I had a wonderful pregnancy, and my husband and I had decided on a natural home waterbirth with a midwife in attendance. I was due Feb. 28, 1998, and my mom came for a visit so that she could be there for the birth and help out afterward. Well, she was there for a week and no baby! She had to leave, but we had a nice visit anyway...by March 13th we had decided to try some black and blue cohosh to get things started by the 15th, if nothing had happened on its own. The baby must have sensed that we meant business because the next morning at 5:00 a.m., I started having contractions about 5 to 10 minutes apart, painful, but do-able. I stayed in bed until about 7:00 a.m., breathing through the contractions with Dh's help, then got up to take a shower, and he phoned our midwife to let her know I was in labor.

Things went on that way for a while, getting a little more intense. We had started to fill the tub which was taking up all the room in the living room, and I decided to get in around 12:00. Bad idea -- the water was too cold and it brought on a really strong contraction. Out of the tub and back into bed. We warmed the water a little more and I was back in by about 2:00 p.m.. All this time Dh called the midwife to let her know what was going on. By 5:00 p.m. the pain was getting really intense; I was moaning loudly through the contractions, and my husband couldn't whisper the encouraging things in my ear that we'd planned -- I was too loud! I was also having terrible back pain. He was on the phone with her and I said she needed to come right NOW! Somehow I thought that when she and her assistant arrived things would get better. Ha Ha! It took them forever to get to our house, about 2 hours, for some reason. When they got there she said it seemed like I was grunting and did I feel like pushing. I didn't really know so I said, sure -- she said it might ease the pain some if I could push. So I pushed. And I pushed. And I pushed. It did help the pain but it didn't really get me anywhere.

About this point I found the pain unbearable, still with a lot of back pain. After a while she checked me and said that I had a cervical lip left that was swelling (probably from all the pushing!), and that the baby was stuck under my pubic bone, probably a posterior presentation (which explained the back pain). They had me get out of the tub, lay on the bed, and tried to manually lift up on the bone to ease the baby down. Man, was that ever painful. I continued to moan through the pain, but it didn't really help that much. My water broke at that point, and there was meconium in the water. We got back into the tub to keep trying to push. Hours of pushing had gone by, and finally by about 2:30 a.m. I said that I had had it and wanted to go to the hospital. If I could have gotten up, I would have!! But a few minutes later I had my first REAL pushing contraction, and thought, oh, that's what the pushing urge is! I didn't push that way for very long, maybe 20-25 minutes -- then Ceilidh Rose (pr. kay-lee) came shooting out all in one push (face up), slipped through Dh's hands, and landed on the bottom of the tub! It was 3:11 a.m.. I don't know where the midwife was at that point, but she wasn't right there to catch the baby. They had to use a melee suction device to suction the baby, because of the meconium. We got out of the tub and went to the bed, where it took 2 more hours and a shot of Pitocin to get the placenta out. I had torn badly, almost a 4th degree tear, which the midwife didn't feel comfortable stitching herself, so we had to go to the hospital to have it stitched, hours after the birth, when it was starting to get painful and swell.

Thoughts in retrospect: I was in so much pain, and feel now that I started pushing way, way too early, and wore myself out. I wish that we had tried more to turn the baby's position, and I wish the midwife had been able to be right there to massage the perineum so that I didn't tear. I don't know why she told me to push so early. I am now due to give birth any day to my second baby, and we are going to go to the hospital this time (where they will allow us to bring a tub!), and have an epidural if I need one. I feel I will be in better hands this time (not because it's a hospital, just because I chose better attendants this time), and hopefully it will be an easier and less traumatic experience! I'll let you know!