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Consecrated2God -> RE: Natural Childbirth-support and discussion (6/14/2008 7:14:43 AM)
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It all started with my mom. She had given birth to her first four children in the hospital, and I attended her last hospital birth. I was right about the age I was in my avatar, actually, maybe a little younger. She delivered my sister on Labor Day. The doctor at the hospital didn't want to be there, and his wife was irritated because she wanted him at home on a holiday. So he went home, thinking it would be awhile, and when things started moving he didn't have time to get back. My sister was delivered by a nurse, and the cord was around her neck. The doctor showed up five minutes later. My sister was fine, but my mom was not happy with her birth experience. When she became pregnant with my next sister, she started looking into midwifery. I was at that birth, too, and the one after that. What I saw convinced me to birth at home, too. Since my husband's mother also used midwives and birthed at home, I didn't have any trouble convincing him to let me try it.
Our first baby was actually born at our midwive's rental house in Tennessee. We thought it would be fun to go down there instead of her coming up. She lived eight hours away, but had a local assistant. She would come up and do prenatals about a week before her clients were due so she'd be around when they went into labor.
Our second baby was born at home, with a different midwife. Our regular midwive's husband had been transfered to Georgia (he was in the military) and so the drive was too long at that point.
They moved back by the time our third was born, and she was born at a friends' house. We had met the midwife there so she could check me and another client at the same time, and the other lady insisted I stay and have my baby, since I was laboring and I didn't have air conditioning at my house.
Then we moved to Missouri, and I found a lovely birthing center with a midwife. It wasn't quite the same as a homebirth, because I didn't have the same relationship with my midwife that I was used to having, but on the pro side they had a jacuzzi to labor it. That was wonderful!
Our last birth was our only unnatural birth, and that was because the midwife retired and I couldn't find another one that I could afford. There was one (probably the one Sherry mentioned) that charged around $3500, but in our last year of school we couldn't afford that. We were on Missouri Medicaid at that point, so I went with a hospital birth. I had an epidural, because the entire experience was so different than what I was used to and they had me on my back with a fetal monitor the whole time. I couldn't manage the pain the way I was used to. I ended up having a horrible headache afterwards, and I was down for a week where normally I was up and about almost immediately after giving birth.
So that's our birth stories, in a nutshell! [:)]
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