I was so excited about having a natural birth, but when the time came things didn’t quite go the way I was expecting. Over the summer I had taken a natural birth class. It was incredible! We learned about how amazing the human body is and how the process of birth works when we let it do what it was designed to do. We also covered interventions, and what happens when things don’t go as planned. I remember thinking, “that won’t happen to me.”
Well my due date came, and my baby wasn’t ready to come out. Around the 42 week mark, on Labor Day, my midwife did a “rough exam” to try to get things moving. I got really sick late that night. My hubby called our midwife. She thought I was fine, but when she tried to go back to bed the Holy Spirit prompted her that she needed to see us right away.
We met her at the birth center and found out our baby’s heart rate was way too fast at around 200 bpm. She told us we needed to go to the hospital. We were in disbelief. She let us wait a few more minutes to see if it would normalize, and then she called 911. We were taken by ambulance to the hospital. When we got there my baby was crashing. His heart rate kept jumping and falling. My midwife was there with me and agreed with the doctors that an emergency C-section was necessary. When they pulled him out, he was limp and blue. The doctors rushed him off to NICU without me even getting a glimpse of him. My husband asked, “What do I do?” and I told him to go be with our son. They wheeled me off to the recovery room. I lay there alone and devastated. This was not the incredible peaceful experience I had prepared for. I wasn’t sure how to process it.
I kept asking when I would get to see my baby. They said I could go to him once the sedation wore off. It took almost an hour. When I finally was taken to the NICU and saw my son for the first time, I felt so disconnected. The fact that we hadn’t even had one second to connect before he was whisked away, made it feel like he was someone else’s child. I was allowed to put my hand on his back, but not hold him. It was horrible.
We began to ask questions about when I could hold him and when I could nurse him. He was stable at this point, and yet they kept telling us “later.” This would begin the process of learning to fight for what was right for my baby.