Dear all,
I have been lurking on and off over the last few months
with a midwife and consumer view as I have given birth myself to a girl,
Ena, on the 19.11.03. Having loosely followed the thread of fetal hearts,
Today show etc along with my own experience I have a couple of
comments.
We had Ena at home and employed the services of the
wonderful Roz Donnellan-Fernandez. She came and saw me about 5 times
antenatally and would be here for a couple of hours so that even though I
didn't see her lots of times (the frequency was my choice) I had plenty of
time to convey to her how I felt, what outside factors may influence me etc
and my husband Andrew had plenty of time to ask questions etc.
We also invited a midwifery student, Jessica, to
share our experience and so the four of us welcomed Ena into the world on a
stormy evening.
I used the lessons taught to me by the many women I have
met over the years including telling no-one our due date (handy as we went a
week over), restricting visitors till 2 weeks, (handy as we had some
postnatal issues), preparing lots of food before hand and taking plenty of
time off before hand (well I am an elderly (38)
primagravida!!).
The birth was the hardest, bestest, most overpowering
thing I have ever done and gave us a girl (first one in Andrew's family for
48 years) in our bathroom. We needed to transfer to hospital for Ena which
was fortuitous as we discovered her platelets were 20,000 as I have an
antibody on my platelets which were destroying hers and my platelets were
50,000 as I have a lupus anti-coagulant on mine (very unusual to have both
or even one but it was a week where everything was unusual!!). So it was
lucky I had a normal birth as an operative birth would have been dangerous
for both of us and as it was a 6 hour ROP labour I am not sure if wouldn't
have elected to have pain relief or what heaps of monitoring would have
done. I am now at home with a baby who is wondering what all of the fuss was
about (there were a few other issues which I won't go into but were all
resolved). I used the maternity services as necessity required and my birth
experience was great. I am so glad I didn't have to recover from a LUSCS as
I was pumping etc as Ena spent some time in the nursery asleep from
phenebarb due to some twitching. I wanted there to be lots of milk for
her when she woke up, which there was (not bad considering my Hb was 7.4 due
to a retained placenta and PPH) all thanks to the LW staff at the WCH
keeping all visitors out, keeping me in LW and having Andrew stay with me.
(I was treated like the Queen of Sheba by everyone and I don't know how Ican
ever thank all of my friends and colleuges for what they did for
us).
Watching part of the Today show really angered me as that
is not childbirth. Mess in the bathroom, exhilarated mother, exhausted and
relieved support people and beautiful, 4.230kgs, caput and moulded
head daughter is childbirth!!!!!
Jackie
