David asked me on Thursday morning if he should
stay home from work. He was worried to
leave me home alone when I was having contractions. I assured him that I would call if they got
closer together or more intense and insisted that he go to work. The rest of Thursday passed slowly, as I
tried to keep myself distracted with last minute errands that needed to be done
before the baby arrived.
Thursday night the contractions were still anywhere from
20-45 minutes apart, and I didn’t get much
sleep that night, because contractions kept waking me.
On Friday David didn’t have to go to work. Due
to the warm winter we’ve been having, there wasn’t much service work that
day. I was so thankful that he was able
to stay with me! Even though contractions
were infrequent, I was starting to feel the pain in my back, so it was
wonderful to have David massage my back during contractions.
By Friday afternoon the contractions were getting much more
intense, even though they were about 10 minutes apart. I was no longer feeling the contractions as
cramps, but rather all as back pain.
Even though David and I had taken a Bradley Method class which taught
that the laboring woman should relax through the contractions, since the baby
had turned into a posterior position it was practically impossible to
relax.
At 7:30pm, with contractions about every 5 minutes, we
called David’s parents who were going to be taking care of our dog while we
were at The Birth Center. We then called
The Birth Center to give notice about my contractions.
By 10pm we’d reached the “4-1-1”… contractions 4 minutes
apart, lasting about a minute for a full hour.
David’s parents had just arrived, so we figured we were ready to
go. However, when I talked to Katie at
The Birth Center she said she still could hear a smile in my voice between
contractions and she wasn’t sure if I was ready to come in yet. (I have been accused of being “too nice,” and
my husband later told me that this was another instance of me covering my true
emotions in an effort to be polite.) Also,
she told us that another baby had been born earlier in the evening, and that
the family was in the water birth room.
This is the room that we had picked for our labor, so we labored at home
for another 3 hours before calling The Birth Center again. This time I was ready to go!
We got to The Birth Center around 1:30am on Saturday,
January 28th (and I was thankful to see that the other family was
getting ready to leave the water birth room).
When Katie checked me I was astonished to hear that I was already
7cm!! I was excited to be so far into
labor, and I thought that surely I would be holding my baby by dawn!
But dilation is not necessarily a gauge for how labor will
progress, and, after almost 5 hours of laboring in the tub, Katie asked to
check me again. I almost started to cry
when she told me I was at 8cm. All those
hours of intense labor only gained me 1cm?
My water hadn’t broken, and Katie believed that was one reason why it
was taking longer than anticipated. She
asked to break my water around 7am, and I gladly agreed! This helped a lot, and suddenly I was almost
completely dilated.
At 8am there was a shift in the on-call staff, with Midwife
Dorinda and Nurses Tyler and Peggy joining us in the water birth room. The baby was still posterior, so Dorinda
suggested I try different positions to help encourage the baby to turn. The next 1 ½ hours passed slowly for me. I was completely focused on the task at hand
and I didn’t notice the people moving around me at all. David later told me that I even started to
fall asleep and snore between the contractions!
By this point I’d been in active labor for over 12 hours, and hadn’t had
much sleep for the past 50 hours. I was
so exhausted, and I doubted myself with almost every contraction. But Dorinda, Tyler and Peggy, along with
David, continued to encourage me and give me reassurance. Without their support (or, in other words, if
I had been trying to do this naturally in a hospital) I think I probably
would’ve given up!
At last, at 9:30am, I was in stage 2 of labor – it was time
to push! However, the baby continued to
be posterior, so with every push the pain in my back was strong. I was grateful to have Tyler putting pressure
on my back during each contraction. Around
10:30am, since I was completely unmedicated, I felt the baby turn into the
anterior position. Of course I was still
exhausted, but it was nice to have the pressure off my back.
At 11:13am, I pushed 4 final times, and suddenly I was
holding my baby! Both David and I were
astonished that she started to cry when only her head was out. And, as Dorinda put it, “she came out waving”,
with her right hand tucked up next to her face.
She was so alert from the first second!
(Only at the time I didn’t know “it” was a she, so I suppose I should
still be referring to her as “the baby”.)
I remember I turned to David, delighted that it was finally over, and
announced “I did it!” Up until the end I
still doubted that I had the strength to do this without pain relief or medical
assistance. And then Dorinda turned to
my husband and said, “David, tell Alvana what it is”, and David got to announce
“IT’S A GIRL!” It was so exciting to
finally learn the gender of this baby!
After a few moments of holding our baby and crying some tears of joy, I
asked David if we were set on the name.
He said he was happy with what we had picked out, and I agreed. Then I was able to introduce our daughter,
Audra Leigh, to Dorinda, Tyler and Peggy. (We had picked her name to honor David's late-grandmother, Audrey Cundey, and my late-mother, Ermalee Crosby, though we altered the first name because we liked the softer sound of Audra and we altered the spelling of Lee, to the more traditional female spelling.)
Looking back, this is not the birth I had planned to
have. I had wanted to have a water
birth, but that didn’t happen because of Audra’s posterior position. Also, I had heard about back labor, but I
really didn’t have any idea how severe the pain would be, and I wasn’t
expecting to be in labor for that long, though I know that 15 hours is around
average. However, David and I both view
this experience as an amazing and beautiful event. We are so glad we chose to experience
natural childbirth outside of a hospital, where a staff of loving women worked
so hard to make this an enriching occasion.
Our hearts are grateful for The Birth Center!
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| Where Audra was born - the waterbirth room at The Birth Center in Wilmington, DE. |
