This week’s birth story comes from the amazing couple Seana & Adam who gave birth to June Stevie after attending Hypnobirthing sessions with Katie Daibess of Your Birth and Becoming, covering Troy, Michigan in the USA.
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“My water broke the day before my due date and contractions started 4 hours later. We spent that time setting up the birthing tub and making a birthday cake for our baby! They were pretty intense right off the bat, so I stayed up all night listening to my hypnobirthing tracks and breathing through them. We started timing contractions in the morning and although being in the shower helped with pain a ton, it slowed my contractions down more than I expected!
At hour 24, we talked with our midwife and decided to go into the hospital. I was 6cm dilated when we got to the hospital. I agreed to pitocin and an epidural. The contractions were intense, but absolutely manageable on their own, but since I had already been laboring for so long, I didn’t think I would be able to sustain them with the pitocin bumping up the intensity. They didn’t start me on antibiotics, they just monitored my temp every hour.
By 9am I was fully dilated but they let me labor down for an hour before I started pushing. Her head was stuck on my pubic bone, so our OB asked if I wanted vacuum assistance and I denied (she didn’t push it at all and was fine when I said no!). After an hour and a half our baby was delivered by my husband! Again, our OB was amazing and still let us have that experience we wanted at home. My husband announced that she was a girl!
She had passed meconium, so the NICU team was in the room to make sure she hadn’t aspirated any. Thankfully she did not, and I had her back in my arms 5 minutes later.
I truly believe if I had been under any other OB’s care, they would have forced an “emergency” C-section due to how long my water had been broken (41 hours from it breaking to birth). Being given the tools to say no and having a team who supported me was essential. Even though our whole birth plan went sideways, we still had so much choice within it, and we feel so lucky for that!
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