Thank you for sharing that link!

I hope you’ve been able to process things a bit, but having had a traumatic birth myself, I know these memories never really go away.

I don’t know if you ever did try to file a complaint, but I think most hospitals have some kind of patient ombudsperson/advocate that you can contact.

I also wanted to let you know about http://www.solaceformothers.org, which is a wonderful online community for dealing with traumatic birth experiences.

Be well!

I kept saying over and over that I personally didn’t FEEL like things were right. I kept saying that SOMETHING was wrong. I just didn’t know what specifically.

It sounds like your intuition was telling you something was wrong, but no one was listening to you. Had someone treated you with respect earlier in a hospital and had a conversation with you as a partner in your care instead of treating you like they did… then it would have been a very different experience for you. HUGS!

Sheridan
shared blog post — Most Inspirational VBAC story!

Oh yes, I was PUNISHED for not consenting to a repeat c/s the moment I found out I was pregnant basically.

I also feel that if my boyfriend wasn’t as proactive as he was, things could have been even worse. He really had my back AND our son’s back if you will.

I just had my second c/s and, aside from not being able to have a VBAC, it was a pretty good experience. The surgical midwife went out of her way to make sure we got as much contact in the OR as possible — I had skin to skin with her and then she breastfed twice while I was on the table. Afterwards DH held her until he went out to recovery to wait for me.

I’m very sorry that your experience was so far from ideal and shame on that doctor for…well EVERYTHING. But especially kicking your partner out of the birth of his child. That’s just so wrong.
shared blog post — Post natal depression

I wonder if that would change things…

I cry nightly over what I went through.

@Dou-la-la thank you for the support! I just don’t know what else I could have done. I am emotionally/mentally/physically traumatized still.

So here’s a quick rundown of my pregnancies / births:

First baby: Problems with my insurance meant I could not get prenatal care until I was four months along, and then I had to interview every doc on my plan until I found one who’d take me that far along and deliver at my preferred hospital (where my step-son was born and the staff was super supportive — at least during my step-son’s birth.) At seven months pregnant, doc dropped me as a patient because I wouldn’t change hospitals purely for his convenience. (He said he didn’t want to drive that far and complained about traffic!) He referred me to another doc who refused to take me because I was too far along. I changed insurance and got the doctor who delivered my step-son, and he seemed great. Several times I thought I was in labor and went to the hospital only to be turned away. The last time, when I was 41 weeks, I was told that I *was* in labor, but I wasn’t progressing so I “needed” Pitocin. (I have since learned that this is BS.) I told them I did not want an epidural, and they said that was fine — that they had this really great other drug they could give me that was much safer and better than an epidural. This turned out to be Demoral, which made me hallucinate, and while I was hallucinating they got my “consent” — with my husband standing right there telling them no and them telling him to mind his own business — to an epidural. I was pumped so full of epidural that I couldn’t feel anything from the waist down, and still so loopy that I barely recall anything from that whole time. I do remember the doctor yelling at me to push, telling me I wasn’t trying, and then saying I needed an “emergency c-section” for CPD. All I remember from the c-section is a blue sheet, though I know my husband was there. The next thing I remember is being in the hospital room with my son.

Second baby: At my first appointment with the doc who’d done my c-section he informed me that he “doesn’t do” VBACs. I did my research and found a doc who I was told was the “most VBAC friendly” doc in my city. He was so VBAC friendly that he ripped me a new one when I tried to talk to him about my birth plan (“Women.. think they know about childbirth because they go online and read about it.”) and told me that an epidural was *mandatory* for a VBAC. He never actually showed up for my birth (I didn’t see a doc until one ran in to catch my son), so I spent most of labor with two horrible nurses who tried to give me Pitocin against my doctor’s orders and then physically held me down when I tried to move into a better position to push. I was not able to birth my son with them in the room; he was born while they were “eating dinner and getting things ready for the c-section” since they had decided I just wasn’t capable of giving birth.

Third baby: At 12 weeks pregnant I developed DVT — a blood clot in my leg. I was hospitalized and it was the *worst* hospital experience I have ever had. I was put in a non-private room and they made my husband leave so my roommate could have privacy, and then I was repeatedly promised that I would be moving to a private room “in 1 hour,” “in a few minutes,” “later tonight,” but then they’d never come back. The nurse even claimed I was lying, that she’d never said I was going to be moved. I couldn’t get out of bed so I had a bedpan, and when it spilled in the bed I was left lying in it for over a hour. An orderly brought me aspirin and then tried to insist I take it “for the pain,” even when I explained that I was pregnant and not supposed to have aspirin. In the ER I had been told that there were two medications I could be given, and that the more common one would be dangerous to the baby so I’d be given the second medication, but then I was prescribed the first one. When I insisted on speaking to an OB to get reassurance that the medication would be safe, a doctor who was *not* an OB came to my room, presented himself as an OB, and told me it was perfectly safe. I took the medication on his assurance, and when I later learned he was *not* an OB, I was livid. I was told that no one had ever said this doctor was an OB — apparently I was lying again — but that there was an OB overseeing my care who had approved the medication. I demanded to see him, and his nurse sent back word that they had never heard of me. I demanded to see the OB and the lying-SOB-not-an-OB doc, and had them both paged every 45 minutes for eight hours. Meanwhile I called a hospital administrator to my room to file a complaint, but instead she just tried to shame me into following doctor’s orders. (She did get me moved to a private room in L&D, though.) When I threatened to leave AMA if the doctors did not come talk to me, another hospital admin came up to threaten me that I was going to leave my children motherless and that if I didn’t obey the doctor the insurance wouldn’t pay for my hospital stay and I’d be stuck with the bill. And told me outright that making sure their treatment for my DVT didn’t kill my daughter was not a priority, that the medication I was taking wasn’t actually *treating* my blood clot, just making it less likely that I’d get another, and that the only reason I was in the hospital is because they didn’t trust me to stay in bed if they let me go home. When a nurse came in at the end of the day to tell me that both doctors had sent word that they’d gone home and were not coming to see me, I threw a fit and demanded my AMA papers. And an hour later, when she never came back, I threw another fit and told them that if they didn’t bring me the papers I’d walk out anyway and then they’d be screwed because I didn’t sign their little forms. Oh, I totally forgot. The reason I called the first admin to my room was that suddenly the nurses, who had been checking my baby’s heartbeat hourly, suddenly couldn’t find her heartbeat anywhere. I was freaking out thinking they’d killed my baby. The admin moved me to L&D where an actual L&D nurse found my baby’s heartbeat, then looked at the chart and exclaimed, shocked, that all the previous nurses had clearly been listening to MY heartbeat — that the heart rates they’d written down could not possibly be a baby’s.

Are you at all surprised that I chose a homebirth for my third baby?

I went to 42w3d with her. She was head down the night before I went into labor. The next morning I woke when my water broke, went to the bathroom and then laid down back in bed. Suddenly I was wracked with extreme contractions. My husband was getting the kids breakfast — our sitter hadn’t even arrived yet — when I screamed that the baby was coming NOW. When he got in the bedroom she was already born to her naval — feet first. She was double footling breech, meaning both feet down, and her head got stuck in the birth canal. My husband called 911, got me on my hands and knees, gloved up, and prepared to deliver her himself (yes, he knew how to extract a stuck baby). Right before he started the paramedics walked in, saw he knew what he was doing and asked if he wanted to do it. He let them do it. ;) The whole labor and birth took about 45 minutes. My daughter wasn’t breathing and had to be intubated, and the paramedics left the cord unclamped until it was done pulsing to let her get as much oxygen as she could from the blood in the placenta. We transferred to the hospital (one I’d never been to before), where she was diagnosed with minor Erb’s Palsy (stretched nerve in the shoulder) and possible seizures (turned out to be nothing). After four days of observation and GREAT care in the NICU, she came home healthy and fine! I’m a Christian, and it’s my belief that God led us to homebirth so that we would be in the best possible position and prepared to handle an emergency on our own since we knew we wouldn’t have a doctor to rely on. We could have had our daughter in morning rush hour traffic on the way to the hospital, difficult for the paramedics to reach, with no clue what was going on or what to do. I’m *so* grateful for our homebirth!

Fourth baby: Hubby was afraid we might have another emergency, so he wanted a hospital birth, though I chose not to use an OB for prenatal care. We’d moved and our new local hospital was anti-VBAC, so we went back to the hospital where our daughter had been in the NICU. I had a lovely, uneventful VBAC.

Fifth baby: Again I chose not to use an OB for prenatal care, but then go to the hospital for the birth. (I considered using an OB for prenatal until I started calling around and kept getting turned down. One doc told me over the phone that the more VBACs you have, the more dangerous they are, and that having a 4th VBAC was *very dangerous*.) I did get one ultrasound at about 4 months because I had a bad feeling. Apparently there was an issue with my placenta, but the doc who did the ultrasound didn’t bother to tell me that. The US tech did decide to tell me that I was having a boy — even though I didn’t want to know and my husband wasn’t with me, so he didn’t even get to be there when I found out. When I arrived at the hospital (same as previous two babies), the first OB I saw told me that since I didn’t have “real” prenatal care with an OB, I needed an automatic c-section. Fortunately she left right after that, and I labored with another OB who was *truly* VBAC supportive. When my baby became distress we tried numerous remedies — the OB said, “I know we really want to avoid another c-section.” Eventually we figured out the issue with the placenta and decided to go ahead with a c-section. Honestly, even though it wasn’t fun and the recovery sucked, I felt good about it because I knew we’d done everything possible and that we hadn’t resorted to surgery until everyone was certain it was our best option. My husband was with me in surgery, I was given my baby in the OR and kept him all through recovery — he never went to the nursery.

Ok, my hubby is waiting for me to come watch TV — gotta go!