First Birth

Last week I experienced my first birth as a doula. It was such an incredible experience and I'm so glad that I decided to go down this path. Her labor was about 7 hours and I was only with her for the last two. She was standing almost the entire time including when she pushed her little girl out. After that she got the rush of hormones that only those without drugs will experience. It was unreal to see. She was beaming and practically bouncing up and down as she sat on the side of the bed. She couldn't believe that she'd done it and that she had this beautiful little girl! As I left I felt incredibly blessed and satisfied with the experience.

I have to keep in mind that my goal was for her to have a satisfying birth experience and to help her stick to her plan as much as possible. It's easy for me to focus on some of the frustrating things that happened. Like the nurse making the comment, "well, you didn't have an IV so we can't give you pitocin to get your uterus contracting back down." I wanted to say out loud, "well thank God you didn't have time to get the IV in then!" But I refrained. Does the nurse not know that God made the body to have kids and recover? There was no sign of any problem with her uterus contracting down, in fact my client had been wincing every few minutes with the contractions after the birth...so clearly her uterus knew what it was doing without the help of your synthetic drugs. Thank you very much!

OK, I'm down off the soapbox:) I need to keep in mind that hospitals are run on the 'there's a problem and we need to fix it' philosophy. This is a big issue in birth because labor and birth are not problems. They are natural occurrences which, left to themselves, will go along quite well most of the time. I wish hospitals would operate on the, 'we're here if you need us and we'll leave you alone otherwise' principle. I think interventions are fabulous when they are necessary! Life saving! But to just shove them down each and every woman's throat and then judge the ones who wont comply is really frustrating. There were a couple other comments made by nurses but I wont share them here. The hardest part for me was seeing a woman who just gave birth be SO ecstatic and then have nurses make these cutting remarks. Everything went well! Everyone was healthy! And the mom could get up and walk around to tell you about it! I don't know what they had to complain about.

I will keep this in mind as I prepare for my next births. This is why being educated about the things that are happening to us and in us is so important! Don't let them get you down girls!