Today commemorates the beginning of something I've wanted to do for a while- share Canadian birth stories in all their glory!
The first story I have to share is from Ashley, a Manitoba mama who has a wonderful blog called The Labouring Mom. She writes about all things pregnancy, childbirth and parenting related and is a wonderful read for an expecting parent, new-parent or baby-enthusiast! (I realize baby enthusiast sounds strange, but I was one of those people watching baby name videos long before ever deciding to have a baby myself) Anyway, I really recommend checking out her blog and social media, and I hope you enjoy her story where she welcomed her sweet little girl into the world in September of 2019.
Ashley didn't enjoy her pregnancy, something that I think shocks a lot of people but is also very, very relatable to mothers like myself. She experienced lots of sickness, and while very excited for her little one and grateful to be pregnant, overall felt the whole thing was pretty crap (something I can very much relate to). She made it to 40 weeks, and when she was checked it was clear that things weren't progressing quite as much as she'd hoped. She went home, feeling a bit defeated, or "like a kid who didn't get any gifts for Christmas" in her own words, but two days later her water broke! As someone who has only ever been induced and had my water broken on a hospital bed, I found her experience of a "slow leak" to be really interesting, and also that if contractions didn't start in 18 hours she would have to be induced as the risk of infection goes way up after the water has broken. After waiting all day for contractions to kick in, finally that night they had begun, and by midnight she was getting 5 minutes apart, 1 minute long contractions. This meant she was able to head to a hotel for her home birth experience! I had to read her description a few times because I've never considered that you may live too far from a hospital to actually have a home birth at home, (kind of spoiled in Southwestern-Ontario I guess!) and so for Ashley the perfect happy-medium was a hotel room close to the hospital, creating the neutral space she desired to deliver her baby in.
Her midwife arrived and she and Ashley's husband began setting up the birthing pool. At this point Ashley had been experiencing some intense active labour contractions but when she was checked she was only 4cm dilated. She hadn't planned a water birth necessarily, but without any other pain relief options the bath seemed like it would be the best and most relaxing place to be... but the hose wouldn't fit onto the hotel faucets, and her midwife and husband were filling the pool with buckets. By 3am the pool was ready, and she was 8cm dilated and so close to the finish line.
By 6:30am Ashley panicked and decided she needed to go to the hospital. She describes it as mothers intuition, and by the sounds of it she was absolutely right. Her cervix had swollen and labour had stopped progressing, in fact her cervix had gone from 8+cm down to 6. Her midwife recommended they go to the hospital, so they packed up and jumped into the car to deliver the baby elsewhere. When she arrived at the hospital and was put into a gown she felt a gush and saw meconium in the fluid, and immediately began to worry about her baby. The OBGYN recommended an epidural and pitocin to try and get the cervix dilating again, or else she would need a C-Section. When Ashley's epidural kicked in and she was able to feel some pain relief, she could see that she was getting irregular and never-ending contractions, which had made the pain very consistent and was of course exhausting due to the lack of a break between contractions.
The next morning a C-Section delivery was on the table for a few hours, despite her progressing to 9cm. If she didn't get to 10 she'd have to go to the operating room, but her OBGYN managed to stretch her cervix to 10cm, which is something she had never heard of and something I had never heard of either. Finally she was ready to push, and with a little help from a vacuum assist and episiotomy her baby girl was born, and after a quick NICU visit she was declared healthy and reunited with her mama!
It took a 31 hour labour, a birthing pool hotel bath, ride to the hospital for an epidural and induction meds and finally some assistance, but Ashley's baby arrived safely- and although the ending was totally different from what she had planned, she really shows the importance of being flexible for childbirth and how it's all worth it in the end!
Thank you so much to Ashley for sharing her birth story with me! Please check out her blog and social media, and if any Canadian parents have birth stories they'd like to share please email me at pregomegoblog@gmail.com
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