Our Journey to Nourishment

25^th May 2009

 

If I had known how difficult this was going to be I’m not sure I would’ve been so committed… but isn’t that the case with most things in life that we make commitments about?  I remember so well when I decided to breastfeed, while pregnant with John, and educating myself and asking other breastfeeding mums questions and even asking for demonstrations, but nothing could’ve prepared me for how much it physically HURT!  Or how devastated I was going to feel when I ran out of milk altogether.  Or how… but I digress.  I made it to 14 months with John and I am so proud of that.

 

Well here I’ve made it to 17 weeks pregnant and I was so educated about nourishment and got so much encouragement from others about continuing with the plan, but nothing could’ve prepared me for how much it physically was going to take out of me, or how devastated I am that despite being better nourished this pregnancy is ten times harder.  I cannot believe that when I was pregnant with John I actually managed to hold down a job!  Thankfully he is still having a daytime nap for a couple of hours, because I’ve had to go to bed too during the day.  I’ve been so ill, I never threw up once with John and this time around I’ve fainted and thrown up and been in hospital on saline, and the worst part is it’s been next to impossible to stick to the nourishing plan.

 

When I was pregnant with John I remember really well that one day I made a beautiful beef and vegetable casserole in my huge slow cooker.  These meals usually fed us for 3 nights, but once it was cooked I couldn’t even stand being in the kitchen.  So poor Ian had to eat it… 6 nights in a row!  I couldn’t be in the kitchen when he was reheating it (in the evil microwave) or in the same room where he was eating it.  But that only lasted a couple of weeks, this time I stocked up on a stack of casseroles made with bone broths and organic veges and I haven’t been able to look at them for months.  And I’ve been craving all the wrong foods… pizza… Chinese… Italian… chocolate!

 

A broad-picture perspective tells me that I am still much better nourished than I was last time around, when I was still using a microwave, still eating all the foods I now know I’m intolerant to, still snacking on lollies and chips, and so on.  But the inner struggle I have had every day since the 6 week mark has been so hard.  I realise it’s so important to encourage and be encouraged on this journey!

 

John is doing ok.  His eczema continues but most of the time it doesn’t bother him at all, and is confined to the ‘typical’ areas (elbows, knees, ankles) and now he’s eating most of our meals with us.  I have given up trying to keep his diet so refined, it has just been too hard, and I see the negative results but they are thankfully short term and as I said don’t seem to bother him much.  And he is so excited about this new baby!  He keeps looking at my belly (huge for only 17 weeks) and saying “There’s a baby in mummy’s tummy!”

3^rd October 2009

 

Today marks 8 months of pregnancy and although we know we are having a little girl, we do not yet know how she will enter the world.  My hopes for VBAC were initially dashed by pelvimetry x-rays which showed a broken tail bone and I was told that not only was this probably the reason John was unable to be born naturally but that it was unlikely I would go into labour and even if I did that I would not be able to progress.  My chiropractor suggested that it might not be so bad and that giving birth might even fix it… but being so unsure I decided that the next best thing would be to have a planned caesarean, and I mean really planned, with requests for things that didn’t happen last time.  A friend who is a midwife suggested that I get a midwifery student so that she could come with me into recovery and keep the baby with me, and so Michelle has joined me on most of my appointments thus far.  She has also spoken to the new head of the Childbirth Unit at the hospital and I have been accepted as a patient even though initially I was told I was not eligible; she is, I’m told, a wonderful supporter of natural methods and allows skin-to-skin and even a feed in theatre where possible.  I haven’t met her yet, I see her for the first time next week, and a part of me holds out hope that she might agree with my chiropractor and allow me to have the baby naturally.

 

Of course this creates other problems, ones that go against the grain of my overly structured personality… the idea of not having a planned caesarean, not having a set date, and the disorganization this will create posing other problems!  My parents would be here by the set date to look after John; I would be able to have all my meals planned to a high degree; Ian would be able to plan leave from work; and so on.  So I wait for next week for a definitive answer before I worry about all of this.

 

I’ve been privileged to give two talks on health, nutrition and my journey to interested groups of people; although it can be overwhelming, most have responded with thanks and a desire to investigate further.  I’ve been very disappointed by the lack of, or even overtly negative, response from some people who I had thought would be interested (even if only from the point of view of understanding what I do and why I do it, let alone learning something relevant to themselves) and it’s been a learning curve yet again about how I communicate and how I deal with others, very similar to my experiences when sharing my faith.  I think people can be scared of two things: passion and change.  Passion in others that they don’t understand and change in themselves they are fearful to make.  Most of all I realise that, as with sharing my faith, in sharing my journey or talking about the health principles I live by, I must above all value the person I am talking to and make sure I encourage them.

 

So the following weeks, and the following months, will bring many changes, many challenges, many opportunities to make choices based on what I have learned.  I look forward to it all with a little fear but great anticipation.

 

29^th March 2010

 

I can’t believe it has taken me this long to write more of our journey… and what a journey it has been!

 

I went to the appointment with my new obstetrician confident that I might be able to change how a c-section would happen and wishing vaguely that she might let me try labour and left with renewed hope that not only would labour happen but that I could deliver this baby naturally.  She was wonderful.  So I began, if a little late, to exercise and eat according to the natural principles I had researched earlier and felt more like this really was going to be different.

 

My final weeks of pregnancy were busy with preparations such as documenting how I run the house and kitchen, cooking and stocking the freezer, and telling John that one day soon the baby would come.  He has been wonderful, very interested in the baby and talking to it and telling people about it.  I bought a little baby doll with a cot and pram and highchair and some little clothes as John is convinced there’s a baby in his tummy too.  He decided since the bassinet for my baby is in my bedroom the cot for his baby should be in his.  We kept reading books about babies and big brothers and he seems to be ready and happy about it all.  We told him that mummy and daddy might have to go to the hospital in a hurry and that a friend of mine may come to look after him but I was really hoping my parents would arrive before the baby.

 

As it was, they did arrive, about a week before my due date and I was so glad.  At least I was glad, until my due date arrived.  I’d been having strong Braxton Hicks for weeks and had begun my little regime of inducing labour naturally on the weekend, including eating a whole pineapple, having hot baths, having sex, drinking lots of raspberry leaf tea, going for a really long walk, you name it, I tried it.  On my due date we were all home and just sitting around waiting for something to happen, by lunch I was snappy and emotional (and mum told me later she suspected something was going on) and decided to go to bed.  I cried and cried, I just wanted to have this baby, we were all ready and just waiting, and as I prayed begging God to start something I fell asleep peacefully for 2 hours.  When I woke, I was so relaxed and I was going through in my mind the things I’d read that could induce labour and remembered one I had forgotten, nipple stimulation.  After 10 minutes I felt a stab and a bubble as if the baby moved and I couldn’t move.  I called out to my mum who suggested I get up and sit on the toilet and as my waters had indeed broken and dribbled out I cried with pure joy.  It was 4:30pm.  Mum found Ian in the shed and told him it had started and he went into instant action putting things in the car.  I rang the hospital but they said not to hurry.  I knew that my midwife student was working later that night but I let her know we were going in.  As we drove, Ian reminded me that I might end up in theatre but I asked him not to mention this again as I was aware of that but really wanted a natural birth and could do without the idea of it.  When we arrived at 6pm my waters gushed in the carpark but soon after I was admitted and shown to a comfortable room, excited but also wondering what the next hours would hold.

 

Initially the labour pains were the same as the Braxton Hicks and the nurses laughed as I sat there cutting my fingernails and braiding my hair.  They had to put a monitor on me, standard procedure for VBACs which I knew, as was the shunt they put in my wrist, which I didn’t.  This was nearly my undoing, I was so confident this was going to be natural and couldn’t get my head around the idea of needing drugs or having a c-section, but they kept assuring me it was just procedure.  My obstetrician was unavailable and my student hadn’t arrived yet, but I wasn’t overly worried by this until Ian went to get himself some dinner and while he was gone the senior doctor asked to see my pelvimetry xrays.  I knew this doctor by reputation as being against VBACs and voiced my concern to the nurses.  As I didn’t have them with me we had to ring Ian to ask him to go home and get them.  When he returned I think they just quietly put them somewhere and the doctor never saw them.

 

The pains got more serious about the same time as my student arrived, about 8pm.  They assigned me another midwife as a supervisor for my student, and I remembered having her looking after me when I’d had John, she was lovely.  My doctor had finally been reached and was on her way.  And Ian went into action as my helper through the labour pains as I sat on a fit ball… for hours… and hours… this was also nearly my undoing.  It was so monotonous it was doing my head in.  I kept asking my student how I was going and how much longer and could she please just take me to theatre, at which point she just smiled and assured me over and over again that I could and would do this, that I had plenty of pain relief options before theatre was even a remote possibility, and she was an absolute rock of assurance through the entire time.

 

But the boredom got to me and I asked if I could go in the bath… not now that my waters had broken, danger of infection.  Well how about the shower?  My student had told me they had a wireless waterproof monitor but they couldn’t get it to work.  I was desperate and the shower was wonderful, they told me I could only stay in there for 20 minutes but I think I had nearly an hour as my poor student had to keep prodding me with a portable monitor and I think she got almost as wet as me!  I could hear the woman labouring in the next room, obviously in the later stages, and wondered what it was like.

 

I found out soon enough, the urge to push suddenly came just after 2am.  It was surprising.  And I felt like I wasn’t ready yet.  But examination showed that the tiny amount of drugs they had injected through the shunt, which did nothing towards pain relief, had indeed brought on the last 2cm dilation quite quickly.  We tried many positions, more for comfort than for effect, as I felt this needed to be slow, instinctively.  My obstetrician and the midwife appeared occasionally, but my husband and my student were wonderful and all I needed until the final stages where the baby, still constantly monitored, began to get a little distressed.  At this point the midwife told me I needed to push more, harder and more concentrated, and then my obstetrician arrived and said “Right let’s get this baby out!”  I panicked momentarily, thinking she meant I was being whisked off to theatre.  Although this is what I’d kept asking for through the boredom of labour, I felt now that we’d come this far we were going to finish it here.  Then I realized she was joking, or rather was letting me know it was time to get serious.

 

I was moved onto my back with my feet supported in the air, I suppose very similar to the old-fashioned stirrups, and coached to push in particular ways.  Between pushes my obstetrician must have been massaging my perineum until Ian and my student both said “We can see the head!”  I felt renewed strength.  But the baby’s monitoring was showing a little more distress and the obstetrician suggested the vacuum and pulled the kit out of the cupboard.  My student had told me months earlier that if intervention (ventouse or forceps) are used in births she is assisting she is unable to count them towards her experience for qualification, she needed 20 births, and she had been so wonderful to me that I really wanted her to be able to count mine.  My obstetrician said I could have 2 more pushes and then she’d be using the vacuum, but after those 2 pushes they moved me into a squatting position.  2 more pushes and the baby’s head was out, and I felt my legs go to jelly and worried I’d squash her, but another push and a shoulder was out and another push and a bit of help from my student and she slithered out.  She had entered the world!  It was 4:15am.

 

I was euphoric.  My student pushed her along the bed in front of me and I set eyes on the most perfect little baby girl, and I watched in amazement as I was laid back on the bed and she was placed on my tummy to wriggle to my breast.  My eyes left her long enough to see my student grin at my obstetrician and say “19!” and I felt proud that I had done what I had done the way I had wanted to do it.  My placenta took its time coming out and they said they’d give me drugs but I said no and yet again it all happened naturally given time.  I cut the cord.  And Ian and Kate and I lay there together in a cloud of contentment and thanks and amazement at what we had achieved, the three of us.

 

I rang my mum at 5am and she came to the hospital to meet her granddaughter and namesake.  I was horrified at myself as I passed the baby to her and realized I hadn’t even let Ian have a hold yet but he wasn’t at all worried, and shortly after made up for it when mum left, he curled up on the bed beside me with Kate in his arms and the two of them slept while I was checked and dressed by the nurses and left in peace, except I was still running on adrenaline so I sent text messages to our friends and called my sister.  Then I just lay there and gazed over at my husband and my baby, still amazed and a little dazed that it had gone the way it had, beyond my wildest wishes and dreams.

 

Kate is the happiest and healthiest little baby you could ever wish for.  She took to feeding and sleeping and that was about it for the first weeks, and as she has grown she has continued to be an easy feeder and sleeper, almost unbelievably.  She’s never had arsenic hour, the worst thing with her is that she overfeeds all the time and brings up a lot of milk after every feed but its not a reflux kind of thing at all.  Her skin needs to be seen to be believed.  Often I will reflect on how different she is as a baby to John, and at every stage I compare the notes that I kept on his feeding and sleeping and health and realise that of course she is different, my nutrition is entirely different.  I did all this to try and avoid the illness and suffering John endured and I have ended up with the quintessential perfect baby.

 

John has taken to being a big brother like a duck to water.  They adore each other.  In the first few weeks he constantly wanted to hold her and hug her, and most of the time he was very careful with her.  She just gazes at him and now that she’s older she giggles and gurgles at him whenever he looks at her.  John has become more responsible and helpful and I’m so proud of him.  He did find the adjustment a little stressful at times, and his eczema of course flared up accordingly at times.  On the whole he continues well though.

 

I wouldn’t say that a natural birth is easier or harder than a c-section.    It is swings and roundabouts as to the difficulty of the birth experience – on my second morning in hospital one of the nurses asked me which I preferred and I said “having done both I’m glad I’m not having either again but knowing that the natural is better and healthier makes me extremely glad to have done it” and she laughed with me.  All the nurses were so excited to have a VBAC on the ward, and they are becoming more common now that this new obstetrician has come.

 

I would say that the recovery is a whole lot quicker.  6 weeks after having John I still wasn’t driving or doing housework, but I took Kate shopping by myself when she was a week old and started doing bits and pieces of housework as well.  The thing that surprised me the most was that although the first week was hard, with the baby blues and the reliving of the pain and difficulties, and the pain down below from birth, after that week I was ready to have it all over again.  And again.  I would dearly love to have 2 more babies!  This surprises me, and Ian, as we only planned to have two.  And for now I am content, and busy, with the two darlings that I have.  I am so very blessed and thankful.

 

About the Author...

I am a princess. I am a daughter and sister and wife and mother and friend. I am very creative and have always wanted to be a nourisher but only recently discovered what that truly means, especially following my most important creative endeavour - my son. I continue to learn more about it and in relationship with my Creator I am confident I will become the nourisher and nurturer that I was made and meant to be.