Further Thoughts

I seriously don't expect anyone to read my entire post from earlier - like I said, I just wanted to this in order to document our family history.

Throughout the course of the morning some more thoughts came into my head. When I was pregnant with Samuel, my first and at the time, only pregnancy, I was trying to be an informed health care consumer and good advocate for myself and my baby. In doing so, I spoke with my OB about labor and delivery issues and the things that concerned me. WARNING: "Female issue" content follows. For instance, I was very concerned about the frequent and apparent unnecessary use of episiotomy and wanted to know what he considered my "risk" to be for needing one. I love my OB, but he is "old school," having started practicing 20+ years ago, and he was pretty sure that most first-time deliveries would require one. I had read extensively that tears heal better and carry fewer future risks than episiotomies and made it quite clear that I would rather have to deal with the former than the latter, but of course that didn't become an issue when Samuel was born because he didn't actually come out the correct way, although he came close and it might've been a possibility had a different OB delivered him (he wasn't delivered by my OB). Anyway, I spent most of my visits with this pregnancy talking about VBAC issues and the associated risks I would be facing. I didn't think a lot about the other issues because I figured it was known that my previous feelings still stood. Well, because Audrey was born on the weekend late in the evening, the OB who delivered her wasn't even one my OB's partners - he's a part of the main practice, but not their group. Everything went so fast that I didn't think to state my opinion on episiotomy, and of course, when the possibility presented itself, Brad and I had about 0.0001 seconds to say anything before the deed was done. Now I have been reading more and more about how much worse episiotomies are versus tears for future deliveries, and it makes me quite sad. Why do they continue practices that have been shown to be outdated and worse than the alternative? And why do I continue to have to be the "victim" of them?

I got my "wish" in a major part of Audrey's delivery because I did not want Pitocin - I refused it outright, but they didn't call it that - and everything progressed fine without it. I didn't want my water broken because the combination of breaking my water artificially and upping the Pitocin most definitely was what put Samuel into the "late decels" that ended in a c-section, which ended in wound dehiscense and twelve additional weeks of OB visits and wound care. Despite that request, the delivery MD insisted that my water needed to be broken because they needed to put in the internal monitor in order to make sure my scarred uterus was okay. I agreed to it, and Audrey was born less than an hour and a half later! That's why I previously referred to the fact that everything went so fast with Audrey - I went into labor around 4 PM, we got to the hospital at 8 PM, and she was born at 10:51 PM! I went into labor with Samuel at 1 AM and he wasn't born until 1 PM, and of course that was by c-section! I know that he was my first one, obviously, but I thought my body might consider Audrey to be like my first one because I never got to complete Samuel's delivery - I just pushed for a couple of hours before they said he was in danger. People have commented that we'd better go straight to the hospital when I go into labor with our next one - I hope I have a couple or more years before that day comes!