What kind of personal attention are you talking about, and why is personal attention more important than the physical safety of the baby and the mother?
I’m sure I could give better nursing care to one patient than 6 at a time, and one patient with all my supplies at hand instead of having to run to the supply room or med cart if I need something. And that attention can help keep them physically safe by recognizing and reacting to changes in medical status more quickly.
They don’t need smothering, constant attention. There’s a lot of down time before the real pushing starts. With my wife’s deliveries, she was never left alone once the actual delivery began. We got all the attention we needed every time.
When did you actually become a nurse, by the way?
The unintended side-effect of this thread is that for 10 years I’ve been researching, calling out CITE!!! and fighting the most ignorant of the ignorant right next to most of these people. And now, I’ve turned the tables on myself by being an informed citizen choosing home birth.
Understandably so, spirituality ought to have been left at home. I knew it when I wrote it.
May 11th, thanks for asking! 
July 9th I take my NCLEX and become a Registered Nurse when the state gets the results, for now I’m on a License Pending provision of the Nurse Practice Act, which means I can practice nursing under the supervision of a Registered Nurse, and I’m bound by all the laws of Registered Nursing in my state. So I’m a nurse, but not quite a Registered Nurse.
But what “all that matters is a healthy baby” does take into consideration is trying to minimize the trauma that a mother might feel when things don’t go the way they have dreamed it will go (e.g., not being able to have a home birth, getting an epidural when you swore up and down you weren’t going to get one, etc.). I know moms who were really unhappy after birth because they “gave in” and got an epidural after wanting so much to have a totally natural delivery. In my own experience, if I had concentrated more on “all that matters is a healthy baby” and less on “I want to maximize my bonding experience!” I would have had a lot less trauma from the problems I had.
Again, this is not to harsh on you or Phlosphr – I can’t do home birth because I have the lowest pain threshold imaginable, but lots of people have home births and natural-births-in-a-hospital and it works out great. The two good friends I have who’ve had home births both had (multiple) smooth experiences and it was a wonderful thing for them. But when it doesn’t work out great, I think it can really be hard on the mom when she’s worked herself up to thinking that she needs to have this great spiritual experience that then she can’t (or doesn’t) have.
This may be true in most cases but not always. When my daughter was born, my wife was going through a regular, easy labor right up until the last couple of minutes (went in at 7:00 am, good contractions, 10:00am, baby ready to go, doctor in place ready to catch). Wife starts pushing, doc says couple of more and we’ll have her…then fetal monitor bottoms out and doesn’t come back up. The doctor starts working and calmly but urgently tells nurse to get anesthesiologist in the room and get him forceps. Anesthesiologist comes in, doc tells him the baby is stressed too much and he is afraid the cord is kinked. He tells him to get meds ready, he is going to try forceps one time and if he can’t get the baby in first try, he wants meds pushed right away. He says baby has to come out NOW and if he can’t get her, he wants to have wife on the table and be cutting in 5 minutes. He slips the forceps in and starts to pull. Luckily he managed to get her out so I don’t know if he was exaggerating the time to surgery or if he really could have been doing a C-section in 5 minutes, but he sure made it sound like he planned to try. Ended up, the cord did have a big double kink in it and was totally shut off.
Now as some have said, in higher risk births, hospitals are neccessary. Well, this was my wifes 6th child. First 5 were fast, easy, uneventfull natural deliveries. Matter of fact, her son (from first marriage) was delivered by a Navy SEAL doing his hospital rotation medic training (ex-husband was military).
So going by her previous experience and delivery history, we should have been able to have the last one in a rubber raft with a guy in a wet suit and a first aid kit but if we hadn’t of been in the hospital…we probably wouldn’t have come home with our beautiful daughter.
Well, my wife didn’t – the nurses ignored her when she asked for help.
It’s not, but it’s a factor in the entire experience.
This story reminds me of a sad story unrelated to birth that happened here in Chicago a few years ago. A couple was taking their baby…I want to say he was maybe like 18 months old…to the hospital in the middle of the night, because he was sick. He was crying and miserable so his mom held him instead of putting him in the car seat. You can guess what happened…they got into an accident, and the baby was killed.
Now, we all have stories about how WE didn’t ride in car seats, we still all made it to adulthood, etc etc., and the vast majority of the time when we drive, we don’t get into accidents and our safety devices are unnecessary. But it only takes once, and you never know when that time will come. None of us I’m sure hold our babies in the car instead of putting them in the carseat, even though the babies might prefer it and be happier, and there’s a reason for that. To me, giving birth where someone can help you in case of an emergency is the same thing…a safety device you probably don’t need, but will be very very glad for if you do need it.
During that time, doctors have both commonly advised, then warned against smoking during pregnancy. I don’t dismiss it; I just admit to its fallibility.
I think, in part, you and your wife might need to recalibrate your expectations. Honestly, what you’ve described as poor treatment doesn’t sound like poor medical treatment. I know you said that your wife came home sleep-deprived after a few days being there, but that’s part of the normal course after giving birth. Multiple intrusions are par for the course. Not coming to see her after she pushed the call button isn’t great, unless they had asked what she needed and ascertained that she needed water but they had greater medical needs to take care of first.
Yes, it was not ideal, but it sounds like more of a customer service issue than a “bad hospital” issue.
Yeah, the Mom might prefer to release her tension by smoking a couple of ciggies during labor. Just another thing those bad hospitals won’t allow.
Maybe, maybe not. That’s just my point; they’re not infallible, and we’re all entirely fallible. To try to argue with authority on this point is ridiculous, as there are anecdotes to cover pretty much every possibility, and hard science can’t even give a definitive answer.
So read a little bit of this thread and the other thread pitting you. Question: who cares if there’s a little bit of chemicals between mother and child? Isn’t it much better to be safe? Kids have survived just fine being beat up or neglected, I’m sure your kid won’t give a damn whether or not there were parental chemicals mixed into his birth water
Sorry to harp on this, but a conversation with a pregnant friend the other day seems relevant. She was booked into a birthing centre for her 1st baby, but had a small unexplained bleed at 33 weeks. This was an automatic denial of service at the birthing centre, and she had to give birth in the associated hospital L&D ward instead (unmedicated birth, and all went well).
So not only could something happen to suggest a home birth may not be recommended - it will likely mean you can’t use the birthing centre either. Perhaps situation varies at your birthing centre, but you might want to be very clear of the circumstances that they will and will not admit your wife.
And good to hear you guys are doing the Bradley classes - I didn’t attend classes but found Natural Childbirth the Bradley way really helpful in understanding the different phases of childbirth (particularly the transition). Probably not available where you are but Birth Skills was another great resource in helping me manage the pain. Although I echo other people in this thread when I say that the things I thought would be wonderfully relaxing and soothing were nightmarish and irritating once I was in labour - and other things I tried just on the off chance were much more helpful. So good idea to have a kitbag of ideas and apparatus to try out which Birth Skills was particularly great for. I also read Hypnobirthing, which was good in early labour but bloody useless once things kicked in. I found my yoga breathing much more useful during each contraction. (Just to demonstrate that you can have a natural birth in hospital with an Ob).
That’s interesting and something we need to look into, I would be surprised if our birthing center didn’t allow us to be admitted if there were complications - simply because of where it is compared to the OR or NICU - they are adjacent to one another. But I will certainly ask when we see our OBGYN next. Also, we pay our midwife either way, and our insurance and hospital allow the midwife to be with us during delivery so that is a good thing.
You found hypnobirthing useless? say more if you can, because we have a hypnobirthing specialist in the family who is touting it’s advantages!
I would assume it’s like everything else–for some folks it’s the bee’s knees, for others it’s the boar’s tits, and someone who specializes in something (which generally means specializes in selling that something) going to focus mainly on the former group.
I don’t have a dog in the home-birthing fight, but if that story about the baby that was stuck for 4 hours and was born gray and in need of resuscitation was a birth your midwife was working and this wasn’t a story of experiences she’s learned from…you might as well cancel your ambulance, because she’s not going to transport unless somebody’s gushing blood, in which case you’re too far away from the hospital to do any good. Which is fine, but I hate to think that you’re putting full faith and confidence in having transport available to someone who won’t transport even when a baby has been stuck in the canal for 4 hours. Yes, she got insanely lucky in that case and got the kid back, but you need to understand that that’s what it was, pure dumb luck, so that you can make an informed decision.
I wanted to add to this discussion that on mothering.com there are fairly frequent stories about homebirths that had tragic outcomes, and often times a “no one could have seen this coming” attitude about it. One recent story, which I won’t link to out of just respect for the mother, involved a cord torsion, which caused the baby to slip away in between the intermittant heart monitoring they were doing with a doppler. One listen and the heartbeat was strong, the next listen, no heartbeat.
How this could happen was a mystery to me until I read this informative piece that addresses the benefits of continuous fetal monitoring. One of my issues with the natural birth movement is that they do not tend to explain the benefits of such interventions, so a person can truly make an informed choice. If they were willing to say, something like: The chance of cord torsion and death without continuous monitoring is small, only x percent, and chance of a cascade of interventions that leads to c-section with fetal monitoring is larger, about y percent. But without intermittent fetal monitoring the chance of death in the rare instance of cord torsion is much higher…z percent. THAT would be informed choice I could get behind.
p.s. Some certified nurse midwives actually do have fetal heart monitors running continuously. It was one question we were told to ask of all midwives…