My Birth Story: How My Natural Birth Intentions Resulted in Interventions

For starters…I’m so excited to have brought my daughter into this world!

But my birth plan (a series of requests you make for how you’d like to give birth and interact with the baby thereafter, ie a water birth, vaginal birth, cesarean birth, whether you want to use an epidural, whether you’d like immediate skin to skin contact with the baby, etc) flew out the window!

My original Birth Plan

Personally, I wanted my birth experience to be as natural as possible. That means that I’d go into labor through contractions or my water breaking, and I’d avoid any interventions such as an epidural. Nowadays it’s pretty normal to pick interventions into the birth plan beforehand regardless of whether you have a medical condition, but for me I wanted to avoid interventions unless they were absolutely necessary.

I also wanted to allow some time between when the baby is born and her umbilical cord is cut (“time” basically meant “no rush”), that my husband would be the one to cut the cord, and that we’d do “Kangaroo Care” (skin-to-skin contact with the baby) as soon as possible to help the baby feel comfortable in transition and start the bonding process.

I think the only other noteworthy thing is that I wanted her to start on breast milk and not be subjected to formula until we see how breast feeding goes.

The baby’s condition during pregnancy

Throughout my pregnancy, I was told that my baby is BIG.

The thing is, it’s pretty common for non-Japanese women to hear this at Japanese clinics. After all, the data they have is based on the average Japanese person who tends to be smaller in stature and have a different average weight of baby compared to other countries.

Another thing that is not uncommon is for the measurements for the weight of the baby during clinic check-ins to be off. So you might get told you have a big baby and find out after birth that the calculations were overestimated.

Having said that, on day 38-0 of pregnancy (Wednesday), I was told that my baby was weighing in at 38.7kgs. The doctor was really concerned about the baby’s size and suggested I come back to get rechecked just in case.

I went in two days later (Friday - not sure what difference 2 days would make but that’s what they asked), and was measured by a different doctor who said my baby was weighing in at 4.1kgs.

The clinic asked me to consider the possibility of inducing the baby since it was getting riskier to deliver naturally. To help with my decision making, they asked me to decide between scheduling being induced 3 days later on Monday, or to just attend my normal 39 week check up 5 days later on Wednesday.

I was definitely conflicted; on one hand I really wanted to give natural birth a chance and the baby hadn’t reached 40 weeks yet, so doing an induction before that seemed a little fast. On the other, I recognized that there could be complications.

Also, a 400g weight gain in a matter of a couple of days seemed unlikely, which kind of made me lean towards thinking the calculations could be off.

After much deliberation, I decided to just wait until my 39 week check up. It would only be 2 days past the induction date and I figured if the doctors were still concerned (highly likely), I could probably get admitted on the spot at my check up. This strategy would bide a little time for me to feel I gave a natural labor a chance while still recognizing that carrying her to 40 weeks would be unlikely.

Here’s how things played out

At 1:30am on Tuesday 7/11 (half a day after I would have been induced had I elected for that), my water broke. And I mean BROKE! I always wondered if I’d be able to tell if it breaks since there are two kinds of breaks (one is below the baby’s head which is typically a big gush of fluid, whereas the other type can be from above the baby resulting in more of a slow leak).

My husband and I made our way to the hospital and the contractions started about 30 minutes after my water broke.

Things progressed pretty quickly in that the contractions were pretty frequent and strong, though it took about 8 hours to get to a dilation point where they moved me into the delivery room (10am).

I spent the next 5 hours or so pushing (as opposed to breathing through contractions). I’m not sure around when, but let’s say midway through, a doctor came in and decided to use these long tweezers to further break my water and see if that would help move things along (I kind of imagine it being like puncturing a hole in a blow up kiddie pool; once that happens the structure deflates and everything comes pouring out).

While it did move things along, unfortunately it wasn’t enough. At this stage, the doctor recommended that I be induced which would increase the intensity and frequency of contractions. The concept was that I may need a bit more support from stronger contractions to move the baby out. At this point, I was really drained of energy (I had been kind of half asleep between contractions trying to muster energy between them) so I agreed to be induced.

Unfortunately, even being induced didn’t help move the baby out even though it did increase the intensity and frequency of my contractions. I even made it to the point where her head was crowning - we were so close but still so far away!

Eventually, another doctor came in and ran an ultrasound and I could see on the monitor exactly what they were saying: that I needed at least 3 more centimeters of a pelvic space for the baby to move out, both because of her size and also because of the difficulty of her being able to rotate out.

They recommended doing a C-section and I could see the writing on the wall that this was best for both the baby and for me; I didn’t see how continuing to push when there was literally no space was going to be lucrative.

The good news is that both I and the baby were in healthy condition - the baby’s heart beat was strong so it wasn’t like we needed to rush due to sudden medical danger.

The hardest part

Despite going through nearly entire labor process, the hardest part was yet to come…and that was the waiting time between the decision to do the c-section and actually getting the c-section.

The timeframe was only around 30 minutes, but what made it difficult is that they wouldn’t turn off the induction medication until they had fully explained the procedure and risk of c-section and gotten my signature. In other words, I was still having intense contractions all the way up until when I was in the operating room and they gave me the epidural. While administering the epidural, they told me I wasn’t allowed to move…so I was having intense contractions while trying to stay still and suppress the urge to push.

But then…she was finally born!

The epidural was like heaven at this point. It was really strange being able to see people operate on me and the baby be born but without feeling anything.

After birth, we found out that the baby weighed 4,390gs (9lbs, 10ozs). I was told that the placenta was literally double the size of placentas they normally see…apparently, she got a lot of nutrition!

Final thoughts

I definitely don’t have any regrets about how things went - I’m happy that I gave myself a chance to go through the natural birth process even though it resulted in a series of interventions. I think it helped my body better prepare for the fact that there would be a baby (ie my breast milk came in fine, for example).

My doula, Stephanie Kawai, commented that it’s like I experienced two births…one was nearly a full natural birth and the other a cesarean birth. Talk about a double whammy! She also mentioned that since I had experienced the majority of a natural birth, I may be able to have a VBAC (Vaginal birth after cesarean) if I have another child (assuming the baby is nowhere near my daughter’s weight).

While I don’t have any regrets, I do have a couple of disappointments.

One of the reasons why I wanted to do a vaginal birth is so that the baby could get good immunity protection from the healthy bacteria that costs the baby through the birth canal.

The other is that we weren’t able to do quick bonding like I had hoped - the baby was taken away for tests and since I’m recovery from a c-section I’ve been relying on my husband and nurses to watch her more, most of the time outside of our hospital room (this is incredibly helpful though since due to the surgery I can’t move much, can’t lift her, and am limited to breast feeding for now). Whenever I see her I feel this surreal-ness that I gave birth and she’s mine! I wonder how my reaction would have been different had the birth experience been different.

Having shared all of that…we are doing great! I’m very happy with picking Ikuryo Clinic and Stephanie Kawai for support, the process and recovery has been as smooth as it possibly can be.