One week ago today, I attended my first birth. My friend’s sister was due on March 7th and reached out to me about two months ago inviting me to shadow her doula knowing I was studying to become a doula myself. I immediately accepted the offer and was looking forward to seeing how an experienced doula offers support to their client. When I am studying in my course and reading all of the materials, a lot of it makes sense to me. I felt like I would be very comfortable putting everything I was learning into practice and that a lot of it would come very naturally to me. However, I still wanted to learn how other doulas work, take notes on what I liked and develop my own way of working with clients.
**For privacy reasons, I’m going to refer to the mama as K, her husband as P, and her doula as M.
K’s due date came and went and then I got the text her water broke around 5 AM on Wednesday, March 11th. Her doula texted me around 8:30 AM that I should come over. I should let you guys know this was a home birth with a midwife. K had delivered her first child at home successfully so she wanted to do it again with this birth. If you have had a healthy pregnancy with little to no complications, a home birth is an option if you are interested. Even though the number of home births is rising, only about 1% of births in the U.S. are home births as of 2019. The reported risk of needing a transfer to a hospital during labor is 23–37% for nulliparous women and 4–9% for multiparous women. Nulliparous means a first time mother and multiparous means this is a woman’s second birth or more. Most of these transfers are for lack of progress in labor, non-reassuring fetal status, need for pain relief, hypertension, bleeding, and fetal malposition. It is a much smaller percentage that are emergency transfers compared to non-emergency. An example of a non-emergency transfer is need for pain relief and an example of an emergency transfer is hemorrhage or concerns of the baby’s heart rate.
When I arrived, K looked like she was doing well. Contractions were pretty close together already and from everything I learned, that meant things were progressing nicely! The doula, M, was there with her offering her positive affirmations as the contractions began and ended. She would offer her words including, breathe with the baby, talk to the baby, let him know he’s safe, you’re safe. She made sure K had any food or drinks she wanted, asked her how she was feeling, and gave K the space to share any fears she was having. It was great to see that despite the pain, K was cracking jokes throughout the entire day.
The contractions grew more intense and K decided to get in the shower for a while. Her doula let me know this was a great time for the person in labor to be alone, have time for themselves to regroup, recenter and find any calm they could. We were checking in on her, adjusting the water temp, and helping her get comfortable. We were always close by.
The thing I learned about labor is that it is slow, a lot of it is waiting around. The contractions get you from one minute to the next. Whether that’s getting through one or seeing how long it takes for the next one to start. It’s definitely like a hurry up and wait situation. Of course, for the person going through it, it’s constant and feels never ending but even K joked, “are you guys as bored as I am?”, despite the amount of pain she had gone through by that time around the 11th hour.
If there had been a time lapse video of the room, K and P’s bedroom, you would see that we were in every part of the room. Moving around is so important. The midwife would sometimes have to gently urge K to get up and change positions. As the contractions grew closer and even more intense, that was harder to convince K to do, but it helped her go from 5 cm to fully dilated within a couple hours. K moved around from the shower, the bed, the tub, the birthing ball, squatting on the ground leaning over the end of the bed, hanging off the door frame, and walking around her back yard. She moved around a lot. I could tell it took a lot of strength to do this, but after finding out she was at 5 cm and hoping she was further along, she was definitely determined to progress. 5 cm was a huge accomplishment though and over half way there. Celebrating every milestone is so important. Of course, she is doing all of the work and entitled to feel every emotion as they come, which she shared with us at times too. It was great for me to see her doula and midwife talk her through feelings of fear and sadness by reassuring her that nothing bad was happening to her body or her baby. Her body was not breaking and her baby’s heartbeat stayed strong and consistent the entire time which was a huge relief.
You know when it’s time to push when you feel the urge to push as a contraction begins. It’s as simple as that. When K started to feel that urge with each contraction, I believe it was around 2 PM, the midwife called in her assistant. When it’s a woman’s second baby, the amount of time she is pushing is usually less than when it is her first baby, so the midwife wanted her assistant there to get ready for baby’s arrival. When I used to hear people say, she was pushing for 30 minutes or 2 hours, I really thought it was pretty constant and non-stop. I didn’t understand how someone could do it for that long. What I realized is that you push with the contraction so there are breaks and they start to have a little more time between them when pushing so the baby can get the oxygen it needs. K looked like she was even dozing off from exhaustion during some of those breaks.
K pushed in the tub, on the bed, in the bathroom, in a squatting position, and briefly on the birthing stool but didn’t like that as much. After about two and a half hours of pushing, we could see the head coming down with each push but it wasn’t getting past the pubic bone. With every push, K tried so hard to get that baby to come through, and we could see the baby kicking his little feet inside the belly so he was doing his part too! Around 5:30 PM the midwife, K, and her husband decided it was time to go to the hospital. I believe there was hope that maybe an epidural would give K some rest she needed and let the contractions continue to do their thing, or maybe a little help from a vacuum would get him through. After a few hours at the hospital though, K ended up having a c-section and having a beautiful TEN POUND, TWO OUNCE baby boy. So while I’m not totally sure what prevented the baby from coming through, I can guess the little babe was just a little too big. All that matters in that moment is getting the baby out safely and everyone being okay at the end of the day, which is how it was.
Overall it really was an amazing experience to be included in. I feel so grateful to K, her family, and her care providers for allowing me to be in that space with them and go through probably one of the most intimate experiences. I learned so much watching the doula and the midwife work together for K. I got to see what a really supportive partner looks like through all of it in K’s husband. Obviously, there are more graphic details I’m choosing to leave out because it’s private, but seeing all of it and knowing I can handle all of the stuff that happens during childbirth makes me feel so much more confident as well, not only as a doula, but also as someone who wants to experience pregnancy and childbirth one day.
I hope you enjoyed this recount of my experience. I would recommend new doulas to shadow a doula at least once if they are feeling unsure of what to say or what to do in the actual moment. It’s not just about being a positive source of support, but holding space is something that’s so crucial to just allow the pregnant person to express how they are feeling and feel like they are being heard. That requires skill and seeing a care team do that so beautifully because of their experience was so helpful to me. I’m looking forward to my next one!
Thank you for stopping by Not A Mama Yet!
Natalie