Our Birth Story

It has been three months since I gave birth to my wonderful son Jace Saang Linthakhan. It was hard, it was painful, and it was intense. But my birth pains no longer remain in my mind and I now can look back on my experience and see it how it was meant to be seen.

First a few quotes that stand out strongly in my head and that cause some thought provoking issues....

“An obstetrician is a trained surgeon” (and we wonder why there are so many interventions during birth!) “They should not be doing normal births because they’re not trained in it. They have no idea how to do it.”

"Caesarean is extremely doctor friendly, Its 20 min, and "I’ll be home for dinner" “peak hours for Cesarean section procedures are 4:00pm and 10:00pm”

"Everywhere else in the world, Great Britain, France, Germany, Scandinavia, Australia, New Zealand, Japan... You can go to all the highly developed countries where they are loosing fewer women and fewer babies around the time of birth. And what do you see? You see midwives attending 70 or 80 percent of all the births. And the doctors are there to take care of the small percentage that develops a complication. That is the proven system everywhere in the world. And the United States stands alone."

"Nothing compares to the privilege of giving life and the responsibility of that. Nothing. So if you don't have the reverence and the respect for that, where do you go from there?"

“The united states has the 2nd worst newborn death rate in the developed world”

Doctors give women an epidural…thus slows contractions…then doctors give pitocin…makes contractions longer, stronger, causing more pain…doctors give another epidural (or up the dose)…which then requires more pitocin…longer, harder contractions…stress to baby…caesarean. It ends with the doc saying “thank God we got your baby out in time!” hmmmm how’d this start in the first place?

“Putting the mother flat on her back literally makes the pelvis smaller, makes it much more difficult for the woman to use her stomach muscles to push, and therefore makes it much more likely for an episiotomy to be cut, or for forceps to be used, or for the vacuum extractor to be used.”

When it comes to giving birth…it’s not an illness, it’s not something that needs to be numbed. It’s an experience that needs to be felt. 4 am I awake to a cramping feeling in my stomach, immediately I wake up and wait to see if it happens again, sure enough about 15 minutes later there was another. I smiled and snuck out of bed. I went to the bathroom, took a shower, straightened my hair, and smiled with each contraction. 5am I was doing the dishes and straightening up the house. I heard David get up and he walked into the kitchen and asked me what in the world I was doing. I said, “the dishes”, he just looked at me like ‘oh goodness’. I then told him that I was having contractions and we were going to have this baby today! Humph little did I know. I said it would still be a while so he should go back to bed. So he did. I continued to be up and doing things because it was less painful when I was up and moving then lying down. A few hours later David was up with me. I was trying to do things to keep my mind busy and not concentrating on the contractions, which were now about 10 min apart. I was doing mandallas, cleaning, and braiding a necklace to put my clay pendant I had made on. I remember contractions getting a little harder and stronger. 4pm David was playing Xbox and I thought it might be time to go; my contractions seemed to be 3-4 min apart and lasting almost a minute. So we got ready to go and then I 2^nd guessed myself and said we should wait longer. We hadn’t really eaten anything all day, so we jumped in the car and headed to Long Johns. We came home and ate…I automatically threw up. Then I wanted to go to the hospital. We arrived and waited and waited…finally in the room I looked around. I saw a TV. With a DVD player right in front of the bed. I thought, “do people really lay here like it’s any other day watching TV and movies while they’re in labor?” What about that is special? They checked me..3cm! Only! After all that work! They said that I needed to go for a walk to see if that would help me dilate more…tears from pain & an hour and a half later I was back in the room. Still 3 cm! Kate, a wonderful midwife, came in and sat down to talk to me. “Its too soon for you to be here”. I was so discouraged.  “Go home, eat something, get some sleep, hopefully we’ll see you back here later”. I was mortified for not knowing I wasn’t that far along. But the contractions hurt so much so I thought it was getting close. 7pm At home I tried to eat a baked potato…I couldn’t keep it down. I was very dehydrated. I lay in bed trying to close my eyes to sleep…I couldn’t. 11pm we were on our way to the hospital again, this time they wheeled me up in a wheel chair…I was so sick. They put us in a room and gave me an IV and morphine to sleep. 5am Anita, another midwife, came in and checked me “5cm…we’re having a baby today!” she said. I was so excited and felt much better. I just needed some rest. We got up, ate some fruit and were handling contractions so well today. Walking around, joking with the nurse between contractions, it was so much fun. 1pm things started getting intense again, I got into the tub and relaxed for while. 7cm…8cm…9cm…my water still hadn’t broke yet and I was sitting at 9cm for the last hour and not progressing. They broke my water. Oh how the pressure released. I got onto the birthing ball for a while hoping the position and bouncing would help bring him down. 3pm still 9cm…went to the tub. I was now in transition. I was in my own world with each contraction; in between I would fall into a state of deep relaxation. I could hear the midwifes talking “shhh she’s in transition, its going to be soon”. I could feel David’s hand rubbing my arm. Then another contraction. 4pm…still 9 cm…4:30…still 9 cm, 98% effaced, that last little bit would not go. The midwives came to me and said, “it’s been a very long time for you, you could push and I could stretch the rest of your cervix to 10cm, or we could give you some pitocin to help you over the edge.” Pitocin, pitocin….NO! I got so scared then. The contractions were so hard I couldn’t handle them any harder. I was throwing up. I could handle things the way they were but not any worse. David’s parents were at the hospital waiting for what seemed like hours, I felt so bad. I finally said that if I get some pain meds then I would take the PIT. They put a little pain med through my IV and hooked the PIT up. “This is not how I wanted things to go” I was hooked up to all these wires and laying in bed. I closed my eyes with each contraction. The pain med was not strong enough…it did nothing. Epidural flashed through my mind…”one more contraction and maybe I’ll ask for one”. 5pm-another contraction; I sat up in bed and said; “I need to push”. It seemed like chaos in the room. I went and sat on the birthing chair, David sat on the bed behind me with his arms under my arms. I remember my sister saying, “pushing feels so good”. No, no it didn’t. It was so hard, less painful though…until he crowned. Kate was sitting on floor with hot compresses and talking to me calmly telling me everything to do. The damn nurse was pushing the Doppler on my belly constantly. “Do you HAVE to do that every time?” I almost yelled at her. Her response, “well we could hook up an internal fetal monitor”…with that threat I just shut my mouth and continued pushing, something in my baby’s scalp was the last thing I wanted. I could feel all these eyes watching me, my MW, the nurse, David, the nic-u docs. I didn’t care who was watching I cried out with each push, somehow it seemed to help get through them. Another push, “reach down and feel your babies head”…I couldn’t, was I scared? Was too I tired? Another push. I put my hand down…there he was, I could feel the top of his soft head. Another push…I looked at Kate “he’s coming” she says, “one more long push one more time”. I pushed with everything I had left, there he was, and I could feel him slipping out. 6:11pm Kate pulled him out and made sure he was breathing, he was. The nurse was trying to grab him away from her. There was meconium in my water so the nic-u was waiting and watching to take him away to suction him out. Kate put him in my arms and I couldn’t believe what I saw. He was so precious. So tiny and wrinkled. He looked up and smiled at me “your not supposed to smile yet” I said with tears. It was an instant love that I had never felt before, he was mine. The nurse kept reaching over to take him and the midwives swarmed around me to keep her away. They cut the cord because David was too busy looking at his son. A few moments later the doctors came and took him away into the next room. I could hear him screaming. 5 minutes went by while the midwives were waiting for my placenta to deliver, we were talking and I just kept saying, “I want my baby”. They finally brought him to me all wrapped up. We tried to nurse, he latched on a little but I knew we would have work ahead of us with that. 15 min later the MW were getting worried that my placenta hadn’t came out yet. They gave me a little Pitocin to see if that would help…no luck. They tried to pull it out…they couldn’t get it. They had to call an OB in to remove it. David was over with Jace taking a few pictures and talking to him. Then they rushed them off to the nursery because they didn’t want them in the room when the ob was there. After was seemed like an eternity and pain that was worse then giving birth itself…finally my placenta was out. A while later David came in the room with a look of shear fear in his face. “What happened, what’d they do”? They hadn’t told David anything; he was scared and didn’t know what they had to do to me. He came over and told me about how brave our son was when they poked his foot. Finally they took out all my IVs…after begging the nurse to. God, she was a stubborn one. I wanted to get in the bathtub with him, but she wouldn’t let me. So her and David gave him a bath in the sink, I jumped into the most painful shower I had ever taken. I was so dizzy. I got dressed, and eased into the bed. My mom, Jordan, melany, jeff, anna and Lauren all came into the room to look at him. We hadn’t decided on a name yet and finally just said Jace…it had been the only name that we had really liked the whole pregnancy…and it fit him. David wanted to hold Jace, but he was in the warmer with the little heart monitors on, so David went over to him and took off the little stickers and picked him up. Immediately this alarm went off and the nurse came rushing in and grabbed Jace and put him back under the lights…sigh…I couldn’t wait till we got a different nurse. 9pm we were moving to another room, ate some food, and then settled into bed. By then Jace had started getting the hang of nursing and he was rooming in with us. The nurses only came in twice that night. Jace also only woke up twice to eat. As tired as I was I was able to stay awake and just stare at him while he ate. Daddy got up and changed his diapers every time he needed it because it was too hard for me to get in and out of bed at that point. We had Jace Saturday night and we got to go home Sunday night, it was so nice to be at home adjusting. I was so thankful we only had to spend one night in the hospital. All in all it was wonderful. It was intense and hard at times…but now that I look back on what happened I’m so thankful it happened the way it did. If I had been with an OB I surely would have had a c-section since labor was so long and not progressing the way OB’s think that it should. I thank God my midwives were so patient. I can remember them sitting on the floor rubbing my back just waiting….waiting for me to be ready. I don’t think you would ever see a doctor doing that. 39 total hours of labor. Not all were hard, but all were long. A Healthy baby boy 6lbs 13oz, 20in long. Born at 6:11pm Saturday May 17, 2008. Giving birth was the most empower thing I have ever done in my life. Its amazing, its indescribable and I’m so glad a got to experience without all the interventions, although I did have a few. Next time will be different. Dad says having a baby was the most humbling experience ever. He says its then that you realize how insignificant you and everything else in life is.