounds and moving into birth, I was doing a hospital birth led by OB GYN and nurses, which again is sort of against the crunchy world. And it was, it was emotional conflict there, because in the crunchy world you know people say things like the body’s meant to birth you don’t need medication, it doesn’t on its own. It basically demonizes the medical community makes it seem like if you have a hospital birth, you’re going against your innate design as a woman, and you’re almost abnormal for being in a hospital. So I had fear that I was going to be treated like something that needs to be sterilized or just a robot vagina having a baby, not like a person, and you know, my OB was very friendly. It was very calm, very understanding. Of course they will arise when you say I want to do unmedicated so whatever, and that’s okay. I was a week post, due date, and waddled in they’re like, oh my gosh you’re still pregnant, I was like, yeah, here I am 41 weeks and they were like, Okay, so do you want to get induced today, I was actually asked as early as 37 weeks if I was gonna do so I’m like no, let’s let this baby do her thing. And then my doctor had a heart to heart, he’s like, we can’t, can’t let you go past 42 weeks. So we scheduled induction for week 42 My daughter is so stubborn, and she came two days before that.
P: Oh good, okay good.
A: And so it’s the middle it’s like eight o’clock at night, my husband’s on the back porch with our dogs crack lightning goes, and my mother in law told him, there’s going to be storm and your wife’s going on flavor and I happened exactly that way. First contraction, you’re like, I don’t know if this is really what I’m feeling it’s uncomfortable and you’re like ooh this is actually happening. Ooh, this is weird. And so we kept track of it, we call, and the doctor on call was like well you don’t sound like you’re in pain and I replied, Because I’m saucy that’s because I’m talking in between contractions. So he told us if it’s still, you know, progressing in the next hour. Come on in, so right around 11 o’clock we drove in my contractions were four minutes apart. They checked us in, I was like, I think, five centimeters because they admitted us. And I labored through the night and my contractions slowed when we got there, and I think all in all, right around 6am You know the doctor kept coming in saying things like, you don’t get a trophy for not being medicated, we’re gonna need to give you Pitocin. If you don’t progress further, you know, you’re there’s no way you’re gonna make this not an epidural like a negative talk but I was ready for battle you know cuz you’re taught that in a crunchy community to like fight against them.
P: Yeah but you crunchy community aside, this does not seem appropriate, this is not a caring, you centered situation is what it sounds like.
A: No, and that particular doctor, he was really funny during all of my prenatal appointments. It was kind of a surprise that he was acting like that. All that aside so I had probably been in labor from, like, 830 at night till six in the morning. The nurse comes in, they’re switching shifts and she’s with me till about seven, eight in the morning, no rest. And I’m falling asleep between contractions waking up, contraction falling asleep, and asked her, so how much longer do you think that I’ll be here, based upon the way that I’m progressing your experience or assumed it like the way that my contractions rolling and she’s like probably another eight hours, maybe as many as 12 Well, I’ve had friends with 24,36, 48 hours, labor so I don’t think that’s far fetched at all, you know, look at my husband and I tell him I can’t keep going this way, I really think that it’s time to get an epidural and the nurse suggested getting Pitocin. Because she said it’s not enough pressure to keep get the cervix ripe, dilated enough. My contractions aren’t effective as effective as they would like them to be she’s positive terms. Anyway, and I was like there’s no way in heck, I’m going to get Pitocin without an epidural because those things are a beast, so we’re doing it. She called in the epidural, got the Pitocin epidural around nine o’clock. I took a nap until about 1030 They woke me up, they’re like, Oh, you’re 10 centimeters, it’s time to push, wow, I started pushing, and I looked at the nurse and I was like, What time do you think she’ll be born and she goes, 1115 and she was born at 1114
P: Oh my god. Wow. Thank God you progress so fast.
A: Yeah, I think this shifted my mind a whole lot on epidurals. I noticed that when I was in labor, every time I had a contraction, every part of my body would tense up.
P: Yeah,
A: my like my pelvic floor, my rear my thighs my core, my hands everything. When I got the epidural on my body. Let go. Yeah. And I think that it gave my body permission to let my daughter bear down on my cervix and let it, let my body progress. I really shifted my mindset from thinking that epidurals were this demon to hey there’s a time and a place for them. Yeah, yeah, the time and place for them,
P: especially when you’ve been up all night laboring right you’re just exhausted, like, imagine you haven’t even put your body through the hardest part yet. Right, like, you’re going to need to draw reserves from somewhere so that totally makes sense. Exactly. Did you enjoy the birth? How did that go
A: Yeah, I was like, pushing and I couldn’t feel anything so I’m just doing what I thought memory felt like what it feels like to have a bowel movement this is what it feels like to push out urine so I’m going to try and connect to these sensations and push. And when she came out it was like, Oh my gosh, like I just birthed a baby
P: amazing. And also, I imagine, given your history as like a training person. You’re very kind of connected in touch with your body in a way that you can, you know, move things in a way that you want to.
A: I will say that that experience, transformed my mindset around the, around muscles and led me to where I am today, to where I do work with women with their core pelvic floor, and her postpartum body because so much changes in pregnancy, there’s so much that changes in your body, just in labor, so much that changes just in birth. First year postpartum. I mean it is. I like to say, more women go through in the two years of getting pregnant, and the first year postpartum that a man goes through in his lifetime.
P: Yeah,
A: exponentially incomparable.
P: I bet so. So what was it like when you went home.
A: So, right away when she was put on my chest, something was wrong. Like I could feel that something was wrong
P: wait, with you or with her.
A: Me, I immediately was afraid. I had postpartum depression but I didn’t recognize it. And I didn’t and I didn’t want to admit it because again that’s like, you’re, you’re doing all the healthy things you’re eating right or exercising or getting adjusted you put the oils on or whatever. If you have depression or anxiety, there’s something you’re broken right like that’s not supposed to happen so I didn’t want to admit it.
P: It took this issue to Rebecca know about the pathways to postpartum depression which is how does it develop,
Rebecca: there could be a biological component right after you have a baby, there’s a massive hormonal crash, right, and even like as as far into 48 hours after you have the baby, your hormones are just fluctuating. And so, you know, that is a component and we don’t want to discount that from a psychological perspective, you know, this idea of, oh my gosh, I just completely changed my life, there is no going back. And all of the ideas and messages that I got about what it means to be a mother come rushing it and I mean even right now talking about I can even get chills thinking about that right, it’s powerful, and all of those messages come not just from our own moms and our own families, but from society from what we would call legacy burdens things that are passed down intergenerationally that we have no control over, but somehow they’re in the cells of our bodies, so you know all that comes flooding in when they put that baby on your chest, and it sounds to me like when she said I knew that there was something wrong, that maybe there was some lack of connection, maybe she had some really fearful anxious part of herself that came into to kind of defend her from bonding right because of her previous traumatic experiences because, oh my gosh, what if I lose this one too. That’s so scary.
A: now, she was a she was a good baby. She didn’t sleep till she was two so she was up every one to three hours so she was 18 months old, I bed shared with her because I thought that’s what women are supposed to do, you’re supposed to breastfeed all night nurse on demand, and you sacrifice your sleep and your sanity to be a good mother, Because this is what you’re supposed to do.
P: I talked to Rebecca a little bit about the expectations that are placed on new mothers
Rebecca: we are taught that we have to sacrifice our bodies minds and souls for our kids…sort of my bottom line philosophy about all of this is that if our moms, and our potential moms were held in warmth and kindness and compassion, and the expectations were dropped it all be a lot better off, and that it feels like a really big tall order to ask for that, and that’s like a societal change that needs to happen. You look at other cultures that really put the mom first. And really care for her. After a baby’s born, it is so different, and also after women lose babies, you know other cultures have rituals around that that you know we’re talking about American society Americans really don’t have those rituals unless they create them themselves. And I think that’s equally important, but I just think that, you know, we’re missing the mark. At the very outset of creating families, it’s, it’s like okay, You know we’re not just a vessel for life It’s a privilege and an honor to be able to do that, I mean it’s nothing short of a miracle. Right. But because of that miracle we have to really be held in a way that is just infinitely different from how we’re doing it now, because how we’re doing it now is just putting a bunch of expectations on you should be this certain weight, you shouldn’t gain more than, you know X number of pounds during a pregnancy, you, you know, you should you should you should, And that just creates so much angst and fear inside of moms and, you know, we know that fear inhibits labor, it inhibits bonding, it’s just, it’s not, not a great place to start.
A: I ended up having to quit my job because I couldn’t do it all.
P: Yeah,
A: don’t get me wrong, she was a wonderful baby she was very happy, she very much needed her mom, and what I’ve learned now is that she feeds off my energy so when I’m having emotional mental struggles she does too and so we kind of like tip tap off of each other but for the most part, I mean, it was, it was still wonderful having her, it was just a struggle until that postpartum depression subsided.
P: Well, what I’ve seen is postpartum depression is one in seven women. And the most common side effect of pregnancy, so it can’t be that you’re broken, it must be that it’s hormonal resolution right or something like that.
A: I firmly, firmly believe and this is one of my many soap boxes is that we do not nourish the prenatal body the way that we should or the postpartum body,
P: Yup
A: the prenatal vitamin is not enough, I mean, women that have autoimmune diseases that show up within one to five years having their baby on thyroid issues one to five years after having their baby inexplicably wait one to five years after having their baby adrenal fatigue. It’s not like our bodies are all of a sudden malfunctioning, it’s because we’ve given given given given we literally create in life. Of course our bodies need to be nourished higher than a prenatal vitamins.
P: That’s totally true, as someone with an autoimmune condition. I hear you
So this is a big topic. Hey, the causes for most autoimmune problems can’t be attributed to one thing or another. True that autoimmune disease is a lot more common in women than men. I mean like a lot more common. It’s estimated that 78% of the population with autoimmune disease is female. And in general, one of the drivers of this imbalance is believed to be dramatic changes in hormones, which in turn affect the immune system. So we tend to see more autoimmune conditions in women after puberty and after menopause, and sometimes also after pregnancy. It could be that hormone swings after pregnancy, in conjunction with the stress of a new baby, Lack of sleep and nutritional deficiencies, contribute to postpartum onset, but the world of immunology, is a giant bottomless hole, and we learn new things about immune activity all the time, so stay tuned for more definitive information on this stuff.
So, ultimately, though this is a success story, you just kind of rode out the postpartum depression or did you get help or how was that
A: I did not. I didn’t even admit to it until my husband and I had a very horrible fights, and he asked me, one of the most simplest questions you can ask and it was are you happy, and I realized, oh my gosh, like, I’m not, but it’s not your fault. I have something’s wrong with me, and nothing happened. Like I didn’t take anything but all of a sudden I just felt lighter and then three months later I got pregnant again.
P: Wow. Oh my god, I’m going to be happy all day thinking how easy it was the second time, so thank you for that.
A: You’re welcome.
P: And how was that pregnancy.
A: It was, it was really good. It was challenging because my, we have so much chaos that happened since my daughter was born, my husband got hit by a freight truck in on November, 8 of 2017
P: Oh my god,
A: he had a concussion, they got he was fine but it put us in a really bad place, financially and emotionally, so he had residual effects from the concussion, and we had the two years have been my postpartum depression that kind of pulled us apart. We had like four or five months where we were good and then pulled us apart so I got pregnant, a month after his car accident. It was really good and I was already doing what I do now, so my heal & seal which is the diocese pelvic floor work. So my body physically was really good. I would say that I struggled a little bit with prenatal depression when I was pregnant, but most of that I could attribute to situational things we were going through, but I will say having gone through what I did with my daughter made me realize that I’m not broken. This is I am okay. This is the season of my life, I am worthy of getting help. It’s okay to take medication, it’s okay to break, it’s okay to eat some cookie dough, and not feel like I’m poisoning myself, you know, I can do all of these things, and be okay. And so I think mindset wise it was a lot better and I actually made the decision to hire a doula with that pregnancy.
P: That’s a good call. And so it sounds like the pregnancy was fairly straightforward.
A: I mean I was a little more nauseous with him but never threw up.
P: And then what was the birth like
A: the birth was incredible. Again, I went into it, wanting to have an unmedicated birth but truthfully, like my birth plan at the very top, just said to have a healthy living mother and a living baby I don’t even want to quantify the term healthy I just did living in the time between having my daughter and my son was about three years my daughter was three years and three months when my son was born. I’ve heard at least 200 Different birth stories. And I, I know that a birth can go any way, single direction at any single time at no fault to anyone whatsoever. And I didn’t want to set myself up with the expectations that I did in my first birth I actually didn’t tell many people that I got an epidural cuz I was ashamed of it. And I feel like that clouded the beauty of her birth and I didn’t want to carry expectations into my son um so as long as we were both alive medicated, I’m medicated C section, put under C section I don’t care. We just need to be alive.
P: yeah
A: So, same thing, exact same situation, I walked in at 41 weeks and they scheduled me for an induction and two days later or two days before the induction date my water broke, which didn’t happen with my daughter, and it terrified me a little bit because when you go into labor on your own, you’re not on the clock, but when you go when your water breaks or on a 24 hour clock now because of risk of infection, and I got my birth plan is everyone alive but I didn’t want to have to get a C section I didn’t have to. Mostly because I know what their cover is like for the scar, for any other purpose. Yeah, water rates, I call my doula. I was like I’m peeing myself and it’s not urine I’m pretty sure my water broke she’s asked me questions about color the smell and I was like, I don’t know, there’s just stuff coming out. My husband’s panicking. And he was like, first of all go to the store, buy me some pads because I just walk around like go buy me some pads so he goes and buys me some pads and comes back and I’m in denial that I’m going to have a baby anytime soon, so I’m just walking around the house, packing up my daughter’s bag with you know, snacks and coloring books and crayons and whatever. So, he here, we’re going outside lightning strikes it starts to rain just like the first one. Apparently my husband said he was watching the Miami Dolphins game and lightning struck as my Waterbrook
P: Oh my, God
A: I know. Go figure. So they’re outside the car he’s yelling. Are you coming or what and my first contraction had and it is world, different than an unwanted broken contraction, and I’m like gripping on to the banner or banister on our porch and he’s like, Well, what are you doing I screamed. I was like, don’t you think call me This is horrible. And it goes away like I’m so sorry. Oh, it’s probably gonna happen a lot, just forgive me and so I get the car sitting on like a stack of towels. Driving in. So this is three o’clock Waterbrook around 233 o’clock we’re heading there we get there, I’m having contractions upon each other, the doula met us there, I can’t get a foot walking without another contraction she’s squeezing my hips and waters falling out with me. They don’t even ask me questions, they just bring me a wheelchair and bring me right back and I’m so grateful. So we’re in there. And it’s interesting, my five year old daughter’s there I don’t mind her being there and my husband’s uncomfortable with it I think it’s beautiful for her to see, what birth is so that she doesn’t have fear, and yeah, 30 years when she has a baby, wherever she has a baby. And I was laboring unmedicated and I did great. My contractions were really intense. They lasted, I think over a minute and
P: oh wow.
A: When I got there I was at seven centimeters so I was pretty good. Oh, I mean I went from like two at my appointment to seven and I’m just, I’m gripping the handles and sitting there, I’m breathing through it, everything’s fine and then they come in and say, you know, we’re not getting a good heart rate on your son, can we do, whatever it’s called, I was like, what does that mean, and they’re like an internal monitor, I was like, does that mean you have to go up to my vagina. She said, Yeah, I was like, No, laying down was painful for me I wanted to sit up and
P: so I think what Ashley Kate is talking about here is called a fetal scalp electrode, it’s an internal monitor that you can use after your water’s broken. If your cervix is dilated enough, and it’s a small clip that’s placed on a baby’s scalp to directly monitor the fetal heart rate.
A: The doctor comes in and says, Listen, your birth plan is everyone alive but we don’t have a heart rate on and we need to do this and I was like, okay, so I waited for the break lay down, it was horrible. They inserted it, I sat back up I was able to get back in the zone and I was fine, then they’re, they’re like tugging on the cord and they’re talking, and apparently it wasn’t working so to do to get to. They laid me down sat me up, and that one wasn’t working so now they’re half there’s like six people in there and it’s starting to break my concentration, and so they’ve done it twice now.
P: Yeah,
A: third time they tell me that they need to reposition it and I was like, no, no, no, like this is torture so they lay me back down, which is fine, I mean I was just rebutting to pray that the gods of the world would just not make me do it again but I had to. So I lay down at this point, they’re like, holding my leg up, trying to take the other one off, well then I start having the ejection reflex, and I’m pooping myself.
P: Okay, this is what I think is going on here, the fetal ejection reflex is also called the Ferguson reflex and happens when your body expels the baby without pushing. There’s a hormone feedback loop that’s engaged during birth, oxytocin is released in bursts in the brain in the body, and it makes the uterus contract, the pressure of the baby, the birth canal stimulates the release of more oxytocin which causes your uterus to contract more and push the baby further down the birth canal, until finally the baby’s born, but the pressure on the cervix and the vagina releases the anal sphincter which can also make you poop. Keep in mind, this is a reflex. So Ashley does not have control over it, but a baby born without pushing does not mean a baby born without pain.
A: and the Doctors like you’re not completely you’re not gonna see I was like I can’t help it I’m screaming.
P: what’s your not complete mean?
A: my, I wasn’t completely dilated I was only enough. He’s like, if you keep tearing down you’re gonna tear your cervix and I’m I can’t like I’m not doing this.
P: Yeah.
A: Yeah. Don’t they clean up my doodle, still on my side, they’re still holding my leg up, husband and daughter have left the room at this point. My doulas with me, and they won’t let me sit back up because for whatever reason they can’t get a good whatever. So I started screaming okay this is it someone fucking helped me and like cutting someone effing helped me, give me an epidural, this is that I’m done, let’s do it so they’ve been gearing up for draw I’m 90 and a half centimeters, and the nurses are like, we can’t get it for you and the doctors like yes we can get like just to get it set me up within 20 minutes I have the epidural, I start to breathe and I feel good. And I look at them and I was like, I’m so sorry.
I’m sorry, and they’re like it’s okay, I was like no, I was crazy, like that’s crazy crazy they’re like it’s okay and I said okay, can the water really thirsty, so they bring me some water and the doctor is like you know what you relax for 20 minutes we’ll come back in and check you and we’ll have a baby and I was like, okay, great, sounds good. So he comes in, and Dude man is ready to go and he’s starting to come out and they lay me back or lay me back, And we get rolling right and I’m pushing. And I can feel pressure. It’s like when you have a really deep pimple and you try and pop it it’s like I could feel the pressure of him, loved it. I can feel him in my belly. So I felt like we were working together versus with my daughter was muscle memory so I knew what I was doing.
And I was pushing, and I think we were like five or six pushes in and the doctor looks at me and says, Listen, if you don’t push this baby out in the next two pushes, we’re gonna have to use the vacuum, and I’m a challenge oriented person and the nurse looked at me, the one I was with the whole time she’s like, Listen, you got this. You’re down, grab your knees, let’s go and I was like, Okay, I was like oh that’s what they’re like yes keep going, I was like, there’s my baby and he came on out and doctor gave him to me it was a totally different experience and with my daughter. It was, I was, I was immediately happier. I was clearer than before. It was totally euphoric, whereas with her it was like, Oh my gosh, what is happening with my leg. Oh it’s a baby here’s my bed like here’s my daughter come in. I thought it was wonderful and then I started thinking like Doctor was kind of reading by telling me that.
so we get three different perspectives on this birth right, I thought it was amazing. I thought he was rude, but I thought okay, like maybe that’s how he talks. It doesn’t matter, like it was one little comment, you know, my husband thought he was wonderful because he took control of chaotic situation and made up happen. My daughter said that he was disrespectful and rude and so now I’m sitting here. My baby, he’s, he’s like, I don’t know, three hours old, and I’m like, what is reality. Like maybe I was just so caught up in pushing that I didn’t realize that I was being mistreated or not, you know, we went, you know, wonderful postpartum the babies slept well I had no pain, no, no real issues to speak of waiting for my appointment and spoke with the doctor and I was like, are we going to talk about the birth at all and he’s like, Well, what do you need. Now I was like well, I have my perspective, my husband has his and my Doula has hers and I kind of want to marry that with what the doctor wrote in the notes to understand what happened, explain my side, and then the doctor said, Well, you know, apparently every time you had a contraction your son’s heart rate decelerated greatly, which is why he was so forceful about getting the monitor, once we got the monitor, we were able to track it yes that was in fact happening. That’s why He gave you the epidural and also why he was telling you so forcibly to push, because when he came out he had the cord wrapped around his neck twice.
P: Wow,
A: that changes perspective, right, Like, is the birthing mother, we sometimes want this gentle, loving experience, but maybe what I needed was to be firmly told because what if my baby had died because that’s right,
P: yeah.
A: Dying delivery, all the time. Yeah, it’s really changed my perspective like, that’s you could have said it softer but maybe not in a moment, you know.
P: Yeah, it’s hard to remember, even though they’re professional adopters are people too and he may have been panicked. Right and that’s his panic voice in the same way that you were yelling at your husband when your body was being squeezed that like an unbelievable force, and it wasn’t, obviously that’s not who you are, it wasn’t really in your control. Maybe he was just responding to the moment.
A: being urgent, Yeah, I have zero trauma from that birth, I know that people have trauma from birth, but I think having those two years of doing my healing seal or three years of doing that program, and hearing all those birth stories made me realize that all these different things happen. And it’s my reaction to it that controls how joyful, the outcome is, aside from medical neglect.
P: Yeah, agree, that sounds like an amazing learning curve, you had between the first and the second, which is not to say the things in the first weren’t difficult, and the experience before that wasn’t super difficult, but it seems like you took all the difficult things from that experience and used them to your advantage to understand like how you could have more of what you wanted in the next one.
A: I agree with you and I think the biggest thing that I realized is that none of it’s in my control.
P: Yeah,
A: I’ve heard of homebirths going awry. I’ve heard of MIS. None of it’s in my control. It’s going to happen the way that it’s going to happen and I think for me as a birthing mother and what I empower all of my pregnant clients is have your plan and have your preferences but make sure that you’re focused on your non negotiables and leave the rest of variables and I mean non negotiable. It’s not like I want to have an epidural or I don’t, but your non negotiables are things that you feel very passionately about like, I want my husband there, or I don’t want to do the vaccines, or I don’t want to do the eyewash or if I need it right then and there, or I want to breastfeed or I don’t want to breastfeed, those things are things that you can control
P: yeah,
A: everything else just happens, and we have to just roll with it, again, aside from medical neglect,
P: it is a it is a challenging experience because my guess is that for most of us before giving birth. There are very few experiences where you have so little control over your own body and sickness may be one example, but outside of like cancer or HIV or something it doesn’t. Yours like pregnancy does, and there aren’t so many people managing you right like it’s a different feeling to have someone else telling you, I’m getting the vacuum.
A: You can’t manage yourself which is why I had the doula. My goal is to try and connect with my baby and feel what my bodies and birth are do that if you can’t like birth a baby and manage people at the same time if anyone in the world could do it, I probably could because I’m a great multitasker but, no
P: yeah I agree, hopefully in the future it will be changed and doulas will be covered by insurance, but they seem like a necessary and necessary person to have on your team in that circumstance, I think, I think for the first birth women don’t understand how compromised, they’ll be right.
A: Yeah, and I love that it’s an on, not that they’re not emotional with you, because my Doula was one of my best friends, but she’s not as emotionally invested in the birth as my husband and I are he acts more on anxiety and fear, I’m acting out of pain and fear. She’s acting out of rational thought she can see it she’s in other words, she, she has perspective, she has a calm tone, you know, it’s someone that is more closely affiliated to me than the doctor or the nurse that I am just meeting, typically for the first time, you know, so I think it’s huge, it’s a huge comfort level I told her that she was wanting stability, like she was just a pole of stability for me full time.
P: That’s awesome. So what are your kids into now.
A: My five and a half year old is very girly. She’s very prissy but she’ll also get very dirty with you she loves digging in the dirt, and my two and a half year old is everything, boy. He likes cars and trucks and dinosaurs and dirt, and he is aggressive and he loves to climb and jump. Oh my gosh, he is just a knight,
P: that’s fun. That’s a fun age and then he probably sounds very busy.
A: Oh yeah.
P: Tell us about your business and how that is related your experience.
A: Yeah, so after, like I said I came from the crunchy community and I found that there was a lot of cattiness between women and motherhood. You know when you’re working as a professional, you kind of just pay attention to your job, you know, I didn’t have a ton of friends I didn’t socialize much how to when I became a mother and stop working. I socialize and I found women were competitive and negative with one another. I found that you’re either vaccination anti vaccination, mostly anti closely breastfeeding bottle feeding, Christian non Christian liberal, conservative, tall, short, fat, skinny, all this, it was stupid to me, because here I am struggling with postpartum depression. I just want to get through the day.
P: yeah
A: bEating up in the little for who I am. So I have this vision of having a facility where women could come and take care of their bodies physically, but in an empowering way not like you’re that you need to lose weight but like let’s get stronger so that you can play with your kids, and the healing field was really the first step to that so healing field. One of my friends was walking through the zoo with me and told me that she her vagina felt like it was gonna fall out. And she’s like, I have a single diastasis recti you’re good with muscles figure it out, I was like okay, challenge accepted me about six to eight months but I created a program how to test group, and then launched it and I then me, I’ll say God, God gave me the information but lives have been changing for the past four and a half years from this program. Women who felt like their core would never feel strong again back pain goes away, and women avoiding surgery, pelvic pain going away prolapse is going away and continents going away.
P: Oh wow.
A: In, yeah, in Canada, it’s actually really easy to fix. By the way,
P: Please tell me that you have like an online presence so people who don’t live in South Carolina can reach you.
A: Yes, so I have a Facebook page and I also have an Instagram for both humans and the studio which is called mommy strong. And the healing seal I have, I can do zoom sessions with people in person sessions and then I have an online vault where you can purchase videos that teach you how to do the techniques.
P: Super cool. And actually this is an amazing story and I’m so grateful to hear it. Thanks so much for sharing it. Thanks so much for coming on the show today.
A: Well thank you really thank you for giving me the chance to help empower women.
P: Thanks again to Ashley for sharing her story and to Rebecca for sharing her insights about the burden of expectations around pregnancy and motherhood, and about postpartum depression. One thing Rebecca mentioned was that the current estimate for the frequency of postpartum depression is now thought to be 1 in 5, and according to some counts, 1 in 3 women which is obviously ridiculously common and the fact that these numbers may be tricky to pin down because women aren’t directly reporting on their experience with it suggests that we need a new way to manage this….
I will put all the links to Ashley’s facebook page for her studio and her videos in the show notes which can be found at the War Stories from the Womb website.
Thanks for listening.
We’ll be back soon with another inspiring story.