Two for Two

Woo Hoo! I'm batting 1,000 for unmedicated, vaginal births. Well, if you count my last two hospital births, anyways!

 This morning I woke up early because I had a potential doula client interview and I was going to have a birth plan meeting with a client who was a couple of days past her due date. Her plan was to stay at home as long as possible but this morning when I looked at my phone I had a text from her from earlier:

Shoot! I hate when my moms run to the hospital as soon as they get a single contraction. I was upset because I know what kind of time restraints people get put on in the hospital but this birth went great. She SROM'd around 6am but was only contracting every 10 minutes when I got there around 9am.

Walking, standing, singing, sitting on the toilet and nipple stimulation got our mama to 7 cm by 5:30pm (with no pain medication or Pitocin). Around 6:30 pm she started feeling pushy so the nurse checked her. She said she was 8-9 but the baby was still "very high." I knew that this mom had hit transition. She was feeling extremely pushy and pushing uncontrollably with every contractions. The nurse reassured me that she still had a while to go and that we could keep walking around and even go sit on the toilet for a while. Seriously? This mom is bearing down! There was no way I was going to have this mom sitting on the toilet because the last thing that I need (as a doula) is to catch a baby in the bathroom of a hospital!

Less than 30 minutes later I paged for the nurse to come back. A new nurse came in (it was after shift change) and the mom was complete at a +1 station. The doctor came in very shortly after that and he had the nurse push with her. Boom, head crowns. Less than 15 minutes later the baby was gently born.

Soon after the birth the mom was nursing the baby with a great latch. This was such a happy birth. I'm glad that I got to be a part of it! It's amazing how intuitively I'm starting to understand where moms are in their labor. The physiology of normal, unmedicated birth is becoming clearer to me the more births I experience. It still amazes me when hospital nurses (who see THOUSANDS of births) have a hard time 'reading' physiologically normal birth! Truly undistirbed birth is still a hospital rarity. I'm glad that this doctor was hands off and let the mom labor at her own pace, in her own time. It was beautiful!