Episode 68: One Woman’s Experience with Recurrent Miscarriage: Eileen’s Story, Part I
Episode 65SN: To Magazine, or Not to Magazine: Corinne’s birth story
Few of us enter pregnancy and delivery with a crystal clear picture of what the experience will be like the first time. In some ways, this makes sense, given that everyone’s experience will be unique in certain ways, depending on their health, their age, their partner, their history…but the distance between the narrative today’s guest received from her mother and her actual experience can only be measured in lightyears….to be fair to her mother who gave birth in the 50s, it was a very different time in maternal care…but carrying this version of the story among others can have real consequence, if not for how her own delivery developed, it has the potential to affect how she understood her own experience.
You can find Corinne’s work here, here, and here
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. Few of us enter pregnancy and delivery with a crystal clear picture of what the experience will be like the first time. In some ways, this makes sense, given that everyone’s experience will be unique in certain ways, depending on their health, their age, their partner, their history…but the distance between the narrative today’s guest received from her mother and her actual experience can only be measured in lightyears….to be fair to her mother who gave birth in the 50s, it was a very different time in maternal care…but carrying this version of the story among others can have real consequence, if not for how her own delivery developed, it has the potential to affect how she understood her own experience. Let’s get to her story.
P: Hi, Thanks for coming on the show. Can you introduce yourself and tell us where you’re from.
Corinne: Sure. My name is Corinne O’ Shaughnessy. I am not really from anywhere but I’ve I’ve lived in New York City the last 30 plus years but I’ve been living in Mexico for the last six months.
P: Wow, that’s fine as your Spanish.
C: It’s not nearly where I’d love it to be. But it’s definitely better than when I arrived.
P: That’s awesome. Wow, I’m totally jealous. Yeah, so we’ll talk about the family that you have created. But let’s also talk about the family you came from. So you did you grew up with siblings?
C: I did. I am a I’m the seventh child. So I’m the youngest. Yeah,
P: wow.
C: Yeah.
P: That feels like an accomplishment in itself. Growing up with how many siblings did you say i This is the kind of family I want. I want to have a lot of kids.
C: You know, I knew from a very young age that I definitely wanted children. I definitely knew that seven was a little much, but I had hoped for three or four.
P: How many years between all of you are you guys close together?
C: It was very, very, very close. Yeah, all seven. We’re about two years apart.
P: Wow. Yeah.
P: That’s seems kind of awesome. Was it chaotic? Or was it awful? Like,
C: it wasn’t so awesome. I would love to say that it was but my mother there’s a line and Hannah and Her Sisters. Like my parents loved having children. They weren’t very much interested in raising us. That’s kind of what that would explain my family as well.
P: How many what’s the gender? Right?
C: Yeah, that was a difficult thing to there were five girls that a boy than me. Another girl. So yeah.
P: Wow, that sounds like a busy house.
C: Yeah, it was definitely busy. Definitely.
P: So because you’re the last child, it seems like you don’t get to see your mother being pregnant.
C: No, definitely didn’t definitely did not.
P: So before you got pregnant, what ideas about pregnancy did you take to that event?
C: Well, my mother, interestingly, had multiple sclerosis. And after she had her second child, the doctor said don’t have any more. So then she had more
P: I’m also an autoimmune a member of the autoimmune club, but not that long. Okay. So some autoimmune conditions are made better by pregnancy and some are made worse.
C: Well, that was the thing. She felt much better when she was pregnant. Yeah. So she had very fond memories of being pregnant. And also, this was the 50s for the most part when she was pregnant. I was born in 60, the two oldest in the late 40s. But the whole you know, that’s when they still told women to smoke, so you wouldn’t gain weight.
P: Wow,
C: have a drink. No problem. My mother left martinis. So pregnancy was a whole different experience for her
P: God that’s super interesting, though, right? It’s totally different. Totally different. I interviewed my mother who’s about to be ad for the Thanksgiving episode. She was talking about how there was literally, I think her pregnancies with us which were in the 70s were the cusp of technology.
C: Yeah.
P: So for example, like there’s no pregnancy tests, so you know that you’re pregnant, because you don’t get your period again for a while. Right, right. Same thing.
C: Right. Exactly, exactly. It’s true.
P: So did you think pregnancy would be easy based on your mother’s experience?
C: I did and what was a little bit more shocking is that I thought birth would be easy, because I’m not kidding you. She told me she used to get very angry when there would be a show on TV and there’d be a woman giving birth either in the next room or you see their face, screaming and yelling and sweating. She’d go oh, it’s not like that. It’s not like that. I was reading a magazine When I gave birth to you. I went in thinking, well, if my mom who was not physically strong at all, had no problem, then this is going to be you know, maybe not a piece of cake, but I’ll certainly I’ll certainly be okay.
P: So before we get to your birth story, have we circled back with mom to say did you have ether or what what were you doing that made it?
C: I think she was knocked out. I mean, I mean, she was reading a magazine. I don’t know maybe or they certainly numbered from the waist down or something. But it also didn’t really portend well for how excited she was to have me in this world…
P: I bet it was a really important issue.
C: It’s like, wow, okay.
P: So that’s very funny. It’s a very interesting story to bring the pregnancy. Did you did you get pregnant easily?
C: Yeah, we actually, we weren’t trying. We were married and we wanted to have kids someday, but it was a little bit of a surprise.
P: So good. So at least that part’s easy check. Oh, yeah, that was super easy. And then what’s the pregnancy like? Is that also kind of straightforward?
C: It was straightforward. The the first three months I had just started teaching at a Bronx middle school. So I was exhausted beyond what I knew exhaustion existed. Like, I would come home and think I’m gonna grade some papers and I would pass out and like literally make up in a pool of drool. Yeah, that was that was something but by the mid point of the pregnancy, I felt I had a little more energy and I was very lucky. I didn’t have like throwing up or nausea stuff. Certain smells I didn’t love. But I was very lucky.
P: That’s awesome. So I know we’re going to talk about the birth so so let’s go to the day that your child was born. How do we know today’s the day like what Oh, and what did you What birth we were imagining you’re going to be reading a magazine?
C: No, I did not imagine that. But I imagined one with no drugs. Okay. Would you know because I had midwives. I was very fortunate to just accidentally sign up for a an OB GYN who used midwives. And I actually never even met my OB GYN because you only met her. If you had problems if you didn’t have problems you just stayed with the midwives. So I they had talked to both my husband and I a number of times about what your options are when you go into labor and all that sort of thing. And I was like, Oh, I’m gonna be fine. I’m no drugs. I’m natural. It’s all gonna be great. yeah
P: And so what happens is the day that your child is born,
C: so the day he was born, I had gone to pee was at this point. It was 10 days past my due date.
P: Wow.
C: And I had gone to the doctor the day before my midwives, and when I was sleeping, everything looked fine, but nothing is started yet. And I just I’ll never forget the receptionist giving me an appointment for the following week. I can’t go another week. Are you kidding? She’s like, Well, no. So the following day at night, I was crawling into bed. My husband was out Christmas shopping. This was right before Christmas. And I was in bed reading a magazine and liquid spurted out from between my legs and I thought oh great, my waters broken because I had the book What to Expect When You’re Expecting and I read that religiously, like over and over again.
And I went to the bathroom and I was bleeding. And I looked that up and they’re like very dangerous. Call your doctor immediately and I was you know, obviously first child my mother was actually came down to be with me, which was great. And my husband had just gotten home and I think as soon as the liquid shot out, he’s like, you know, the midwives told me to get my rest so he went to sleep right away and I read that. So I called my midwife and she just talked to me and she said, I need to talk to you for a while I’m here your breathing. And she did everything by by listening to that. She goes you know, I think you’re okay. We don’t know why sometimes women bleed, but I think you’re okay. So just try to stay home, relax at home. It’s much easier there.
P: So how do we feel about this? Because if I’m bleeding 10 days after my due date, and someone says it seems like you’re fine. I’m gonna need more than that.
C: I was totally panicked. My mother and my husband actually had very similar personalities. They were both like, well, with the midwife says, you know, and they both went to sleep and I was panicking by myself. And then I I started to have the labor pains and those were like by the third labor pain, literally, I was like, Oh, I’m going to need drugs, and I’m going to need really strong ones really quickly. So I called my midwife back and I said, I’m in labor and she again, she talked me through it. She’s like, stay home stay home. I was like no, no, I really think I’m going to come in. And I woke my husband and my mother up and neither of them moved very quickly or thought anything was going on and we’re kinda like, yeah, you know, well, doesn’t she want it? And I was I was the one it was like, I gotta get to the hospital. And so we did we went to the hospital. Yeah,
P: I’m on fire just listening. So I just I can’t even imagine, you know, someone moving slowly around me in that in what should be a fire drill?
C: Exactly. That’s what I was thinking. Absolutely.
P: So when you get to the hospital what happens?
C: So I got to the hospital, and by that time I was literally like drugs. I need drugs. I need drugs right away.
P: Corinne has written about this aspect of her birth experience, this part where she’s trying to manage her pain. Her piece is called apology and it’s sort of a love letter to her late husband. I thought I’d include an excerpt here to more fully flush out the change in her state of mind. So this is what she writes. I don’t even take aspirin. I told her midwives. Susan. I’m totally gone with natural. You, Susan and I were reviewing the drug options available while giving birth. The natural childbirth though Drugger was safest. For the baby. But not so easy on the mothers isn’t said not so easy for other mothers. I thought I’ll be fine. I was different my other girlfriends called when there were no men to help him move from dorm to rented van or apartment to apartment. I was clearly descended from peasant stock, not royalty. Some women opt for a painkiller like Demerol take the edge off. The mother still feels the contractions but it’s distanced Susan continued. distanced please try to make sense Susan I thought if you still feel pain, what’s the point? And then she cautioned, it can slow the contractions prolonging labor. Okay then really what’s the point? I’m going with natural I repeated. I don’t want to do anything that may harm the baby. I had a terrible bicycle accident a decade before I’ve been pedaling quickly home from a maids job and foolishly let my squeegee get caught and my front tire. I don’t remember falling or where I’ve been all day. I remember being aware I was sitting in the street blocking traffic. I knew blood was gushing from my face and I remember thinking stand up you’re causing a scene just get home. But I couldn’t find up. The doctors in the emergency room stitched up my face and told me I was in shock and had a deep concussion. How much worse could giving birth the I thought I says continue to explaining possibilities. I just want you to know all your options beforehand, Susan continued. You can also choose an epidural where a needle is inserted into the mother’s spine. It numbs her completely from the waist down. You knew how I felt about needles. An epidural was not on the table. I’m going to know drug route I announced again.
C: And she was like Well alright, we’ll give you a shot. We’ll hook you up to an IV. I’ll give you a shot of Demerol, but we really want you to stay on your feet. Well this was like 11 o’clock at night I just started to go to sleep for the first time actually by then it was about one morning and I was exhausted. I was like I need to lay down. So I laid down for a while and she gave me a shot at Demerol and I’ll never forget a woman came in you know people keep coming in the room to take information and she says What’s your job? And I was like, Well, I’m a teacher. And as the demo went through my veins I was like and I’m going to tell my kids don’t do crack do Demerol because it’s amazing. Because I was like so like I just remember the sensation of I’ve got to get out of my body. I have to get out of here. This body is not working for me anymore. It was just that like sticking your hand in a flame. It was like you have to get it out. And the Demerol took that Panic Away, which was amazing. And then I was I kept bleeding so they brought in a doctor because everyone else was a midwife to do a sonogram. And it was so interesting because as soon as a doctor walked in the whole mood and feeling in the room changed. But he did a sonogram. He said everything looks fine, you know we don’t need to do anything, even though they didn’t know why I was bleeding. And so I did that for a couple of hours. And then the demo wore off and my midwife came in and she goes you’re not dilated enough. You have to stand up you have to start walking around and I was just like, light and my husband picked me up held me up and we just kind of slow danced to to I Love Lucy reruns on the TV. I remember that. And I was so exhausted and I just kept I remember I kept biting his shoulder, because he said squeezed my hand but I didn’t have this strength. I didn’t realize how much strength it takes to be in pain.
P: yeah
C: And it was just debilitating. So when I was biting him he kind of was like he said to the midwife Do you have a towel and he tried to put a towel on his shoulder and it’s like the towel and do it. I didn’t want to bite into a towel I needed his flesh and I remember sinking to the ground and just having my arms around his ankles and say I can’t do this and I was screaming for an epidural at that point and my midwife was like oh, just another 45 minutes but thank God in like, I don’t know how many more minutes I finally found felt the urge to push and once I could push everything was you know, everything was fine. It wasn’t easy, but it was way better than just being in labor and those horrible pains.
P: So you ended up not getting the epidural.
C: I didn’t get an epidural. I had one shot of Demerol, but I literally spent the whole time thinking, why isn’t the entire world made up of single children? I was just like no one in their right mind would ever do this again ever.
P: But but you have more than one child.
C: I have two
P: Okay, so we’ll get to the second one but so the birth you’re successful with the birth,
C: I was successful, no complications. My mother was there she was able to cut the cord. And she did say to me later, I didn’t go through anything like you went through. So I’m thinking she definitely just was given a ton more drugs and that was also back when they kept mom’s in the hospital for like a week.
P: Yes, yeah, I definitely remember reading about moms who considered the hospital vacation from their kids at home because it’s not taking care of you so I can see why there’s like a rosy glow around that experience.
C: Yeah, exactly. Exactly.
P: So what’s the fourth trimester like when you get home? Is that smoother?
C: Um, like the recovery? Yeah. The that was interesting. The hormone part. I’m not a crier in general. But I was just I would sob. like I’d get exhausted. And my husband would say, well give me the baby, go lie down. And I’d be like, I can’t, I can’t have you know, you’ll be so far away. And I would just love her and it was just kind of like looking at myself like what is wrong with you? So I do remember the hormones and crying a ton and also how your whole world changes because now it’s all about protecting this tiny little incredibly vulnerable thing that you love more than you knew love existed. And how are you going to do that? You know, how are you going to protect them from cars that jumped the sidewalk or a bomb left in the mailbox or I remember feeling like physically I was gonna have to do that. And it would figure it out. You know?
P: It does feel like a changed perspective on the world around you. I remember crying when my newborn got wet in the rain. You know, I was with my mom and I was like it’s raining on her and she’s like she couldn’t get wet. That’s like one of her tricks. We’re not so I totally get that feeling. So then how do we get into another one? If the feeling is I’m not doing this again.
C: Because you love that baby so much. You know, and honestly I would have liked to have three or four. So after a while, yes, the pain the thoughts of that pain and the remember you said that pain never ever went away. And I think about it every time literally every time I see a drug addict. I do go okay, I get it. I totally get it. You just need to get out of your body, whatever is causing that pain. You didn’t find a different way, whatever. And then I just adore children and endured being a mom. So eventually, you know, they’re four years apart. So it took a little while not to get pregnant again but to be say okay, let’s do it again. When we got pregnant in it, we didn’t have any problems with that. And then the second pregnancy was pretty much like the first although not quite as bad in terms of exhaustion. I don’t know if that’s nature saying oh, this poor woman’s already got a kid we can’t let her get a as exhausted STI. But yeah, so I made it through without too much trouble with that.
P: And was the second pregnancy and delivery easier than the first because you kind of knew what to expect better.
C: It was and I think my body you know, it’s I feel like it’s kind of like the first time you blow up a balloon. It’s really hard. And the second time it just kind of, you know, does its thing a lot easier. Because I didn’t have any drugs the second time I still you know begged them to kill me and wanted it to be saved the baby just killed me. But this Yeah, so he was he was an easier birth and that although he was the cord was around his neck. So that caused tension and scariness at the very end and they whisked him away the second he was born was first child, I could just just slap them on my belly and I was able to hold them and try and nurse him right away. So
P: were you able to watch the experiences of your sisters does anyone Did anyone else have kids before? You
C: No I wasn’t I was able to get to the hospital after my one of my sisters gave birth but I was not there participating because they were giving birth early 70s when that kind of thing like people weren’t or you know, even husbands, I don’t think yeah, like in the room and stuff. And then my second sister lived in Los Angeles. And I was in on the East Coast. And then she ended up having a terrible like two day laborer. And then eventually they did a C section. So I wouldn’t have been around there for that either. That
P: so it sounds like it sounds like no magazines in the second generation.
C: No, Exactly, exactly. No magazines and no prepared speeches that were like grounding in reality either.
P: Yeah, yeah, that’s interesting. Right? So you went in a little bit blind with what was on TV and what your mother said, which are two very contradictory stories.
C: Exactly. And my Bible What to Expect When You’re Expecting, which was helpful, but you can’t really describe that kind of pain. I don’t think I think it’s very hard for women to understand, at least for me, I I’ve been lucky with good health and whatnot. So this whole idea of thinking I have to get out of my body. Now. That took me by surprise. I really had never experienced anything like that.
P: Yeah, I think I think usually for pain and other difficult experiences, we analogize but I’m not sure there’s any appropriate analogy for childbirth, right. So
C: Right. Right. I agree. I agree. I just can’t describe it. All I could say to men in my life was think about a muscle cramp. And like multiply it by a million. And that’s kind of what a labor pain feels like. Because it is it’s just really hard to explain what happens.
P: Yeah, it is. It is a hard thing to put into words. I totally agree. Yeah. So having had these two experiences, looking back, would you have advice for younger you about maybe how to manage things differently? Or?
C: Yeah, I think I would just, I think I would not have been so much I’m not going to do drugs. I would say if you you know don’t do the whole like, Oh, I’m I’m really strong and I don’t need to, you know, just don’t blame and say yeah, I can use that. And then my midwives had told me if you can stay on your feet, stay on your feet. And I just, I wish I was able to do with my second son and that helped a lot because I went into labor towards the morning with my first son. I was just ready to go to sleep. I was exhausted before I even started labor.
P: Yeah,
C: I would. I would say those things. Don’t be afraid to ask for drugs. And if you can stay on your feet helps a lot.
P: So the sounds like the first one. I guess what’s confusing me is they didn’t give you drugs either time, even though it sounds like at some point you asked for them.
C: The first time I got one shot of Demerol, that was it? Yeah. Yeah. And I actually I understood their reasoning. They’re like the more drugs we give you, the longer it’s going to take you to recover and I get that. But with my first son, I felt great right away. And with my second son as well, I mean, I would forego that I would I would take time to recover to not experience quite the extreme. of pain. Yeah.
P: So what you’re saving is the recovery right after birth. Is that what you’re saying? Yeah, okay.
C: For me. I did. I was so elated. I had like a rush of hormones, I guess of like, you know, it was just this incredible miracle in your arms. It was very Yeah, I felt like I could jump up and dance a jig right afterwards.
P: Did you do the whole breastfeeding thing or?
C: I did with both boys but not as long as other friends because both my boys got very active around nine months old. So they literally want to nurse for three seconds and then crawl away and then come back and then cretinous like yeah, okay, I’m not the 24 hour Deli. So yeah,
P: well, that’s amazing.
C: Yeah.
P: And did you have writing more to share on this topic?
C: Well, the writing is not exactly it’s related. My husband ended up passing away from drug addiction. And I didn’t connect it. He was so supportive. And so there for me when I was in pain, giving birth begging for drugs and I didn’t reverse that when he was going through his travels. So that’s what my story is about. It’s about me giving birth, and then him eventually confessing that he’d been doing drugs all along in secret. And then he you know, he lost his battle, and that I think about giving birth. Now, more than before, because I just remember I would have done anything for drugs at that point, anything, you know. And so that’s the story. that I that I wrote,
P: well, that sounds like a powerful story, and I’m so sorry about your husband. It does seem like there’s something beautiful in your ability to connect to that that feeling of desperation in someone else that I think most people can’t connect or write it off or know why this is my way to make sense of all the anti vaccine and all the all the stuff of the pandemic is that these people have never experienced, you know, a medical situation that’s gone sideways, something right there some so they have no way to connect. To the fear that people have who are staying home and getting vaxed and doing all that stuff.
C: right Right.
P: And it is so it is like valuable for you to have this experience to say I understand it and I don’t condemn you unnecessarily. Like I get where you’re coming from.
C: Right exactly. Exactly. It’s all starts out with me giving birth and making fun of myself because I was Miss I’m not gonna do drugs and within minutes, I was like, give me drugs. And then it gets into talking, you know, finally saying, you know, I do drugs all the time, like, hide it. From you. I don’t know why I do it.
P: You know, birth is a transformative experience that leads to many other things it doesn’t have to be about…Thanks for sharing it. Thanks so much for coming on and sharing your story.
C: Thank you so much. Thank you.
P: I’m grateful to talk with Corinne story. There’s so many inputs into our images of pregnancy and birth. And it’s really interesting to hear about the ones that played a role in her life, and how she managed her deliveries when our expectations clashed so immediately in her lived experience. Thanks again to her for sharing your story. Chris has written work all over the place. I’ll put some links to our work in the show notes, which you can find at war stories from a little.com Thanks for listening. We’ll be back next week with another inspiring story.
Episode 63: Suddenly Blindness, a Run in with Preeclampsia, Diana’s Story, Part II
Episode 63 SN: Suddenly Blindness, a Run in with Preeclampsia, Diana’s Story, Part II
Today we hear part two of my conversation with Diana about her experiences with pregnancy and delivery. Last week, our conversation ended with Diana 41 weeks pregnant, partially dilated, stomping around in the hall of the hospital trying to get her baby to move into a better position for birth. When all of a sudden she loses her sight. We’ll pick up the conversation where we left off in this part of the episode I also include the insights of a doctor training in ophthalmology and neuro ophthalmology.
To find Diana’s writing, go here
Bell’s Palsy in Pregnancy
Sarah Ruhl’s book is here
Risk of Preeclampsia in a First or Second Pregnancy
https://www.preeclampsia.org/the-news/community-support/after-preeclampsia-another-pregnancy-or-not
Abortion Statistics
https://www.guttmacher.org/united-states/abortion/demographics
Audio Transcript
Paulette: Hi, welcome to war stories from the womb. I’m your host, Paulette kamenecka. I’m an economist and writer and the mother of two girls. Today we hear part two of my conversation with Diana about her experiences with pregnancy and delivery. Last week, our conversation ended with Diana 41 weeks pregnant, partially dilated, stomping around in the hall of the hospital trying to get her baby to move into a better position for birth. When all of a sudden she loses her sight. We’ll pick up the conversation where we left off in this part of the episode I also include the insights of a doctor training in ophthalmology and neuro ophthalmology.
Diana: So let’s go back to the chronology they told me to go stomp down the hall sleep at night I’ve been in active Labor’s you know for at least 12 hours maybe longer but also I’d been in that prodromal labor for days have contractions that stop and start but little very painful contractions. They just weren’t doing anything. And I’m stomping and like half naked I mean it must have been looked absolutely insane. And then I went blind. I couldn’t see
P: out in the hole while you’re stomping?
D: Yeah. And I started screaming I can’t see anything I can’t see. And I think my husband had been with me and he calls for the midwife or whoever is attending and they kind of come and get me back in the bed. And I checked my blood pressure. And it is sky high. I mean, I think they’d been monitoring it a little but I hadn’t really shown signs that were in the danger zone beyond maybe like a little bit of elevation. But I had severe preeclampsia. So much so that I had lost my vision because your brain swells and, you know, something had happened to the ocular nerve and I could not see I was blind. And that is where at that point. I pretty much don’t remember anything and I have to take the rest of the experience from my husband Tim story where it’s very, very serious.
P: Today we’re lucky to have Dr. Avi sonra on the show. She’s a doctor trained in ophthalmology and neuro ophthalmology and currently finished her training in neurology at the University of Kentucky, Dr. Abu Samara, thanks for coming on the show.
Dr. Abusamra: Oh, thank you very much for having me today.
P: We’re here to talk about Diana, who runs into severe preeclampsia many hours into her first delivery, and it takes the form of high blood pressure and complete blindness she was shocked by the sudden onset. I’m wondering if preeclampsia tends to overtake a person so quickly.
Dr. Abusamra: Yeah, yeah, it can. definitely can. So you know, the definition of the clamp says the new onset hypertension, and that’s associated with the proteinuria. Their success should be certain amount of protein in the urine. Or the new onset of hypertension in a patient who did not have hypertension before in association with some organ dysfunction. And I think the heart and the brain and it can effect the eyes so yeah, it can it can make the patient turn around so quickly.
P: Can you explain how preeclampsia creates blindness?
Dr. Abusamra: Yeah, so most of the DataLogic changes that happens in in the pregnancy are actually related to gestational hypertension and preeclampsia and eclampsia and preeclampsia and eclampsia there’s like a vascular damage endothelial damage, and this damage will we’ve cause different pathologies. Blindness in the preeclampsia and eclampsia is rare, but it happens and I think the the incidence rate is around one to 2% one to 3% of severe preeclampsia. Preeclampsia can result in blindness and the blindness and eclampsia. Preeclampsia can happen because of either damage that happened within the eye itself like the ocular structure some somewhere in the eye or damage happen or due to insult to the brain surprisingly. So if it’s if it’s caused by damage to the eye, it’s either caused for example, by bilateral retinal detachment, sometimes eclampsia of severe enough can cause serious detachment of the sample some some layers of the retina, and typically in a big lousier. It’s bilateral and it’s a dramatic and it can cause bilateral vision loss.
P: Let me stop you there for one second. So you’re saying high blood pressure causes enough pressure on the eye that it part of the eye is detaching, and it happens in both eyes. That’s how easily
Dr. Abusamra: it’s not exactly the the hypertension itself. It’s what results from the hypertension. For example, there’s there’s edema forming between the layers of the retina because of the severe hypertension and the vascular injury that can cause the Internet to detect. It’s called like serous retinal detachment and it’s a dramatic in preeclampsia, and usually multiple of the eyes
P: do we think that happens in some people because of the specific architecture of veins in their eye?
Dr. Abusamra: we don’t know the exact mechanism is not completed and patients get affected is not clear either, but this can happen. But they will think about it that the treatment is conservative management and once the reason for the detachment stops because I’ve been controlling the blood pressure. It resolves. Nowadays there’s there’s more focus to one or the other cause of blindness and the people I’m seeing eclampsia, which is actually the brain. So there’s something called cortical blindness which means that the patient will develop blindness without any issues with the structure of the eye itself. So if you examine the eye, it’s fine. There’s nothing to suggest nothing to explain why the patient was visual, right? However, it’s closed because of the damage or like an insult to the part of the brain that is responsible about interpreting vision, which is usually which is called the occipital cortex. So this type of disorder the cortical blindness is usually a part of a syndrome called PRES. PRES is the posterior posterior reversible encephalopathy syndrome. And patients in such syndrome will be complaining of headaches, sometimes they’re confused seizure and blindness. This is because of the severe hypertension will cause damage to the autoregulation of the blood vessels inside the brain. And the most common area that’s affected in such cases is the occipital lobe and the parietal lobe. occipital lobe is the is the part of the brain that controls vision. So that’s why patient might lose vision because of preeclampsia
P: what I’m focused on in that description is I thought you said reversible.
Dr. Abusamra: Yes. First of all, yeah,
P: so even though it’s we’re describing it as damage it we it can be fixed.
Dr. Abusamra: Yeah. And so yeah, it’s, it’s more of a like a temporary damage. That would be because of the severe hypertension and the DIS regulation of the blood supply to that area of the brain. There’ll be a temporary, dysfunctional in that area of the brain that controls the division, and that’s why a patient might suddenly become blind
D: at that point to have severe preeclampsia.
P: I had like I’m covered with goosebumps. Oh my god. Yeah, just it seems like it came on so fast.
D: It did. I mean, I it’s hard to know what the different markers were. I never asked like Well, what was my blood pressure, you know, a day ago, but clearly they weren’t worried about it. Right. And you know, the, like I said about the the formula like I’ve been so active and healthy and like everything had been great or whatever. Not everything was great. I was kind of depressed and my dad had died and all that but physically, I think I I presented healthy and but then there I was still at six centimeters with the baby and occipital, posterior and I was blind. And it was terrifying. It was terrifying for me. It was more terrifying for my husband who was watching and I think started to be afraid that I might die.
P: Yeah,
D: and nobody was paying attention to him.
P: has everyone said it’s preeclampsia?
D: I mean, once they took the readings, I mean, I think they had to check my blood pressure right away and they got the whatever they’ve been they put the band on for the baby’s heart rate. And probably I’m not probably getting all the details right because I was blind and I was kind of out of my head. So what they do right away is they give you something called magnesium sulfate, which basically kind of stabilizes you. There was no way I was going to be able to give a vaginal birth in that state
P: yeah
D:, I was blind. I was kind of out of my mind. The baby was stuck. And so they gave me this mag sulfate, which made me completely loopy. I had no idea where I was and this was the thing was really scary for Tim. I had no idea that I was even pregnant and in labor anymore. So I was like hallucinating and calling out things like what’s going on and why does it hurt like?
P: So at some point, obviously they put her on magnesium sulfate. She said she didn’t know she was pregnant or why she was in the hospital. And I’m wondering why magnesium sulfate has that consequence or
Dr. Abusamra: I’m not sure if it’s actually due to the magnesium sulfate. Now you’re talking about magnesium because I know that magnesium they use it in pregnancy and patients who have preeclampsia or eclampsia to treat the hypertension and return seizures. But maybe she was confused because I’m not sure what was the reason for her vision loss. But if you if you should see if she’s saying that she was confused at that time, that she actually developed PRES, which is the posterior reversible encephalopathy syndrome, where patients actually confused by the hospital like they disoriented to time to place they don’t know what’s going on with them. So it’s gonna be this is part of her hypertensive emergency that happened in the time of preeclampsia rather than the magnesium is the magnesium should be like a treatment for your condition not causing her to be confused.
D: So they said we need to do an emergency C section. She has preeclampsia. We need to get the baby delivered. But it was I don’t know like Saturday night in a small hospital in Keene New Hampshire. And it took a while to like get the anesthesiologist It was like he said it was two hours of waiting.
P: wow…Oh my god
D: with me in that state. I mean maybe it wasn’t quite that long. But with me in that state not even knowing I was pregnant, being blind and going from natural birth goals in the walk in like the tub to blind severe preeclampsia and hallucinating so at that point. I really don’t remember anything. He remembers a lot more than I do. When they did this. Like no one was like, we’re going to do a C section. This is what’s going to happen like it was just full on emergency mode.
P: Yeah, yeah.
D: No one talked us through it. Even if I had been able to understand certainly no one talked him through it. And I had never read the chapter on C sections in the birthing book, because that wasn’t gonna happen to me. I was a yoga teacher and I was super healthy and I exercised and took my vitamins and like, did my Hypno birthing exercises. So who knows if that would have made any difference but that was part of just my unpreparedness I want to say right now on this podcast like every woman should read the chapter, just read that chapter just understand that sometimes there are situations where this is a necessary outcome. And like you should understand what it is and also maybe what your options are for that kind of a delivery. So I don’t think Tim was even allowed in the room. Maybe you know, I can’t you know, there’s certain things that are hazy, but eventually our baby was our baby Ava was delivered. And I couldn’t see her. But because I was blind still but I remember this is like such a powerful physical memory was like they took her and they held her up to my face, and I could smell her and then they whisked her away to have the you know, things sectioned out. And that was another real grief because we had had this plan of skin to skin afterwards and you lay the baby on the chest and like none of those things happened.
P: Yeah, yeah.
D: And for a long time I worried and I I was so sad that I failed my my baby because she didn’t get that. In fact, my mom had even given me a book on how important skin to skin was. It was some beautiful book of pictures and it was like showing that that sacred time after the birth is very quiet and it was like, that didn’t happen for us, you know?
P: Yeah,
D: but here’s the thing. Our baby was so healthy. She was a eight pounds, 10 ounces. And like, you know, she’d been in there, you know, a long past 40 weeks and do this big, round cheeks. She nursed immediately with no trouble ever latching no trouble ever with nursing. And so then by the next day, so we spent like a good three days in the hospital, you know, recovering and everything. My vision did slowly return. So that was obviously a great relief and blessing.
P: While you’re waiting for that to happen. Have they told you usually people get their vision back or….
D: I don’t really remember that interim time. The timeline between when she was delivered when they brought her to me like all of that like I couldn’t see I think I was just I mean also they gave me I went under for I was fully sedated for the action. Yeah. Which I think I think it’s better to just have local and not have general anaesthetic but
P: my understanding is that is that it’s much faster acting to get general so yeah, when it becomes an emergency. That’s why they flip the script and make it Yeah,
D: yeah. So you know, there’s so much of it, that’s just it’s just hazy. They’re these sort of parts of the memory that burn really bright like the baby being like, I could smell that her and then I could hear her crying, which is obviously good noise and but then kind of fast forward to being in our hospital room and there’s baby Ava, and she had a full head of dark hair that kind of stuck with red temps that kind of stuck up. She was totally adorable in a way that like a lot of newborns are and she was nursing and healthy and had all the Apgar you know was a champ and she would like lay on Tim’s on like within the first day lay on his chest and she could kind of frog kick, like up it. I mean, that was amazing. And I realized pretty quickly, like whatever trauma that I’ve been through and that we’ve been all been through together. Like this baby was thriving. And I feel like as I had to process what happened over the next weeks and months and even years I held on to I kept my baby alive and strong. And she is okay. And that’s the most important thing. It’s not whether I had that ecstatic, orgasmic waterbirth in my living room, naturally like you know, be a birth goddess. That’s beautiful if another woman can have it and and I had to let go of that and then instead look at my real life baby who was just amazing.
P: That is amazing. And it sounds like your symptoms resolved slowly. While you were in the hospital. By the time they release you was she was your blood pressure normal?
D: Yeah, they kept me on the mag sulfate and they had to get it down to a certain time before they wouldn’t really say one other thing happened that was pretty scary. Was that by the next like by the next day, by the time my vision came back. At some point in the interim after the birth I developed a Bell’s palsy in my face so I had like a whole drooping side of the face. Scary. They were like they didn’t know if I’d had a stroke. Yeah, they didn’t know why they didn’t know if it would resolve.
P: Bell’s Palsy is a facial nerve neuropathy. That’s a rare disorder, but apparently occurs at higher frequencies in pregnancy. Almost 30% of cases are associated with preeclampsia or gestational hypertension. In fact, pregnant women are three times more likely to experience Bell’s palsy than non pregnant women. With a predominance in the third trimester. Several theories exist as to why there’s an increased incidence of Bell’s Palsy and pregnancy. And those include the following increased total body water leading to swelling and our compression of the facial nerve. weakened immune system especially in the third trimester, which can lead the reactivation of the herpes simplex virus. Increased blood clotting factors and elevated levels of female hormones estrogen and progesterone.
D: actually there’s a writer Sarah Ruhl are you he said price range she just she had a Bell’s Palsy. After twins and mine did was like over the course of the three plus days, but that was another sense of like, my body has been through some really extraordinary like that and that sense of like am I gonna be back to normal, whatever normal is.
P: Yeah, that seems terrifying. And another thing I’m interested in is like you my first pregnancy. Delivery involves a lot of trauma and we have a second child. Yes, and how to walk into that is different for everyone. So, so share with that was like how do we Why don’t we have a second one?
D: I know. I know. I mean, I guess the reason like you think why would you ever want to do I mean I started research include camp clam Sia, I went to see how often it was that you it’s actually more common in first pregnancies. And like I think I read the statistic around repeat preeclampsia. I’m not gonna able to quote it now and maybe it’s different.
P: The risk of developing preeclampsia in a second pregnancy if you had it in the first depends on when you had it in the prior pregnancy, how severe it was additional risk factors that you might have to just give a sense of the numbers and article and British Medical Journal using a giant sample found that the risk of preeclampsia in any pregnancy was 3%. The risk was 4.1% in the first pregnancy and 1.7 and later pregnancies during the second pregnancy. The risk was 14.7% for women who had developed preeclampsia, and then first pregnancy and 1.1% for those who had not
D; when I did get pregnant the second time and it was like another sort of accident. Ava was I think around 13 months like my kids are less than two years apart. So she was maybe yeah, 14 months when I got pregnant. I was still not menstruating like I was nursing a lot I think I thought it was going to be really hard to get pregnant because I wasn’t it was so there I was pregnant again. And I was like yeah, I’m gonna have a VBAC. You know, like redemption story, and actually a nurse a visiting nurse who’d come to look at my C section scar. And we haven’t even talked about like the C section recovery, which was like really long and arduous but she was like, Yeah, you can always have a VBAC. She kind of said it offhanded and I felt like that was such a, you know, a lovely seed to plant but I the local hospital, like they wouldn’t see me there. I was considered a high risk pregnancy. So the only prenatal care and like the only place that would let me deliver was at a hospital over an hour or like an hour and 15 away. So that’s where I had to go because they specialized in high risk. Pregnancy.
P: If you’re not at high risk to develop preeclampsia, what what are we worried about? I mean, maybe I was at higher risk.
D: That’s a good point.
P: I’m not I’m not contesting I’m just asking.
D: No, I think also the fact that I wanted a VBAC.
P: Yeah,
D: I think it’s I’ve been willing to have a planned C section. We could have done it at the local hospital. Yay. In a chilled out way. And let me tell you, I actually looking back I’m like, That actually sounds pretty relaxed ish. Maybe I should have done that. But I really wanted to try for that feedback. And so I needed to go through these people, you know, the providers who were kind of specialized because I think I think it was more about the the I think the risk of of rupture during you know, that’s what they’re worried about,
P: especially if it’s not if it’s less than two years apart, right?
D:Yes, exactly. So they’re, they’re all these things. It wasn’t just a was a VBAC. It was said maybe the history of preeclampsia but then it was also the close together and
P: was your first C section. Is it horizontal? Is that it’s horizontal?
D: Yeah. But, you know, I’ve sort of learned some things about C sections. Definitely the ones that are like fast and urgent or refer surgery my body, right. So for Carmen my second, it was also an August I did certain things different during that pregnancy. They didn’t want to let me go beyond 40 weeks for whatever reasons it was about the chances of preeclampsia start increasing after that 14 week mark. And I did a lot of different things like acupuncture and rosemary Evening Primrose oils and like, all the different things herbs to try to get things ready. But Carmen came right on her due day and I think I had a I had like the checkup prenatal checkup like right around that time. I think they might have done like they swept the membrane, that membranes and then I basically like went into labor. So I didn’t need the kind of induction that I did with the first baby. But I actually had an amazing I did a different Hypno birthing class with a different teacher who knew the full history of trauma. I also had a therapist who I had done a really cool technique on trauma processing called EMDR. Without that, I don’t think I would have been prepared to go into labor again, given how scary it was. So I you know, it was a more I don’t know, like maybe a more normal progression, things went faster. When you try for a VBAC. You have to wear the belt the entire time. So you are being monitored. There’s a lot of precautions. And basically, I I got to a certain point it kind of stalled. Carmen was in that same position, that occipital posterior and later a midwife would say, yeah, there’s probably something about your pelvic geometry. That is why your babies are in that position. And I didn’t even know that was a thing, but there you go. That’s nothing I could control.
P: Yeah.
D: But you know, I was like, probably, I don’t know, like eight centimeters and I was really tired. And then I was like, I want an epidural. My fears around the same interventions were totally gone in the same way because I saw what had happened before. So I kind of went to sleep because I was so so tired. And during that time, I basically fully dilated and started feeling the need to push which I’ve never gotten to the first time. So I kind of woke up out of that sleep and I was like I need to push I need to push and it was exciting. And then like it was like I’m doing it this time like this, you know, I was ready. I’m gonna like push this baby out. Like I Hypno birthing like everything. And then you know, I had this big monitor on and the baby’s heart rate went way down to like 30 or something and it stayed down and all the alarms and buzzes are going off.
And then it goes way up, and it starts doing tech cardio doing like up and down, up and down, up and down. And they called in the big guns. And it was like, something’s not right and when you’re having a VBAC and something like that happens, they don’t give you another chance. I was like, I’m like, Come on, I’m ready to push like I want to do this and they’re like, they’re afraid of a uterine rupture and that’s why the baby’s not okay. And at that point, they rushed me like I was naked on the bed. They got me on a gurney and they ran me down the hall naked to the O R. And they’re like, We need to get this baby out now. And I was I was like, no, no, please let me try like I want to push her out. And they kind of they checked me one more time and there was like a tiny lip of cervix which hadn’t like fully dilated, and they’re like, it’s gonna be too long. Like it’s gonna take too long for and the baby’s in distress, and we can’t risk it.
And that was that and they same thing they put me under Tim wasn’t allowed in. It was a very fast, very urgent, very scary emergency C section. And I had a great doula at the time. In fact, it was the same woman who had been a nurse who had said you could always have a VBAC. I’d asked her to be my doula. And she was like they were outside. of the window. And I feel like they kind of put me under still like, protesting like, let me keep trying. And my Doula was like, I saw your C section. It was really rough. Like there was a lot of blood, you bled a lot. And here’s the thing that happened, which again, didn’t know could happen. The surgeon cut my baby on the face with a scalpel.
P: Wow,
D: she was faced up again. So Carmen was born with a cut on her cheek. And the first pretty much the first thing that needed to happen to her once she cleaned up and everything but before she was given to me to nurse in the recovery room was she had to go to the plastic surgeon and she had like four tiny stitches on her face.
P: Wow. I have never heard of that. wow.
D: I was me when I finally heard about that. I was really angry. It was like, what was that doctor doing? You know? Anyway, I actually asked like in my six week chair, I was like, I want to talk to that doctor. I want to ask her what was what that was like, what happened? And that I never got the opportunity to do that.
P: But now do we think it was just a frantic rush to get the baby out?
D: Yeah. I mean, who knows what was happening? how long she’d been on for where she’d been on call for whatever. It was late. It was 1040 1035 at night. You know, I don’t I don’t know. I mean, people are human. There’s error in anything ADA. But that’s a pretty big errors to cut a newborn baby when you’re delivering a C section. And yeah, I mean, when we talk about birth trauma for our babies, you know that to come into the world that way for sure. So I I made sure like after we got home and everything I got like cranial sacral treatment for Carmen. She then she went on to have like, extreme colic like she would scream and scream for hours and I always felt like some of that was connected to like a really traumatic birth.
P: Colic sounds unbelievably hard, and I think it’s hard for people to understand just how difficult it is to live with a colicky baby unless they can witness it.
D: Oh my gosh, yes. She used to come down outside. And it luckily she was born in August. So it was like summer into fall that this was happening. I mean, it went on for like I want to say like for at least four to six months, like Oh, four months like I would walk around the neighborhood and sometimes I’d be walking her and she’d be screaming Unknown Speaker 0:02
meaning and I’d be like wondering if the neighbors were going to call like Child Protective Services. And I would be like, I’m trying to comfort my baby and I was totally powerless. Eventually she fall asleep and then I try to transfer her really carefully to like the little tick tock swing from my like baby carrier, and then maybe she would like sleep for 20 minutes and then she I mean, it was that was its own thing. You know, now she’s a fierce and incredibly healthy 14 year old varsity ice hockey player. Like she’s a very fiery Leo. You know, I think sometimes I’m like, Oh, that was just kind of her fire that we were. We were seeing that was she was expressing in that in that kind of first first few months of her life. I mean, somehow we made it through but I will say my recovery from that C section. I think if you have a planned second C section, and they kind of carefully go through the same star, like I almost have like two stars, that kind of cross. It was
P: oh wow.
D: Yeah, I mean, I’ve also had like a pelvic chronic pelvic pain condition which I had had before getting pregnant the first time that kind of came back, which I think was connected to the surgeries and trying to heal and all that scar tissue there. So and you know, so that’s when we started like, did you want a big family? You know, I knew that too. That was all my body could take. Yeah, yeah. And there was a lot of grief there. My sister just had her third baby a few months ago, and I really, you know, I felt the heartache. I mean, that’s over for me. I’m in my late 40s. I’ve two beautiful teenagers. I’m really grateful for the family I have but there’s always that sense of oh, what is or you know, it just it wasn’t my karma not for this life.
P: Yeah, it is. It is a hard thing to let go of, and we were in the same boat or we wanted a big family and it was too because of all these physical things that happened. So it is it is hard. To hard but makes sense to hold both like the gratefulness for what you have some sense of loss
D;loss, I think the loss is real and I that’s really why I’m grateful to you for having this podcast and holding the space for women mothers, I don’t know do you have dads on here too or is it just women?
P: So it’s funny I have it is just within and I tried to get most of the experts to be women because it’s yeah, I want it to be kind of women’s voices. But I was suggesting to my husband that maybe I would interview him about our birth story and he was like, Absolutely not. 0% chance.
D: That’s what my husband works. I mean, he the first birth he describes as hands down the most terrifying experience of his life.
P: Yeah,
D: I mean, he no one was telling him anything. He fully thought that I was gonna die. Maybe our baby was gonna die and he was just gonna watch it toddler Don’t be by myself. Waiting for tins are watching and I didn’t know what it was but it was the episode daughter those until April. In literally she dies.
P: Yeah. Yeah.
D: It is one of the most riveting fighting scenes like a television show. Talk about pts. Like I really did some trauma because it was so activated was like I felt and I think I understood like the day if it had been 100 years ago for me, kind of in 2005 that had been 95 There was no mag sulfate yeah and been in a hospital that would have happened like they saved my life in a way that seemed that helped me put aside my what ifs. I had a good friend at the time who had a C section and went on to have a very empowering VBAC and wrote about it and I felt a lot of jealousy and like, sense of failure. But I also just felt watching the worst case scenario play out on Downton Abbey. That actually helped me to just feel odd what I’d been through survived and like gratitude for the medical care that saved my life and like gratitude that I have these had these like strong, healthy, thriving babies, you know, because like, Isn’t that the most important part?
P: Yes, yeah. easy to lose track in the 10 months of getting there, but that is the ending we’re all looking for. Yeah, also, it was really interesting for you to watch a thing that you were kind of not present for right so now you can see everything your or some version.
D: Find and selfie and various and hallucinating so it was with all my faculties observing. It was really shocking. Yeah, that was really interesting. And so here’s like, the final thing is that I did get pregnant again
P: Wow.
D: Accidentally flare up of my chronic pelvic pain could come back and it was really ideon for years, I guess, since Carmen’s birth. That was our birth control. And I became convinced me to do everything to relieve where I was with this plane failure, which was really scary and I got the idea. And Tim scheduled a vasectomy lesson that was like the best and most compassionate thing that a man could do, especially to a woman who’s been through the kind of pelvic traumas that I have, but there was a window of time between the IUD coming out and we use some condoms. I don’t know. It has easy for me to get pregnant. I thought it’d be really hard to get pregnant at age 40.
P: Yeah,
D: it was not. And I got pregnant again. And we I had to make that decision. But it was an agonizing I understood that I would have needed a third C section. Like no one there was no not going to be a VBAC. I talked to the doctor about it, a third C section through that scar tissue which had already was in in rough shape, and hit I was already trying to treat the scar tissue to try to help with the pelvic pain. And I just knew I had like a very deep level and I talked with my doctor that like my body couldn’t really go through that or maybe it could but there was going to be a real cost in the long term for my health. And that was the decision I made and I was able to do like a medical, a chemical abortion like at home where I took the two pills and it was like just induced a miscarriage, and it was much less traumatic. than that first experience. When I was a teenager, I knew it was the right thing. And never looked back. I was just very grateful that I had access to that kind of care and could make that decision with my health care provider. So yeah, but so a lot of what ifs you know, sometimes I have because that would have been I would have had a baby like in 2014. So I would have a eight year old now, you know, so there’s definitely that. I’ve had some moments of that. But when I come back and get grounded in my body, and I almost like visualize what what’s going on down and then the C section scar and like everything. I just just like that was my limit. That was my limit. Were those those two babies, those two pregnancies, and those two surge emergency surgeries and I knew I couldn’t have gone through it again.
P: Yeah, I mean that that sounds wildly reasonable, especially since now you look at the two kids you’re responsible for right to say this becomes a bigger a different decision. I think. I think it’s most common for people to have abortions if they already have kids.
D: Oh, really?
P: So I think yeah. Okay, to be more clear about the abortion statistic according to the Guttmacher Institute, a research organization that focuses on reproductive health policy 59% of abortions are obtained by women with children.
So I think many people are making that calculus, right. What what’s cost and what can I do and now it’s not just me and it’s not just my partner. It’s yeah, it’s this family that we’ve already created.
D: Totally. And I mean, let me tell you, I don’t know what your teenage years are like, but like, we’ve gone through some intense stuff, past few years. And it’s been, I mean, at times, it’s brought me to my knees again and the ways that
P: surrender Yes, right.
D: So yeah, I’m not trying to say like people have more I mean, I think whatever you given what you can handle maybe but like two was what I could handle, you know?
P: Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Well, that’s an amazing story and I am grateful for your good ending there.
D: Okay. Thank you. This was really cool. I like how you kind of, we kind of made a full circle.
P: Yeah. Thanks so much for coming on. Thanks so much today and for sharing her story. We didn’t get to talk too much about her writing, but I’ll link to her website in the show notes at war stories from the wound.com and you can check out our work. Thanks also to Dr. Alessandra, are insights about preeclampsia and blindness. Anyone listening to this story can relate to the fact that pregnancy and birth are complicated processes that really require flexibility and more grit than you can imagine. So many things happened in Diana’s two pregnancies and we only focused on the most dramatic aspects. We didn’t spend one minute talking about recovery from the C sections, and how challenging it must have been to have these difficult births close together in a period of intense childbearing. Her resilience and her partner’s resilience are really are really just inspiring. Thanks for listening. We’ll be back next week with another amazing story.
Transcribed by https://otter.ai
Episode 62: Suddenly Blindness–a Run in with Preeclampsia: Diana’s Story, Part I
Episode 39: A Birth that Requires Stamina: Kristen
Episode 39 SN: A Birth that Requires Stamina: Kristen
Every person has their super power. Yours could be patience or wit or strength. I am guessing that among the things that today’s guest could list as her super power, toughness and or stamina are probably near the top of the list. She contends with a fair amount of uncertainty about elemental issues, like the timing of both pregnancies, and then manages a stack of challenges beginning with birthing a baby who is not situated in the birth canal in a friendly way, tending to said baby, who is getting fed too often to make restorative sleep a viable goal in the early postpartum, and then carefully dissecting her own diet to manage a food allergy …and she does it all with a certain grace and good humor.
Weight gain during pregnancy
https://www.webmd.com/baby/guide/healthy-weight-gain#1
https://www.cdc.gov/reproductivehealth/maternalinfanthealth/pregnancy-weight-gain.htm
Sweeping membranes
https://my.clevelandclinic.org/health/treatments/21900-membrane-sweep
Vernix
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2763724/
https://www.nature.com/articles/7211305
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.
Every person has their super power. When my kids were little, I’d say my super power was being entertained by almost every mishap. One time the older one was potty training and she got mad at me in the car and peed in her carseat and my initial reaction was to laugh (to myself) and think “well played toddler–use the tools at your disposal”. Message received.
Yours could be patience or wit or strength. I am guessing that among the things that today’s guest could list as her super power, toughness and or stamina are probably near the top of the list. She contends with a fair amount of uncertainty about elemental issues, like the timing of both pregnancies, and then manages a stack of challenges beginning with birthing a baby who is not situated in the birth canal in a friendly way, tending to said baby, who is getting fed too often to make restorative sleep a viable goal in the early postpartum, and then carefully dissecting her own diet to manage a food allergy …and she does it all with a certain grace and good humor.
After our conversation, I went back into the interview to add some details when medical issues came up.
Let’s get to this inspiring story.
Hi, thanks for coming on the show. Can you tell us your name and where you’re from?
Kristen: My name is Kristen and I am from a small town called cooks Creek Manitoba in Canada.
P: Oh, wow. Nice.
K: How many kids do you have?
K: I have two biological children and I have two stepchildren so I have four
P: that sounds like a full house.
K: Always.
P: What’s the age range?
K: Our youngest is seven. He just turns to Oh, he’ll be eight in August and our oldest just turned 12 in October.
P: Oh, so are pretty tight.
K: Yes, my two are oh, he just turned 12 actually on the ninth of January and my daughter will be 11 this coming September. And then my husband’s two are 12 and seven.
P: that’s a band. That’s awesome
K: Yeah, they and they all get along so incredibly. Well. We get so lucky with these four.
P: That’s awesome. What’s the gender mix?
K: We have two girls and two boys.
P: Oh, nice. God it’s really balanced.
K: Yeah, and in fact, it actually made from oldest to youngest. We go girl boy, girl boy.
P: Well done. I don’t know how you did it. But that’s well done. So before you got pregnant, what did you imagine pregnancy would be Like?
K: I was I was relatively young. I was 24 when I got pregnant with my son, so I’m 23 I guess I was 24 when I had them. I really hadn’t given it a lot of thought before getting pregnant. I was probably one of my first friends. My best friend. At the time had a terrible pregnancy and terrible birth experience. She was sick all the time I was there while she had her daughter and it was less than ideal birth experience. So I had worries that my birth might go the same way as first had put on got pregnant, but before then, I’d really give it a lot of thought
P: yeah there’s was probably something to be said about that approach. So the first time did you get pregnant easily?
K: Yeah, I actually I had gone off. I got off birth control for health reasons and told my boyfriend at the time that it was not his responsibility to take care of birth control and I ended up pregnant three months later.
P: Already, then that’s pretty easy. Yes.
K: Yeah. it wasn’t. There was no training involved. There was no planning involved. It was just kind of like, this is my this is why I met I had given him the speech of this is my five year plan. If it’s not yours, that’s okay. But this is mine. You’re in charge and wasn’t in charge.
P: I’m assuming having a baby immediately was not the top of the five year plan.
K: No, no, it wasn’t. My long term plan. My long term five year plan was to buy a house have kids, but apparently my son decided it was time for him anyway.
P: I assume you found out with like a home test?
K: I did. Yeah. And I actually had thought I was pregnant the month before. Yeah, and I was just feeling off. I was working one day and I made a comment to my partner that my boobs are really sore and the the nurse or the assistant healthcare and I think that we had with us that day. She she’s pregnant to sit No, I don’t think so. But it really got me thinking about it. And actually that day after work, I went and picked up a test and went home did it and lo and behold, I actually was pregnant. So the only real thing that kind of tipped me off was like I hadn’t missed my period yet. I was yes, I had maybe a little bit but I wasn’t unusual for me to be late. That’s why I had been on birth control for so long was to regulate my my periods. So the just the the soreness of my boobs was kind of the giveaway that I might be pregnant and I wouldn’t have even thought about it had somebody else not suggested it
P:Oh wow.
There’s some common signs you might be pregnant, like this period or tender breasts or fatigue. And according to the Mayo Clinic Another symptom that makes the list is increased urination from the increase in blood volume. Other signs of pregnancy include moodiness, bloating, cramping, food aversions, these are also kind of what you’d expect, but symptoms I’d never heard of before are constipation which may arise thanks to hormone changes and nasal congestion, which could also be related to hormone changes and or increased blood production which can cause nasal passages as well.
P: And what was the pregnancy like?
K: It was was pretty well uneventful with the exception of the fact that I’m a paramedic. That’s I was, I was I’ve been a paramedic now for 15 years and when I got pregnant with my son, I was still working on the truck. I stayed on the truck, but every time I would go and do a heavy lift, I was spotting. So I actually ended up having to come off the truck around 20 weeks I might have been 20 weeks pregnant. My doctors said that’s enough. You’re done because I had at that point gone in probably four or five times with spotting worried that something was going wrong. And all I could think about for months, all those times was like I’m losing my baby. I had had probably around the 10 week mark I had a long conversation with my aunt who’s a nurse about about it and come to terms with the fact that if I was going to lose my beanie, there was a reason for it. And yes, it was gonna suck but that meant that there was something that wasn’t working. And there was a reason why that that was supposed to happen. But lucky for me that didn’t happen.
P: did they link the spotting to the heavy lifting is gonna pay off.
K: later down the road, they discovered that my placenta was fairly low lying, laying near my cervix. So every time I would lift there was too much pressure. And that’s what caused the spotting. The the following 20 Weeks was pretty uneventful. I gained a lot of weight. Please, for me anyway, I gained about 40 pounds in my pregnancy and having been a very active person who was very weight conscious all my life. It was really difficult to get behind the idea that this was weight I needed to gain. When that was really tough to get up on the scale and see more weight, more weight more weight.
P:Yeah.
Okay let’s talk about weight gain during pregnancy. according to webmd and the CDC, the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, someone who’s quote unquote average weight and average is defined by BMI, she gained 25 to 35 pounds during the pregnancy. And someone who’s underweight should gained 28 to 40 pounds. For those who are overweight, the window of 15 to 25 pounds. How’s that window determined? Where’s the weight going? Here’s some estimates. Let’s just look at the lower bound. Let’s say the baby’s eight pounds add the placenta that’s another two three pounds so now we’re at 10. At ml fluid. That’s another two three pounds an hour 12 fresh tissue increases that adds to three pounds. Now we’re at 14 and the blood supply that increase that could cause nasal congestion. That’s four pounds so now we’re 18 uterus expanded to a growing baby as two to five pounds. So now we’re already up to 20. And then you’re going to need some stored fat for breastfeeding because that fuels milk production, which has another five to nine pounds, which gets us pretty easily to 25 pounds. And that’s just the lower bound
K: you know, but the rest of that pregnancy was was pretty easy. was about the 32 week mark when my placenta finally moved enough that the doctor decided I could get back in the gym and I could do light working out, which was fantastic because I really needed to get moving after doing nothing for 12 weeks.
P: Yeah, that’s hard. You rest right. You just couldn’t do a lot of stuff.
K: Right? I just couldn’t do any any lifting and anyone didn’t want me working out. Anything strenuous really.
P: it’s interesting that Your placenta just moved.
K: Yeah. And the way they explained it is it’s kind of kind of not that it moved but that it’s you know the uterus gets bigger right so naturally, where it was positioned with move as the uterus is expanding. This way I understood what they were explaining to me so that was interesting, because I didn’t I thought that once it implanted itself where it was it was it was just a stay there.
P: Yeah, yeah, I agree. That’s cool.
K: I guess it wasn’t it wasn’t covering my cervix. It was just low enough that it was causing grief.
P; Tell us about the birth. How did you know you were in labor?
K: I have had my membranes stripped.
P: So your doctor might suggest stripping your membranes aka sweeping membranes to try to induce labor if you’re near or over your duty. And this procedure Doctor separates the amniotic sac from the wall of the uterus. And this separation encourages your body to produce prostaglandins. Chemicals that soften your cervix and repair your body fileserver know that it can only be done if your cervix is a little bit dilated, and it doesn’t always bring on labor.
K: at my last appointment I was like 39 weeks three days movie and the opposite like I was already two centimeters dilated so she gave it a good good sweep, which is probably not the most comfortable thing in the world. But she she did that and I went home and I had a lot of back pain over the course of the night and I didn’t really think much of it until about 530 in the morning when my water broke. I actually sent my my boyfriend to work and said you don’t go to work. I have no labor at home. I’ll be fine until I can’t walk or talk through these contractions and they’ll call you and you can come home.
P: and was the water breaking like a Hollywood event or
K: no I was actually in bed and all of a sudden I kind of felt a little bit wet nose like I think that’s my water and I got up to go to the washroom. It wasn’t the big gush or anything it was a little bit of a trickle but he and he went off to work and I hopped in the shower I had some breakfast and then I got in the shower and knowing knowing what I know from my from my job I knew that once I got to work or to the to the hospital, they’re not gonna let me eat. Let me do anything. They’re just gonna let the labor and I wanted to make sure I had food in my system before I went in.
So I had my breakfast say hey, had my shower stood in there for a while. By the time I was getting out of the hot shower, only about an hour after I sent him to work. I was calling him saying you know what? I actually think it’s a good idea. If we go by the time you get there, it should be ready to go. So he came back and he got me we went off to the hospital and they got me triaged but they had no bed so they had me walk the hallway. And when I got there around 11 o’clock in the morning, and I walked and I walked in I walked that they had a room and then
P: how are you? How are you feeling during all this walking?
K: Not overly comfortable but I had to bet I had decided at the beginning of the pregnancy that the as a result of my friends negative experience with an epidural and and medications that I was going to do this all natural. I had many people ask me are you sure that’s what you want to do? Are you like are too afraid it’s gonna hurt tonight I would respond with Well, I know it’s gonna hurt. There’s no, there’s no, there’s no, no two ways about that. It is what it is and I’m expecting that so it was uncomfortable to say the least but not intolerable.
P: okay
K: walking the hallways. I would stop every once in a while have a contraction and keep going. Once they had a space for me, I got to labor in the birthing tub. I should say birthing tub it’s just a tub because they won’t allow you to have your baby in the tub. I labored in there for a while and then I I went into the shower and I stood in the shower for a while they got me a birthing ball and they sat on that. So my water had broken about 530 in the morning and by about 430 In the afternoon I was ready to push the I was 10 centimeters dilated and they had this lovely little rail that they were able to attach to my bed if I wanted to get up and use that as a as an option to bear down and I pushed for so long it was five hours
P: oh my god that’s super long. Wow.
K: enduring that that whole process while I was laboring in my room I actually one of my friends and co workers had popped into the hospital knew I was in labor pop came upstairs and the nurse comes in she’s like your friend is here is wondering and I’m like can I let him in sewing for a while. That was that was before it was pushing but then. So by the time I was ready to push, the nurse was convinced that every time I push she could see his head so she figured this was going to be a short process but an hour and a half later I was still pushing in the resident came in to take a look and see what was going on. And it turns out that my son was situated sideways so he was shoulders instead of being held facedown he was facing sideways. Oh, square peg round hole doesn’t work.
P: Yes. Yeah.
K: So she she tried to turn him and was unsuccessful. He was too far down into that birth canal for him to be successfully turned.
P: That sounds like a not super comfortable procedure.
K: No, no, it’s definitely not I don’t I don’t have a lot of memory about how it went down but I just remember it being kind of an uncomfortable push. But at that point I’d already been pushing for an hour and a half so it didn’t really that much different. So she she tried and she was unsuccessful. And she said you know what? he might still turn on his own so we’re gonna give you to about a three hour mark usually at about three hours that’s when we come in and assist delivery. Okay, and off she left and I continued to push for another hour and a half. My mom was there my my mother in law my other half and my aunt and my sister were all there in the room with us. And obviously, by the time I got to three hours he still hadn’t come out. And the resident and the physician were both in C sections. So there was nobody to come and help me at three hour mark. So at that point, the nurse says to me, she says do you want the nitrous and I said, Well, is it gonna is that going to stop my contractions really because she said at this point she’s saying tried to breathe through your contractions and I’ve been pushing for three hours you want me to breathe through my contractions…that’s not a thing that is going to happen. And slowly we can offer you the nitrous. They said they’re going to do what’s not going to do for me so that might decrease the intensity of the contraction. I said okay, well I’ll give it a try. Because at this point my my eyelids were swollen
P: oh my God
K: and purple because I’ve been pushing so hard for so long. It looked like I was wearing eyeshadow and I could barely you barely keep my eyes open. So I took that first hit of nitrous and it’s subdued my contractions for about four minutes. It was the most brilliant four minutes of my entire life. It was nice to just kind of relax and chill for a couple of minutes after, you know, screaming pushing for so long. But it didn’t obviously stop the contractions and definitely but it did it did make them a little bit less intense. I didn’t think it was doing a lot but the nurse was insistent that yes, absolutely. You’re not squeezing your eyes shut as hard. You’re not pushing as hard. It’s doing something for you. He’s always ready to give it back because like this is useless. I’m not getting anything after that first shot. So by another another hour and a half goes by or whatever and the doc the doc finally comes in at about the five almost five hour mark and then resident at that point suggests taking me to an OR because just in case. Anything goes awry and my nurse was wonderful and she actually advocated for me. She says, Do we really need to take her somewhere else like she’s gotten this far without drugs because of these five people here.
P: Yeah
K: These people have been helping her through this. She’s only here because of that. We need to take her somewhere else and then the OB she says you know what? You’re right. We’ll get the NICU called the NICU team bring them here because our room was nice and big.
P: Yeah.
K: So they brought them in and they ended up having to do an episiotomy. And then vacuum deliver him which
P: you’re not anesthetized for the episiotomy?
K: No, not at all she said that the pressure from the head will cause enough to have you not feel really the episiotomy and I don’t remember feeling the episiotomy So,
P: okay, good.
K: It wasn’t it wasn’t an overly traumatic experience there. But when the the suction delivered him there was actually a pop as he came out, because of the just the pressure from him being there and he was his head was very bruised afterwards just from being and cone like from being stuck in the birth, birth now for long. My My first thought after he came out was oh my god, thank goodness that’s over.
P: Yeah.
K: But at the same time they I was I was thankful that it was over but I also the first things out of my mouth. Were that wasn’t so bad. And the nurse and the doctors are looking at me and I really just pushed for five hours that you’re saying that wasn’t that bad. Really, it wasn’t too over. They put them only on my chest for about 30 seconds. And I knew I remember saying to him like you I’m sure you’re beautiful but mommy can’t even see you because I couldn’t open my eyes.
P: Oh my god. Wow.
K: And he was crying very quietly and I said if this is all I have to deal with, I can deal with this. The doctor was like, That’s not normal. We’re actually going to take him Now, he wasn’t trying very loudly. He was very, very quiet. So the NICU team ended up taking him and suctioning him and taking him off to the NICU for a while. What had happened was because he was stuck for so long in the birth canal he was full of mucus
P: Oh Wow.
K: They had to take took him away to make sure that the other they got all of that out. They kept him on his stomach for a little while he was making. I didn’t see him for that entire time that he was in the NICU. His dad went in and walked down the hallway but they really didn’t give him a much opportunity to see him. While they were dealing with it. He ended up having his first bath without me and being all cleaned up and he came back to me all wrapped up wearing a diaper.And it was probably a couple hours from the time that I had until the time he came back to my room.
P: When they returned them to you. He was fine.
K: he was fine. Yeah. But in that in that hour and a half I remember saying to my mom Mom I want I need something to eat go and get me a big extra which she’s all I wanted after having that experience was she what she’s from?
P: I mean, you basically just run like two marathons right? That makes sense. Yeah.
K: When he when he came back, it took him a little bit of time to learn how to latch and I actually ended up in the hospital for four days postpartum because he lost 11% of his body weight his birth weight and the they were really kind of reluctant to send us home until he gains back some of that. He ended up on phototherapy because he was jaundice. So they had him in an incubator with phototherapy going but he was not having any of that he didn’t want to be that far away from mom so he ended up with a phototherapy blanket. And this is just basically like a UV light that they put inside his his blanket. He doesn’t keep on clothes. He just kept through this diaper and wrapped up in a blanket with that UV light behind him. And he hadn’t quite gained back his birth weight by the time we left but he was he was significantly better but I had to nurse him and then supplement him and then pump and I did that for every hour every couple hours or the first couple of days. And I remember it being about 60 hours that I hadn’t slept from the time when my water broke until the time I finally got a good nap in. And that was me saying to the nurses please take my baby so that I can sleep.
P: yeah, no kidding, Good Lord,
K: can you do something because this is this has been over two two and a half days here and I I need a good rest because every time I would just fall asleep they would come in to be doing vitals on me or the baby.
P: Yeah.
K: And then just they finally they took him for a couple hours so that I could get a solid sleep in the in the night. They’ve just brought it back to me when it was time to feed him. Yeah, by the end by the time he took me home I had to I had to keep doing that. The nurse supplement pump every three hours and that process took about I don’t know an hour an hour and a half. So I would do that every every three hours for the whole day for 10 days. So those first 10 days of his life are pretty much a blur of sleepless everything
P: that just seems like an unbelievable task. I mean, I don’t know how you slept or ate.
K: I guess they just I can’t even remember at this point. It was it was it’s just a blur. He slept in my bed. I co slept with him because it was impossible. I had I had a bassinet beside my bed but it was so much easier to just, you know he would sleep there for the first block of sleep and he didn’t sleep my son did not sleep very well. He only ever really slept for two or three hours at a time. And he didn’t nap during the day if he nap during the day. It was short. Unless I was holding him if I was holding him he would sleep.
P: Yeah,
K: so at nighttime it was just, you know do what I needed to do to get some sleep which meant he usually slept with me that worked out alright because his dad he wasn’t homeless. He was he worked out of town. So a lot of the time he he wasn’t there. It was just me and my son in bed. It worked out alright.
P: wow.. Oh, that’s some initiation into parenthood.
K: Yeah, my second one was so much easier than that. But thank goodness.
P: So he required all that feeding. Was it because of the latch issue or was it something
K: just because he lost so much weight they wanted him to catch up but by the by the time he hit that 10 day mark and the public health nurse had come to check on him. She’s like, you don’t have to do this anymore. my milk head had come in in abundance.
P: I imagine everything else seemed easy after that introduction.
K: Yes, yeah, it was not. Although he the first four months maybe before I figured out what was causing him grief is every night around the same time he would. He would just start crying and crying crying and I remember having to call my mom My mom lives. I lived in a duplex. My mom lived downstairs and I remember getting her to come upstairs and take him and walk with him because I just I needed a break from the crying. I tried so many different things and we were you stopped eating spicy foods. I stopped eating anything with spices. I couldn’t figure out what was the issue until I realized that every morning for breakfast. I was eating yogurt. I stopped eating the yogurt for breakfast and my son stopped being colicky.
P: oh Wow. So it was a food sensitivity on his part
K: And I had tried that when I tried probiotics and I had tried all sorts of thing eliminating everything tasty under my diet try to find out what the problem was. And it was the yogurt and as soon as I ended that he started sleeping a little bit better and he stopped crying in at night. There was always an evening who was okay all day in the evening. It was awful to this day. He still he’s 12 now and he still has a dairy sensitivity, but that knowledge that I had from that experience carried through to my daughter and she had a similar problem when she was first born and she would projectile vomit and shortly after I would nurse her and at least at that point I knew to eliminate the dairy in my diet in that solve the problem for her as well.
P: That’s super interesting. Do you or your husband have a dairy sensitivity?
K: I have always had a dairy sensitivity and it was kind of like an upset stomach. I don’t generally digest animal proteins very well. And I find that dairy products actually caused me to have an asthma attack. So
P: oh Wow.
K: It wasn’t a surprise that my kids would both be have adverse reactions to to dairy. Their dad also was a heel heel he would he would tell you he wasn’t lactose intolerant until he met me but he didn’t he didn’t recognize the gastrointestinal upsets that he was having were as a result of dairy he was eating because once I went sparse done once I realized he was not he was not able to have dairy. I stopped buying it. And we started using alternatives and their dad’s problems also stopped. So he didn’t know until I suggested that this was potentially a problem for
P: Wow, that’s amazing. And so your kids are close together in age. Did you guys play in the second one?
K: Nope. I had one one menstrual cycle in between my kids. I didn’t have any cycles up until I started. Nighttime weaning my son so when I started taking him and he was about 10 months old when I started getting getting him into a routine of not nursing at night because I was going to go back to work at the one year mark. And so I had a cycle at the beginning of this. He was born in January 9th. I had my typical post partum bleeding for about six weeks. And then I had nothing until the beginning of December of that same year, and I ended up pregnant December 23.
P: oh Wow.
K: I knew I knew the day it happened.
P: That sounds like you’re pretty in tune with your body. So my guess is you were you were on it. And were you surprised?
K: again it was one of these situations where I had said to to my ex that you know, like we have to be careful because this is where we’re at like and so I was I wasn’t necessarily surprised that had happened. I was I had a hard time with the idea that I was pregnant again. Right away. I actually was in denial until a new year until I’ve got to a point where I was gonna miss my next period.
P: Yeah, it sounds like your body is still recovering. And so that is kind of a surprise.
K: Yeah, it wasn’t it wasn’t there wasn’t ready for it. I wouldn’t I wouldn’t change it for the world my kids are as his best friends as they could possibly be being multi for the boy and girl. But I definitely remember thinking the day the day after the day I got pregnant like the next day when I was spotting and I was certain it was implantation bleeding. Yeah. I was like, Oh, you’ve got to be kidding me. We had planned for a New Year’s Eve party at our house and I sipped on the same beer the whole entire night because I was sure that I was pregnant. Yeah. And lo and behold, I did my test in January, and I picked him up one day, and I said to him, like, yeah, when I was talking on the phone the other day, and I told you, you have children. Yes, yeah. pregnant again. This is well it’s too soon. This time. I will agree with you. Yeah. But here we are. So we’re gonna have another one. And it took me about 16 weeks 16 weeks to be okay with the idea that I was having another baby, because I was so excited that my son would finally sit and play with a bucket of toys. By himself that he will do things he would see was crawling and he was mobile, and I didn’t have to be with him 100% of the time to keep him entertained. And at that point, I’d also discovered that he was allergic to dairy and eggs. So I already had this like worry that now I’m going to have you know, two kids with allergies and I don’t want to have ya I’m just learning how to deal with one I don’t want to have to deal with 2am I gonna do this. I’m gonna have two toddlers in my house. Yeah, but it’s actually a lot easier than I thought it was gonna be.
P: Oh, good. Yeah, that sounds pretty busy. And one benefit of having nine months of pregnancy is it gives you time to adjust the idea.
K: Yes.
P: So how was the second pregnancy
K: uneventful. Oh, I was I was able to maintain my my my gym routines. Maintain my work. I stayed on the on truck until I was I think 28 or 29 weeks and I only came off because my belly was starting to get in the way I didn’t gain as much weight with her. I had like his basketball belly. If he looked at me from behind, you would never know that I was pregnant.
P: and he didn’t have a placenta issue again.
K: No, no problem with the placenta. I had a lot of back pain with my son and I and as a result I had a lot of back leg was back labor. The thing they thought that was big because my placenta or my uterus was tipped backwards to towards my back as opposed towards the front. Whereas if my daughter had after that first pregnancy had put itself in a good position. I didn’t really have much for pregnancy symptoms with her like I had with my son. I had no real knowledge that I was pregnant other than you know that other than that spotting Other than that, like if I wouldn’t have known that just go on about my life like there was nothing Yeah. Blowing up saying he’ll, you know, here’s alarm saying you’re pregnant. I did have a little bit of morning sickness with her which I never had with my son but like very minimal link to the point where like, Oh, I haven’t eaten enough today. So I better eat something and that’s how I felt. That nausea that you get when you have an empty stomach.
P: Yeah, good. Well, that doesn’t sound too bad. And then what was the birth like for her?
K: Oh, that was so good. I was in comparison Lee again. My daughter had gone into my my appointment on the 10th of September. She was she was due on the 15th Avenue and we went in probably on the 10th and she stripped my membranes because again, I was dilated, and I knew from my previous pregnancy that that meant I was probably going to end up having a baby within the next 24 hours. So I went and I did my grocery shopping after that, and I started laboring probably around two o’clock in the afternoon. While I was at superstore actually, and I just picked up all of my groceries, I went home, my ex got home from work and I told him the city. We’re gonna we’re gonna have a baby tonight. So be mindful of what it is you’re choosing to do tonight. Little bit of background as he he was a heavy drinker. And so he actually came home from work and he hit the beer pretty hard. And I kept telling him like, I’m gonna have this baby tonight. And he kept choosing to drink and going to bed around midnight and as about 130 When I said Okay, it’s time to go, but there was no way he could drive me actually to call my mom. My mom was coming to watch my my son so that I could go to the hospital and yeah, I was convinced I was just going to take a taxi to the hospital because there was no way he was going to be able to drive me and my mom actually called my sister and my sister came and picked me up after she woke my my apps up multiple times and told him to get his butt out of bed so that he could come with me in the hospital to have this baby because I was fully prepared to have him have her all by myself.
P: Yeah,
K: you know, he decided he needed to have a shower first and then my sister’s like, hurrying wrong I lucked out that I waited so long to go to the hospital because they actually had no beds that night. They had their just their emergency labor beds and I was five centimeters dilated. By the time I got to the hospital.
P: Wow.
K: And they said well, it’s a good thing. You find that you’re in active labor because if you wouldn’t we would be sending you home or sending you off to another facility to have your baby basically because we don’t have anyone. But because I was an active labor they couldn’t send me anywhere so they put me in a room. That was about 330 in the morning. probably about 630 My nurse said she was going to go for a break and she said to the relief nurse, when I get back she’s going to be ready to push. I was quiet at this this this particular pregnancy was so sick even the labor was so easy. There was no loud pushes there was no screaming there was no anything. I was just calm. I was breathing through the contractions. And her relief nurse was convinced that I had had an epidural or some kind of medication she refused to let me get up and go to the bathroom when I had to pee. The only I guess the only real complication with my daughter there was like she her heart rate got really high. So they ended up giving me an IV they wanted to try to hydrate me to see if that would decrease her heart rate. But I because I had this IV I had to pee in the source was like no way you can’t get up I
P: was like you were she thought you were anesthetized.
K: Right Yeah, and she’s like I’m just gonna catheterized you like I don’t care just empty my bladder like don’t get let me get up. That’s fine. Have to pee somehow, and so she ended up St. Catheter me and my nurse came back from her break and she’s like, oh like catheter I string catheter and emptier blah. She’s like why was that epidural? Like no she hasn’t She’s nothing like she was fine. She couldn’t go she’s been getting up to go to the bathroom all morning. Such as like, really? She’s quiet. Like yes, she’s she’s fine. But the bonus I had here was that she my water never broke. He actually had to I was 10 centimeters dilated. My waters were still intact. And the OB actually had to break the water in order to for me to push.
P: does that feel like anything?
K: it actually it’s more scary to look at because it looks like this big one crochet hook that they’re going to use to break the water and she sticks this up in there and puts a hole in it. And I don’t remember it really feeling like much other than all of a sudden I could feel gosh, oh yeah. And then I actually only pushed four times with her and she was out as a forefront anyway. I don’t even know if it was four to four pushes but every every every push was solid push and she came
P: that is awesome. Some awesome and averaging out over the two to make it reasonable.
K: Yeah, absolutely.
P: And so she didn’t have any mucus issues or anything.
K: She’s totally fine. He was fine. They thought maybe she was a that maybe we got the due date wrong just because the amount of vernix that she was covered in they figured she was more than 30 week baby than the 39 week baby.
P: It’s a quick note here about vernix versus that white pasty material that covers a newborn. It developed from a third trimester and has all kinds of functions during the pregnancy and right after delivery. In Utero it protects fetal skin from amniotic fluid at the same time the fetus swallows vernix in amniotic fluid, and the Fornix is believed to aid in innate immunity and intestinal development. In the first hours after delivery. Researchers think vernix helps with temperature regulation and also acts as a skin moisturizer.
K: But she was super teeny tiny she measured tiny through the whole pregnancy and now she’s 10 years old and she’s like my seven year old and 10 year old rolls and things like that. She’s a tiny little petite thing. And she always has been she she was born like seven pounds 18 and a quarter inches like she was just
P: the year about seven pounds isn’t that tiny? That’s that feels average,
K: seven pounds, definitely average but her her length was very short. Like in comparison, my son was 76 and 19 and a half inches long. So you know, comparatively she was bigger, you know per inch. Yeah, yeah. Then my son was
P: well good. I’m glad that wasn’t easier birth.
K: Oh, yeah.
P: Did you get to leave the next day or how did that work?
K: Yeah, you she they were slightly concerned that her Billy Rubin was a little bit high when we were leaving, but it was still borderline because they had no rooms they could put me actually on a warm and I was sharing a room with four other women.
P: Oh, wow.
K: And and their babies. Yeah. So I actually said to them the next day, so I’d had her at 730 by noon. It was like 900 Yeah, I don’t have to be like No, I have to keep you will keep you today. We’re just to monitor and then you know, everything’s good. You can go home tomorrow. And thank God I got to go home tomorrow because it was it was in the night with four babies other than my own in the bedroom was actually more stressful than being at home with my toddler and infant. Myself.
P: Yeah, yeah. Yeah. I shared the room too. And that’s that’s a recipe for no sleep at all.
K: No. And they were giving me a hard time the nurses at that point is I have my daughter had my daughter and my bed and they had her sleeping with me and their policy at the hospital is no co sleeping in the hospital.
P: Yeah,
K: and they kept coming in tell you she can’t sleep with you. I was like, yes, she can. This is my baby. It’s your policy like, I don’t care if it’s your policy that she has to sleep in that bed unless you’re gonna sit here and take care of her every time she wakes up. All these other babies are I’m keeping her in my bed because she’s sleeping and she’s quiet.
P: Yeah, yeah, yeah, that’s worth a lot. And when you got home with her, how was that?
K: It was it was an easy, relatively easy transition to having two kids. My son was really good with her. He was very excited to have a new sister. He was very helpful and willing to to give me whatever it was I needed. And I learned very quickly how to do everything with one hand because I always had a baby attached to me. She She was my warp speed child though. Like she did everything faster than the speed of light. And as a result, like by the time she was four months old, I didn’t really have to do a ton for she was rolling already. She was sitting already. My son would hang out with her and I could do a lot more than I could when my son was the same age.
P: Yeah.
K: Which was which was wonderful and made for a much easier time having two small kids then I thought it was going to be when she was crawling away by six months and walking by nine months and
P: wow.
K: And learning that she she basically taught herself how to potty train like I was potty training my son and she decided that that was what she wanted to do also so before she I think she might have been 18 months old. 20 months old been potty trained and getting up like she would get up in the middle of the night. Go to the potty in her room and go back to sleep.
P: I hope you all the money you saved on diapers you have given to her for her new car
K: it was it was a dream and she she slept like my son didn’t sleep and my daughter slept I put I ended up putting her crib in my room because I was anticipating her being much like my son.
P: Yeah,
K: and she preferred to sleep in her crib than she did to sleep with me. So once her once she outgrew her bassinet, that’s when the crib made it to our room and that way I still didn’t have to go in and wake up my son every time I wanted. She was waking up. Yeah, but she would she would just get up she would nurse and go back to her bed and she would sleep for six hours stretches at night.
P: wow. Oh my god. That’s awesome.
K: It was a dream. It was a dream after having a child who didn’t sleep.
P: Yeah, it’s also it’s also your kids who’ve done it in the right order as if it had been the reverse. He wouldn’t seem so much more difficult. Yes, absolutely. Well, that’s awesome. So what are they into now?
K: My son plays hockey. And of course with COVID This year we have missed hockey desperately.
P: Yeah,
K: we don’t do any any summertime sports but he plays ice hockey in the winter and ball hockey in the summer. My daughter is curls in the wintertime that she was when she was about six when she decided she wanted to curl and she’s really enjoyed it. She decided a couple years ago that she wanted to play ball hockey in the springtime as well and she used to play soccer and baseball hockey in the spring. They go to school and we have a farm and they help take care of animals occasionally.
P: That sounds awesome. That’s very cool. So if you could give advice to your younger self about pregnancy, what do you think you would tell her?
K: It’s never going to go the way you expect it to go. Or the the everything that you will be thrown curveballs just roll with it.
P: Yeah, that’s good advice. That seems to be a pretty common experience. Right? People come in with a plan and it’s hard to really stick to that.
K: Yeah, I was lucky in the sense of you. Well, maybe my my birth didn’t necessarily make my first birth didn’t necessarily go as I had at home, I was still able to do it without deviating too far off what I was hoping to do, I still had chosen to maintain a natural birth in the sense that I didn’t need any anesthesia or pain control, which I always was thankful for. Because it doesn’t work that way for everybody. My hand and my sister had gone into her first pregnancy with hoping to follow in my footsteps. She’s a I’m not going to do I’m going to do this naturally. I’m not going to do this with any drugs and she got there and she was laboring and she said looked at me and she says I hope you don’t think less of me but I need to take something because I can’t do this. And I said this is your story not mine. Yeah. Well, you you do what works for you. And if it’s not the same as what works for me, that’s okay.
P: For sure everybody’s different right? So yeah, that makes sense. Well, thank you so much for coming on and sharing your stories today.
K; No problem. I really appreciate it. I enjoy I enjoy telling me no problem. Thank you. So much for having me.
Episode 37 SN: A Look at Pregnancy & Birth from a bygone Era: Lily’s Story
Since it’s Thanksgiving weekend, I decided to make this episode about family. And in that spirit, I interviewed my mother about her experiences of pregnancy and childbirth. My mother, who is in her late 70s, had four kids starting in 1966, and ending in 1978. You’ll hear her reference my two older brothers: Josh who is the first born, and Teddy who is the second. I was the third in line, and there is an 8 year gap between me and my sister Samara. It’s surprising to hear about how much she changed and how much the medical apparatus around pregnancy in general changed in that 12 year period. Of course, this is just one woman’s story, and my father was a doctor, so she had very good access to different medical technologies, which you’ll hear about, but I found it really interesting to hear about how her experiences were so different from how pregnancies and births are managed today. And I hope you do too.
Hypnosis in pregnancy
https://www.mayoclinic.org/tests-procedures/hypnosis/about/pac-20394405
Female Gynecologists in the 70s
https://www.latimes.com/health/la-me-male-gynos-20180307-htmlstory.html
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. Since it’s Thanksgiving weekend, I decided to make this episode about family. And in that spirit, I interviewed my mother about her experiences of pregnancy and childbirth. My mother, who is in her late 70s, had four kids starting in 1966, and ending in 1978. You’ll hear her reference my two older brothers: Josh who is the first born, and Teddy who is the second. I was the third in line, and there is an 8 year gap between me and my sister Samara. It’s surprising to hear about how much she changed and how much the medical apparatus around pregnancy in general changed in that 12 year period.
Of course, this is just one woman’s story, and my father was a doctor, so she had very good access to different medical technologies, which you’ll hear about, but I found it really interesting to hear about how her experiences were so different from how pregnancies and births are managed today. And I hope you do too.
P: So hi, mom. I appreciate you letting me tear you away from Thanksgiving mingling, thanks for coming on the show.
Lily: Thank you for having me, anytime.
P: Exciting. So I thought I would focus on a couple things. with you because you started having kids in 1968 is that when Josh was born 66 Oh, wow. 66 Okay, so you’re you’re pregnant and 65 Right. You obviously wanted a family?
L: Yes.
P: And and you got pregnant easily. I know that part of the story.
L: Yes.
P: Did they have home testing kits when you were pregnant?
L: I’m trying to think no, you sort of found out the hard way. Once you got sick nauseous.
P: Oh, that’s interesting, so you just. You started to feel poorly and then what you went to see the doctor.
L: No, I didn’t I had a doctor in the house.
P: What you need to know here is that my dad’s hematologist.
L: Yeah. So when I started getting nauseous in throwing up, you know, a couple times a day and my lasted like a whole day so my husband figured I’m pregnant. Because after all I was fine before
P: and you guys never thought oh, it’s the flu or Oh, it’s something I ate or
L: well, but you could do that the first day but if you keep on having morning sickness and chucking up at anything that you drink or eat.
P: And then once you think you’re pregnant, then do you have to go to the doctor’s office for a blood test or how does it work?
L: No, no, we really didn’t go right away. Dad at the time was practicing at Kaiser Permanente. So I was sort of the housewife because he was in the house. And first time I met my gynecologist obstetrician, he says, oh, a doctor’s wife like that. Like, oh, boy. They’re difficult patients. So this was my first first meeting. And I told him, I what my symptoms were. But also what happened is that I had a lot of chest pains and we didn’t know what that was for. And that’s the only reason I started going to the obstetrician. And he sort of blew it off. He says, oh, maybe you’re worried you’re anxious, whatever it is. He checked me out and I was fine. And, you know, I was pregnant. And that was it. But yet I was having these these chest pains and I guess later on we found it was more anxiety because of my past experience.
P: Okay,
L: from after the war.
P: So my mom was born in the middle of World War Two in Poland to Polish Jews. That’s what she’s referencing here. Yeah.
L: So he had nothing for me and he didn’t spend any time with me either. He just said, Well, you know, doctors, wives are always difficult. Nice. So, what happened is that we decided to go to another obstetrician. And this one, both my husband and I went to a seminar on hypnosis. And that’s when this obstetrician presented his use of hypnosis during pregnancy. And if he started early enough, you could by the time you’re ready to deliver, you could be so relax and use the auto hypnosis that you could deliver without any medication without spinal.
P; Yeah.
L: So this is this is his reasoning, and he sort of exuded such confidence and warmth. So my husband turns to me, he says, Should we try him? Okay, because I didn’t like the obstetrician at Kaiser. So we made an appointment with him. And I told him my story, and he wanted background. So I told him where I came from and the experiences that I had, and he was fine. He says, Well, he uses auto hypnosis would I be willing to try it? So I said, okay, and he had the kind the chain with a little ball that moves back and forth.
P: Oh, you’re kidding…And I was just asked about that. If you have like a watch on a string.
L: Right, right, with a crystal ball, and he would just go back and forth and you had to concentrate, and he would try to get you under, and I was a good candidate. So I went under. And under hypnosis, he asked me why do I have this tightness in my chest and why does it hurt so much? What am I afraid of? Am I afraid of the pregnancy? And I said to him, it’s my experience of being in the hospital in Germany, and I needed to have my belly button. Because I was born during the war and with my parents running from the woods and everything. They didn’t close my belly button correctly. So with an outie instead of an any, okay,
P: so my mother and her mother survived the war. They’re getting ready to go to America. They need all their medical affairs in order and for some reason, there’s some belly button issue that needs to be fixed before they can board the ship for the US.
L: I wouldn’t be accepted in the US unless it was it was operated on and it was pushed inside. So okay, so that’s what my mother had to do. So she, she took me to the hospital in Germany, but she never told me about it. And I was seven years old, and she said I would get treats. And when she took me to the hospital, she came in the nurses took care of me and she had to leave. Well, I found out that the this doctor’s coming within like a big needle. I was terrified because I didn’t know what was happening. And I ran away so they had to chase me at 7 years and finally they found me and they just held me down, put me on the operating table and there was this big big light up on top. You know, the the light for operations, ya know, within the surgical ward, and all I could remember is that big shiny light, and they’re giving me an injection. And that’s the only thing I remember after that I recovered, and I had the surgery. So I think the idea of going to the hospital for the first time because I didn’t need to go to the hospital ever since.
P; Right
L: So the idea of going to the hospital and seeing that big light and being on a surgical table to deliver. I get that pack petrified. So once he knew that, he could work with that. And through a couple of sessions with the auto hypnosis I recovered and I wasn’t afraid of that anymore. So he just released me from from this this anxiety that I had,
P: but what I love about this story is that it feels very, you know, 60s hippie out in California, which I totally dig. And and amazing that helped him like nice of him to take walk the extra step to say why are you anxious and how can I help you and
L: yes, well, that’s why he was so special. Yeah.
P: So while I’m talking to my mother, I’m enjoying the story of auto hypnosis like it’s from a bygone era. But when I went to look it up, it’s still around now more likely called hypnotherapy. It’s still used to treat anxiety and is used specifically to treat anxiety and pregnancy
L: by auto hypnosis if you were a good patient that you could go under and, and he could ask you questions you would respond. That’s what he did. So after several sessions, I felt more relaxed and I wasn’t fearful of that situation. And my pregnancy moved along very well.
P: That’s awesome. And so after that medical intervention, you don’t have ultrasound, right.
L: No.
P: So what what thing like that was so what’s the doctor’s visit? Like? What do they do when you get there to check you out during the pregnancy?
L: You know, they feel around the size, you know, with their hands and they feel around your belly. They listened to the heartbeats and you could hear them, they let you listen to it. And the only internal exam was right in the beginning and everything was fine. And from then on, it was not every single month till towards the end. And then it was like every two weeks by the eighth month.
P: So did you get to 40 weeks.
L: Oh, yeah, because I was over I was overdue by two
P: by two days?
L: I was over two weeks.
P: Oh my god. Two weeks is a long time at that point. So how did you know that you were going to give birth that day?
L: Oh, well, it was different since I was two weeks overdue. And you know, he figured out a date and when he was he was to be born but it didn’t exactly fit on that day. So he was going to go back to New York for a conference. And he really wanted to deliver me because he had practice with me with the auto hypnosis. Yeah. He didn’t want to turn me over to another obstetrician. So that’s when he induced me
P: so his induction in 1966. Does that involve like an IV with Pitocin? Or what does it look like?
L: Yes. Yes
P: Okay. Yeah, that sounds painful.
L: Well, that wasn’t so painful until the labor really started.
P: Did you get an epidural?
L: I didn’t get an epidural. Because he at the same time because I had a 17 hour labor. So he had given me all the pain medication during that time. And he was worried because the baby was so big. So basically all the pain, pain medication during this, this labor for so long. That when I went on the delivery table at the time that I came in, I had nothing and he gave me laughing gas
P: and didn’t work at all
L; with the laughing gas, but no, not really
P: well, because since then you had your other gym. With epidurals so you can compare
L: Yeah. Oh, yes. Once you got the epidural, it was a nice relief.
P: So he basically had a natural childbirth for your first one.
L: Yes, yes. Yeah. And he was nine and a half pounds. So I had a lot of tears that he had to prepare.
P: Yeah, that sounds hard. And then you stay in the hospital for like a week?
L: No, three, four days. Okay.
P: And in 1966 Where you were, was breastfeeding a thing or it wasn’t a thing?
L: No, it was if you wanted to you you can. But unfortunately, Josh was such a big baby. That I didn’t get enough milk.
P; Yeah.
L: And he was always crying because he was hungry.
P: Yeah.
L: And of course, if you were nursing, you couldn’t give him a bottle as a supplement. Yeah. So eventually, we found a pediatrician who had nine kids of his own so he knows. He knows about babies. So I went we went there. After three weeks. We just couldn’t figure out I was still not getting enough milk to feed, feed a big he was like a three month old baby and they’re in the nursery. Everybody said, What’s I think baby doing? He’s not a newborn. But the pediatrician said, look, he said you’re not getting enough milk. He’s hungry. He said, Give him a bottle of formula and see how much he drinks. And if he drinks, a full eight ounce bottle, then change them over for the sanity of you and the baby.
P; Yeah, yeah.
L: And he did he guzzled up that bottle of formula. And he was happy and he finally went to sleep. So I said, I’m done.
P: sold
L: So yes, exactly. Yeah, I’m one because I’m suffering. I was crying the same time the baby was crying. I didn’t know what to do. Yeah, so yeah, so that’s all
P: A couple of questions here: first, what were the first few months like with with a newborn? I’m assuming that you didn’t get much help.
L: Had no help. No help. Plus, my husband got, you know, he was recruited to the army because of Vietnam. So we had to leave he was a month and we left for Texas
P: Wow.
L: We left for Texas,. Yes. And we were really nervous. And we lived in this terrible terrible rooming house, because we didn’t realize that the Army gave you some kind of funds so that you could stay in a motel, which would have been air conditioned and not plus bucks. You know, real big bucks.
P: Yeah.
L: So it was a very unpleasant experience. Until later we found out that tickets daily pay out for hotel room. So we left that darn place so darn fast we moved into the Holiday Inn and it was like having that
P: that’s awesome. Yes, but the baby but Josh is asleep right is asleep or had all that go.
L: He was wonderful once once he was fed, all that he needed. He was wonderful. So he slept he just got up once or twice during the night. And that eventually changed. And he was so good. Once he was asleep. You could take him anywhere. We used to take him to the officer’s club. Hide him under the table, but the long table clocks were able to eat and nobody realized it was a baby in there. And when we left they sort of
P: I can’t believe you’re going out after the baby’s like two months old.
L: Yeah, yeah, we did. We did. So as long as the baby slept once I put him down at six. And you know, he slept to half the night. It was a big baby and he ate so he was fine.
P: It occurs to me as I will say this that my mother was 21 when she had her first child, so of course she’s going out when a baby is two months old. Were you surprised at how hard it was to take care of a baby or or no, that seemed appropriate.
L: You know what? I’m with the first one that had a baby in my group.
P: Yeah.
L: So I couldn’t ask anybody because nobody had any experience. Right? So mine within and my mother had no idea and no interest.
P: Yeah.
L: in babies So she said if I have to feed him Do not leave him. That was a clear answer. Right?
P: Yeah. Yeah.
L: So I enjoyed it because I really was very happy with him and he was just such a lovely baby. You know, I enjoyed every minute of it. And that’s why I was so broken up when he was crying. I was crying and my husband come home and he said why? Are you crying? I said because she’s crying. And then I don’t know what to do. And I couldn’t call anybody because nobody had children.
P: Yeah. yeah, yeah
L: I was the first one Married and I was the first one that had a baby. Yeah. So I had and I don’t didn’t have cousins or aunts and uncles or whatever task so I was really on my own.
P: Yeah, that sounds tricky. And was it was it cloth diapers or what was that like?
L: It was cloth diapers. It was and we had a service. Thank goodness we had a service. But in the army, they started having plastic diapers. So that’s what I use because I didn’t want cloth diapers because you know who am I going to call? We’re in a motel.
P: Yeah, So it’s like an old time milk man?
L: We’ll get a service. No, no to get a service.
P: No, what’s a service? What does that mean?
L: Oh, the diaper service wouldn’t bring you cloth.
P: You leave them a bag of dirty diapers and then they replace it with clean ones,
L: with clean ones and they count how many I returned and that’s how many I got.
P: Wow, that’s a good deal.
L: Yeah, yeah, that was a saving, saving grace. Because we didn’t have a machine in our apartment.
P: Oh, a washing machine.
L: Yeah, yeah, washing machine. So where was I going to go wash diapers with the baby? Yeah, and I didn’t have a car because my husband’s up the car. So I so I needed something and we didn’t have the paper the paper diapers.
P: Yeah.
L: At that time. So you know, was a whole mess and we just decided that was a good investment.
P: Yeah, that sounds like it so when you’re in the military, that you’re pregnant with number two.
L: Right.
P: And that also, I’m assuming was not planned?
L: Yes. We decided that let’s have a baby in the military so we don’t have to pay anything.
P: Okay. All right. That was planned. And that was the second one easier because you knew what to expect and
L: yeah, I had the same the same episodes with with the nausea. You know, that kind of thing. But, you know, luckily, everything went very smoothly and I had a very nice obstetrician in the army. Very nice.
P: And then so for that birth, this the second one come on time.
L: Ooh, it’s army time. They give you the date. babies delivered. But yes, I was full term I my due date was was February 17. And I came to see my obstetrician. He says okay, you’re ready. Oh, you come in on come break the water and you’re ready to go.
P: Wow.
L: Yeah,
P: now people get really excited if you if you break the water that’s not considered cool for the doctor to break the water unless like things have gone wrong.
L: You know what? I was clueless again. Who knew? Who knew? I certainly was hoping that I wouldn’t have such a long labor as I did with Josh.
P: Yeah.
L: And he felt this baby was big enough.
P: Yeah. So you had an appointment on your due date. And you went in. He broke your water and then did that start contractions? Are you needed to be induced?
L: No, no, I came in on the day before that was my came in the 16. And he says, You know what? You’re ready. Your your due date is tomorrow. Why don’t you go home, make arrangements for your other child and set it up? And come on in. We’ll break the water in and you’ll have the baby. So we did.
P: So you went in like it was a business meeting because you weren’t having contractions. Right, right. And he broke the water and then did your contractions start?
L: In a little while? Yeah, yeah, definitely pretty fast. Labor was was very fast.
P: did you get an epidural for this one.
L: Yes, he did the epidural. He didn’t call him in an anesthesiologist which surprised me but he did it and the only thing I have to say he didn’t stress about drinking water. So I had a lot of spinal headaches when I came home, miserable in the hospital and when I went home, so if I had known that I would have been guzzling water constantly.
P: Yeah.
L: But I didn’t know that in grandma was watching Drush. And she never never heard of it and didn’t know about it either.
P: Well, she didn’t have an epidural. There’s no
L: right but he would think that she’s a general physician. She would have had some idea of women having epidurals and you could have a headache, spinal headache, because you don’t take enough fluids. But she didn’t know anything about that. So
P: that’s totally interesting. And so did you remember how long the labor was with Teddy? Four and a half hours?
L: Oh, that’s quick.
P: Yeah, no, it’s Yeah, yeah.
L: So I like that.
P: No kidding. Yeah, that’s a great reduction. Did you feel the birth or no, because the epidural work,
L: the epidural work, so that was really slow. Everything worked out very well. I said geez, the army.
P: The mission is to get this baby out. Right So did you get to stay in the hospital man Are they kick you out? What do they do?
L: Yes. Oh, no, no, no, I got the royal treatment because my husband was an officer. So unfortunately, the baby got a real treatment. He had his own bassinet in his own room by himself because it was no other officers wives that had babies.
P: Oh they segregated the kids, that’s funny.
L: Yes, yes. Yes, they segregated the wives and segregated the babies.
P: That is strange So what was it like when you brought the second one home because now you have two and you still don’t have much help was my guess.
L: Right? Well, it was work. It was constant constant and you had an almost two year old. You know, when he was a little jealous of the baby. Yeah, he kept pushing when I and I didn’t breastfeed the second one at all. He was 8 12
P: Yeah.
L: But he was a big baby too. And you know what, I didn’t want to go through that and whether he’s getting enough milk or not and I had the two year old. I said, You know what? I’m okay. You know, so I saw with the first one that giving him formula. He turned out pretty well. Yeah, so I just went straight ahead to give him formula for the second one too.
P: Well also this is 1968. So I think the fashion of breastfeeding comes and go
L: oh, at that point. Yeah, at that point, and 66 It wasn’t really an 68 Absolutely not everybody sort of used formula.
P: Yeah. Well imagine postpartum is tricky because you’re exhausted. And have too little babies.
L: You know what, I was just happy to have two healthy kids. And that we were together because Vietnam was hanging over us every single day. Yeah. So in that sense, and and we had, what, six months left, before he got discharged, you know, dad a discharge. So I’m keeping my fingers crossed that we don’t get any letters.
P: Yeah. I would guess that’s a giant dose of perspective.
L: Yeah, right. Yeah. So all in all, you know, there were too many other stresses around. So I just concentrated on the babies.
P: Okay. And then from there, you move.
L: We went back to California. They had a position waiting for dad because he signed and then he got drafted. So they were holding that position for him.
P: So why did you leave California?
L: And that was other things. This was a general practice and they really didn’t explain that to Dad. And he had to do everything from pediatrics to wow, you know, geriatrics to, you know, everything in between. And he just didn’t like that kind of practice. And there were a lot of wealthy communities there that demanded you to come out for a headache.
P: Yeah.
L: So during the night he’d have to drive in the wilderness to find his house. And he says, oh, Doc, give me something. And he’s there stained by the fireplace with the with the drink. And he says, I have a headache. And I just came back from Japan or whatever. So dad does not like any part of it.
P: Yeah, I can see it was I can see what’s not appealing there.
L: And we decided to go to the east coast because he wanted to go back to New York. Plus, we thought we had family. For Kids. Yeah, and stuff. So yes, we headed to New York.
P: Okay, now I want you to walk very carefully through this next pregnancy which is me. So then planned again, am I planned.
L: No, that just happened in my surprise. What happened is I I had my time, it wasn’t a copper T.
P: It’s some kind of birth control.
L: Yeah. So I had, you know, different things inserted. What was on 68? Yeah, but I decided since we’re going east coast, and I was having issues with these new new thing that I would have it removed. Not thinking, yeah, you can get pregnant again.
P: Yeah. Yeah.
L: And that’s what happened on our way across.
P: Oh, wow.
L: Yeah. So I found out that I was very tired and sleepy and totally exhausted to New York. And I didn’t realize that’s one of the symptoms to have early pregnancy. So that’s, that’s when you came around.
P: wait So there’s still no home pregnancy test.
L: And no, we didn’t do anything like that. Okay, we didn’t do anything. So yeah. So we came to New York, and we thought of the heat and the humidity. It was during the summer. And of course, you know, I wasn’t used to that. And that’s why I was so exhausted and everything. But eventually, I got nauseous again. That was one little symbol of what’s what’s coming.
P: I was trying to send several signals at first, but no one was getting it.
L: Nobody was listening. I’m sorry.
P: That’s okay.
L: So how was that pregnancy that pregnancy? It was normal in that sense. It’s just that we were stuck in a motel room with, you know, with four of us. Yeah, two little ones and I was pregnant again, and I was sick. And dad was starting this new practice. So he was gone all day.
P: Yeah.
L: Sometimes in the evening, too. So I was just, you know, it was just hard there. It was very hard, and to be stuck in the motel with the heat and the air conditioning, not working and no car you know, so yeah. So that that was a difficult kind of thing, but not because of the pregnancy.
P: Okay. And then okay, and then for my birthday, do you? How did that happen? How did you know? My birthday was the day
L: well, that really annoyed me because I my obstetrician who I loved, and I think he was so great, but he wasn’t available. He had emergency, you know, delivery or something. So I saw his partner. And he he said, oh your Do you know and I was you know, maybe closing in on my ninth month. And he says, Why don’t you come on in and because you tend to have big babies and we don’t want to worry about that. Make it easier. Just come on in. And you know, we’ll give you some and we’ll induce labor. So I said no, I don’t want to do that. I said, Maybe this time I will wait till the baby is telling me yes, I’m ready.
P: Yes. Now you’ve got wise. Yes.
L: Yes. Yes. You know, you learn from each one. Yeah, but the thing is in the army, I was really due. Yeah. And everything was was just just the right timing. But what happened is that Dad told his mother, that this is what the doctor said. And we had to figure out if she would come and help us take care of the two kids at home. And that’s when I could go in the hospital. And at the time to was February, and he wanted me to come in on the 17th. I said, No. I said I’m not having two kids. Born on the same day.
P: Yeah.
L: it’s Not necessary. I’m not sure we due. feel any. I felt Braxton Hicks kind of things, but not labor.
P: Your kids appreciate that. Way to stand your ground.
L: Yeah. So then, he said, Well, your taking chances he tried to scare me. I didn’t. didn’t appreciate that. So I said thank you. I’ll think about it. And I just wanted to get out of his office because I said no to I called my obstetrician. And we were at that point on first name basis, because of the doctor community kind of thing. Yeah, he was just the warm person. And he didn’t want me to call him Dr. Stall. So he’s just call me. So I called him up. And I said, your partner, which I named, he wanted me to come in that you would do pit and just induce labor. But I didn’t want to and I said why can’t I wait and have the baby when when this you know, I didn’t know what your boy or girl there’s no way of testing that. I said I’ll wait till till I’m in labor. So he says okay, okay. But then what happened? I got pressured into the following week, because grandma said the only time she could come with the following week to take care and help me out.
P: So Grandma decided my birthday.
L: Yep. Yeah,
P: was she still a practicing doctor at that point.
So, to give a little background here, my grandmother is also a doctor, now living in NYC, and my parents have moved from the west coast to the NY suburbs to be near her. My grandmother and my father were also war refugees who came to the US in 1950…so although she’s a doctor, she had to start her life over again in the US, and had now been in NY for about twenty years…as you can hear for a variety of reasons she and my mother always have kind of a contentious relationship
L: Yeah, I wasn’t happy about that. But dad didn’t want to be left. Taking care of kids. Yeah. So he sort of pressured me to go in the follow me. Yeah. And, you know, with with all the arrangements and the baby with was fine, and you were in position, so nobody saw any problem with that. And Dr. Stall said, Look, we’ll give you pit, if it doesn’t work. You could go home and your weight of it works, then you’ll have your baby.
P: How far from the due date?
L: Pretty close to close? But I think babies gain most of their weight the last two weeks, yes, three weeks.
P: According to the american…
L: And the other doctor told me that you were smaller than than the other two users. Oh, you had only bruisers. We don’t want that. You know, that kind of, you know, attitude. So he said it’ll be easier on you and get on everybody. And he was he was always concerned about you know, problems with the umbilical cord and all that kind of thing. He was trying to scare me into certain things.
P: Yeah.
L: You know, so when I said that’s the only time she could come. What am I going to do? Yeah, I didn’t know anybody here either at a new place. Yeah. So I couldn’t get somebody else to come in and help me and I wouldn’t trust a new sitter to come and take care of the two kids. That’s how we did it. I went in. They gave me pit and, you know, I had you
P: and how was that delivery?
L: Fine, and I had the epidural, and you came out and there is no worry about the umbilical cord or whatever. But you were seven pounds six pounds. Okay. Yeah. So you were much smaller than my other two.
P: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
L: So, so by the fourth one, I lay down the law I said I’m not coming in You know what, this baby is going to tell me when it’s coming in and I’m not coming in at all. So until it until it’s it’s time, but this you know, the fourth one of course I had the amniocentesis
P: wait so let’s go go slowly. Then the fourth one because there’s a big gap between me and the next one.
L: Yes, you came out. Everything was fine. You’re beautiful. You’re healthy and and it was like three and a half hours. An hour off.
P: You’re shaving off the hours that well done.
L: Yes. Three days in the hospital that out? Yeah, that’s not too bad. Yeah, yeah. Well, I was fine. If everything is fine. You know, and how we’re
P: we’re still doing formula but now we’re doing plastic diapers is my guess.
L: Yes. Okay. Yes.
P: Okay. Yeah. And then there’s an eight year gap between me and the next one. Right. So that one is a surprise.
L: Yeah,
P: were you 35 for that one?
L: I turned 35. in December. She was born in January.
P: Yeah, so you just turned 35 But nowadays, they call the geriatric pregnancy
L: I know, but yet a lot of people have them this late.
P: No, I’m not saying they’re right. I’m just saying what was the reaction? Were you older at the time to be having another baby?
L: You know what, after the three normal births and I never had any problems or issues my obstetrician wasn’t worried.
P: Let’s talk for a second about how different it was between the first and the fourth. Okay, for the first year 21 of your child and for your 35 so
L: 3434 Because that’s my whole pregnancy. was when I was 34.
P: Yeah, that’s true. Yeah, that’s a good point. So 34 for the second one. How much has the doctor’s office changed? And do you get a home kit for this one to know that you’re pregnant?
L: Well, I went in and they did the test. Okay. I didn’t get home. They didn’t take it at home. And he he examines you so he knows right away that you’re pregnant,
P: but did you go because you felt nauseous? Or what was your
L: I had the same thing and I just, you know, I said, I’m pregnant. You know, I knew that after we were out in the motel once we got a rental and moved into the house I was looking for an obstetrician. And it was funny because we we met the obstetrician at one of the doctors parties, and he bumped into me and he spilled a drink on my dress. I got so upset because I sewed it. I made the dress and it was a pregnancy. Yeah, very elegant dress. And he says, Oh, he says I’m so sorry. He says, please send it to cleaners. I will pay for it. Don’t worry about it. And he introduced himself and they said, I see you’re pregnant. He says who you’re going to
I say don’t have an obstetrician. A pretty good one. It was very, very sweet and very, ebbullient genuine
P: I hope you looked around the party to see if he wasn’t spilling drinks on everyone and that wasn’t
L: no and I asked around and they knew there were three of them. The other guy was his brother in law. And another guy but he was cold. I didn’t care for him. He was a good technician. Like cold.
P: Yeah,
L: that’s how I met sigh and then I you know like you fall in love with your obstetrician. He was one of those guys that so, so nice. You know so caring.
P: In this taped conversation i didn’t press to know more about the idea that someone would “fall in love with their obstetrician”, but I called her back to ask about that, and it sounds like this doctor was very solicitious when it came to my mother’s care. If she brought some fear up in her appointment, he’d call her a few days later to check on her. I’m guessing that this kind of special treatment is a reflection of the fact that she is a doctor’s wife, and when she says “fall in love” I think she means, you form a real emotional attachment to someone taking such good care of you during this vulnerable period
L: When I got pregnant the fourth time grandma just seated Him with all these What if something is wrong? What if you know, baby has such and such whatever so dad said you know we are taking a big chance we always throw the dice when we have kids.
P: Yeah.
L: You don’t know there’s no test. There’s nothing and I said you know what? Whatever happens, I will take care of it. You don’t have to do anything. You haven’t done any You haven’t changed a diaper you have the baby.
P: Good news. More of the same
L: what’s the Difference. What’s the difference? I said this is what what I’ll be doing again. I would love to have another child.
P: I’m guessing he because he was worried about the baby big do an amnio?
L: Well, that’s why I went back to Sy and I said look, Hank is up to the very upset about it. So is there anything I could have as a test to see if everything is okay with the baby. So at that time, that procedure was just coming out and insert that big long needle and draw the fluid out. And you know his story. He did it the first time with all the students around and dad was there front and center to watch him and he drew blood And everybody gasped and he took the needle out real fast dad was so white they walked him out.
P: his concern is that if you draw blood, it’s an increased chance of aborting the fetus
L: aborting Yeah. So he begged me when he could do it again. And carefully because he’s working with the monitor.
P: Yeah.
L: To see wherever it is. And he just to insert the needle again. And he said he promised it would be quick turnaround to the students and he said I don’t want to sound or else out of here. You know, yeah, I didn’t want anybody saying anything. So since I was already there, I said just do it because it would ease so much other things.
P: Yeah,
L: at home. So he did it and it worked really well smoothly. But he told Dad, to drive as fast as he can. put me to bed, put my feet up and not to move for a whole day.
P: Okay.
L: 24 hours. So once I pass that it became sort of safer, that I’m not aborting. Okay, but I would have been would have been very upset.
P: How far along were you?
L: I think it was three and a half or four months at that point and that was so hard for now. was later on? Yeah. It was wait. It wasn’t like six weeks?
P: Yeah, yeah, that’s like 16 weeks. And at this point you’re probably showing earlier because you already have three kids.
L: Right, right. Right. So and we had a wait for a month.
P: Or oh my god that’s crazy
L: I was ready to just just scream by the time it came. And at the same time dad got the Tay Sachs We never did the Tay Sachs and we should have done it for the other two because we are both European jews
P: Yeah, you mean he just got the test for it while you’re waiting for the amnio .
L: Yeah, yeah. And they said you want to do what do what tests? No, I’m having big tests. Like,
P: was he negative?
L: Yeah, if he’s negative, I’m okay.
P: So Tay Sachs is a terrible disease that causes all kinds of problems for babies who usually die by the age of five. Anyone can be a carrier for this genetic disease, but it’s much more common in Jews of European discent…about 1 in 27 people in this category are carriers, carriers don’t have symptoms, and to pass the disease on, both parents have to be carriers. if both parents have the genes, the baby has a one in four chance of having the disease–
L: yeah, yeah. So that’s that we did that that time.
P: When you get the annual results, is it a letter in the mail?
L: Oh, with the whole packet. Sy got the report, too. But he called me in because he didn’t want to say it on the phone. I was so nervous and he gave me a kiss on the cheek. He says everything is fine.
P: Oh, good. Okay, good.
L: Yeah, yeah. So until until I got the whole report. And they had the X chromosomes, you know everything. I have the whole report. I want to see that. That’s cool. And of course told the sex of the child but I never told anybody. So we made a pack. Nobody knows.
P: You and dad knew.
L: Of course it’s on the test. So that’s a secret you definitely kept from us.
P: I remember saying if it’s a boy, I’m gonna send it back.
L: I was like, sister, I remember being pan I was so excited. I was so excited that you’re going to have a sister never told her friend nothing. I was very excited. And after four months, I finally was able to enjoy the pregnancy.
P: Yeah, it sounds like you enjoyed all of them to some degree.
L: Well, the first first three months were Yeah. And I’d had every, every one of them exactly the same. Nope, nothing changed about one and four. So once after that, it was it was very, very nice.
P: But now it seems like you’re wading into technology in that you have an end of this time you have a definitive blood test to find out that you are pregnant, and did not have ultrasound or you did no,
L: we still didn’t have ultrasound, we still didn’t have
P: so what’s the scan that the OB uses to do the amnio?
L: He’s connected to a screen and everything at that point. But in the doctor’s office, we don’t have that
P: so that they have ultrasound there just for this test.
L: Yes. Just to see where he’s putting the needle and
P: it’s not regularly available so people aren’t getting this.
L: No, no, this is all new. This was all new. That’s why all the students were there. Learning. We were right on the foreground with this test.
P: That’s amazing. And then I remember I remember going to the hospital so you must have started started having contractions
L: on the 16th of January.
P: Yeah,
L: he said on the 16th of January. I woke up with
P: Wow.
L: Go figure
P: nowadays, if you have contractions they say don’t come to the hospital until two minutes apart. Where they tell you
L: Yeah, well the thing is, I went to the office first. Perfect. And he says yes, you’re in labor. But he said you can’t go to the hospital yet. But you have to, you know, wait till till they’re closer. But there was a blizzard coming,
P: I remember that.
L: When I went further along, went to the hospital because his partner was there. So he said to you and he said you better hurry up because ready
P: Wow.
L: So Sy had to zip out and go to the delivery and he broke the water. Okay, just was the final thing and boy that was it. Was a very hard labor. It really came on very, very strong, much stronger than then with you. Or Teddy.
P: How long were you labor for?
L: three hours
P: Oh, okay, so still is almost the same length as mine. Yeah, and no Pitocin I’m assuming
L: no, no. Pitocin and the thing is, by the time he gave me the epidural on the delivery table, yeah, not in the unit. You know when you check in, but um, delivery table, and then she was born and I don’t think the epidural even took effect.
P: Yeah, yeah, it’s too late. Yeah,
L: I felt everything. But everything was was nice. And so I was so happy because the umbilical cord was so short. Which was good because I worry about wrapped up in everything. And he kissed his babies when they were delivered. If it always gets the babies, and he had he had students there. this time? Not the last time but it was great. What’s good.
P: So, so two questions. One is dad is never in the delivery room.
L: No, he didn’t want to go in. He went in with Dr. Cheek with Josh. Okay. And I was in such pain with the contractions and he gave me the laughing gas because the epidural had worn off hours before and when he gave me laughing guess, Dr. Cheek said. You’re not helping at all leave. And he kicked him out
P: It wasn’t common to have the husband in the delivery room or was not. No, it
L: it wasn’t common. The fathers so we sat outside but since he was a doctor, they let him in. Yeah, yeah. But each time after that when they said you want to come in. That’s it? No. Wait outside.
P: Yeah, that’s helpful. Okay. Yeah. And then no female gynecologist were to be seen
L: at that point. No. No, all of them were men. Yeah. All of them were men.
P: so I was curious about this and looked it up: according to the LA times, in the 1970s roughly 7% of gynecologists were women…now its 59%, so what my mom was saying is true, pretty much all of them were men
P: so you seem like you have changed a lot over the course of those four births in that you were such a like deer in the headlights for the first one.
L: oh definitely, are you kidding
P: Right and you just didn’t know how any of it was gonna go right. You know how what pregnancy would be like and what were 50 like and
L: and they didn’t have those classes to come into the hospital. expecting parents to come in and be take you on a tour. This is where the delivery this is whatever. And you certainly didn’t have any lamaze classes. Let’s put it that way. Yeah,
P: yeah. By the time the last one was born, there were like breathing glasses and stuff, right?
L: Yeah, yes. Yeah.
P: You didn’t want to go
L: you know, was my fourth one. You know, I knew what to expect.
P: Yeah. Yeah.
L: And I felt very comfortable in my obstetrician.
P: Yeah, God, you’ve had quite a ride.
L: Yeah, yeah. I got stronger and more confident of telling them what I want. Like, like the last one.
P: It more assertive yah, yah,
Thanks again to my mother for sharing her story and for hanging out with me on Thanksgiving. Women of her generation seem very strong to me, to deal with the massive uncertainty of this process with much less than future generations would enjoy. One thing we didn’t talk much about was the postpartum period, and when I called my mom back to see if I’d missed anything, she said, that there were no lactation specialists…the nurse helped you with breastfeeding in the hospital and then if everything seemed okay, you were sent on your way and the doctor didn’t check you out again until six weeks later…although so much has changed around pregnancy and birth, not enough has changed around postpartum care, since it looks very similar today to what it looked like 50 years ago…that’s a frontier to work on for sure.
Thanks for listening. If you liked the show, feel free to share it with friends.
We’ll be back next week with another inspiring story
Episode 35 SN: Vagonominal: A vaginal delivery and a cesarean visit the same birth: Kristy
Today we are lucky to get to talk to a midwife who shares her experience of a twin pregnancy. The process of getting pregnant and giving birth did not look at all as she had planned–and she had a lot of real information on which to base her prediction. Although she didn’t have the specific birth she originally envisioned, she successfully carried twins to term, and gained personal experience with more styles of delivery in one pregnancy than most mothers of twins–she delivered one twin vaginally and the other through cesarean section–which she described as a vaginominal, thus the title. Now she can bring her hard won knowledge to her midwifery work.
Relationship between sleep and birth outcomes
https://academic.oup.com/sleep/article/43/12/zsaa110/5851407?login=true
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/29103944/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3836666/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2824023/
Preeclampsia
https://academic.oup.com/jn/article/133/5/1684S/4558569
https://www.uptodate.com/contents/preeclampsia-clinical-features-and-diagnosis
Maternity leave laws in US
https://worldpopulationreview.com/state-rankings/paid-maternity-leave-by-state
https://www.patriotsoftware.com/blog/payroll/states-with-paid-family-leave/
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. My kids are in their late teens, and talking with todays guest, who has kids of the same vintage, its really interesting to acknowledge how much has changed in the world of pregnancy between the time we had our kids and now. And that comparison is made possible by the fact that today’s guest is a midwife.
The process of getting pregnant and giving birth did not look at all as she had planned–and she had a lot of real information on which to base her prediction. Although she didn’t have the specific birth she originally envisioned, she successfully carried twins to term, and gained personal experience with more styles of delivery in one pregnancy than most mothers of twins–she delivered one twin vaginally and the other through cesarean section–which she described as a vaginominal, thus the title. Now she can bring her hard won knowledge to her midwifery work.
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?
Kristy: I’m Kristy Culp-Leonard and I’m from California.
P: Cool. Thanks for coming on the show Kristy. One thing I should bring up before we really get into it is that you are a midwife, which is super cool. So But before we talk about your kids, why don’t you tell us how you came to midwifery?
K: Oh, wow. Well, that’s a long journey ago. I’ve been a certified nurse midwife since 2002. I was my in my early years in college, I did public health work in Latin America, and was very much interested in Spanish speaking culture and then found myself to also be interested in public health and working with families and decided to go on to nursing school with the idea was going to be a nurse practitioner and work with women and families, and then learned about becoming a certified nurse midwife and being able to really care for women through their lifespan and work with them. Through labor and birth and empowerment and post birth. So that’s how I ended up being a certified nurse midwife.
P: That’s very cool. Where are you in Latin America, what countries.
K: I have an in Paraguay twice. Costa Rica. And Mexico twice.
P: I assume you’re fluent in Spanish. I’m totally jealous. Oh my god. That’s very cool. Did you become a nurse midwife before you had kids?
K: I’d graduated from the University of San Francisco with my bachelor’s in nursing. moved to Houston Texas. Wow get work experience knowing that I wanted to be a nurse midwife. So my app the time fiance but now husband, we just packed up and moved there and and I worked is an OB nurse in labor and delivery are about five years before I went to midwifery school at University of Texas in Galveston.
P: Okay, so you’re a midwife first. So how do you step into pregnancy? Many of us who you know we’re just civilians, we walk into pregnancy with this very idealized view of what it’s going to look like. But I wonder how people in the know might approach it.
K: so we were very plans. husband went to law school, some work experience. I was getting my graduate degree in midwifery getting all of our degrees out of the way. Kind of like a lot of Silicon Valley couples these days.
P: Yeah,
K: and work experience and then decided on having a family also decided to go back and get a master’s degree which kind of threw a wrench in it all. But that’s, that’s okay. I was a professional as an as a certified nurse midwife at the time, and then we encountered some trouble getting pregnant and had to seek out some assistance there. So that kind of threw us for a loop because I had at the time done a lot of internships in birthing centers and home birth and just really had this dream of a beautiful waterbirth with my colleague in her birthing center, and all of a sudden those dreams came to a halt because we had to work on getting pregnant, not the most traditional way at home. So but we were pregnant with our first try through assistance. Twins.
P: Wow. I remember when I was pregnant, and we got that first ultrasound, and they’re like, I see a heartbeat and I was like checking CVC and other one was keep looking around there. So that to me feels like a feels like a lottery win. When were you excited for twins?
K: I was not my husband was super stoked. He was like, oh two for the price of one. I immediately as a midwife, and having previously worked as a high risk OB nurse. I was stressed, worried about premature birth. Worried about being laid up at home in bed all the time during pregnancy. I was not excited at all. In fact, it probably wasn’t really embracing it until about halfway through the pregnancy.
P: So this is a difference between knowledge and no knowledge, which is you and me because I would have no idea what the risks are. So I like your husband will be like oh my god, this is so great. We only have to do this once.
K: Right? And I was not feeling that and you kind of at the beginning of pregnancy in general. You don’t feel that great or most people don’t feel that great with morning sickness and just feeling really tired. I think with twins, you have a much higher risk of morning sickness. So just knowing that in my mind, I kind of went full force with all of the natural remedies like taking vitamin B and trying all of the other natural remedies like ginger and just making myself eat a snack every two hours regardless of how I felt. So I think that kind of stuff was really important at first I was also extremely worried about the future, looking all the way forward to school days with twins and parenting twins. And is it right to have them in the same class or not? And so I’ve all of a sudden had to like start reading general lay persons literature about parenting twins and trying to not look at it from a clinical perspective.
P: yeah, yeah, You’re right that it does obviously bring up 100 different challenges for parenting that you may not have. It just does having twins mean you can’t do the waterbirth
K: correct
P: okay, so you also do that?
K: Yeah. Oh, yes. During our pregnancy, we went to a cloth diapering class at my friend’s birthing center. And it was it was the first time my husband had ever been there. But I had been there to seeing as a student nurse midwife, and assisting in birth, I said, Hey, let me show you this place and we walked around and he was like, Oh, my gosh, this is seems so awesome. Why can’t we have the babies here? And I was just like, Oh, you just like crushed my dreams.
P: Yeah I’m on a slower learning curve with your husband there. It was. It would have taken me going as well to be like, Oh, this idea. So how was the pregnancy?
K: Actually my pregnancy went pretty well. Probably around 12 weeks of pregnancy. I let most of my co workers know. I was pregnant and they were super kind and took me off of night calls. So I didn’t have to do night call in the hospital.
P: So it occurs to me that very few professions would be so understanding about pregnancy in terms of what your schedule was like, is there are they just being kind or is there clinical evidence to suggest you need to sleep or you shouldn’t have interrupted sleep or anything like that?
K; that’s a Good point. I think that we know being mindful and having less stress is really important for pregnancy. And however, there’s not a lot of great supports in the workplace for that. We experienced this with all kinds of professions I do when I’m caring for patients. And they happen to have the night shift whether they’re working at Home Depot stocking housekeeper for a hotel or a nurse in the hospital. Yeah, and there’s really not much as a professional that I that we can do except for just saying, you know, it’s really important to manage your life when you’re not at work. Make sure you’re getting adequate sleep for me because I’m a nurse midwife. We work in the office so we have daytime work hours as well as nighttime work hours, and you swap back and forth a lot. So I think if there was another person in my practice that had a singleton pregnancy, the group might not have been so supportive. But knowing that this was twins and I think some people knew that it was challenging for us to get pregnant. They were supportive
P: kudos, to practice for doing the right thing.
P: so I was impressed by the nurse midwives in Kristy’s practice before I did a lot of research but it turns out that researchers think there is a relationship between sleep and birth outcomes. There’s some studies in both humans and racks that suggest as you might expect, that sleep deprivation is associated with worse outcomes for mother and baby. It’s associated with higher rates of gestational diabetes in the mother, which is probably not super surprising. Since there’s a bunch of research about how sleep deprivation interferes with glucose metabolism in people who aren’t pregnant. But in pregnancy, this problem can be shared with the fetus and affect this development. One study found a higher rate of preterm births. Another found that sleep deprivation of the mothers was related to higher BMI. And higher risk for overweight or obesity in girl babies, but not boys. It’s nice to see a practice treating one of its own in a way that is consistent with good birth outcomes. Now we just need the rest of the workforce to follow suit and think more carefully about how pregnant women are treated since it fell in love who’s affected it’s also the baby which translates into public health.
K: I was still working a solid 40 to 50 hours a week. Yeah, it’s the removal of night call was extremely supportive and helpful. Yeah.
P: That’s awesome. So, so 12 weeks you tell everyone and you’re doing pretty well. And then for twin pregnancies, does it start imagining and starts to feel harder to carry the pregnancy just kind of physically earlier than it does for a single family? Is that your experience?
K: Yes. When I was 12 weeks pregnant, my tummy was probably more like 18 to 20 weeks sighs maybe still you can hide it and scrubs.
P: Yeah,
K: at work. Well, yeah. And then around 30 weeks, I looked like I was gonna deliver. Yeah, it’s just extra heavy weight and little ones growing in there.
P: Are there any recommendations for twin pregnancies like different levels of vitamins or something else you’re supposed to do?
K: Yeah, I did do some early reading in the pregnancy and what I was basing it off of was like a twin mom book that I had read about vitamins and protein being really important to try to prevent preeclampsia in pregnancy.
P: One thing that’s interesting about talking to Kristy is that she’s in the medical field so likely in touch with the most up to date information. And in the last 20 years since she’s had kids, information, ideas about preeclampsia have changed. So for example, around the time when her kids were born, doctors used to say that preeclampsia resolves with the delivery of the baby in the placenta. And now doctors think that preeclampsia is not a condition cured. By delivery. And long term women who experienced preeclampsia are an increased risk for heart and kidney issues. Researchers used to think that protein intake might be related to the incidence of preeclampsia, as well as calcium, sodium, iron and folate. But now more extensive studies suggest that we can’t link protein or these specific micronutrients to the development of preeclampsia. So medical community has known about preeclampsia for something like 2000 years, but we still don’t know what causes it. Having said that, you can’t really go wrong by pursuing a healthy diet. The only trick there is defining healthy
P: are you at higher risk with twins?
K: Yes.
P: Okay.
K: higher for gestational diabetes, preeclampsia. And so I just really managed my nutrition really well. And made sure my body was nurses like those cupcakes. Eating those I was like, I’m not doing it. I because I don’t have a lot of space, right?
P: Yeah, yeah.
K: So it has to be pure value if I was eating it.
P: That’s an impressive thing to follow. Because it takes a lot of willpower and you’re already tired with my first pregnancy. I was really careful about eating what I imagined in Olympian would eat. And with my second one, I was nauseous the whole time and only ate hotdogs and I’m a vegetarian. So it’s disgusting and under no circumstance should anyone consume that many hotdogs but I just I couldn’t I couldn’t hold anything else down so I’m impressed that you that you kind of traveled the straight and narrow….that’s a hard thing to do.
K: Well, interesting thing is, this was back so they were born in 2004. Yeah, so it was near the end of my pregnancy. I think I remember reading an article about professional article about mere mercury and fish and really the types of fish we should be limiting during pregnancy. Like all of that information started coming out. Yeah. One of the things was albacore tuna. Oh, my main sources of protein during my entire pregnancy was albacore tuna. So I stopped eating the albacore tuna probably about and went to chunk light tuna, probably only about a month before they were born. That was really science.
P: Totally, totally it you know, you’re you’re doing your best and you’re you’re better than Mrs. Hot dog. So that’s a we’ll take a week yet. So how far do you get to your in your pregnancy?
K: Well, that’s an interesting situation. They were born 39 weeks and four days. Wow. That’s 2004 Oh, so about I think it was about a year or two after that recommendation from maternal fetal medicine was that twins should be delivered by 38 weeks of pregnancy because of risks of the placenta, just aging and maturing a little bit faster and maybe not functioning as well. At the end of pregnancy, also risks of hypertension in the mom.
P; So did you make it to that late date intact? Is there any obvious cost to you for going longer?
K: But I worked all the way until 39 weeks? Oh, wow. I was living in Texas. We don’t have state disability there. So I had to work. And I actually I probably had preeclampsia in retrospect. And they were most likely some pretty solid signs of it starting around 37 weeks.
P: What so what happened that what happened that wasn’t caught by her practice?
K: well, I think there was this feeling of oh, she’s gonna be fine. When she lays down her blood pressure goes down. So a couple things we look at when there’s preeclampsia and pregnancy is maternal blood pressure. If it’s elevated, then that signs of at least hypertension, high blood pressure and pregnancy and then if there’s protein in your urine that’s a latter sign of eclampsia as well. So I had intermittently small amounts of protein in my urine, but when I would lay down my blood pressure wasn’t really elevated at all. So
P: are the guidelines for the blood pressure positional
K: not really like your body shouldn’t be shooting high blood pressures, intermittently like that?
P: Yeah.
K: I’m currently speaking about hypertension from my current knowledge and what the guidelines are currently. Yeah, this is back in 2004.
P: Yeah,
K: we weren’t as strict okay about hypertension in pregnancy. So I would go into the office and be checked and then I would take a couple breaths and my blood pressure would be fine. And then I would go home and I feel fine, no headache or anything like that. And then at 39 weeks, in a couple of days, I had an office appointment. And my blood pressure was sustaining of pretty high, pretty high numbers. In that practice. I was sent home to rest with a plan to be induced the next day, when a bed opened up. If I had at that time if I had seen a person in my practice with those blood pressures. He would have said Beeline it to the hospital right now. But I was in a different practice slightly different guidelines at that time. So I said, okay, I’m fine to go home because I’m in my heart. I didn’t want to be induced. But clinically, I knew it was right to be induced.
P: Well, that sounds like a tricky thing. And advances in medicine take a really long time. This doesn’t seem all that long, right? It’s like 17 years. Right? So it’s interesting how much we have learned about pregnancy in the since well, I have a 2004 birth also. So since those kids yeah, I feel like a lot has changed.
K: I’m going to rewind a little bit. So just share one of the things about twin pregnancies,
P: yeah.
K: And route of delivery though. So it’s in twin pregnancies. We have to be concerned about the two babies and the position that they are in the womb. So ideally, you have babies in the womb that are both head down. And we checked out at the end of pregnancy and if a person’s desiring a vaginal birth, and we move forward with plans for vaginal birth twins are both head down.
So in my pregnancy at around 28 weeks, first baby twin A is head down but Baby B was Baby B had prior to that then head down or vertex so he continues to be breach breach breach, and I started going bonkers thinking I’m not having a cesarean birth and talked to my OB was in support with my midwife and I said I know you have a lot of experience with a breech extraction. And we need to have an honest discussion about this because I really want to have a breech extraction with Baby B. And he kind of was not giving me like an absolute solid answer on that. Well Kristy, we’re just gonna kind of roll with it and see how it goes. And let’s just seeing it that baby turns. I start getting stressed about this and start at around
P: thats a stressful answer.
K: right? I think it’s yeah, it probably didn’t help that my husband is an attorney either. So we have a midwife patient and houses an attorney and honestly, so I enlisted some support of local pregnancy natural support people in Houston. First I went to my acupuncturist said we got to do something to help this baby turns her head down and they’re like, no, what we’ve got we we do have tricks for that, but not when there’s a twin pregnancy. You can do some acupuncture to help with relaxation. Oh, I did that. Then there’s a doula massage therapist in Houston at the time, who was known for pregnancy massage and helping open up the lower back and the mostly the lower back of, of the pregnant woman at her hips. In her massage techniques, and frequently breech babies would turn to head down. So I started seeing her like two to three times a week, around probably around 35 weeks of pregnancy. It wasn’t cheap. It was well worth it. Initially, I knew there was an OB physician in Houston. That’s known for his technique at doing vaginal breech births, which now is more of a lost art, especially for the first time mom and I had actually like looked into going to him to transfer care. It was like 37 weeks of pregnancy.
P: Yeah,
K: really late.
P: Yeah.
K: So if I did transfer care to him, though, it was going to be extremely tricky. It was going to definitely be induced labor because of his call schedule and where he worked. It was going to be a lot more medicalized than I was really desiring so I decided to stick with my team. I was super nervous about being in the hospital, even though I work in a hospital and literally went on two tours of the labor and delivery unit with my midwife. I was just like, oh, I have to see where I’m going to be. I have to see the operating room. I know I’m going to give birth in there so I’ve got to got to feel comfortable here. So fast forward to about that 39 week visit where my blood pressure is going up. We do an ultrasound and lo and behold, Baby B is head down as well.
P: Oh, Wow,
K: so I’ve got two babies that are heads down. And at this point, I was like, Okay, this is great. I’m totally on board with being induced. I know I have high blood pressure. This is a bummer but I can do this.
P: Is it riskier to be induced? What if you have high blood pressure?
K: not necessarily, I mean, it’s risky to stay pregnant,
P: okay.
K: Depends on how high your blood pressure how high the person’s blood pressure is, and if we can control it, so sometimes there’s people depending on where they are in their pregnancy in the way the baby’s laying that do need a cesarean birth as a result of their high blood pressure, okay?
P: but You’re not that person. So, now I’m imagining your bag is packed and you go in for your induction.
K: Well, my bag is packed. And I go home and I from the office and I sleep right? And then we call the next morning. We’re ready. Like when should we go in and they’re like, You know what, we were really busy all night. We don’t have a bed. So,
P: wow.
K: So eventually that evening, have a bed for me. And so we go in to be induced
P: and how did that go?
K: We get there and one of the midwives from the group, probably I would say the people always have personality clicks, right. And so she’s like one of my favorite midwives in the group. She was on call that night. So she comes in and she checks my cervix. And I was thinking I was like, you know, maybe a half a centimeter dilated or one because my physician the day before checks me and she looks at me with all honesty and she said you know, Kristy, I think doctor was really generous. Yesterday, your cervix is rock solid.
P: Oh
K: hard and you are not dilated. So I’m just gonna start this induction
P: so you’re starting from ground zero
K: there is what I’m starting from ground zero and we started with Pitocin and my IV from ground zero.
P: Well, that doesn’t sound comfortable already.
K: Really, but here’s the thing. Things that happens when a woman has preeclampsia and I’ll be honest, I don’t truly understand the physiology of this but a true a person with true preeclampsia many times once their body is into labor, they just go and their bodies like we know we have to cure this by delivering the baby in my case babies and placenta so also as pretty. I feel like I’m fortunate my mom has really good birthing genes. She’s just kind of like that person that accepted labor contractions and just went with it and had a baby in a normal ish amount of time. So I just kept thinking about my mom during the labor and go and thinking like I’ve I’ve got my mom’s genes on my side, I can do this. My husband and I did have a doula with us. It was someone that I had worked with in the community, so I knew her do her techniques. I felt super comfortable with her.
So she was there for our labor. The beginning of the labor, we started with Pitocin it was a little rough. I had a newish nurse caring for me. So this was the hard part. Because remember, I had been a nurse before I was a midwife I have ideas and how a nurse should be
P: Yeah, yeah.
K: And I don’t think we were a good personality fit. That’s okay, but one of the things for me was don’t offer me pain medicine. I’m very much aware of what the options are. I’ll let you know if I want it. And the first couple hours all of a sudden into labor I just had some excruciating pain in like, of my lower quadrants on my abdomen and it would not let up at all. In retrospect I think it was probably one of the babies like just elbowing me and was just like, This is what I’ve got to do to come out so deal But The team was pretty like worry about my level of pain, because it wasn’t related to contractions. It was like this severe shooting pain and rare but we’re always concerned what if there’s a spontaneous uterine rupture like it’s thin and it ruptures or something we’re more concerned about that of course and someone that’s having a vaginal birth after cesarean but the twins do create an over distended uterus, so we turned off the Pitocin for a while. And the nurse of course offered me pain medicine.
And I was like, we’re not going there. My doula will be in in just a moment. And I think like at that point, I was probably only like, one and a half centimeter dilated or maybe even one. Like I knew this was gonna be a long night and a long next day, and I’m sure everyone in the background was like just shaking their head and rolling their eyes at the midwife laying in the bed in room, whatever. But my Doula Nadia came and when she was there, I just felt like super confident and comfortable. And something just changed. And I said, let’s start that Pitocin backup. Come on, like we’re not going to sit here all day.
P; Yeah,
K: or really. It was at night. And I think we started the Pitocin backup around midnight. And things just truly picked up at that point in they did not have any option for like cordless monitoring or anything like that and the bathroom was across the room from the fetal monitoring.
But I felt the best sitting on the toilets. So I had every like side effects like nausea, vomiting, and and I was like, Well, I’m gonna I’m gonna go to bathroom. I need to go to the bathroom. And I just kept getting off the monitor and going to the bathroom. And I begged my midwife please can we just like let me take five minutes shower. Like because I was trying so much just be in the shower because I knew that water is like what we call an agua dural. So water is super helpful for support but I couldn’t be in there. Because they had to monitor the high risk pregnancy. And keep in mind I had high blood pressure too. My midwife had to come in and give me a little lecture on how it was really important to be on the monitor. So we went back to the bedside, and I was on the monitor and then the nurse kept fiddling around with the monitors on my tummy which drove me crazy because the night before I got into so I broke out with a rash called pups, which is an itchy rash all over it was all over my lower abdomen and thighs.
And so I was extremely sensitive to fetal monitors. I was just getting annoyed with them adjusting them the whole time. So my bag of water had broken and my husband was super stoked and excited things are moving along. And Nadia and I just looked at each other and we’re like, we’re not gonna make a big deal out of this out the bag of water breaking and we just kind of just kept laboring because we felt like the more the nurse wasn’t in the room, the better it was for my mental state and progress, which absolutely was true. They should have changed I should have asked for a different nurse or they should have changed us or something. Bad personality fit but that’s okay.
At Some point my husband goes outside to get ice and water and he’s just so excited and he tells the nurses all we think her bag of water broke about an hour ago.
P: Oops.
K: Exactly. So Nadia and I when we heard that, that he did that we were just shaking our heads because we knew we were like doing this on the down low or not telling anyone because we knew the babies were fine like listening to their heartbeat. And we knew that they had central monitoring outside of our room and they could see their heartbeat tracings. So it was fine. So the nurse comes in, you know, we get scolded, how come you didn’t tell me? Because everything’s fine. That’s why we didn’t tell you I literally I had to calm her down. I said because everything’s fine. That’s why we didn’t tell you. And then she, she looks through the pads and she’s like, there’s Meconium in the amniotic fluid. I said yes, there is. It’s like meconium but everything is fine. So there’s nothing we’re going to change about this. We’re just going to keep supporting my labor. I mean, I’m having to labor support my nurse, literally so as much as possible that we could get her keep her out of the room. It was great.
At that point I said you know what, I’m I’m done with you pressing around on my tummy. Can we just put scalp clip on baby as head because it’s hard for you to monitor and I can’t I can’t handle you touching me all the time. And so we agreed to that. I was four to five centimeters already. I was probably like, at three in the morning. Literally. We started Pitocin around midnight, and that was probably around three or four in the morning.
P: That seems fast.
K: oh Yes. It was. And I was really like, don’t really want to be in my mind. I was like, I don’t want to be checks because in my mind I was thinking oh my word. I’m only going to be one centimeter and it’s going to be so depressing. I don’t want to know that I’m one centimeter but I’m bracing myself mentally. I can do this if I’m one centimeter right. And then she’s like, you’re like four to five. Okay, that’s pretty impressive. We put the scalp electrode on the baby and then probably about an hour and a half later I’m still standing at the bedside standing getting on my hands and knees just moaning with each contraction and just taking one at a time. No pain medicine at all. And then probably about an hour and a half later. Started like showing signs of transition shaking. Things were just getting really intense.
I think we had to check on one of the babies or something at that point. Or it could have been a time when Titi was telling me I needed to stay on the monitor again because I was sitting on the toilet a little too often. And so she checked me and I was already seven to eight centimeters.
P: Oh Wow.
K: It was really intense. Pretty sure she left the room and went and called the doc because he was probably at home I’m assuming to say hey, you’re not going to believe this or midwife twin patient is almost complete. And so about an hour, hour and a half after being seven centimeters I was fully dilated.
P: Wow.
K: Yeah. 10 centimeters and bearing down spontaneously.
P: Wow.
K: Yeah. Kind of how my mom’s? I think labor went like smooth that way. Like literally like I really only had like six hour labor though.
P: Wow. So is the delivery smooth now that we’ve gotten complete,
K: right? So my doctor, he comes in and he’s just like trying to you know, talk to me and I’m just having contractions back to back. And I’m on my hands and knees and I just keep looking at him going. This is so hard. This is the hardest work I’ve ever done. This is so hard. That was my mantra. I never said like, I can’t do this. How much longer nothing like that. I just kept acknowledging how challenging the situation was my doula and I didn’t really want to start pushing in the operating room. We really were hoping to like do some of the pushing in our delivery room but with twin deliveries, you need to go to the operating room for the just in case
P: Yeah,
K: there was a scenario and my midwife told me, Oh, Kristy, you’re doing great. You’re not going to push that long. Which I will never say that to a patient because that was the longest hour in my life. So we go to the operating room, and unfortunately in the operating room, you’re laying on a table meant for surgery. It was much different than my my ability to be free standing or on my hands and knees and moving around and squatting. And I was just laying there and with my over distended tummy it was plopping over to one side or the other was very challenging to get my pushing efforts together. There’s probably about like 10 or 15 people in the operating room, which I didn’t really feel or notice, because I think I was used to that.
P: Yeah,
K: but my husband was like, Oh my gosh, what’s going on here? So we just working on pushing a lot of like the nurses had to do a lot of coaching. Eventually, they pulled in this nurse who I had actually worked with when I was a labor and delivery nurse before I was a midwife, and I really admired her and thought she was a great nurse. She just got in my face and was really screaming at me like come on, you can do this. You’ve got this that’s exactly how to do it. And that is truly what got me to help birth my baby. Some people really want to have a calm pushing experience. But I needed somebody to be in my face, coached me through this to give me the feedback.
Additionally, I was like, Wait a minute. It was just running around in here and nobody’s helping me hold my tummy. I was lucky enough. They let my Doula go in. And I think that’s really because possibly my persistence and me being a midwife, and they knew that we had this really good teamwork bond going on.
P: Yeah.
K: And they also they they knew this doula really well. And so usually you can only bring one person into the OR with you but husband and doula both gotta go. And Nadia knew her place and she sat there and she just like worked with me and helps me. She helped hold my tummy in place. And then I was like, Don’t you know, have a mirror in here so I can see what I’m doing. They got that mirror in there and the nurse was super helpful was coaching me then we had baby A. so Baby A was born and was handed to the pediatric team I barely got to see are our babies were our their genders were surprised. So that was exciting.
P: that is exciting
K: it was a little girl. And I totally didn’t believe my husband when he announced it. That was one of the like the the most important thing I had a birth plan. The most important thing to me on it was nobody announced the gender of our children let my husband look and say it’s everything out like if I got an epidural or something like that, I’d be okay with it. That was the most important thing. So he told me and I was like you got to be like, I don’t believe this. I said, Okay. And then I just remember looking up at him and going, Oh, my God, I got to do this again for the next one. So at that point, there’s in a twin delivery there’s a lot of poking and prodding and everything into the vagina and feeling the cervix and breaking the bag of water and think, you know, ultrasound on your tummy to check the position of baby B and that was that was pretty stressful. So we confirmed Baby B was head down. they broke the bag of water which Ideally,
bring the baby’s head down to the cervix and then you just push the baby out. That’s not what happened in my case.
So my cervix moved back to be about eight centimeters dilated
P: No,
K: yes. But I didn’t know that. And baby’s heart rate started having these huge dips, which I was not aware of because part of me trying to be mindful and in the moment of labor and birth was I absolutely didn’t follow. I didn’t look at the fetal monitoring or anything like that. I was not interpreting anything that was going on. I just said, You know what, I’m just going to take care of each contraction at a time, push the babies out. You’re my clinical people. Trust that you’re monitoring the monitors. Right?
P: Yeah,
K: It’s not my job. My job is to go through labor. Not a midwife today. Oh, I didn’t know his heart rate was doing all these changes. Everyone in the room starts to get a little worried. Doc was in there and you could see the look on his face like oh, he’s like, listen, we have to have a true discussion here. Baby B’s having a lot of decelerations on the monitor. This doesn’t look good. I’d really like to deliver baby soon. But we can go through a few more contractions and see how it is a baby will tolerate it. So we go through a few more contractions and at this point, they turn the volume up on the monitor so everyone knows what’s going on. And then I hear it and I can just hear the dunk. Which is a very slow rate, right? Oh, yeah. And I was just like, Oh no, this isn’t good. I practically sat up on the operating table and I was like, I give you permissions. Put a vacuum or forceps on baby B right now. Let’s just do it and he looks at me and says, You know what? I can’t do it. You’re only eight centimeters.
P: Are you surprised by that? Is it normal for the cervix to close? Well, there’s another baby in there.
K: I mean, it could but it’s not that like usually in all of my experience. Between deliveries. You break the bag of water. The baby mom bears down the cervix stays dilated.
P: Yeah,
K: you have the next baby. There’s usually like a, like a 10 minute difference in their age or something like that.
P: Yeah.
K: No. And so we try a bunch of position changes to alleviate heart rate changes, and that didn’t work. So I decided that I needed a cesarean birth for the Cesarean birth though I remember I don’t have any pain medicine.
P: Oh, yeah.
K: So I just started to mentally prepare myself that I was going to have to have general anesthesia be put to sleep
P: because that’s faster acting than a seat get an epidural. Right?
K: Yeah, I started to get like a little teary eyed and freaked out but I was like, I can’t do that. Because if I’m freaking out, going under, I’m going to be freaking out coming out. Need to just calm down. And I remember the anesthesiologist, just saying in his like lovely think it was a British accent. Listen Kristy just roll over to your side and push your back out and let me see if I think I can get a spinal anesthesia in you really fast. And I was probably the most compliant person ever.
I rolled over. I was laying there for probably like two minutes, maybe three, pushing my back out towards him. Watching the fetal monitor and watching that baby’s heart rate go super low. And then he’s like I got it in control over now. Oh, who’s like the most grateful person ever? Because that is not very common.
P: Yeah,
K: it was literally like three minutes. I rolled over. I looked at the team and I said because you have to have a Foley catheter in your bladder before surgery to keep your bladder empty. And I was like, alright, team, let’s put in that catheter and let’s go then I was kind of a midwife telling them what to do. Then they started the Cesarean birth, and I looked up at my husband and that was really scary. I looked at him knowing what I saw on the fetal monitor and I said this might not be good. It might not come out screaming and crying right away. That’s why we have this neonatal team in here. We’re just gonna like, be calm right now, but this might not be good. And that was sTinker came out. screaming and crying.
P: Awesome. Well done.
K: Yeah, I joke now that it was a vaginal birth. One vagina, one abdominal.
P: I feel like you’ve coined a useful phrase here.
K: Yeah. I’m like super grateful for the anesthesia team for their skills. Getting that spinal anesthesia in me. I’m super grateful because like, literally that was about three minutes. And they’re under some stress.
P: yeah, Yeah,
K: trying to feel through this and also thinking like, I’m not gonna mess this one up. Yeah. You any wasted three minutes.
P: Yep. Yep.
K: So I’m very grateful for that. Then my husband was like, Oh, we have a boy. So we had a we have a girl and a boy. And I was like, that’s great. Make sure he’s tagged and there there was a nursery and I was like, I need to recover. I’m extremely nauseous and vomiting right now. I can’t enjoy these babies. Send them to the nursery.
P: Yeah, that’s probably smart though,. Right? That that is again, like I think evidence of what real knowledge is helpful for?
K: I think, yes. So for me, I needed to take care of myself so that I could start parenting them better. Yeah, and a couple of hours. I really had to get past the nausea and vomiting because that was horrible. And then I was confident about, you know, the security and the nursery. So going into pregnancy, I thought I was going to have this like singleton waterbirth at my friend’s birthing center, and waddle back to a queen sized bed and have that bonding golden hour after birth with a baby on my chest. But I didn’t I got to see them about two hours after birth. And they were on my chest for months and months after that.
P: Yeah, no, honestly. It Sounds like because you know so much you kind of expected from challenges in your pregnancy and that went pretty well. I mean, that went shockingly well, to make it so late.
K: Yeah. I just had to like mostly let go a couple times. I called my Doula one time when I was at work, and I was like, I think I’m having contractions. This is so stressful. I put myself on the monitor and she’s like, Kristy, you gotta take your clinical mind out of this. Go with what how your body’s feeling. I want you to lay down right now and be patient and her support in that sense was super helpful. I wasn’t that person that went home. And listened to the baby’s heartbeats with a Doppler all the time. I have my own Doppler. I could do that.
P: yeah, Yeah,
K: I only did ultrasounds during pregnancy when I needed them. I didn’t I never did them for fun at work. Because I was worried not even to check position.
P: yeah.
K; So I’m, I mean, I’m grateful for my ability to be able to do that. Well, and the support of my Doula friend.
P: that seems amazing. Since your kids have been born. Have you seen any other twin births like yours?
K: I have not. I don’t think so. Something I’ve been present. Of course, there have been people in our practice that have had vaginal and unnecessary and but most of the time, I have not either somebody chooses to have an elective Cesarean birth for twins, or they have successful vaginal birth times two
P: that is totally interesting.
K: Yeah, one of my best friends who is a labor and delivery nurse, I would have wanted her to be with me if she could have been with me, but she was living in a different state at the time. But she hears my story and she’s sometimes a little bit more on the high risk end and I’m on the low risk end of like, how things go and how we approach and and she’s like, wow, that’s a bummer. Wouldn’t you have just rather just had a cesarean birth to begin with and I was like, No, I got to experience labor and birth
P: yeah, Yeah.
K: And even if I had gotten an epidural, I still would have experienced labor in my mind, but I am happy that I truly experienced a full labor and vaginal birth without an epidural.
P: My guess is it’s a boon to your patients. That You have this pretty wide experience in one pregnancy,
K: I could have a better idea of how they feel.
P: Yeah,
K: you know, actually on that note, like it’s, it’s definitely helped me coach people and be genuinely honest with them before having a cesarean birth and what their recovery will look like. Because we talked to people about to cesarean birth, and we’re just really, oh, these are the risks, you know, infection and bleeding and da da da, but we don’t really talk to them much about the sensations, yeah, of recovery. Say a little bit about like, what you might feel during the actual birth, but not all of the recovery, but definitely has helped me change the way I speak to people before Cesarean birth, how their recovery is going to be and also just being supportive with them, even a year after their Cesarean birth if I just meet them for the first time talking to them about the sensations they have, because there’s a lot of things that go on with when your nerves start waking up and the sensations like on your skin level. The tingling and the itching and pulling in the corners of your scar and how weird it is.
P: Yeah,
K: and that’s ignored.
P: Yeah, I mean, that falls into the giant, bottomless postpartum bucket in which wrecks many things are shoved right without examination. How was your postpartum with twins?
P: There wasn’t much sleep. I forced myself to take a nap every single day. The whole time. I was on maternity leave, which was only 11 weeks so
P: oh, Wow, good lord.
Let’s talk real briefly about maternity leave while we’re on the topic. The US currently ranks 36 Rock Bottom among OECD countries for the carrot provides new parents for maternity leave. Probably everyone listening heard that the attempt to pass a paid leave bill is precarious right now in Congress. current federal law requires 12 weeks of unpaid leave for companies with at least 50 employees. Basically, this leads to about 12% of Americans getting paid leave for 12 weeks. States have passed their own paid leave bills in 2018 and 2019. And these states are basically on the east or west coasts, and they vary in their generosity.
K: I was in Texas and I didn’t have a lot of benefits and I guess it was just all I got was my FMLA. That’s it.
P: here FMLA is money from the Family Medical Leave Act.
K: So it was 11 weeks and the whole time I was on maternity leave for 11 weeks. I made sure I took a nap every single day I was scared to death of getting postpartum depression because I had the blues that was definitely apparent and I probably had some depression but just kind of worked my way through it, keeping my chin up and acknowledging it and taking naps and then once I went back to work, I only went back to work part time which I’m super grateful for my employer, allowing me to change my status. I only worked in the office, so I stopped doing call in the hospital, but every single day I was off. I still took a nap. So we were woken up frequently for a very long time. In fact, our children didn’t really ever sleep through the night until probably about three or four years old. And I nursed 100% A little over a year.
P: Good lord. Wow. that’s a lot of work…
K: I had helped a lot of people with breastfeeding and nursing and the minute they came out of the nursery, I was like alright, we got to nurse these little babies and did send them to the nursery. Again to try to get like a three, three or four hour solid nap in because I was like this was like maybe day two postbirth is one of my midwives from the practice came in to round on me and I got an earful in a lecture from her about how silly it was to send those babies to the nursery. They needed to be with me mammals are never left by their left by their mom, almost pulling their baby cubs every two hours to offer them milk to keep them alive. They need it for survival. I loved Theodora she was also one of my other favorite midwives in the group for background was breastfeeding support and also doula support. The babies had already been latching and stuffing perfectly so I was feeling like pretty overly confident. That’s why I sent him to the nursery but she she must yourself into that nursery brought those two babies back and was like, alright, what is it then you need to nurse them for survival. And honestly with that little pep talk and lecture. I didn’t have any issues with milk supply. I mean, I had to work hard when I got back to work and I was pumping and all of that would pump in my car on the way to work and do crazy things like that, but I never had to purchase formula.
P: and Now there have one foot out the door for college right?
K: Mm hmm.
P: Amazing.
K: Yep.
P: Thank you so much for sharing your story.
K: Thank you
P: Thanks so much to Kristy for sharing her story and her insights about pregnancy in general and twin pregnancy, given her professional life as a midwife. And thank you for listening. We’ll be back soon with another inspiring story.
Episode 34 : Learn to Love the Birth you Had: Katie
