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Birth Stories
Lilliana Taylor S. was born October 30, at 6:02 p.m.
I went into labor at 3:30 a.m. and was at the hospital by 6:30. As those of you from my class may recall, I moved to rural, northwestern Pennsylvania in July. Although there are several hospitals within a 30 mile radius, all of them follow very outdated practices when it comes to childbirth. There was no nurse midwife on staff. They required I get an IV for fluids and be strapped down with a heart monitor upon admittance to the hospital. I was not happy about any of this, but accepted this is how it had to be.
I had back labor the entire time, which was no picnic. At noon, I received an epidural. It stopped my contractions which had been one minute apart. They gave me pitocin to begin the contractions again. That all took me back to square one with my contractions 7 minutes apart.
I began to push at 4:30. Nurse Ratchet was on duty and she yelled very helpful things at me like “GET ANGRY! GET MAD! PUSH! PUSH! PUSH!” Needless to say, anger wasn’t exactly the emotion I was looking to conjure. I think she actually inhibited my labor because my thoughts kept drifting to what an idiot she was.
I had done a lot of research regarding labor and had decided I would hold each push to a count of 6. The hospital’s policy was counts of 10. Ratchet kept yelling at me about holding ‘til 10 and I just kept ignoring her. She called the doctor in and told him I was being difficult. He then sat down and gave me a lovely lecture about how they were skilled professionals who knew what they were doing and I needed to listen to them.
At this point I was just so deflated that I gave in to them and held until the 10 count. Still, no baby. The doctor ended up using a suction on her head. With that, she came out on one push.
At this point the doctor redeemed himself to me as he showed that he really was a very skilled physician…just one with no bedside manner. Lilly’s cord was wrapped tightly around her neck and she began to cry with only her head out. We did cord blood collection, so the doc had to work very quickly to get the cord off without cutting it, while extracting fluids from her mouth and nose. It turns out the baby had very old meconium in her too, so they did an awful lot of suctioning out her tummy and throat once she was completely out.
I let the whole experience haunt me for a week. Everything went so differently than I had hoped. The result is a beautiful little girl, so I’m not letting the means by which she arrived overshadow that fact. We are absolutely in love with her. The enclosed picture was taken when she was about 30 minutes old.
--Angella