Baby #7 - Part 1 - Changing Birth Plans

I'm not sure why, but I tend to be extremely open about my birth stories. And I love all the details, and want to be sure to remember everything... so my birth stories are super long. This one for some reason ended up even longer than normal. So, I decided to break it up a bit. I'm posting these all the same day, but as separate posts, so you don't have to read all of them if you don't want to.

Changing Birth Plans

In mid-January I found myself in the emergency room of our local hospital. After some lab work, my husband was admitted to the hospital for severe anemia. His iron levels were lower than most people have ever heard of, and he required four units of blood over the next two days before he was released. More tests, procedures and surgeries were done over the next two months to fix the cause of his anemia, and he’s doing tons better now.

Unfortunately, all his medical bills wiped out our health savings account, and we realized that while our homebirth would cost us $2000 more than we had already paid… thanks to our deductible being met, a hospital birth would be free.

After two wonderful homebirths, I was not eager to return to birth in a hospital setting. But I felt confident in my experience and my ability to create the birth experience I wanted, even if it couldn’t be in the setting I had hoped for.

I started the transfer process by searching for a natural-birth friendly OB and discussed the pros & cons of local hospitals with friends and facebook groups. I determined that the community hospital where my husband had been was a very natural-birth friendly place, and mostly handled low-risk births, and didn’t even have a NICU. I found a family practice OB, Dr. B, who has been attending births since before I was born, and who seemed very open to my preferences, and many of her “standard practices” were already more natural than most OBs I’ve spoken with. (I also recently found out that this particular doctor has her practice where she does because 30 years ago, it was the only place in the state with a nearby “birth center attached to a hospital” and she wanted to focus on natural births.)

The hardest part about switching care providers at 32 weeks turned out to be convincing my husband. He enjoyed the midwives and trusted that they would respect our wishes for labor, birth, and baby care. He was not convinced that the hospital/doctor would do the same. We toured the hospital, and he came with me to a couple different OB appointments, and decided that he trusted that I was making informed decisions and while he didn’t necessarily trust the hospital or doctor (because he didn’t feel he knew enough about either), he trusted me. 

Part 2 - Prodromal Labor
Part 3 - Labor & Birth!
Part 4 - Birth Plan & Hospital Experience