Homebirths gone awry and hooray for highspeed internet

[tracilicious]

FINALLY, my internet is on! Not that I can actually sit at my computer desk, because for some reason there are loads of computers under it. Hmmm...I only use the one....

Now, for the moment you've all been waiting on pins and needles for, (I'm sure), Jade Lily Phoenix was born last Saturday at 9:33am. She weighed 8 pounds 10 ounces and was 21 inches long. I'll post pics as soon as I get them uploaded.

Sadly, she wasn't born at home. To make a long long story as short as possible, the second time we moved my legs got super swollen and stayed that way. In itself that is ok, but my blood pressure was randomly high and once in a while there was protein in my urine indicating that my kidneys weren't functioning quite as they should be.

My midwife was fabulous about everything, we were really proactive and I ate a high protein diet, drank lots of water, took herbs, and rested a lot. Things were looking normal and I felt pretty good. Then two Saturdays ago I was hit with horrific vertigo that made me puke every time I moved. It turned out to be a viral inner ear infection. After three days of laying in bed and the dehydration that accompanied it (the baby was closely monitored the entire time. The midwife was over twice a day most days.) all the pre-eclampsia signs came back.

By this time I was a week past my due date and we didn't have much time to self correct the condition. After an alarmingly low hemoglobin reading my midwife strongly suggested that we go to the hospital for an evaluation and a series of non-stress tests to make sure the baby wasn't stressing out. All the test came back great, except for the uric acid levels, which were pretty high. The midwife could no longer legally deliver the baby at home.

We snuck a castor oil cocktail in an attempt to avoid pitocin, which actually did make me go into labor, but of course the doctors didn't believe me. So the pitocin was awful, I couldn't move around to cope with the pain, and I was already hooked up to a million monitors. I got the epidural and labor went much quicker after (it usually slows things down, but the pitocin and the magnesium sulfate I was on were working against each other which caused a great deal of pain and prevented dilation.)

Thankfully, most of the nurses were very nice. Hospitals can get very hostile when homebirthers come in, but I only experienced that with the doctors, who I spent a total of five minutes with. I can't say that it was a good experience, but it was the best it could have been given the circumstances. Unfortunately, hospitals are fraught with policies an politics that interfere with a woman's natural ability to give birth. I was totally treated like a patient and not a person. But in the end I still got a beautiful baby, in spite of hospital procedures that took the beauty out of the entire experience.

So, that wasn't short, it was still very long. But I'm glad to be back and hopefully I'll be able to sneak online at naptimes.