Episode 27: How did We Get our Current Culture around Pregnancy & Birth: Ask the Historians of Science
Episode 27SN: How did We Get our Current Culture around Pregnancy & Birth: Ask the Historians of Science
Talking to my mother and other women from previous generations it sounds like they got pregnant and gave birth in a culture that’s different from the one we face today. Based on these talks, I have often wondered how we got to the specific point we are at: where pregnancy is a very medical experience, C sections are so common, we seem to be just starting to talk more openly about miscarriages and the postpartum period, and women are trying to navigate the demands of breastfeeding and work. In today’s show I interview two historians of science to get a sense of how we arrived at this particular moment in which we find ourselves.
Lamaze method
https://www.healthline.com/health/pregnancy/lamaze-method-pain-relief
Audio Transcript
Paulette: Hi Welcome to War Stories from the Womb. I’m your host Paulette Kamenecka. I’m an economist and a writer, and a mother of two girls…I’m also a daughter…and from talking to my mother and other women from previous generations it sounds like they had a very different pregnancy and birth experience than I did. Talking to my mother I have often wondered how we got to the specific point we are at: where pregnancy is a very medical experience, C sections are so common, we seem to be just starting to talk more openly about miscarriages and the postpartum period, and women are trying to navigate the demands of breastfeeding and work. In today’s show I interview two historians of science to get a sense of how we arrived at this particular moment we find ourselves in….
First I’ll talk to Dr. Judith Leavitt from University of Wisconsin and then I’ll talk to Dr. Janet Golden from Rutgers university about maternal mortality, and miscarriage and hospital births and breastfeeding, among other things
Paulette: Hi, today I’m excited to welcome my guest, Dr. Judith Leavitt, who was the Ruth Blier Professor of History of Medicine history of science and Women’s Studies and the Associate Dean of Faculty at the medical school, University of Wisconsin Madison. She’s the author and editor of many books about women’s intersection with public health and medicine in America, and 2010 authored a book about changes over time and a father’s experience of birth. I feel lucky to get to talk to her today about how we find ourselves in the current birthing environment. Welcome Dr Leavitt.
Dr. Leavitt: Thank you very much.
P: So I’ve been reading your book brought to bed childbearing in America 1750 to 1950, which focuses on the experience of women mostly white middle class but it includes some details about immigrant women and women of color. These questions will all come from reading that which kind of blew my mind, in part because it’s shockingly relevant. Regrettably, so the first thing I want to ask is that in our not so distant past maternal mortality rates were super high, (accurately counting maternal deaths remains a tricky thing to do, even today, but according to dr leavitt’s book, she writes, “the statistics show that deaths from maternity related causes at eh turn of the twentieth century were approximately 65 times greater than they (were) in the 1980s”) and I’m wondering if women looked forward at all to start doing families like they do today or was the threat of their health, Overwhelming Do you have any sense of that.
Dr. L: I think women were very aware of the fact that childbirth was dangerous, and they were aware of it, not necessarily because they knew about national rates or any numbers around that but they did know and had experience with women who had difficulty, and had come close to death with childbirth and they also knew women who had died in childbirth or whose babies had died in childbirth, so they were certainly very aware and I’m talking now 18th century and 19th century, very aware that child birth was dangerous, I saw that worry very much in their writing. And let me say that I read women’s diaries and letters, for the most part to get their own point of view at the moment that it happened not and sometimes in the, in their memoirs and memories of past events but a lot of it was very current in their minds and they were very eager to have babies. They were scared, because they knew it was dangerous, and I think some of the choices that they made about what they wanted for their childbirth, had to do with that danger fright, that they had. But they were just enormously eager to have children. Also, and it didn’t seem to lessen that eagerness, the fact that it was dangerous, dangerous I think it did influence their choices, a lot, and one of the points of my book, I should say is that I think women’s choices is largely what drew changes in childbirth history over time, used to be thought that doctors kind of forced women into the changes that happen, and doctors certainly played an important role, especially in the 20th century, but my contention in my book is that it was women who made the choices that they made and they made them as you started out this conversation by saying because they were fearful that they might die or might get into some serious physical difficulty in childbirth. And those changes, you know, I always thought, unfortunately tended to medicalize childbirth more than it might have happened, traditional childbirth was an event that happened in women’s homes, and women were surrounded by women, other women who had had children, their mothers, their relatives, their aunts, their cousins, and their friends. And it was around that female birthing bed that male physicians started to enter the 18th century,In those situations, most frequently they were invited in when women were having a long and very difficult labor, and they thought that maybe physicians could help. And it was forceps that physicians first brought to that helping effort, and many physicians said all they had to do is rattle the forceps in their pockets to get the women’s labor to progress more without them.
P: A little adrenaline, sure…
Dr. L: And that’s right exactly, and that they were invited in for those difficult kinds of childbirth, normal obstetrics wasn’t called obstetrics The ticket was called childbirth was midwife assisted and friend assisted and it was a very female event, and the physicians that did come in the male physicians were those that could enter a female, environment, and survive many didn’t many got scared by all the women around the birthing bed and left. Really, not, not doing much,
P: that’s super interesting I guess I didn’t, it didn’t occur to me that there was selection in the types of births that doctors first attended. So I imagine their success rate was low in part because they’re at the most challenging births,
Dr. L: right, except that they did have some success, obviously, helping birth. But midwives had a lot of tools in their kits, walking women around keeping them, mobile and and vertical was very helpful to a lot of women as they tried to get thrugh labor so midwives, had a lot of things they could do did do successfully midwives, it was really among the most important medical practitioners in the colonial period in America, by far, and they did more than just deliver babies they did a lot of other things that, because they were the, often the nearest and the most familiar of the health people that a woman, or family could call, they did call midwives to do other things, midwives. There’s a wonderful book on a colonial midwife by Laurel. LAUREL Thatcher over, called the midwives tale, and in we get a lot of what we know about late 18th century, early 19th century. Midwives from that. One of the things that we learned that was, I think, something we didn’t necessarily expect to learn is that midwives kept very very full, gardens, a lot of herbs that they would use in their medical treatments and some, some having to do a childbirth with them having to do with other diseases as well. So they were, pharmacists, as well as healers, and they were really very important part of whole scene around health and disease in the 18th and 19th centuries,
P: as women moved to the hospital in the 20th century is that the death knell for midwives because I feel like midwives are not nearly as common today.
Dr. L: Well, midwives started to be replaced in the 19th century, so it was well still in the homebirth period that doctors wouldn’t be called increasingly for normal deliveries as opposed to difficult deliveries, and then it depended on who you were, how much money you had who you knew who you might call so doctors when they started coming to normal deliveries in the 19th century, they often came with midwives, that is midwives came and midwives might even call them and they’d be both of them around the birthing doctors are very kind of gradually taking over some normal births, especially urban ones in the 19th century, but it’s really in the 20th century when childbirth, moves to the hospital that midwives are most replaced by doctors and it’s really the midwives still in the south, well into the 20th century, in rural areas and in some rural areas in the north, especially immigrant rural areas but immigrants in the cities also might have tried to find an immigrant midwife who spoke their language and call her in before calling in a doctor before going to the hospital so midwives have been involved in childbirth. Always in American history, and are still. But as you know, a very small part but I think a slightly growing part of childbirth today, and it’s mostly, I think among some immigrant groups, Hispanic immigrant groups, for example in Texas are very user friendly to midwives and other rural groups. There’s a big Midwife center in Washington state, and is catching on around the country, again I think somewhat urban, as well as rural by a lot of middle class women who feel they have voice and who don’t choose to go to the hospital. So, midwives and birthing centers which are often run by midwives are increasingly used it’s still a small percentage of total births, but it is an increasing number.
P: Yeah, on this podcast I’ve talked to a bunch of women, both from England and Australia, where it’s just a much more common practice to go to a midwife unless you have a complication and deliver birth there which I wonder if that contributes to their low C section or lower than ours.
Dr. L: Probably. Yeah, wonderful book, new book on the history of homebirths that deals with 20th century home births and Midwifery, which you may want to look at by Wendy Klein. It’s really a good entry into that question.
P: I’m wondering about all these journals that you read. If anybody talks about infertility, how that was handled.
Dr. L: If they did, I didn’t pay attention to it at the time I was looking at some I’m sorry, I think, I let me tell you that when I started this research, it was really very hard to find childbirth accounts everyone told me don’t even look, You’re not going to find anything people don’t write about it, it’s this kind of taboo subject even Well of course I knew that wasn’t true, but I, I had to find ways to find childbirth stories, and so what I did when I went to an archive for example is look at family papers, kind of scanning through family papers until it was a birth, and a child in the family. And then I would go back to the women of reproductive age in that family. Nine months or further to see their child birth experiences and when and how and when they got pregnant and so that’s when I found a lot of a lot of women writing about wanting to get pregnant about excitement about getting pregnant, and they wrote about, you know their excitement when they were getting married and their excitement that they would get pregnant and their excitement about getting pregnant. And those women I found because they had had babies so in terms of women who might have been infertile, I probably wouldn’t have found them in that way of searching, unless that same woman has some infertility issues in her, her own experience, Shannon Whitleycombhas written a wonderful book on the history of miscarriage and that is partly about insecurities
P: in brought to bed it says the women who did not lose any of her children either at birth, or in the early years of their lives was rare in 18th and 19th century, far more common to the woman’s experience was the necessity of accepting the deaths of numerous offspring. I was wondering if because that was such a reality if miscarriage didn’t get any attention. If it was you know relatively early like it does today because he was surrounded by the death of children.
Dr. L: No, absolutely, it did. In that sense it did but but the ones I was talking about were ones, women who had lost children they had live birth, yeah, yeah. So in that sense I was, I was not talking about those women and infant mortality was just spectacularly high. In those years, and women experienced that they sometimes didn’t name their babies until they were a year or two old because they were worried that that would be kind of Jinx, their success and raising them, and very often they named babies, after baby who had already died,
P: that’s interesting
Dr. L: or a child who had already died so there was Elizabeth who was in the grave and Elizabeth who had just been born or had been born a few months before, when they were finally named so a lot of families, you know, made one of my it was one of my difficulties in searching out experiences because you might have had three Elisabeth’s in a family, and trying to figure out which one was the one that I might get a birth story from,
P: yeah. Yeah
Dr. L: That’s hard.
P: Yeah, it’s hard to imagine that, I mean obviously we kind of know, we know that intellectually but it’s hard to imagine what life was like with those editions, and that threat.
Dr. L: Exactly. And there have been people have written about it as if women didn’t love their children until they were a certain age because they were afraid to emotionally commit. And I don’t think that was true at all. I think women committed. The incident of birth, most of them are certainly in the first year of life.
P: In my first pregnancy halfway through the pregnancy. Doctors found that I had an autoimmune condition that was attacking the fetal heart. And so for the last three months they kept saying she’s not going to survive, she’s not going to survive and I had this struggle, on the one hand, you might try not to get attached to the idea of this baby. Although you’re already very pregnant with her. On the other hand, I thought, That’s not realistic. I’m already attached, and there will be no way to dampen the pain by waiting to name her. I’m sympathetic to the idea that naming someone makes them more real and more embodied, not naming them doesn’t make them any less real For me, that idea I can connect to. I myself was not able to say, and she’s fine. By the way she’s so good 19 Freshman. Freshman in college.
Dr. L: Good for you for sticking it out. That must have been very difficult.
P: It was super stressful, but you know, not naming a child, you’re still in love with the child right there’s no, no getting around that.
Dr. L: Right.
P: so another thing you mentioned in your book is that, women moved to hospitals to deliver before the death rate in hospitals, actually dropped below the death rate in home births and you have that great graphic of urban versus rural death rates which will forever be emblazoned in my mind, and I’m wondering if that was an issue of failure to communicate information effectively, how was that gap created.
Dr. L: No, it was the same thing I had talked about for the earlier period women were always seeking out something that was going to make their childbirth experience better. And they always thought that paying attention to what was the most advanced in medicine was going to help them the most. So that’s why they got doctors involved in the first place with with difficult births, it’s why they have kept doctors involved for normal births, so called normal verse in the 19th century. What was interesting, it wasn’t just give me everything you have, I’ll take it with the doctors, the women always remained very critical of what doctors would do they were, they wanted the forceps, but they didn’t want the forcepts.
P: Yeah,
Dr. L: they wanted something that anesthesia for example, women really really wanted anesthesia after the middle of the 19th century, and yet, they wanted to be the ones in control of it not necessarily give that control to doctors. So there’s constant push and pull between women and physicians, even though it’s women who wanted the physicians and what they had to offer. You can’t really think of this as something kind of straightforward, so the move to the hospital was part of that, that women thought that the hospitals would have something to offer and one of the things that hospitals had to offer was around the clock care, which women were having a harder and harder time finding at home, it used to be that relatives would come they’d move in for, you know, maybe months to help you around childbirth and early childhood for the babies and your sister would come and it would be easy, relatively easy to have somebody with you all the time for all the help that you needed. Well that became harder and harder as the 19th century wore on, as women were in the workforce more as families who are more mobile and moved away from their original family. So women had that real drive to look for some place that they could go and have care that they didn’t have to worry about. So that was a big part of it. Another part of it was the physicians once surgery was getting established in hospitals, physicians themselves were moving into hospitals, instead of doing office care and home care. So it was harder to get physicians to attend you if you wanted a physician. If you stay at home so that that was part of what women wanted and it was also that part of it was something physicians wanted it was a lot easier for them to have nurses on call and everybody ready and they just run in and hold out their hands and deliver the baby, where everyone else had done all the work so that was easier for them they didn’t have to worry about the horse and buggy, they didn’t have to worry about cranking up their early automobile they were set in the hospital and had a much easier time too, so it was really a push and pull from physicians and then from women’s end wanting to move birth into the hospital, they didn’t, I think realize as you put it about that mortality might still have been high in the hospital that infection was still an issue in fact is a bigger issue in the hospital than it was home. If they knew about it, it wasn’t the predominant thing in their minds they were looking for what they hoped would be a safe experience with people who knew what they were doing around them. What they didn’t realize that first generation that went into the hospital and it wasn’t the whole generation obviously all at once. The first women who went into that school didn’t realize consciously, what they were leaving behind. They didn’t realize the female world that they had created at home, which had been such a comfort to them and had eased the birth transition so well. They didn’t realize they were losing that if they went to the hospital, hospitals, they labored, if you can imagine this we don’t do this anymore they labored alone delivery room obviously there are people around them, the physician and probably the anesthesiologists and nurses in the labor room they were mostly alone nurses would come in from time to time to check if they were dilating, how far dilated, they were to check that they were okay maybe offer them some ice cubes, maybe not even that. Otherwise they’d be alone. And that was really, really hard to make that transition from being in the comfort of your family and friends to being alone as they put it, alone among strangers that’s why I named my book brought to bear because in the early period women were brought to bed by their friends by their relatives by people they loved and who loved them. In the hospital, they were alone among strangers, women in labor rooms would talk about listening to doctors and nurses talking outside in the corridor. they might come to the door and look at you, but they wouldn’t really come in and hold your hand and give you the kind of comfort that you wanted and needed if you if labor was going to progress. Well, so it was a very difficult transition in that sense, but as I say women didn’t know they missed it until they missed it, and then they missed it badly.
P: Yeah, no kidding that that sounds really dramatic I talked to a woman yesterday who was born in Britain but her family’s from Nigeria. And she was saying when she got home from the hospital, her mother was with her for living with her for a month and you know that her mother in law came and she was saying in Nigeria that is the common practice that exactly what you described, which is that someone moves in with you to take care of everything, and the mother’s feet are not to hit the ground and, which sounds kind of amazing and she herself was saying, it’s much harder to do you know that we live in England because everyone has a job. So, you know, my mom can’t live with me anymore because she has to go to work.
Dr. L: so I recreated that a little bit when I had my first child, I’ll tell you this experience, it was on the delivery table, literally the delivery table when I was pushing, I’m working so hard that I realized the birthing mother is the most important person in that room, and, of course, working the hardest of anybody in the room. And the story historically from her point of view had not been told we knew about the doctors we knew about the nurses we knew about the midwives, you know less about the nurses and midwives and we have since come to know but we knew about childbirth from the medical point of view and we did not know it from the birthing woman’s point of view. And that’s right there is where my book was conceived as my child was pushing her way into the world, I knew I had to tell, try to tell the story from my point of view my working hard point of view. And the other thing that happened which was totally inadvertent but quite wonderful. In my first birthing experience was that I was doing a Lamaze delivery which was in, in my day a little unusual,
P: the lamaze method was developed in 1950 by a french obstetrician and it was a natural birthing technique that focused on regimented breathing for each stage of labor
Dr. L: and the nursing student class heard about it and wanted to come in and see it. And so I had about 10 nursing students around my bed, all female. So, other than my husband who was there, I had recreated without knowing it, the female part of the experience, and it did help they all saying happy birthday when Sarah came out and it was, you know, it was quite a party in that sense in the same way as it had been what we used to call social childbirth, it was a social childbirth and a female social childbirth.
P: That seems fitting.
Dr.L: Yeah, it was but I didn’t know it at the time.
P: Let’s talk a little bit about Twilight sleep if it seemed as though, women were edging away from that social circle that was so helpful. It sounds like Twilight sleep was just the end of that.
Dr. L: it was, but one of many things in the hospital that ended that Twilight sleep was seemed very very attractive to women women, as I found out who call themselves feminists who wanted to imbibe that they men, choosing the way they wanted to have birth. When I was a feminist writing this book, I was thinking of feminism as something that meant I controlled the birth itself and that was a slightly different use of the word feminist but they were feminist and they wanted to choose and they had heard about this method this we’re talking about the second decade of the 20th century, in the 19 teens, and they had heard about this childbirth technique in Germany and wanted to bring it to America, and basically it was giving the laboring woman, a combination of scopolamine and morphine which would morphine to dull the pain and scopolamine to help you forget it, and it would kind of put you into this totally relaxed state of sedation and not really knowing what’s happening to you, and you would deliver your baby and then you would wake up and some women who did that. I remember having had a baby they didn’t know they had had a baby, so he missed the whole thing, which for me was really terrible because I loved the whole thing, I loved it, not in the kind of romantic, fuzzy pink way.
P: Yeah,
Dr. L: but in a way that helped that I understood the power of my body in a way that I hadn’t understood it before I had a baby. And that was incredible to me that a body, a woman’s body can do that, and I wanted every minute of that experience I wanted to be awake and alert for it, which is why I didn’t want medications but in, in the twilight sleep. Example women wanted that medication wanting to forget it wanted to wake up with a baby and not knowing it and not having felt it, and they did that until they realized that the dosages in those early years of using scopolamine and morphine the doses weren’t well regulated were, weren’t well understood and some of the babies were very lethargic after being born and the women not necessarily in great shape themselves so it was something that fell by the wayside pretty quickly in that form, but was continued to you be used once they understood dose medication, well into the 1960s. You may be still being used in places, my sister in law had a scopolamine Birth in the 70s but it was a way to medicate women without them, understanding it as medication per se. I think anyway they liked it and they came to the hospital for it so yeah they ended up one of the things you did under the effects of it was thrash about a lot and so they would put women into these into bed, high Canvas sheets so they couldn’t see and they couldn’t fall out, which also, you know freaked me out because you’re really alone in that environment, and I didn’t like that but they loved it, so.
P: Yeah, it sounds like horse blinders I’m not for that. And do you have any insight on abortion was it handled by midwives, was it a political issue, or the 18th The 19th
Dr. L: well, yes and no. I mean, in traditional societies and including our own life was not seen to exist before quickening between the 16th and 20th week of pregnancy. So until a woman felt movement, you didn’t worry about that and yes women tried to get abortions if they didn’t want to have their babies and they helped each other do that. Midwives sometimes helped some, some absolutely refused to help, and doctors got into the act and helped, and then some also absolutely refused to help, until the late 19th century was seen as perfectly fine for quickening because it wasn’t seen as you had life yet. Technically, so people did it and, and the problem was finding a way to do it successfully. And of course, there weren’t a lot of very successful remedies. Then, and the same with birth control, you know, they tried all sorts of things for birth control and weren’t necessarily successful,
P: that is super interesting to see how many historical lines from the past are still totally relevant today.
Dr. L: I do think that we are re experiencing many of the things we as individual women are really experiencing many of the things that women in the past have and we have some of the same concerns they may be manifesting slightly differently today but they are. There’s a lot of a lot we can learn from women in the past.
P: Yeah, the issue of control is so, fundamental to every woman who talks about her story about control over her bodyand almost everyone universally says, when they feel a loss of that sense when things are being done to them, it feels terrible and not natural and, and that seems true forever and I can see why women fought so hard to have people with them.
Dr. L: People with them and to make birth plans, even though a lot of women know that the birth plans can get thrown out…maybe too easily. They make them and they, they put a lot of stake in them, because they really do think about what they want in a childbirth experience, and of course many doctors really try to give them that. And pay attention to their birth plans and help them with that. And others just say dear, dear, I know more about this than you do, don’t worry just put it in my hands. So, you know we have those experiences, right away first in the hospital in the early 20th century and we still have today. You know, it’s something that we can look back on and see how did women, those women who kept control how did they do it. Yeah, and we can learn from that.
P: Oh, thank you so much for taking us on this tour of where we’ve been and hopefully where we’re going.
Dr.L: Well thank you for asking me. I hope that was useful.
P: Yeah, it was great. Thank you
P: and now a little bit more on where breastfeeding fits into the current day picture:
A special welcome to Dr Janet golden, a professor at Rutgers who specializes in the history of medicine, history of childhood, women’s history, and the American social history. She’s the author of several books, including most recently, babies made us modern how infants brought America into the 20th century, which is a very intriguing title, thank you so much for coming on Dr. Rosen.
Dr. Golden: Oh, thank you for inviting me.
P: One thing I want to talk about today is breastfeeding and sort of how we got where we are now culturally, I think there was no push to get my mother to breastfeed, as opposed to my kids when I, when they were born, there was an enormous push to breastfeed. So I’m wondering if you could kind of walk us through how we got here.
Dr. G: All right, that’s it, that’s a great question and I think we can say that there’s a very long history of forces, promoting breastfeeding and forces opposing breastfeeding, it’s very different in the United States than in other places, of course, where, just as an example. The French were very concerned to promote breastfeeding and for reasons of health because they were being outnumbered by the Germans and they wanted to build a strong healthy population that can then it becomes out of fashion to breastfeed everybody wants to have a wet nurse or send a baby out to a wet nurse so there are constant changes in this history
In the United States, you know for most women in the early centuries of what we will call United States history, you pretty much had a choice of breastfeeding or using animal milks which weren’t as well formulated as they might be today, and most people simply didn’t have the means to purchase them out to maintain it properly if they did purchase it, they didn’t have refrigeration so breastfeeding was really the way to go until these canned formulas developed and then the formula companies jumped in and said get rid of wet nurses. Feed your baby the scientific way and go with melons, baby food or go with Borden’s condensed milk in a formula. So there was pressure in the other direction
P: is that like 1950s When is that?
Dr. G: that really gets going in the end the first formula is get going in the late 1860s 70s 80s
P: Oh, Wow,
Dr. G: so they start pushing that only a few people can afford it, of course, the breast, but breastfeeding begins to look unscientific and so there’s, you know, we start selling the, the sugar formulas that go into the milk formulas, and of course once you have running water clean water indoors, you have electricity or gas heat to boil things, it just becomes a lot safer to do that. Now obviously, there is some controversy when formula companies are promoting these powdered formulas in countries where people don’t have access to clean water, low income they have to dilute the formulas so they’re not healthy for babies but we’re not, we’re not going to talk about that so we’re really gonna say that by the post war period 1950s Breastfeeding is just out of fashion it seems primitive It seems something that poor women do. The modern scientific ways is to bottle feed, and then it’s very precise you can measure how many ounces did my baby, drink some baby books had you weigh the baby before you fed the baby and then feed the baby and see how many ounces, they took in, and then people began to push back against that and saying no. Why should this commercialized enterprise these be in charge, why should medical authority dictate over what’s natural for women, let’s go back to breastfeeding and of course there is good scientific literature that says it’s, it’s a better alternative, you know, cows make milk for calves women make milk for babies, you know it’s it’s a natural correctly designed product, but of course not everybody can do it and not everybody wants to do it so we live in a world now where two things are true. One is that I think we can stipulate that scientifically medically speaking babies are better off drinking milk, designed for babies, which is from human females, But we can also say that. Secondly, we live in a world where we get clean water, we can properly prepare our formulas the formulas are well designed, and not everybody can or wants to breastfeed their baby so both things are true, and we’ve gone in the direction of making it easier to promote breastfeeding in hospitals, maybe a little too pushy on that as you can explain, and we’ve also reformulated to use a bad pun there are our WIC program and other things to support breastfeeding and we’ve put in, in places that employ large numbers of people we put in stations where women can pump their milk store their milk etc so we’ve made it certainly made it easier to be a breast feeding person, but that that has, I think shaded over for some people to be almost a command, and making people very resentful and unhappy with that, you know, I guess we live in a world where everything is polarized nowadays even taking care of infants.
P: yeah, That seems to be the case and a lot of women describe how they expected breastfeeding to be easy, because it is natural, but I don’t know that those two things go hand in hand, and once it is difficult, then there, then they think it’s something that’s wrong with them and all of a sudden it’s a comment about their ability to be a mother…after you give birth, that is the first thing that you’re doing. So, it’s challenging to have the first thing be something that’s not necessarily super easy. Do you have any sense of how common it is to have trouble breastfeeding.
Dr. G: I really don’t know because I think I’m sure there are studies on that I’m sure it’s difficult in the beginning I believe it’s harder for women who’ve had cesarean sections and have had some anaesthesia in their system, I believe it gets easier with second and third and fourth. So on children. But certainly, initiating breastfeeding it’s often better done if you have a mom or a support person who can get you through it it’s, it can be, you know it can be painful. Problems do develop you need support breastfeeding may be natural, your body may be designed to do it but that doesn’t mean you necessarily know how to do it. Some infants have trouble sucking latching on, you know it’s not, it’s not a perfect and easy thing to do, but I think what makes it so hard for people is the, the weight of expectations and judgment, you know, we live in a culture, I think it’s fair to say that the easiest people in the world to pass judgment on are either people like us who we feel we can do better than other moms in the, in the hospital with us or in the birthing center with us, and then people who are different from us and who behave differently from us and we can say oh they’re different and there’s something wrong with them. And oftentimes that judgment is really about women and about mothers and about child rearing. And that I think makes it all the harder, all that judgment that goes on and, and political divisiveness,
P: Yeah, and what I find, talking to people is that it’s not always on the surface, sometimes it is a it is a buried expectation that you don’t realize until you don’t meet it. Many women have come on the show and talked about how breastfeeding is the super painful and difficult thing and the latch didn’t quite work and the baby wasn’t getting enough milk, but it was still hard to give up, Because her expectation was, you know, good moms breastfeed.
Dr. G: Right. Just like when other women wanting to breastfeed and the 50s and the expectation was you’re a bad mom. Because you’re not buying the most up to date formulas and the fancy bottles that go with it. So, if we took the judgment, out of it. I think it would be easier for people to breastfeed it would be easier for people who didn’t want to breastfeed to bottle feed, it will be easier for people who want to partially breastfeed and partially bottle feed to be comfortable with that, but there’s the idea that we, that we have to pass judgment on this and make people uncomfortable about their choices. It’s always been that way, but it doesn’t have to be that way.
P: Well that’s interesting to hear that that is always the case so even when the pendulum swung the other way and people were being discouraged from breastfeeding, you were made to feel bad if you breastfed.
Dr. G: You were made to feel bad and there are many many stories of women who said I want to breastfeed my babies and the nurses would would only would start the babies on bottles without telling you so it was hard for them to latch on and then they would only bring you the babies every four hours even if babies were hungry and they’d cry themselves to sleep, and then they start wiping down your breasts with alcohol and other antiseptics. Oh they made it, you know, because it seemed like you were doing it seemed dirty if I can put it that way to put your baby on a breast and when you could have a scientific bottle that was you know had been sterilized to the right degree and gotten out all the germs so. As difficult as women today have it who choose not to breastfeed and get judged by nurses or by their friends or their doctors, it was a different way, maybe 50 6070 years ago.
P: That’s sort of shocking and I guess I don’t know whether I would call that marketing exceedingly creative because suggests that the scientific way is to do something that’s made in a lab, as opposed to what your body has produced, that’s sort of amazing.
Dr. G: Well, that you know we were very into measurement. So, how much is your baby weigh how much did How big was your baby how fast is it growing so if you can measure how many ounces your baby drank and write that down, which a lot of moms had charts to do that that just seemed like a very scientific thing to do.
P: Yeah, that that’s fair and I’m sympathetic to that and actually I don’t know if you’ve heard of a company called hatch. No, they have a very special changing pad with really sensitive monitors in it so that you can weigh your Baby and breastfeed and weigh them again, and it’s there’s an app on your phone and you can check it out and and it is for that purpose explicitly because so many women who breastfeed say I have no idea how much they got or if they drink anything or you know what’s going on so it’s funny that science has come to meet that demand another way.
Dr. G: Right, well, you know, our medical world is always in part about marketing, They’re very much intertwined, because you can sell people on science, whether it’s the science of hygiene and cleanliness or it’s the science of measuring your baby for a time women, middle class, upper class women were encouraged to buy scales and weigh their baby every day and write it down you know because measuring is science. So, and then the marketers got very into this our department stores have infants departments, they used to have nurses who works there who would tell you the right things to buy and give you medical advice so you know that that the world of science which has brought us many, many wonderful advances is also about the world of marketing which has brought us many, many products and they do get tied up together and help to sell each other.
P: That’s shocking to hear that there were nurses at department stores, impossible to imagine, and I guess a great way to sell stuff.
So let’s talk for a little bit about these baby friendly designated hospitals, the impetus for this came from the WHO World Health Organization,
Dr. G: right, it’s a worldwide effort
P: in the 90s, and then I’m sure it looks different here than it does in other countries, in 2007, it says that less than 3% of United States births occurred in 60 Baby Friendly designated facilities, but by 2019 28% of births are in 600 Baby Friendly facilities and Baby Friendly is a designation you get if you follow this 10 step approach to encouraging breastfeeding, but it sounds like it’s almost aggressively to the exclusion of anything else.
Dr. G: Well, I would, I would say two things about that one is it’s fascinating to see how much it’s grown and I’m sure that has a lot to do with the marketing of the hospitals, right, if you have health insurance and you pick that hospital, because it’s a Baby Friendly Hospital and you like it, you’ll continue to bring your insurance cards when and go back to that hospital so that’s that’s good for the hospital. It is probably good for hospitals to move away from promoting bottle feeding to supporting breastfeeding, that how aggressively they do that, I would assume is to some degree determined by the, the nurses on the obstetrics floors, and how seriously they promote breastfeeding over bottle feeding, and if you think about it from the nurses perspective, if you have rooming in and a mom can pick up her baby and breastfeed on demand, then that’s a lot less work for the nurse taking the baby back to the baby part of the hospital and feeding the baby, him or herself. So there are all sorts of incentives built in for the hospitals for the staffing of the hospitals for the baby, certainly, you know if you’re going to support breastfeeding, which is a good thing overall, But how you handle that I’m sure it’s very idiosyncratic, and it may depend on whether you have the night nurses or the day nurses and are they new hires are they the older hires how they feel about it.
P: Yeah, it’s interesting to see sort of what’s developing and just so interesting to me that there’s this cultural shift that happens you know almost on its own cycle, where it goes back and forth. So, can you imagine at some point in the future where breastfeeding will be out of fashion.
Dr. G: It may well change because now, you know, now we’re beginning to see what uh what environmental pollutants are in women’s bodies and in breast milk so maybe they’ll have formulas that don’t have those pollutants and we’ll move away from it. When we talk about breastfeeding we’re talking about the health of a woman and a baby and a family and workplace issues and social issues and environmental issues, and it all gets encapsulated in this tiny realm of Will you or won’t you breastfeed, but there really so many bigger surrounding issues is breastfeeding supported by do we have six months of paid family leave in this country. No we do not, you know, that might be a better support for breastfeeding or partial breastfeeding, then what happens in a Baby Friendly Hospital or a baby unfriendly hospital if we want to label the other ones
P: that oh that sounds much more expensive, potentially, potentially much more helpful but much more expensive.
Dr. G: Right.
P: The other thing that seems tricky about maternal health and newborn health is that I feel like it has not received as much medical attention. You know all the issues that come with pregnancy, many of which remain a black box preeclampsia we’ve known about for hundreds of years, we’ll still know kind of how that works. So it’s, it’s tricky to see what will be the lever that will encourage a shift in one way or the other to change.
Dr. G: Right, I mean we still have many many women who’s who are uninsured.
P: Yeah,
Dr. G: even with our expanded Medicaid and programs there. We have undocumented women, who I believe if they call up a center, they can get prenatal care, and they’re supposed to not wait more than six weeks but in fact I think there is not enough services for them, their children are going to be Americans. They’re here. And yet we’re denying them a kind of Healthy Start There are so many complicated issues around pregnancy and birth that are much more expensive as you say, not necessarily harder to solve because the rest of the world seems to solve them. But if we don’t have those conversations then we bring it back to this individual well that mom didn’t breastfeed or that mom should breastfeed or why is she fully breastfeeding and leaving the baby formula when she goes to work We’re talking about individual decisions, but we’re not talking about the structure in which they’re made.
P: Well, so you bring up a good point other than vastly more generous medical supports that other countries give their women. Is there any do you have any sense a theory about, you know why culturally in America, you know postpartum care is one visit at six weeks, and I as far as I can tell, you know, after you’ve been through, almost 10 months of pregnancy and an exceedingly challenging delivery, you could, you could use care before then, but we, but we don’t do it that way. Do you have a sense of like, what else is driving those differences between US and other countries.
Dr. G: Well, you know we have a for profit healthcare system. So, I believe that if you’re an insurance company said, Is there any data to say you need continuing care that, you know, first year after giving birth. Well, no their baby will go to the pediatrician and you as the mom, you’ve had your one postpartum visit you’re done. Why do we have to pay for another visit for you. So we have that problem right there. Yeah. And, and I think that there’s just a sense of, you know you’re you’ve become. you go from being the vessel for the baby you deliver the baby then the baby is going to get that the S chips care the Medicaid care the private insurance care the clinic care, but you as the mom you’re kind of done to your next pregnancy I guess, Or your annual gynecological checkup. We don’t and so we have a very high maternal mortality rate in this country as a result of that, but we have a strong tradition, really, I would say from the post world war two period of saying, everything is a private matter, you know, It’s for you to go to your doctor. It’s for you to decide if you want to be pregnant or not pregnant, we don’t, we don’t have a system that says, we have some responsibility to our citizens and non citizens who are here and who should have good healthcare.
P: Dr golden thanks so much for coming on and talking to us today. I feel like I’ve learned a ton.
Dr. G: Okay, well it’s been wonderful to talk to you.
P: Thank you again to Dr. Judith Leavitt and Dr. Janet Golden for giving us a sense of the factors over time that have come together to contribute to the pregnancy and birth culture we have today. Thank you for listening, and if you liked this episode, please consider sharing the podcast with your friends. The next episode is a return to a birth story…and this story is really, in some sense, a loveletter to becoming a parent–it showcases the many challenges that sometimes have to be overcome to get there…
Episode 26: The Press of the Postpartum Period: Dana’s story
Episode 26 SN: The Press of the Postpartum Period: Dana’s story
Today’s guest sailed pretty smoothly through the process of starting a family–she got pregnant relatively easily, carried her pregnancy without too many hiccups and gave birth in a way that wasn’t too far from her expectation–and then she hit a breastfeeding wall, which likely contributed to her experience with post partum depression. Now she’s focused on helping women build a better relationship with their bodies. She clearly articulates the mental and emotional struggle so many of us experience as this process transforms our bodies into something new we’ve not experienced before, and aims to guide women to a more compassionate understanding of all the amazing things our bodies do. Today’s episode is a little different from previous episodes because not only do we talk about my guest’s experience, but because of the work she does, we also discuss the press and pressure of postpartum expectations many women have, and talk briefly about one route out of what can be a really challenging fourth trimester.
You can find Dana, and more about her work, at wellnesslately.com
To find more about Dr. Golden‘s work, click here
Breastfeeding research
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0974694312000163
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 who taught me very early on about my lack of control over the process of growing a family. Today’s guest sailed pretty smoothly through this process–getting pregnant easily, being pregnant without too many hiccups and giving birth in a way that wasn’t too far from her expectation–and then she hit a breastfeeding wall, which likely contributed to her experience with post partum depression. She’s focused her work on helping women build a better relationship with their bodies. she articulates the mental and emotional struggle so many of us experience as this process transforms our bodies into something new we’ve not experienced before, and aims to guide women to a more compassionate understanding of all the amazing things our bodies do.
In this episode, I include a brief clip from my interview of a professor of the history of science, because she provides some historical context for our current cultural understanding of breastfeeding.
Let’s get to the conversation.
Hi, thanks so much for coming on the show, can you introduce yourself and tell us where you are.
Dana: Sure I am Dana Baron, I’m an intuitive eating and body image coach and I’m in exotic suburban New Jersey outside of New York City. Yeah and I help women to basically escape the diet mentality that keeps them trapped and cycling through restrictive diets and then binge eating and emotional eating and beating themselves up and really build body image resilience. So that’s the work I do
P: That sounds like we’ll have a lot to talk about. excellent.
D: Yeah.
P: So let’s talk a little bit about pregnancy, before you got pregnant, I’m sure you had the image of where it would be like, what did you imagine you were stepping into
D: I imagined I you know coming from the sort of, quote unquote wellness industry I imagined the pregnancy glow, and just feeling like a goddess of fertility. And, you know, just being absolutely enamored with my body and the miracle of life and all that kind of stuff it was not the case for me I’ve had two I’ve had two babies. My oldest is three and my youngest is 17 months so,
P: oh wow,
D: something fresh for me yeah,
P: good Lord well, people listen to you can’t see, but you don’t look like you have two babies in the morning.
D: Oh,
P: you look rested and you know there’s a lot of work at that age, so
D: yeah, I’m glad I look rested, we are. Everybody is sleeping through the night so
P: oh, nice
D: that is a huge, that’s, yeah so I do get regular sleep but yeah I mean in COVID preschool clothes, no babysitters coming running a business, so it has definitely been a wild ride over here so I’m glad I look rested.
P: Yeah, my kids are older, my kids are teenagers and you know my younger one just got her license so
D: Wow,
P: I’m Literally completely superfluous, which is, you know, he relatively easy and COVID, so yeah but my sister has young kids and so I think about your cohort, a lot like, oh my god imagine.
D: Yeah, I mean, on the one hand the physical like manual labor is endless. At this point you know even my three year old can barely get himself dressed just yet. We did potty training in COVID all of that but, so that is a lot but I also think about, you know, the older kids, all the things they’ve missed and all the things they are grieving right now and certainly being setback academically like I, I’m glad I didn’t have to teach my kids math that would have been a real issue for all of us. I think there’s different challenges and especially, you know, a teenager just getting their license I’m sure there’s a whole new world of emotional and anxious, navigating, you know, at that age because right now they’re just always kind of home with me and safe under my care but you know they go out in the world, it’s a different, a different type of exhaustion, I would assume.
P: Yeah, you know, I have two girls and they’re both extremely competent. And so, I’m not super worried, you know, they’re both really cautious so the real thing would be they get pulled over for going too slowly or something, you know,
D: that’s me.
P: Yeah, me too. That’s me a good problem to have. Yeah, so let’s talk about your experience did you get pregnant easily.
D: I did, I actually think in hindsight I don’t I don’t think I knew enough at the time but we started trying, maybe in November and I do think I had a very very very early, not even pregnancy detected yet miscarriage because of what had happened with my cycle that month and that was the first time we tried and then, you know, the, I think a month after that I was pregnant or, you know, six weeks or whatever it was so.
P: Oh good Lord I’m glad it happens that way for some people because we all have that story in our head and, and it seems like it may not be true but it is so yeah, thanks for that. Okay,
D: yeah.
P: And how was the pregnancy.
D: It was very straightforward and no complications besides for sciatic stuff after you know after I guess that’s more postpartum but yeah it was really straightforward and I was really lucky to just both of us healthy, the whole time
P: Good
D: and I know she’s was your vision for the birth, something you experienced. It was, I come from a long line of nurses, half of my, you know, half of the women in my family are nurses two of them labor and delivery nurses. Wow, so I always just expected a hospital birth, an epidural, sort of the straightforward Western medicine so I didn’t have. I definitely run on the anxious side especially, I lost my father at 18 and it’s sort of very quickly and he wasn’t sick, it gave me a little bit of my girl syndrome so like a little hypochondria. So I always feel safe around medical establishment. So in my sort of anxious line of thinking I just wanted to get to the hospital and get the baby out safely. That was the sort of the only thing in my mind I didn’t have any expectations really
P: well that’s like a smooth way to do it. What was the birth like did you have contractions and did you know what they were like What was all that like,
D: yeah, so I never went into labor, my OB practice basically schedule you for an induction if you were eight days past your due date, that was just what you agreed to when you went to this practice essentially so it was, I never went into labor, my best friend came out of the city we watched the Office all day on my due date I was like wait, I had no idea what to expect, and I just never went into labor so I went in they scheduled me for a Monday evening, to go in and get, I don’t know cervadil or whatever the, yeah, yeah, well one of the first stage of it but when I went in, they realized that I was like a centimeter or two dilated, so they said we’re going to skip that just go to Pitocin. So, I was given Pitocin and about 930 at night, and then I by one I think I asked for the epidural. I didn’t know what to expect and I, my aunt had my aunt who is a labor and delivery nurse said that if you do have to be induced. You might want to just be able to walk around as long as possible because once you do get an epidural now you’re in the bed, and you don’t know what’s going to happen, you could be in that bed for 18 hours so
P: yeah,
D: so I just kind of had that in my mind and then at some point I just said, You know what, and they checked me and I was moving along pretty rapidly, so I just got it at that point and then I think I pushed for like an hour and a half, maybe, and he just kind of came right out by 7am So it was a very quick.
P: That’s awesome for a first birth
D: yeah, it was great. I think I got like one stitch it was, it was very straightforward. I was very relieved.
P: That’s awesome. And then, how long did you say the hospital? Just a day, or?
D: I think we got lucky, because here I don’t know if your audience is global, but here in the states you get like a certain amount,
P: Yeah,
D: from one. And we, oh I think it was like if you checked in. I forgot. Anyway, we got the longest amount possible so I think I was there two nights. Yeah and it was really interesting because my grandmother was actually upstairs at the same hospital like going through the process of the end of life.
P: Oh wow
D: So she got to come downstairs and like me so we were all, it was a very full circle moment because my entire extended family was coming in and out of the hospital to be with my grandmother and then to come, you know, check on me too, so it was very I mean this is obviously all pre COVID
P: yeah, yeah, yeah, Yeah, That is kind of special and unexpected. Huh. And so two days after the baby’s born, you’re sent home. And what does that feel like was the fourth trimester.
D: It was sort of bewildering, the first really the first change in the emotional space around it was that they very quickly realized that my son wasn’t getting enough nutrition. I was trying to breastfeed. And, you know, I was so out of it, it was sort of like an out of body but you know the pumping wasn’t working his latch wasn’t happening I wasn’t they didn’t seem to see any colostrum, what does that colostrum?
P: yeah, colostrum
D: So it was devastating to me sort of like 233 o’clock in the morning when the nurse comes in to check and he’s, you know, he’s not. He doesn’t have enough output, so they’re like we have to we need to give him formula he needs to eat this is too long and I was just like, I was beside myself I like just I never imagined that happening, I don’t know why, in hindsight is, feels ridiculous to me in hindsight but I just was so attached to breastfeeding, that was sort of all you hear when you’re pregnant is how good for the baby and my mom and my aunt and everybody my family breastfed it and I’m here I am like in the wellness industry, you know like, and it just wasn’t working so the first like that there was something so devastating about watching this nurse and stranger, give my son his first bottle in the middle of the night because the baby needed to eat and I was not doing well. And I just remember my husband and the nurse standing there with their backs to me like feeding my baby and I just was so like I felt like I had already failed.
P: well also in your case where everything else had gone smoothly, you think Oh I can I can trust this, this is a process that’s working right. So, do they give you like classes or have a have, lactation consultant
D: we did it all. We did it all they had the lactation consultants in and out my aunt, my mom everybody squeezing my boobs all day. I even went in and I was just so attached to this you know I went in. My mom and I brought him back in maybe like five or six days later for like a lactation specialist and this is like a big Regional Hospital. My mom worked out for 40 years, there’s plenty of support and care here right. They have a whole team there, I went in, they measured the baby, they we breastfed on both sides we measured the baby again like trying to figure out exactly how many ounces and I was basically producing like half an ounce from one of my breasts, and I had had a breast reduction when I was 20, which the work I do now it’s like a very interesting to have done. So they told me, but I was, you know, 20 years old I wasn’t thinking about breastfeeding and the surgeon was like I cannot guarantee like I have to tell you that this could interfere. For most women, it’s not an issue but it could prevent you from being able to produce enough. So I’m kind of assuming that that’s what happened. So all those things combined I don’t know why it was so shocking to me but, yeah, so it’s like coming home my husband having to Google the right formula we had no bottles. It was, yeah, it was a mess. So, yeah.
P: And then, it sounds like you got that sorted or what was that process like
D: yeah I mean, about three and a half, four weeks of doing the. Yeah, in hindsight it’s very interesting, doing the skin to skin breastfeeding. And then I’d have to give him a bottle, and then I’d have to pump. And this was around the clock because I was told that you know you got that first few weeks of a window to get a supply going, and it just wasn’t happening.
P: You want to get into the weeds on breastfeeding, you could argue that it starts in puberty when the breast is being formed and is subject to all kinds of influences, but let’s fast forward to birth. Once the placenta is birthed, a bunch of hormones shift your breasts gear up for breastfeeding on demand, but what’s required for successful breastfeeding is the coordination of physical and biological factors. Essentially, you need to breastfeed, to be able to breastfeed because the process releases more hormones that encourage milk production. A study in the journal Pediatrics from 2020 collected all the most recent research about breastfeeding and said that colostrum that thick early milk, usually comes in in the first days, but that milk changes after a few days and consistency and volume. The authors here say that most women, and I put most in quotes, get the second stage of milk supply within 72 hours after birth, but that about 35% of first time mothers didn’t really get this milk in until four days or more after delivery. This delay could be linked to a first birth C section or a higher BMI, or things like gestational diabetes, or the Apgar score for the baby. But for a fraction of women between five and 8% this milk doesn’t really come in at any volume and for these women, the theory is that there might be something wrong with the breast architecture, or it could be consequence of breast surgery, or a hormonal disruption like an issue with the thyroid or PCOS. For more information check out the show notes.
D: And I was just at this point, you know, anyone has that a newborn. Breastfeeding bottle feeding and then pumping, there’s literally no time in between that,
P: yeah, yeah
D” So I basically haven’t slept in three weeks. Can’t let go of this and finally, like it was like my mom and my husband had like an intervention with me and my aunt came up from North Carolina and it was just like, you can just feed this baby formula like Don’t miss this whole newborn phase because of this like it’s okay to let go of this struggle, and I was just I was a mess. Mess, you know,
P: well also not sleeping at all doesn’t in any way contribute to like a happy, balanced, you know view of the world. So,
D: yeah,
P: I’m sympathetic to that. And I’m impressed that your family, many of whom are in the labor and delivery world are supportive because I hear so many stories about people who say, Oh, the nurse said, you have to breastfeed or I don’t know, people just feel the pressure and I, I guess I’m assuming is coming apart from medical establishment. Maybe I’m wrong. Tell me.
D: well, I think I think there’s a I mean, at least in my world there’s that general consensus like even if you don’t want even if you just don’t want to breastfeed, like that’s your right as a woman and a mother and I understand the push for it right to because there’s sort of like, there’s been a sea change around the thinking. But what about the mothers who can, what about the mothers who don’t want to it. Where’s the space for them, especially in the prenatal care, everything is about breastfeeding. There’s no at least in my experience, there was no and if it’s not your choice to breastfeed, here’s how you find the right formula. Here are the different bottle options there isn’t any of that. So you really feel like you’re failing on a profound level as a woman I found maybe that was just my mentality I’m sure not everyone has the same experience but the old I have a generation of women in my family who– do curse on the show. And if you don’t want me to. They just, they could care less about anybody else’s opinions, and they just thought I should just give it up like let go of it like you just need to take care of yourself to like you don’t need to be attached to this. So, yeah,
P: so that sounds awesome that you were supported. And did you, you know, it’s hard to let go of something that you have, you know, packed away in the back of your head and had for a while but it sounds like you were separated from the idea at some point. And what was Do you remember that what that was like did you feel freed were you, you know, was it easy.
D: It was an epic relief.
P: Okay, good
D: My husband could do middle the night feedings and I could sleep friends could come over and help you I could leave the baby for more than a few hours. So once that relief flooded in I was over it, you know, pretty quickly at least consciously I was over it pretty quickly like it felt like a relief for sure.
P: That’s awesome and it is, it is a lot of pressure. and I hear a lot of women say, No, I was told every woman could breastfeed.
D: yeah
P: it’s what Your body does. So yeah,
D: and it’s so much better for the baby, that’s all you hear.
P: Yeah, yeah,
D: and then my grandmother. Yeah, go ahead.
P: Sorry. Go ahead you can tell your grandmother story
D: I was just gonna say she told me, like, in her age, she had too much of a supply but everyone was telling her that the formula was better so she was like, You’re never get they’re never gonna let you get it right, so just do what you need to do for your family and your sanity, basically,
P; that’s a totally interesting perspective. It just so happens that I recently talked to a professor of medicine about the changing cultural appreciation of breastfeeding, I want to include a small clip from our discussion right here, a special welcome to Dr Janet golden, a professor at Rutgers who specializes in the history of medicine, history of childhood, women’s history, and the American social history. She’s the author of several books, including most recently, babies made us modern how infants brought America into the 20th century, which is a very intriguing title, thank you so much for coming on Dr golden.
Dr. Golden: Oh, thank you for inviting me.
P: One thing I want to talk about today is breastfeeding and sort of how we got where we are now culturally.
Dr. Golden All right, that’s it, that’s a great question and I think we can say that there’s a very long history of horses, promoting breastfeeding and forces opposing breastfeeding. In the United States by the 19 post war period 1950s Breastfeeding is just out of fashion it seems primitive It seems something that poor women do the modern scientific way is to bottle feed, and then it’s very precise you can measure how many ounces did my baby, drink some baby books had you weigh the baby before you fed the baby and then feed the baby and see how many ounces, they took in, and then people began to push back against that and saying no. Why should this commercialized enterprise these be in charge, why should medical authority dictate over what’s natural for women. Let’s go back to breastfeeding and of course there is good scientific literature that says it’s, it’s a better alternative, you know, cows make milk for calves women make milk for babies, you know it’s it’s a natural correctly designed product, but of course not everybody can do it and not everybody wants to do it so we live in a world now where two things are true. One is that I think we can stipulate that scientifically medically speaking babies are better off drinking milk, designed for babies, which is from human females, but we can also say that. Secondly, we live in a world where we get clean water, we can properly prepare our formulas the formulas are well designed, and not everybody can or wants to breastfeed their babies so both things are true.
P: So why did you, you want to walk us through like how you got to the other side.
D: How I got to the other side of the of the breastfeeding situation.,
P: yeah
D: Yeah, I thought it was, I thought it was quickly, I thought I was cool, but then I had some like late onset postpartum depression. When you’re in it you don’t recognize that that’s what’s happening. I also think my circumstances played a role in in I, you know, nobody was really around during the week, we had moved close to my mom, but she hadn’t retired yet and she had a sick boyfriend and a dying mother so she just wasn’t she couldn’t physically be there as much. And my husband was commuting and out of New York 5:30am to 730 at night. And so I was just home all winter isolated with this baby, and, you know, it looked like a lot of watching Outlander in my bathroom all day, not realizing that that was not normal.
P: Yeah,
D: cuz I just didn’t. I just I sort of felt like this really culminated in the early spring when I just told my mom I felt like I didn’t have anything to look forward to, like I was just so overwhelmed, taking care of this kid, losing myself, having no time to even shower, let alone like have pursuits or a career of my own things like that. I remember I used to like knowing what time my husband would come home, that’s when I would like put normal clothes on so that he wouldn’t like worry about me.
P: Yeah,
D: and I think when my best friend who’s single and has this very adventurous sexy life in New York as an actor and comedian, she came out to see me and was just like none of this is okay, like what is going on here and I was just like, Well you never had a baby, you don’t understand she’s like, I have seen plenty of people with babies and like you are not okay. And I just, I just didn’t realize it and in hindsight, my husband, seemed to think that he was on top of it because he knew but he never discussed it with me and my mom is of an old school generation that’s not super open to therapy and mental health care and was just kind of like it’s the baby blues so you’ll get through it, you know, so I was pretty annoyed by all that. But I think moving to a new home having community around me it becoming spring getting involved in baby class activities and meeting other new mothers like just being out in the world again. Certainly was sort of how I got through it like I just think moving to a new place, and honestly spring I always have a little bit of seasonal depression, just before kids too, so I think it was just sort of like I certainly didn’t do anything proactive to get out of it. Unfortunately, I didn’t even really recognize it until it was in hindsight.
P: Well, kudos to your friend and you articulated really well that it’s hard to see when you’re in it.
D: Yeah,
P: which is a great explanation for why most people may not usually help comes from the outside because you’re not in a position to be proactive.
D: Yeah.
P: So, this regrettably sounds like an all too common story where many people are sent home from the hospital told they have to breastfeed, there’s no other way. And it doesn’t work out for one reason or another, and they just feel terribly. and there are bunch of other things that contribute to women feeling overwhelmed in the postpartum period, taking care of themselves and a new baby, maybe taking a break from work, and that world they knew well, and dealing with your post pregnancy body, whether it’s fatigure or brain fog or pregnancy weightSo can you talk to us a little bit about like what your work is focused on and how maybe you help women in this circumstance.
D: Yeah, I mean, so we generally work with women around their relationship with food and body. And from my perspective, a contributing factor to the postpartum issues women face is the pressure we’re putting on ourselves to return, quote unquote, to this pre baby body this expectation of losing the weight quickly getting back into exercise very quickly. And I think that that contributes to this feeling of failure because especially with your first child. It is such an overwhelming experience that you literally don’t even have time to shower so how you going to prep keto meal plans or whatever the hell you’re trying to, you know what I mean. Yeah, so there’s this added layer and I think what’s really sad about it is that it’s not. It’s a moment that we dread for our bodies. Typically, and it should be a moment of celebration its a rite of passage like this becoming like this journey from made into mother should be celebrated, and instead we have hardly any support in any area and there’s all these different ways that we’re already, it’s sort of baked in that we’re not going to meet these expectations in some way, whether it’s breastfeeding or being able to stick to a diet or whatever it is. So we really help women around, letting go of the diet mentality in the first place so that they can actually nourish themselves instead of restricting themselves, and also starting to see our bodies as more than a body, right, like we are full human beings and our bodies deserve respect and appreciation and care and nourishment, even if we don’t currently find them beautiful right so it’s a really it’s a, it’s mostly a shift in perspective, this is all an inside job as opposed to, like I said meal planning or something like that.
P: That seems super valuable and super useful and now that you’re talking about this, I do remember being worried getting pregnant that I’d gain all this weight, which. And what would happen after and you know who knows why, then, so I definitely somehow I’ve gotten that message too. Do you have a sense of like where it comes from or like how we change it, you know, more broadly.
D: Yeah I mean it’s a narrative of diet culture. The diet culture that we live in and this expectation that women’s bodies are never supposed to change. Right we’re battling our bodies from puberty on most of us in our culture, battling weight gain which is very normal in puberty and then, you know, pregnancy, it’s just this idea it’s this narrative we all subscribe to because of our culture and the way that we were raised, and it tells us that we should have the same body after children that we had before, which, if you really think about it like all women’s bodies do is change throughout our lives. And this idea that we’re all supposed to get back like where did your body go What do you mean you have to get it back like you’re still in your body it’s just this new version of your body. Right so again it’s the expectation thing right like there’s this myth we’re all living by that we’re supposed to look the same, our entire adult lives like why do I have, you know 38 After two children, why would I expect to look like I did when I was 17 before I had children or even if children are involved, you know. So it’s really just starting to wake up I think media literacy is really important and also just waking up to this narrative that we’re all living by right like I think I’m supposed to get my body back. Like what does that mean why, you know starting to ask those questions.
P: Yeah, when you see it that way it does not take account of all the massive changes that pregnancy brings and watch a dramatic change in everything is wrought by pregnancy as if it’s this easy thing that you just
D: bounce back from,
P: yeah. Oh my god. Yeah, that is kind of a crazy story that I can’t imagine who wrote that script because somebody who never had, who was never pregnant is my guess
D: I always pictured Don Draper
P: poor Jon Hamm….
D: So handsome. He’s doing fine…
P: I’ll worry less about him… It does, it does sound like a, like a 1950s ad executive kind of thing to sell diet pills or some something crazy right that does not,
D: well yeah I mean, you know this, I think it was Naomi Wolf who says like this, these a culture obsessed with female beauty and this is not her direct quote but it’s not about beauty, it’s about obedience right if women spend all of their time and energy and resources and mind space, trying to control their body that doesn’t want to be controlled, then they don’t have that time energy resources mind space to look up and recognize that there’s so much wrong in our world that if we use those resources, maybe, like what would the world look like if women didn’t diet.
P: yeah, That’s amazing. That is a really good question because there is a lot of a lot of energy. I can imagine that is super prominent in the postpartum period and I hear a lot of people say that they did have body image issues when they were pregnant, and I, I’m not sure I had body image issues but I definitely said to my husband as I started develop a belly, I’m doing this wrong, this can’t possibly be what’s supposed to happen because I’ve never heard anybody talk about how weird this feels and how strange I look right this is such a weird feeling
D: I couldn’t wait to fit in to pregnant to maternity clothes because I felt like that in between, I was, you know, with my first pregnancy, it’s like you just don’t look like yourself.
P: Yeah,
D: but you don’t look that cute pregnant look at, you know, and just the fact that we all think about this so much as is the problem, right.
P: Agreed
D: But yeah it is and I would say that we, you know, the postpartum space is really is really vulnerable and I think a lot of times what happens is women come to us after that and are thinking that they, their whole battle against food in their body is a lot of times wrapped up in wanting to get their body back right like wanting under this illusion of control that we have that we can eat our way back into our pre baby bodies right and that comes up a lot in pregnancy is a massive body image disruption, right, just like trauma can be a body image disruption or illness or, you know, a comment from your mother or something about your body right there’s so pregnancy and childbirth alone are massive body image disruptions because your body is so foreign to you after you give birth, right, nothing is in the same place nothing feels the same, you know, and I think, especially if you are breastfeeding, you feel like your body’s not even yours anymore, so it’s sort of this out of body experience. So, you know, working to heal that body image and to start to respect your body for everything it does and is outside of the way that it looks right and I’m starting to think in terms of body respect, especially when it comes to what’s going on in your brain. How am I speaking about my body, how am I speaking to myself about my body. That’s really sort of where the work is for sure.
P: That’s amazing. That sounds so valuable. I have never heard anybody else talk about it in the terms that you’re using,
D: really.
P: Yeah and it’s, I mean not maybe because I live under a rock like. But, but it is like now that you’re saying this I realize all the stories I’ve been telling myself are basically the wrong thing right. I’m not sure I I’m like not organized enough to do, to stick to a diet, or, you know, eat 1000 calories a day or something crazy like that but, but I definitely, I definitely have that voice, I definitely have that voice telling me to Oh, don’t eat
D: it would be uncommon not to have that voice right because we have it from the beauty ideal side but now we also have it from the medical and wellness industry side where we have these food police and we’ve moralized food choices right we think we’re good or bad around eating clean and dirty all these things so there’s, there’s a lot going on in our brains about food and our culture for sure there’s a lot of anxiety and guilt and shame around food choices.
P: Is there any international example where you think they’re doing it right.
D: Wow. Not that I know of no so there’s an interesting study done in Fiji, a while back where you know the culture there had historically preferred in terms of beauty ideals, a more robust figure food and eating and being in a larger body were seen as a positive thing. And then Western, they got Western television, and basically eating disorders were virtually non existent in the culture there, and then they got Western television and eating disorders skyrocketed they’re seeing the girls on 90210 Right, so the beauty ideals shifted. And it’s become a problem there as well so I think any corner of the world where Western culture and media has reached, because these are European beauty standards right that are really impacting everybody in terms of their body image. So, yeah, there’s a lot tied up in it but not that I know of, maybe, you know that I’m sure there are so many cultures that haven’t been touched by Western culture at this point but not that I know of.
P: Is there any other measure of the degree to which we’ve strayed from, you know, just have a healthy body other than like eating disorders, any other way to recognize like oh this is like eating disorders is a clear measure that we’ve done something wrong.
D: Yeah, so we look at it as like and I think it’s interesting because I think that the issues around alcohol have some parallels here in terms of we no longer see it as an alcoholic or not an alcoholic, there’s this gray area spectrum right of substance abuse, right. And I really believe that a clinical eating disorder. The difference between that and actually you know just the average woman who diets is really just the behaviors and the mind and the thinking is very similar, right, but it’s the frequency and severity and percentage of time and energy right, so I like to look at it as a spectrum, right and most women in our culture have dieted or will diet at some point in their lives, and it’s really, it’s not a question of like do I have an eating disorder or not, but the average woman diets, I think the latest data I’ve seen is 25 to 60% of her time each day thinking about food in her body.
P: Oh, that’s a crime
D: that’s just the average woman that diets right because someone’s suffering from anorexia could be dreaming about it 110% of the time, right, yeah. That is the mind space and the energy we’re talking about here and that is just the average woman who’s googling Paleo Meal Plans. Right, so it is something that impacts everyone really and essentially it’s anti fatness, it’s a fat phobia that we have, and it’s just drilled into us, you know, from, from the womb, basically.
P: So what would be a healthier mind space for like to think about food just obviously this is a long term project and you can, you know, if it could be crystallized in a sentence, we don’t know what it was but, like, just give me a sense,
D: yeah sure so intuitive eating and Health at Every Size, are the framework that we work with and intuitive eating is essentially eating based on your body and your body’s cues, instead of what’s going on in your brain. Right,
P: so that seems like retraining,
D: it is if you look at a toddler dieting yet or hasn’t had their food controlled, they eat when they’re hungry they stop when they’re full. Many of them eat a variety of balanced foods right and they just listen to their bodies.
P: Yeah,
D: we’re the ones who have all these rules in our heads and really the dysfunction begins when we try to make our bodies something they’re not right, our natural genetic makeup has a weight setpoint determined by our genetics our bodies want to be in this certain range healthy and whole. We try to manipulate that and that’s where the dysfunction begins right it’s the binge eating the emotional eating the diet rock bottom of like, I can’t stick to it was 30 days now it’s 10 days and that was one day and now I’m just thinking about starting a diet all the time I’ve never actually dieting, and you feel addicted to food you feel out of control certain foods are off limits you’re cutting your food groups down to nothing, right, and all of this is sort of in the name of health, but at the end of the day, it’s really about weight, and everything tangled up in that for women, which is a lot
P: I’m grateful to you for doing this work because that sounds like literally your audience’s everyone, and
D: yes, yes, well a lot of mothers for sure. Oh it is it is
P: as I mentioned before the phrase bounce back is like she’d come with like a trigger warning or something because it, I definitely that’s planted somewhere in me. So I know that that is out there a lot. And,
D: yeah, I mean all we see is celebrities how they lost the baby weight all over every magazine like women’s weight somehow makes national headlines, Adele Gwenyth gaining weight and in quarantine, I mean, the world makes our weight news. There’s a global pandemic we’re talking about Adele’s weight. So like, of course, we think that, of course, we think about our body, our own bodies and, and whether or not we’re going to be able to lose the baby weight or the pandemic weight and all that stuff.
P: Yeah, that does seem like a colossal waste of time and energy for the person who wrote the article the personal research theoretical everyone who’s reading it right,
D: a lot of money to be made, though, as you know, the stuff about what is Wait comes out at the same time she promoted the book about I’m not even gonna say the title because I don’t want to trigger people into.
P: Yeah, yeah, yeah…
D: that’s what you follow the money and it’s a $72 billion industry that selling things to women to change their bodies and all the mind space and energy follows.
P: yeah, At the same time you’re supposed to have a beautiful pregnancy to the you know,
D: goddess of fertility, no hemorrhoids no sciatic pain, none of that.
P: Yeah, no kidding. That, that is such a de legitimization of, you know everything you’ve actually gone through.
D: Yeah, absolutely.
P: If you could go back and talk to your younger self and give her advice. What do you think he would tell her.
D: Just stop messing with your body and just eat. I mean I came to this word through my own struggle with disordered eating and body image and the term that comes to mind the most for me is waiting on the wait, like not feeling qualified for the life that you want to live or the person you want to be until you reach this expectation in your brain about how your body should look or be, and it’s usually not something that’s attainable for anybody because we know from our own lived experience and from the research that we can’t actually manipulate our weight, so just let your body be, stop messing with yourself is what I would say you know and to really stop seeing yourself as an object and be in a dynamic relationship with your body so that when things like illness or pregnancy or weight gain happen, you still have the same level of self respect and self worth that you had in a smaller body.
P: So, that’s amazing advice. Thank you so much for coming on and sharing your story, Where can people find you if they want to dive more deeply into this work that you’re doing.
D: Sure, so we’re at wellness lately.com We have a free masterclass at wellness lately.com slash masterclass that will take you through the five shifts to start to relate to food and your body differently to start to heal from this diet rock bottom that you might be in. So that’s why obviously the.com slash masterclass and everything can be found on our website.
P: That sounds amazing. I’m going directly.
D: Fantastic. Yeah,
P: thank you so much for talking, I totally appreciate our discussion.
D: Yeah, thanks for having me. This is great.
P: Thanks so much to Dana for sharing her story and for her work to help women appreciate their bodies in whatever size and shape they find themselves in. You can find more about Dana’s work at wellnesslately.com And thanks also to professor Golden for her insight about the historical context of today’s breastfeeding culture.
Episode 18 SN: Communication is Key to a Good Birth, Lessons Learned: Stacey
The challenges of pregnancy and birth can be useful mentors for future parents. Today’s guest learned something significant from each of her three birth experiences. The first taught her that she’d need an advocate in birth given that it’s such a powerful and vulnerable experience. The second taught her that trust could be restored in a situation when a real partnership was at work, and the third taught her about physical limits and flexibility. Her experiences also encouraged a career change, from a police officer to a trauma practitioner. Listen to her inspiring story of growth.
To learn more about Stacey, you can find her at www.facebook.com/StaceyWebbEFT and www.instagram.com/_staceywebb
If you are looking for the insights of an empathic OB, look no further. This is my whole conversation with Dr. Matityahu
Audio Transcript
Paulette: Hi, welcome to war stories from the room. I’m your host Paulette Kamenecka. I’m an economist, or writer and a mother of two who had trouble with every aspect of growing a family. But today, Stacey will share her own story. The challenges of pregnancy and birth can be useful mentors for future parents. Today’s guest, learn something significant from each of her three birth experiences. The first taught her that she’d need an advocate in birth, given that it’s such a powerful and vulnerable experience. The second term of that trust could be restored in a situation when a real partnership was at work. And the third taught her about physical limits and flexibility. Her experiences also encouraged a career change for a police officer to a trauma practitioner. I also include the insights of a fabulous OB only clips of our conversation are included in Stacy’s story, but if you want to hear the whole interview, Go to the extended show notes on war stories from the room, calm. Let’s get to Stacy’s inspiring story.
Hi, thanks so much for coming on the show, can you tell us your name and where you’re from.
Stacey: Yeah, my name is Stacy Webb and I’m from Sydney, Australia.
P: Lucky you. Oh my god,
S: it’s a it’s a beautiful place on earth.
P: Yes, It is right. Wow, that’s cool. So, how many kids do you have Stacey,
S: I have four kids in total, I have an eight year old a six year old in two and a half year old twins.
P: Wow, that’s a busy house
S: very chaotic.
P: So before you had those kids, I’m imagining you had some idea of what pregnancy would be like, what did you think it would be like,
S: I guess, I assumed that you know you get pregnant, and you would see a midwife throughout pregnancy, in my case here you’d see a midwife at the hospital, and then when it was time to have a baby, you would go to the hospital, maybe experience a bit of pain and then you’d have a baby.
P: So, Pretty straightforward.
S: Yeah, and any my sense I always thought if you ended up in a cesarean, that there may have been problems throughout the pregnancy, and really, so I guess in my mind cesarean was very it was never the front part of a conversation when it came to a pregnancy and giving birth as well unless it was discussed throughout.
P: Yeah, I think I think I’m the same I think I thought as like a last ditch effort or I don’t know like I just thought it wouldn’t happen to me. You’re setting us up for the story once you let’s, I’m interested to hear. So, with the first pregnancy was easy to get pregnant.
S: Yes I, we weren’t actively trying. My husband and I, at that point in time in our lives. And so it was a surprise pregnancy I guess some muck around and say it was a love pregnancy, but nonetheless, you know, we had spoke about children, it was just any awkward a lot of speeches voted be a little bit later so I was about 28 when I got pregnant with my first, it was a very smooth, pregnancy, you know, really didn’t feel like there was any issues at all. So my midwife, appointments, and everything was always awkward. And so, again like nothing when it came to giving birth. It was always okay, a, you know, a vaginal birth, and it was going through the pain options in regards to epidurals and things like that, but a C section was never really discussed, no real issues throughout the pregnancy that arose, I just then stayed with a midwife, which was also very lovely because, you know, it was also very calming.
P: That sounds lovely so it’s gonna take us to the first birth take us to that day. How do you know this is the day what’s going on.
S: I was coming up to being 42 weeks pregnant with my first
P: Wow
S: I was overdue. Yes, that was when I spoke about induction they, I was, you know, if everything was safe was happy to try and wait as long as, as long as possible, but then again I didn’t really know much, I just thought, okay, at some point. I knew that they would induce me and I would have a baby, I had a scan to check how the baby was. And at that point they said oh look, the fluid, and I apologize if I’m wrong, because the amniotic fluid, fluid around the baby was getting low. As I was approaching the 42 weeks that having an induction needed to happen. So I had that scan in the morning and they said in the afternoon you’re, you’re coming into be admitted and we’re going to induce you, I wasn’t really fully aware that that day was going to be the day when it was going to happen.
P: Did you not have any contractions or anything.
S: No, no nothing at all. She just wanted to say that my husband was working that day so I called him up and said, Look, this afternoon is apparently the day that we’re going to go in and they’re going to induce me, so we went into the hospital in the afternoon and got admitted, and they said for me to be induced they needed to use the Foley bulb. Yeah, so when it came to doing that my cervix was too high and they needed to manually bring it down. And that
P: that sounds comfortable.
S: Yeah. And they never really fully explained it and I think I was in a state of shock that I normally I would, I’m a very inquisitive woman, and I would ask a lot of questions, and I felt like I asked questions and on reflection I probably didn’t ask as much as I should have, you know, I asked you know, would I be able to have pain relief and they said yes, but the doctor had come in to do the manual, bringing down of the cervix, but they didn’t give me the pain relief, and so they did that without an I was in excruciating pain. I remember telling my husband going. If this isn’t even labor yet I don’t even know if I could go through labor in the birth because I, I was in so much pain. To be honest, it was, it was extremely traumatic for me because it wasn’t something that was expected, I was telling them that I was in pain, and I was kind of given the thing of well you have pain relief, but I kept saying to him, I don’t think I’ve had anything, you know, like you’ve given me something to breathe but it’s not doing anything to me. It was because it wasn’t turned on.
P: Oh my god,
S: yeah. And so, I’m saying to the midwife midwife that was in the room and the doctor who’s bringing down this cervix manually that you know I’m in pain, please stop it and I just felt like I wasn’t really seen or heard and I was kind of dismissed, until another midwife came in and realized that the pain relief wasn’t turned on so she you know immediately stopped everything can to do that but in my mind, it was kind of already done the damage had already been done, I was, you know just still extremely shocked and traumatized with that.
P: To learn more about what happened to stacy, I took this question to an OB. Hi, thanks so much for coming on the show doctor Dr. Matityahu will you introduce yourself and tell us where you work
Dr. Matityahu: I’m happy to introduce myself and thanks, Paulette for inviting me on the show. So my name is Dr. Deb Matityahu my patients call me Dr. Deb and I am an OB GYN at Kaiser in Redwood City, part of the Permanente Medical Group, and I’ve been there for about 18 years. Another point of interest. I also have a nonprofit in Kenya, it’s called Beyond fistula, and we take care of women who have severe childbirth injuries so women who have prolonged labor and pushing and have end up with internal damage and sometimes causes injury to the baby. And so I work with a fistula surgeon in Kenya, and he does the repair and then my organization does vocational training educational scholarships and business grants and training for women, after they’ve survived, what’s called obstetric fistula.
P: Wow, that’s super cool,
Dr. M: it’s a rare complication for childbirth at this point. Yeah, in the US, but not, not in areas where women’s health care is overlooked.
P: Yeah. Wow, that’s amazing. Well thanks so much for coming to talk to us today this will be, I think these issues are more common that our guest today that we’re talking about. So when Stacey goes into get induce the doctor says her cervix is too high, it has to be manually lowered. Do we know what that means
Dr. M: I’m going to just try and guess what that means since clearly I wasn’t there, early on before you’re fully in labor before you’ve had a lot of contractions, the cervix and the uterus are a little bit high so when we go to check you meaning we’re putting our fingers inside and we want to feel to see if the cervix is dilated, the cervix can be high up in the vagina or even sort of pushed a little bit back because of the way the uterus is growing. And so early on before you really are in active labor, it can be hard to essentially reach your cervix and get a finger up inside to check your cervix, and in order to do the Foley balloon. What we’re essentially doing is we’re putting a catheter up through the cervix so the cervix has to be dilated, a little bit so we want to at least be able to get a finger or two, up into the cervix, and then feed a catheter that has a balloon on the end, one to the catheter is all the way in the cervix you inflate the balloon and it just mechanically stretching open your cervix for you so that you can have an early induction without, without medication to cause contractions, you know just stretching your cervix will eventually cause contractions. So, from what you’re saying on Stacy, it sounds like it was really hard to reach the cervix. And when that happens. Sometimes what we’ll do is we’ll try and put a finger behind or inside the cervix and pull the cervix down closer, closer towards us, like sort of pulling it forward and try and get the other finger in so we can feed a Foley balloon or Foley bulb into the cervix, and it can be incredibly painful and it sounds like for her it was really painful and really traumatic.
S: So that had happened, where they then, you know, finally brought it down, and you know they did the induction and everything sort of was then going to plan, you know I was then starting to get contractions because of the inducement, I did say yes to an epidural and so that happened as well, which I wanted, especially at that point as well. I got up to eight centimeters, but during that time, especially towards the end because it had been go for quite a long while, I think at that point in time from the beginning of, of the inducement, after the cervix had been brought down until the point where they said no this isn’t working, would have been about 20 hours.
P: Oh my god
S: And, yeah, you know, they’re probably, you know, gave me all these things in between but I just honestly don’t remember, because my main focal point was, was being so traumatized at the beginning, and they said that I wasn’t progressing well enough, or fast enough. And that a emergency C section needed to happen and I, I feel like a little bit of the wait was in hopes to obviously not have food in your stomach when when going into surgery and things like that,
P: are they taking you because the baby’s heart rate is reacting or is it something wrong with the baby or go on understand like what yeah happening fast enough means
S: yes….And that’s the thing I don’t, I don’t really remember too much in my mind, I felt like everything was going okay, in my mind, I felt like the baby’s heart rate was going well, and again when I’m asking these questions, I’m not really being told much, and I’m also in a state of shock. My husband’s in a state of shock, because again there was no talk of a cesarean and so we’re all thinking why all the sudden, now we have an experience so you know when I’m thinking, you know, these people are professionals they definitely know more than me when it comes to giving birth and having a baby, and you know if they think that this is the safest option, you know, they must be right. And so I ended up having an emergency surgery and at the end, and it wasn’t like a rushed process like okay, we’ve got to rush through because the baby’s in danger. It was still, you know, as I said we waited quite a while before I could go in, that was the birth of my first child.
P: I’m so sorry that happened to you that just sounds like the word that comes to mind is manhandled, whether they were men or not
S: Yeah, no, that really was
P: they were not taking you into account in a way that you would want to be and I’m, and I also relate to the deference to vertical authority like I assume they know what they’re doing. So, I could just easily see that happening to people and I’m so sorry that happened that just it sounds traumatizing,
S: I didn’t really get to have a debrief, as to why the cesarean needed to happen, especially that point, there was nothing to say, you know, look, Stacy. The reason why we chose a cesarean and to do it this way is because of all these have been, you know, it wasn’t just as progressing, you know, fast enough, especially afterwards it was really trying to push me out the door, I’d never had surgery before besides this cesarean I’d never really been in hospital for anything to have a cesarean and it was extremely scary to me, although this is Erin was going to happen, just knowing that I was going to be supported and I guess you know, held in a sense to go you know you’re not alone. We’re here with you I really feel like I got that and from having a very nice, lovely easy pregnancy, it really put a sour taste in my mouth, that that was the birth that I got in the end,
P: God, no kidding. What is failure to progress, how do we measure that and is it reliable, what does it mean
Dr. M: that is a great question, before I even answer that. What I’m hearing about Stacy’s delivery is that there just wasn’t really great communication and communication is so important, because knowledge is power, and if you don’t know what’s happening to your body and you’re just experiencing pain you’re just being put through a process and you don’t understand what’s happening. It can be scary, it’s painful and if there’s not a lot of communication or poor communication it makes it much, Much worse I mean it sets someone up for really having a traumatic experience and and people can carry that for a really long time, and so I just wanted to put that out there and as far as failure to progress, we pretty much presume that you’re in active labor when you’re about four centimeters dilated and you’re having regular contractions and at that point, there’s a sort of a standard normal curve that we expect people to generally follow, like how they progress in labor for us to say that it’s a normal progression and that things are going well and so about a centimeter or so an hour in our dilation, If you’re not dilating and progressing as we expect, we look to see are you contracting well enough, we have ways to measure the strength of the contractions we can give you Pitocin to improve your contractions strengthen quality and frequency, you know, and we’re constantly checking and yes we checked by feel, you know, any OB GYN can tell you how many centimeters, their fingers are apart because we’ve checked so many cervixes. So we check and we see you know are you four centimeters are You five are you six are things are things progressing, every hour or two or three, if there’s no change in the call dilation effacement is helping the services and station is how far down the baby’s head comes, if there’s no change in those three parameters with what we can measure as appropriate frequency and strength of contractions, then we say something’s holding up this baby and we call that failure to progress because there’s been no progression in 234 hours, and usually leading up to that you’re doing some interventions to maybe give Pitocin and try and increase the force of the contractions maybe you’re putting in a catheter to measure the actual strength of your contractions just to see that we’re doing everything to get this baby down and out, and if nothing happens, then at that point we say okay it’s been three, four hours. Let’s, let’s talk about another way to get this baby out and that means C section, and often when this is happening, like you had said like there’s, there’s not this urgency that we would have if the baby’s heart rate is going down and we’re doing a C section emergently because of a baby in distress, when you have lack of progress with dilation, a effacement or station, yeah we we watch get Pitocin. We check the baby and often the baby’s doing fine. There’s no distress on the part of the baby, you know, once you have a discussion with the couple and you say, there’s no progress we’re trying this we’re trying that, you know we’re trying everything we can and the baby’s not coming down on its own, and it’s been a number of hours, and we should proceed to C section. And so then you ideally do the C section. Shortly after that, but it’s not urgent, so it can wait.
P: How was your daughter was fine.
S: She was perfectly fine she was. She was 8 lb baby, she was. She was beautiful and healthy. Nice still beautiful and healthy. Yep.
P: So how was it when you got home after the C section and taking care of your first baby,
S: it was really, it was really rough. I was in a lot of pain. And I again I wasn’t really given a lot of pain relief afterwards as well. And I just felt like it was a really rough recovery and I had troubles with breastfeeding and I really wasn’t feeling like I was getting the support in that. And so it just really felt like everything that I thought on what motherhood was, I just felt like I really wasn’t told the real truth, or really, or maybe I just didn’t want to understand the real truth beforehand and it was a bit, it was a big wake up call for me.
P: Yeah, the breastfeeding is also really tricky because it’s portrayed as a must, and everyone can do it.
S: Yes,
P: I think that’s not true, I think. Not everyone can do it and not everyone produces enough milk and your kids latch well, like there’s just a million things that make that interaction really hard and so it’s so glossing over the difficulties to say everyone should and everyone will.
S: Yeah,
P: because not everyone can
S: Yeah, I really, in my mind I wanted to be, you know, the perfect mom and there’s there’s no now obviously I know there’s a perfect mom is easy in so many different forms, but I felt like I had to breastfeed and if I wasn’t I was failing. When I was introducing formula and she didn’t end up being on formula full time, I really had a hard trouble mentally transitioning to that. And when I was reaching out for help I really didn’t feel like it was there until quite some months later and then I just kind of felt like it’s too late now, like wanting to come earlier. I kind of had that bit of a mentality of well I don’t want you to help me out. At that point in time and, and, you know I’ve done this by myself already and, you know, I’ve been asking for help for so many months and no one will help me, and I don’t want to forget there wasn’t that person’s fault who actually came out to help me. And she, she, you know, I thought bad, but just letting it all out then but I guess it was that no one had listened to me. and I guess it’s coming also from the birth, and having no one listened to me, I just didn’t want to do one of our burning one by then. Yeah,
P: so that sounds hard but she’s eight now right she’s,
S: she is.
P: What’s she into?
S: She’s a very creative and creative soul and she loves drawing and reading and really using creative, making creative art as well as dancing around the house so she’s just.
P: That’s cool. So now, given that you’ve had this hard time with the first one, what happens the second time do you and your husband have a discussion where you think we’ll blow past this or. Let’s keep having kids or has that happened.
S: Yes, so we had discussed, we will have another child. And I knew then that I felt like I knew I would be able to speak up more, you know, I knew what had sort of happened throughout the first time, and especially obviously then having a cesarean and I knew that, you know, in the possibility of persevering could happen next. So we had a discussion to have a second child, but I ended up falling pregnant before we originally had planned so we had another love baby, In a sense, and so, throughout that pregnancy, I really felt like I was becoming more aware of my body, I would be more of an advocate for myself and really speaking up for myself so throughout that pregnancy was still a very good healthy pregnancy, and I had some spoken up that I would like to try for a VBAC for a vaginal birth after some cesarean, and so the midwife that I saw throughout that pregnancy was an amazing, amazing midwife who really listened to me and took into account what happened throughout my first pregnancy. We had extra scans to, I guess, check the scar and all of that type of stuff throughout pregnancy, towards the end of the pregnancy, my goal was to avoid any induction if possible, because I felt like that would give my body, a better chance to be able to have a successful VBAC, , I ended up with her being about 41 weeks pregnant when I actually went all spontaneous labor.
P: Good, good
S: So, yes, so that was a completely different experience. I was asleep when I was feeling, the pains of of labor. I’d never experienced the slow, the slow part of it at the beginning so I’ve woken up and had pains and, you know, the night before because it’s it was around Easter time and we have a little Easter Show here, where we took our eldest there and I bought a couple of chocolate showbags and that night I just ate all the chocolate from the show. I got so super threw up so I thought when I woke up and I was getting a little stunning paper, I thought it was because I was hungry because I’d thrown up everything the night before. So I got in, you know, some little biscuits and I’m sitting there like a little mouse eatingmy at my biscuits hoping that that would ease this, you know, little needle in my stomach, and it didn’t it sort of, you know, after it would come in waves and I thought oh, is this the start of what contractions feel like because I had no idea. And I had a little app that would let me know how many minutes apart that these waves of feelings were coming in. And as each time it would come was getting a little bit more intense, a little bit more intense. So then I thought, oh well, okay, this is actually contractions.
And so when it came to a point where I felt like I you know we’re standing over the bed, taking really deep breaths for each contractions was when I woke up my husband, we’d always sort of joked throughout the pregnancy that you know this time, when it came time to have the baby would probably be during the night where I’d have to tap him on the shoulder to wake up so that sort of had actually happened And so we got, I got my daughter in the car and my mom was going to meet us at the hospital to take my eldest, we had set off, and was driving. So we, we were traveling, and we’re going down a very big hill so we can see that down towards the bottom of a hill that a police car or highway car had pulled out and was driving in front of us, and we sort of had by that time managed to be right behind the highway car and they must have seen us going a little bit fast like when I say look we fast, we went traveling extremely fast but we would have, you know, been a couple of Kay’s, maybe over the speed limit. And this, this highway car is driving extremely low, so where we’re in a 15 Kilometer belt probably driving 30 in front of us and I and it’s a one one lane road each way and also to my husband said not this isn’t happening, like, pull him over you like you get you put your high liens on and attract him to pull over because we aren’t driving 30 Ks to the hospital, this isn’t working, and I’m saying usually between contractions, and I’m a police officer myself. So the place folks that had pulled over and banned him you know when he’s Everything okay and I said all Amin labor, you’re going too slow, too slow in front of me and he’s like oh do you want to call an ambulance said no I’m a police officer myself I just want to get to the hospital so he said, Okay, follow me. And so he drives in front of me in front of us, I should say, with, with his lights on and wages driving behind him so you know when we were driving and I said to my husband, he’ll pull over soon and asked me to go in the car with him, because it’s obviously a lot safer. And sure enough, a little bit down the road, he pulls over and says I you know my supervisor says you need to come, come in the car with me, so I can get you to the hospital, quicker rather than you guys follow me. So, in between contractions and getting out of the car and getting in the highway car. I’ll try and find, you know, a piece of towel in the backseat and I was like I’m not a cat, it’s fine.
I was like the last thing I want. And so I went into the highway car and we took off.
P: This is made for TV movie by the way
S: it was it was. And and we were chatting in between, you know, about both are works of sleep I’ve been in the place, and we’re having a bit of a chat while I’m in between contractions on the way to the hospital and at that point in time, I was very vocal when midwives were coming in and stuff that you learned, I would like to try for a VBAC, and if anything keys have happening throughout the pregnancy, we want you to be upfront with me because I felt like I was being lied to, or information was being withheld. I wasn’t really going to take that in my birthing room I was very really stood up for myself, because I didn’t stand up for myself in the first one. And I had an amazing lovely midwife who was very supportive with me wanting for the back and it was really a great advocate for me as well I really extremely value her…this birth was also very different. I really felt seen and heard throughout it all, every time they’d come into the room, they must have seen my shock of are you going to come and tell me something’s wrong because that’s what always happened the first time you’re going to come in and tell me. We’re not progressing enough, I always felt like I was rushing against a clock, whereas this time they’re coming and going. Look, it’s fine. Calm down. The baby’s fine, you are fine we’re just checking, which is doing a checkout was really a lot different experience. I then ended up having the midwife come in and say, Look, we want to check your cervix to see how it was compared because of what’s happened last time. And when they checked it, it was still high, where they said we need to manually bring it down. And so I started to become in that panic again. And that same midwife has sort of come out says look, you’ve got it on here in this gig writing must be given pain relief we will make sure we give you pain right well the doctor even comes in to touch you, as I said it was extremely different experience because they were sitting there listening to me, calming me down and actually take into account my previous birth trauma into trying to ease any trauma retriggering reactivating in anything else throughout this one so I was given pain relief, it still hurt a little bit but definitely not as bad or as traumatic,
I had that at the cervix is brought down and the labor was progressing really well, so everything was going really well I said yes to an epidural again. And so I had that. And then I actually had the midwife coming and goes, Stacy I actually have your notes from your first birth, and the reasons why you had a C section, and she listed a bunch of reasons. She actually gave me the debrief that I never had the first time. And so it gave me a little bit of closure, the epidural was starting to wear off a little bit so I could actually feel when the contractions were coming so I knew when to push but I wasn’t feeling the pain of when I pushed if that made sense, which was, to me I actually quite enjoyed that.
But again as the midwife said when it came time to push Stacy at this moment you are like a first time mom because you’ve never had to,
P: Yeah…
S: in terms of your first time on giving birth vaginally you have never had to do this before so I was listening to their cues as to winter portion and when it came to the, I realized that I could, you know, no so you know if you can feel it coming on you can also let us know which I do, and I ended up having a vaginal birth with my second daughter,
P: whoo. Triumph
S: Yes, yes, I had a very small tail, she was eight pound baby. And I guess a really different experience. After I had my second daughter, and then for both pregnancies my first and second, we didn’t know the sex of the baby until the baby was born so when it came to having my first, my husband had told me it was a girl, and, and for my second, because the baby was brought immediately onto my chest, I was able to look and I told my husband that we had another girl, so it was a nice experience to be able to do that as well. And then also very different experience from the cane moving from the birthing switch to the maternity ward. When you have the cesarean and you go into a bit of a recovery room, and then you go into, you get wheeled in a bit so they’re like okay we’re going to the material now and okay and I sort of sat down on the bed because I used to being wheeled and I didn’t realize, oh, actually yes I can walk and I’m here I am pushing, you know, in the, in the little cribs and I’m pushing the crib to the maternity ward I was such a real different experience, it was just, it blew my mind at how different just even that part of the birthing experience was so
P: interestingly between your first and your second your first got. So, immediately medicalized when you got to the hospital.
S: Yeah,
P: like all your control was taken away and it seems like with your second, that it’s very much in the spirit of, you know, this is not a medical procedure you’re giving birth and you’re capable of doing that…it sounds lovely
S:yeah and it’s yeah, it really was and you know they were listening to me and if there were any problems come up they’ll actually sit and talk to me about it and letting me know you’re telling me information because it’s relating to me my own body and, and my birth of my child so it was such a different experience that I really felt I really felt happy with that somehow that I actually really got to speak up for myself and that I also was seen and heard throughout that birthing experience regardless of what the result ended up with being in terms of a vaginal or cesearean birth,
P: that sounds awesome, was the recovery much easier for the second one.
S: Yes. The recovery was much easier. Yes, it was a lot more of a smoother transition, I still was having trouble breastfeeding, but I was getting help from the beginning, which, in my mind made things easier. And also I wasn’t so harsh and so critical of myself on wanting to be this perfectionist mother so really made that postnatal experience extremely after so much more easier to me,
P: yeah that all sounds lovely.
S: Yes, I have quite a few months afterwards, though I was really I guess I started to feel really harsh on my body, postnatal body, I’d have been somewhat of a reasonably fit person before my first and got myself back to a stage where I was happy with my body before I got pregnant with my second, and we were actually planning my husband are actually planning our wedding, when I fell pregnant with my second, we’re in the middle of that where I ended up being married when I was about five months pregnant with my second so after I had my second it just felt like it was harder for me to get back to a state within my body that I was happy with. And so I was really harsh on myself for that. I just started to become really sort of reclusive within myself I avoid going out unless I really needed to with my children because I didn’t have any clothes that fit me and the ones that did I wasn’t really happy with how I looked. I was used to baby wear a lot with my second, I would happily go out. If I was babywearing because I felt like it was covering my body, so I felt like I was able to face the public world because I was somewhat covered, so it really took me a long time mentally to understand what my body was going through, no one really spoke to me about that and no one really said, your body may take a little while to adjust to things, just, just the way I guess you know how your, your stomach is after you have a baby and it’s very normal and natural whereas I thought you had to get back into your post baby state, you know, I don’t think that now, but at that time I did and I was really harsh was awful why I never did that. And, and because of that I really affected how I do things as well, so
P: that’s super hard and I, I had a conversation with someone yesterday where I realized that bounce back is like a trigger word for me, I think that’s a term that’s commonly used and you’re imagining like I will have the body I had when I was 20 before I was pregnant. Even though your body has been used for the better part of a year to grow a human being.
S: that’s right…That’s the emphasis from other people like, Oh you had your baby six months ago. So, why do you still, you know, like you still have a stomach, and it’s like well, because that’s how my body is right now like and why do you care, but that’s how my body is
P: Stacy was uncomfortable with her postpartum body and people making comments about her, not getting her body back, or quickly enough after the birth. What are your thoughts about that what is postpartum. What is a woman’s postpartum body is supposed to look like,
Dr. M: I don’t think the phrase, get your body back is helpful for anyone, because you’re right, we don’t get our body back we have a different body we have, you know, for a mom, and our body changes and it changes pretty much forever. You know you can get stronger you can get tone you can do different things but your body does not go back to pre pregnancy, state, and never does. And I think the more that we can embrace that and be okay with that, the better off we are. This just adds to another way that we as moms judge ourselves and feel bad about ourselves, it’s emotionally exhausting having a child, and then you’re feeling guilty that am I doing a good enough job, how is my breast milk it was my baby on the right schedules aren’t they’ve eaten the right stuff is the diaper material. The right one is, do I have the right bottles, you know is my body look the way I’m supposed to look. And now my husband wants sex like I’m so f’ing tired that like I don’t even want to have that, why aren’t I, as good as I was before. And so I think that there’s a lot of judgment that we put on ourselves instead of just embracing the fact that I’m different, I’m a mom and I’m not going to bounce back overnight and I’m not going to look like my teenage self, and if I do okay maybe in the future you will but that shouldn’t be the goal for the first year after you’ve given birth.
When I gave birth to my first Cindy Crawford was giving birth to her first and there was this huge write up with her in the newspaper where she was interviewed all these beautiful pregnancy photos and all these postpartum photos and someone made a comment about how quickly she bounced back. And what I love about her and why I just love her now, is that she said, I want to be very clear, it is my job to look good. And so my full time job after giving birth was to go to the gym and get my body to be more tone and ready for camera again but for a normal mom, who’s not a model that’s not their full time job and shouldn’t be this should not be the expectation of a normal Mom, this is the expectation of me because it is my career. But if this wasn’t my career I would not look like this, because it’s exhausting and it’s a full time job to look like this so I was like yay Cindy, I’m not a model and so I’m not going to look like that. I’m not going back to quote unquote my body, I have a baby, I’m going back to work and just trying to survive and be the best mom I can be without feeling horrible about myself so that, that being said, let’s, let’s now go back to, yes, our bodies change and what can we do about it. And there’s a whole bunch of changes that happen, you know, one is especially if you have vaginal delivery, things are really loosened stretched out down there. And so, you know there’s a lot of talk about the benefit of doing cables and pelvic floor strengthening and in our hospital and I’m hoping it’s getting more common, just across the country. We have a handful of pelvic floor physical therapists, these are women who are really focused on the pelvic floor and the vaginal tissue and can help you with exercises to get things a little bit tighter and toned and stronger, you know, so that you don’t have back pain so you, your core feels more stable. So the vagina doesn’t feel so overstretched. Sometimes you’re leaking urine afterward, you know during pregnancy. And so just strengthening the vaginal musculature, can help decrease or stop any of the urinary leakage. So there’s a lot of changes that the body goes through. And there’s a lot that we can do for it.
S: I took me caught a few years to sort of get my head around that, which thankfully I did, I understood within my head that my body is different, and I was still very active and healthy and and reasonably fit, and had gotten myself to a weight that I was happy with however my body was a completely different shape to what it was before children, and I was very accepting of that and it didn’t worry me regardless of the weight I was very happy with my body, so it was at a really good stage in my life, but it took me quite a few years afterwards,
P: you’re responding to every cue around you. It makes total sense why you would think that it’s just like, I think it’s unfair and unrealistic expectation that people place on Mothers, that you should bounce back, you know, now looking back right even for you I’m sure looking back I think that was crazy.
S: Yeah, it was crazy and and even looking back it was always. the focus on how much weight you lost, or what weight you’re at, rather than how your body feels, and for me like I do, I did a bit of running and a bit of weight so it was like okay I’m really happy that I was able to run at this, you know, at this pace that was more important to me than what my weight was, and so that was such a really big eye opener for me which I’m really glad I got, I got to that point.
P: Yeah and actually very useful to have done the for twins, I’m guessing.
S: Yes, yes, my husband and I had discussed on having a third child, when it came to the twins, we have planned, and we’re actively trying for our third baby when I fell pregnant. It was expected that took me about five months to get pregnant,
P: did that feel like a lot or you were okay with it?
S: It felt like a lot. Yeah, it felt like a lot, because the first few times, yeah I felt pregnant without Yeah, so, but I also knew I had not long before that had a back injury. And so I thought maybe it’s just because I have been injured, not long ago, and then we
P: I can’t wait to hear when we, when we found out we had twins.
S: And so, with us, are deciding on having a third child we had decided that we would trade in one of our cars and buy a new car, my husband had been researching on a car that he wanted to buy with our trade in and that I don’t even know what type of car was but it was a five seater car I know that. And so we booked in for an ultrasound, and the technicians, rubbing the jelly on my stomach and doing all of that and so suppose the screen he goes oh what do you see and I said oh, oh, there’s a baby in, and there’s my bladder I thought because you have a full bladder when you have ultrasound, and he’s like no it’s not. Oh no, why What do you mean I was so blase about it he’s like there’s one baby, and there’s a heartbeat and shows her how many guys, and what you think is your bladder is actually another sack, and he’s another baby, and he’s like you’re having twins, and I thought he was joking, I just and I had that nervous that nervous laugh around with me so I was like smirking because that was just correction I was just like are you kidding me. Are you joking. No, that’s not right. No, you’ve got some check up on your, on your thing there i My husband hadn’t spoken at that point I think he was still in shock. And the first thing you said when he was able to talk was like I guess I’m not buying that car then, but it was obviously also still a blessing. That’s how we didn’t buy that car because it would have needed to trade it in again and
P: that’s awesome.
S: Yeah, so, so my twins are fraternal twins, what’s known in, in Australia, he’s DCDA twins. So again, we didn’t try and find out the sex of our twins until birth as well
P: can you use a midwife if you’re having twins, that seems like the more complicated thing,
S: twins will always is a high risk pregnancy so therefore, I had to see an obstetrician for each appointment instead of a midwife, I had said that I would like to try for another vaginal birth with the twins, and it was purely to me just thinking how the recovery was afterwards that it might be a third of might be easier on me if I had a vaginal birth with having to handle two babies at once. The doctors a bit hesitant at the beginning thinking, you know, of wanting to book me for the C section how I was always also pretty adamant on myself that I’m not walking in the C sections so this is what we’re doing, but I’m also open to the fact that I could end up in a C section
so when I got to the thirty seven weeks I’d seen the doctor again. And we had spoke about, you know, when would be the rough time point that we would be looking at, you know, to having the babies in terms of inducement if needed. Obviously for me I was wanting to avoid inducement unless it was medically necessary for the babies, but I had a very healthy pregnancy, and I was still very active and doing things throughout the pregnancy that if I haven’t gone into labor by the time I’m 39 weeks, I will consent to an induction. So I hit 39 weeks pregnant and I was still pregnant, but at that point. Especially that last week, I was, I felt like my body was having a really hard time then being able to cope with the twins, I was having a really hard, trouble breathing.
P: My husband said well I was pregnant with just a single term like Darth Vader at night.
Trying to breath Right, so I can’t even imagine how you’ve gotten this far.
S: Yeah, I at that point it was, it was getting to the point I could walk from my bed to our on suite, and I would sound like I was an asmatic….my stomach was so big I just felt like all my organs are really constricting and I was just sort of like, like gasping for air. So I thought, this is the point I think I can’t, I don’t think I could do another week, when it came to that, we had the had the induction and again I was worried about the cervix, but when they did the check my cervix was down, so it just felt like this way the worry and it wasn’t as big as the worry because of what happened during the second birth, but it was still a concern within my mind because I still had that sometimes that little bit of a trigger as to oh my god, am I going to feel this game, I had the, the Foley bowl. And that was successful that had fallen out, I was getting contractions. I had a grade two an epidural as though I was happy for that in the birth was progressing really well. And when I got to about six centimeters, baby, as heart rate started to then drop really low. Every time I was having a contraction, to the point where I had so many people in the birthing space in terms of medical professionals. When this was all happening. And so I knew that things were changing and the lack of product necessary was likely to happen. And so, before they even told me I knew it was going to end up necessary, and they were really lovely about a really took the time to sit down and brief with me as to why this is Erin was going to happen but concerned about baby’s a heart rate, I could see the heart rate drop really low, even like my husband each time when the first time it happened he stood up really concerned as well so I understood the severity of it, and really appreciated that I was being told up front on information, you know, my husband was getting changed again and that I, I did have a little cry, and it wasn’t so much on that I was gonna end up zero. Yeah, it was just like it’s really acknowledging what was happening at that time and just to sort of let that out so then I could approach the next phase of the birth in a really good mentality site because I didn’t have that mentality so when I had the searing for my first, and this one was more of a rushed Susteren so I was you know that bit more of rushed down the hallways, and even though it had that more urgency to the birth. In my mind it was also a lot more calm up because I was more conscious of what was happening, and it wasn’t a trauma for me, compared to what happened in the first, so I just had one recommendation when we’re in there I said I don’t know the gender of the babies so when you get the babies. Yeah, I don’t want you to tell me the babies, I want my husband to told me. So when they, when baby a came out, it was, you know baby eyes out, and they didn’t tell me that they’re six, my husband had said to me off. It’s a, it’s a three to one. Now when it comes to babies and we’re you know, have we got a boy you only guys here can you believe it, we’ve got a boy and a girl because we always joked that we were going to have girls, and my husband just needs to grow up in a house of women. It was a surprise to, to then have a boy and a girl so a baby a was a boy, and Baby B was that girl, they think that the reason why baby’s heart rate was going down extremely low every time I had a contraction was because the cord was wrapped around his neck, three times. Oh well, I was in the hospital for a couple of days, I was the one who wanted to leave the hospital early so they said you know between so we’re happy to have me evening longer in the hospital. In the end this is still a public hospital system, but I wanted to get home because I knew going home, I would have my support that I needed my support network. I also knew that I had my other children, I felt like the recovery from that C section was extremely better than the first as well I don’t know if it’s whether because I knew what was going to happen. And so to be aware of how I move and things like that, and had these two healthy babies that were 6.7 and seven points counts, so
P: Wow. That’s amazing. And how was it having them home but twins seem tricky to me, like, like a lot of work. Yeah,
S: I was really grateful that my babies were healthy and was able to take them home. It was, it was different having to try to get my groove on feeding the two and sort their sleeping arrangements and stuff, one would wake up half an hour before the other and stuff like that so, which is understandable because they’re two completely different babies so it was trying to each of their cues and and different stuff like that. And I guess also for me and especially as I’ve grown older as well like understanding the urgencies of their cries as to which baby I may need to attend first because the other hand is organizing getting their bottle ready or things like that as well. I especially if I was by myself so not being so hard on myself I can pick both up at the same time, and not put so much guilt and shame, you know, shame on myself if I couldn’t do things so I felt like because I, after my second year, I managed to mentally get my head around to a degree that I was happy with that I really felt like it gave me a good chance throughout the twin pregnancy to really be compassionate to myself because I wasn’t after my first, and I was learning from my second, and then with the twins, I was a lot better off that like I did learn a lesson from each one and you get better mentally within my mind after each one as well.
P: Yeah, that seems amazing and lucky that the twins came last because,
S: oh yeah,
P: like I mean just I would imagine you’re just feeding all the time, right, there’s Yeah, people and they both need stuff and
S: see and then you still have two other children to care for and
P: thank you so much for sharing this story, it’s such a good story of learning, yeah evolution is pretty quick because you’re able to squeeze the lesson of each pregnancy in time to use it for the next one.
S: Yes.
P: So, one last question. You were a policewoman but you changed careers, what do you do now.
S: I am a trauma informed EFT practitioner AF T stands for Emotional Freedom Techniques and really is more acupuncture for emotions so to speak, use your meridian points, and instead of using little needles you use your fingers and fingertips, and you tap on your meridian points, which is predominantly on your face, upper body and your hands, and with that it really just helps calm your nervous system. So helps you get out of that fight or flight response as well as your freeze response back into your social engagement sewing is only feeling safe from working in emergency services of I was surrounded by trauma, all the time, whether that’s with the public that I was helping that my colleagues, or even myself so I used EFT on myself, and I found at times when I was in certain situations with the public that I would be helping them, calm down by doing EFT tapping with them, and it just you service sort of comes becomes your medicine so to speak, and so I got my qualification and now I help others.
P: That’s awesome. Well thank you so much for coming on and thanks for sharing your story, it’s a it’s a great one to have out there.
S: It’s okay thank you so much for having me Paulette I really appreciate it.
Thanks again to Dr Matityahu for coming on the show and sharing her insights, she and I had a much longer conversation that I included here if you want to hear the whole conversation, go to war stories for womb.com and check it out. Thanks also to Stacey for sharing her story. And thank you so much for listening. If you like this episode, feel free to like and subscribe. We’ll be back soon with another story of women’s strength and resilience to overcome the many challenges involved in creating a family.