Today’s post is a guest post from a loss mom. This is
Jenny’s story (in her words) of the birth and death of her daughter, Acacia.
"I've been deliberately vague about the
complication that my daughter suffered because some people have been
unable to resist the urge to pick over the details of her birth and suggest
that if we'd had "better" paramedics, or a midwife, something could
have gone differently. This is both unhelpful and unrealistic. The paramedics'
quick thinking meant we had a chance to get to know her before she died. But no
matter what anyone tells you, paramedics do not have operating rooms, surgical
teams, anesthesiologists, blood transfusions, neonatalogists, neonatal nurses,
or respiratory therapists hidden away on that ambulance. They just
don't. And neither do midwives. The best, most experienced
homebirth CNM in our area transfers at the drop of a hat exactly
because she hopes to avoid injuries like the one my daughter
suffered.
Unfortunately, what happened to my daughter was something no
one could have predicted. My daughter's complication is one of those
events every OB and midwife fears. The only
thing that could have made a substantial difference to her
outcome was a change in our location prior to the event - if we'd been in
the hospital instead of in my kitchen.
~
Before I had my first child, I
was terrified of doctors. I had unrelated trauma that made trusting
anyone an ordeal. What I read and heard about natural
childbirth left me believing that in a hospital, I would
be medically battered, strapped to a bed, shamed, touched without my
consent, and bullied into accepting interventions I did not want.
Nevertheless, when my time came, I asked my boyfriend to drive us to the
hospital - "why" would be too big of a story to go into here. Imagine
my relief when I was treated with kindness, dignity and
respect. We brought our firstborn daughter home at three days old.
When I was pregnant with our second child, I felt that my previous experience in the hospital had been decent enough to repeat. Many of my peers had or were having home births and I eagerly listened to their stories. But as nice as they sounded, I decided that three days in the hospital would allow me to rest up before launching into the challenge of being a mother of two. Planning a second hospital birth was a housekeeping decision. I was not particularly worried about safety because through playground chats and reading about natural childbirth on the internet, I'd come to accept the notion that "birth without interventions is best," and that women should "trust birth." Underneath it all was a belief that birth is basically safe. When I talked about birth with other moms, we sometimes wondered if this intervention or that intervention had really been necessary. But we seldom, if ever, talked about death as though it were a real possibility.
Then my daughter, my second child, died because one of those
"rare" split-second, every minute counts birth emergencies. Despite
living just minutes from two hospitals (mine, and the one with
the best NICU in the area), we did not make it in time. My labor was
irregular then suddenly intensified. Just as I was putting on my
shoes to go to the hospital, I started involuntarily pushing and my water
broke. I couldn't make it down the stairs, so my boyfriend called
911.
The paramedics arrived promptly and by the time they did,
she was crowning. They did all they could while I gave birth there on my
kitchen floor, paralyzed by labor and unable to speak. But as close to the
hospital as we were, we might as well have been an hour away.
We didn't know at the time, but moments before our 911 call,
she experienced a complication. Because of that complication, she did not
breathe at birth, and was in need of some very specialized help - the
kind of help you can only get from a well-oiled pediatric team in a
hospital. The paramedics attempted to start her breathing, gave her oxygen, cut
her cord, took her, called ahead in the ambulance, and were met
by NICU staff at the entrance of the ER. My boyfriend says
a a swarm of people began treating her the moment she arrived, and
she was not yet ten minutes old.
My daughter lived four days, and despite being treated with
a cooling blanket, she suffered total brain damage and the breakdown of her
body following the long oxygen deprivation. Together with her care team, we
chose to have her healing supported by technology as long as there was a
possibility she could actually heal. However, as the days went on, we learned
that her kidneys and her gut were destroyed. Her other organs were following
close behind and her body could not recover. We brought family and friends to
meet her, and then we chose to discontinue any intervention that did not
add to her comfort. Her dad and I got to spend several hours holding
her and watching the sunset with her. These were some of the most
beautiful and holy hours of my life.
After I came home without my daughter, I searched for
stories similar to what had happened to her and was horrified to find that they
mostly happened to women and babies who'd had planned home
births. Getting out of the house always took longer than anyone
would have imagined, and devastating brain damage was always the result. Women who
happened to be in a hospital when similar birth accidents occurred
generally got scary crash c-sections and mostly - though not always - took
their living children home. I met a mother in the NICU whose baby was
born in the hospital, didn't breathe for eight minutes, and received the same
cooling blanket treatment my daughter would receive. Her daughter was going
home healthy and neurologically intact. What other differences there were
between her daughter and mine, I can only guess, but any baby who doesn't breathe
for eight minutes was almost certainly in trouble before birth too. It took
eight minutes just to get my daughter to the place where she could receive the
breathing help and blood transfusion she needed.
At one time, I had fervently believed that my body knew just
what to do, but I came to resent every time I'd ever read "trust
birth" or "birth is safe" or "our bodies were made to do
this" or "all you need is instinct" and "interventions are
what cause complications." Every time that I read, "If an emergency
happens we will just go to the hospital." As if it were that easy. The
paramedics had arrived to my house before we anyone
suspected anything was wrong. I also resented the fact that I had feared a
c-section more than I had feared my child dying. I resented the fact that I had
worried about the "cascade of interventions" more than I had worried
about brain damage. I had been worried about all the wrong things.
In the hospital, we were treated with more compassion than I
have ever encountered in my life. From the moment we arrived in the emergency
room to long after we left our daughter, newly dead and swaddled, they focused
not just on the physical, not just on her health and mine, but our whole family
system, our feelings, her comfort, our comfort, her humanity.
Her essential value as a person was at the center of every
decision, from the one to try to save her, to the one to let her go.
The doctors and hospital midwives were more than willing to
admit that they didn't have all the answers, and that sometimes things happen
that can't be prevented or fixed. They refused to speculate - if only I'd done
this or that. All they would say is, "If you had been in the hospital, we
could have done x, y, and z. We can give you percentages on how often that is
successful, but we can't promise your outcome would have been different. I wish
we could. I wish we could tell you this will never happen again. But we're not
gods." And in a small way, that saved me because it was the truth. The
truth is we never had a guarantee.
I'm not telling my daughter's story to say that women should
not have home births - that's not my decision to make for others. But I am
telling her story because I think that the notion that "birth is safe as
life gets" is a shaky one. No decision should be made on that premise.
Birth is not as safe as life gets. Mothers and babies can die and the
human race will go on. Most of the time, people get lucky, and things go off
well enough. When shit goes bad, it has the potential to go really, really bad.
We cannot control whether our babies survive birth by eating a special diet,
doing the right stretches, or with positive thinking. I was low risk as can be.
My baby didn't die because I failed to trust birth or my body. She didn't die
because unnecessary interventions interfered with her natural process. She died
because sometimes, in the absence of the right kind of help, and sometimes even
despite it, birth kills.
I miss her little face. Not a day goes by that I don't
regret the fact that I never heard her cry, that I will never hear her cry, or
that I never got to see her as the healthy baby she was before she was born.
My boyfriend lost his child. My older daughter lost her
sister. Our brothers and sisters lost a niece. Our parents lost their
grandchild. My friends lost a dear new baby to love and watch grow up.
She wasn't mine alone to lose.”
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Baby Acacia after resuscitation
Click here to read more from Jenny's mother on her experiences and thoughts regarding birth - where they once were and where they are now, after their loss.
