The VBAC Link

• Episode 375 Dr. Darrell Martin Shares His Journey as an OB/GYN + Can a Midwife Support VBAC?

  Dr. Darrell Martin is an OB/GYN with four decades of expertise in women’s health and the author of the bestselling memoir “In Good Hands: A Doctor’s Story of Breaking Barriers for Midwifery and Birth Rights.” In this episode, Dr. Martin and Meagan walk down memory lane talking about differences in birth from when he started practicing to when he retired. He even testified before Congress to fight for the rights of Certified Nurse Midwives and for patients' freedom to select their healthcare providers! Dr. Martin also touches on the important role of doulas and why midwifery observation is a huge asset during a VBAC.Dr. Martin's TikTokIn Good Hands: A Doctor's Story of Breaking Barriers for Midwifery and Birth RightsDr. Martin's WebsiteCoterie DiapersUse code VBAC20 at checkout for 20% off your first order of $40 or more.How to VBAC: The Ultimate Prep Course for ParentsFull Transcript under Episode Details Meagan: Hello, everybody. We have Dr. Darrell Martin joining us today. Dr. Martin hasn’t really been in the OB world as of recently, but has years and years and over 5000 babies of experience. He wrote a book called, “In Good Hands: A Doctor’s Story of Breaking Barriers for Midwifery and Birth Rights.” We wanted to have him on and talk just a little bit more about this book and his history. That is exactly what he did. He walked us down memory lane, told us lots of crazy stories, and good stories, and things they did along the way to really advocate for birth rights and midwives in their area. Dr. Darrell Martin is a gynecologist, a dedicated healthcare advocate with four decades of expertise in women’s health, and the author of the bestselling memoir, “In Good Hands: A Doctor’s Story of Breaking Barriers for Midwifery and Birth Rights.” His dedication to patient care and choice propelled him to testify before Congress, championing the rights of Certified Nurse Midwives (CNMs) and advocating for patients' freedom to select their healthcare providers. A standout moment in his career was his fervent support for nurse-midwifery in Nashville, Tennessee, showcasing his commitment to advancing the profession. Additionally, Dr. Martin takes great pride in having played a pivotal role, in like I said, more than 5,000 births, marking a legacy of life and joy he has helped bring into the world.Our interview was wonderful. We really walked down what he had seen and what he had gone through to testify before Congress. We also talked about being safe with your provider, and the time that he put into his patients. We know that today we don’t have the time with our providers and a lot of time with OBs because of hospital time and restricting how many patients they see per day and all of those things. But really, he encourages you to find a provider who you feel safe with and trust. I am excited for you guys to hear today’s episode. I would love to hear what your thoughts were, but definitely check out the book, “In Good Hands: A Doctor’s Story of Breaking Barriers for Midwifery and Birth Rights.”Meagan: Okay, you guys. I really am so excited to be recording with Dr. Martin today. We actually met a month ago from the time of this recording just to chitchat and get a better feel for one another. I hung up and was like, “Yes. Yes. I am so excited to be talking with Dr. Martin. You guys, he has been through quite the journey which you can learn a lot more about in more depth through his book. We are going to talk right there really quick. Dr. Martin, welcome to the show. Can we dive into your book very first? Dr. Darrell Martin: Surely. Thank you. Meagan: Yeah. I think your book goes with who you are and your history, so we will cover both. Dr. Darrell Martin: Okay, okay. Meagan: Tell us more. Darrell Martin’s book is “In Good Hands”. First of all, I have to say that I love the picture. It’s baby’s little head. It’s just so awesome. Okay, we’ve got “In Good Hands: A Doctor’s Story of Breaking Barriers for Midwifery and Birth Rights.” Just right there, that title is so powerful. I feel like with VBAC specifically, if we are going to dive into VBAC specifically, there are a lot of barriers that need to be broken within the world of birth. We need to keep understanding our birth rights. We also have had many people who have had their rights taken away as midwives. They can’t even help someone who wants to VBAC in a lot of areas. A lot of power is in this book. Tell us a little bit more about this book and how it came about. Dr. Darrell Martin: Well, the book came because of patients. As I was heading into my final run prior to retirement, that last 6-8 months, and I use that term, but it shouldn’t be patient. It should be client because patient would imply that they have an illness. Occasionally, they do have some problems, but in reality, they are first the client wanting a service. I thought my role as to provide this service and listen to them about what that was and what they wanted to have occur. In response to the question of what was I going to do when I retired, I just almost casually said, “I’m going to write a book.” The book evolved into the story of my life because so much of the patients and clients when they would come to me were sharing their life, and they were sharing what was going on in their life. Amazingly, it was always amazing to me that in 3 or 4 minutes of an initial meeting, they would sometimes open up about their deepest, darkest secrets and it was a safe place for them to share. I always was blown away with that. I respected that. Many times there were friends of my wife who would come in. I would not dare share a single thing notwithstanding the fact that there were HIPAA regulations, but the right thing was they were sharing with me their life. I thought, “I’m going to turn that around as much as I can by sharing my life with them.” It was an homage to that group of individuals so I would like them to see where I was coming from as I was helping them. That was the goal. That was the intent. Secondarily, for my grandchildren and hopefully the great-grandchildren that come whether I’m here or not because including them with that was the history of my entire American heritage and my grandfather coming over or as we would call him Nono, coming over to the United States and to a better place to better a life for his family. Our name was changed from Marta to Martin at Ellis Island. I wanted that story of his sacrifice for his family and subsequently my uncles’ sacrifice and my parents’ sacrifice for the priority they placed on families. That was for my children as well and grandchildren. There were a lot of old pictures that we had that we pulled out and that didn’t occur in the book because there wasn’t enough money to produce a lot of those pictures into the book, but they will be there in a separate place for my kids and grandkids. It was a two-fold reason to do the book. It started just as a narrative. I started typing away. The one funny ironic, and I don’t know if ironic is the right word, story as I was growing up, is that people as my why I become an OB/GYN. I’m sure this was not the reason, but it’s interesting as I reflected that growing up, it was apparently difficult for my mother to have me. I was her only child. She always would say I was spoiled nice, but I was definitely spoiled. When she was mad at me, the one thing she would say, and I didn’t understand it until much later when I was actually probably in medical school, was that I was a dry birth and I was breech, and I just ruined her bottom. When she really got aggravated occasionally, she would say those little words to me as I was probably a teenager. Then on reflection, I became an OB/GYN so I really understood what she was saying then. Meagan: It was interesting that you said the words “dry birth” because my mom, when my water broke with my second, she was telling me that I was going to have this dry birth. She was like, “If you don’t go in, you’re going to have this dry birth.” So many people I have said that to are like, “What? I have never heard of that in my entire life,” and you just said that, so it really was a thing. It really was something that was said. Dr. Darrell Martin: Yes. It was a term back then in the late 40s to late 50s I guess. Meagan: Crazy. So you were inspired. You decided to do the OB route. Tell us a little bit of how that started and then how you changed over the years. Dr. Darrell Martin: Well, when I was in med school, and I went to West Virginia University Medical School, principally, it was fortunate because I would say in retrospect, they were probably lower middle class. I had the opportunity to go to West Virginia. Literally, my tuition per semester was $500. Meagan: Oh my gosh. Dr. Darrell Martin: My parents didn’t have to dig into money they didn’t have. They never had to borrow any money, so I was fortunate. I did have a scholarship to college. They didn’t have to put out the money with the little they had saved. The affordability was there and never an issue. I went to West Virginia, and in my second year, I guess I connected a little bit with some of the docs and some of the chair of the department in West Virginia, Dr. Walter Bonnie, who I didn’t realize at the time had left. He was the chairman of Vanderbilt before he was the chairman of West Virginia so now I understand why he was pointing me to either go to Vanderbilt or to Duke. I think I’m fortunate that I went to Vanderbilt. In spite of everything that happened, it was the path I was supposed to take. I did a little rotation as a 2nd-year medical student with some private OBs. I was just amazed. I was enthralled by the intervention of the episiotomies I observed. I said, “Well, you’re going to learn how to sew.” What really struck me was that I went into this. I still can picture it. It was a large room where there were probably four or six women laboring. They had almost one of the baby beds. They had the thing where you can pull up the sides so someone couldn’t get out of the bed. I couldn’t figure out why someone in labor was like this. There was a lady there. I’ll never forget. She had been given scopolamine which is the amnesiac which was often used where women sometimes don’t even know where they are. They don’t even have memory of where they are. She was underneath the bed on all fours barking like a dog. I asked him, “Why are you not going to let her husband in here?” They were saying things they probably shouldn’t say under the influence of these crazy drugs. It made me start thinking even from that point on, “Why are they doing this? Why are they zapping them so much in the way of drugs?” Then I didn’t see or understand fetal monitoring. We didn’t have it at West Virginia. It came in my residency. It had just come in the first year prior to that, and the new maternal-fetal head at Vanderbilt brought in fetal monitoring. He had done some of the original research with Dr. Han at Yale. What I was doing a medical student during my rotations was sitting at the bedside. That’s what we as medical students were responsible to do. Sit at the bedside. Palpate the abdomen. Sit with the fetoscope, the little one you stick around your head and put down, and count the heartbeats. We would be there six or eight hours. We were responsible for drawing all of the blood, but more importantly, we were there observing labor. Albeit, they weren’t allowed to get up, but it was just the connection and I loved that connection. I loved that sense of connecting with people, and then that evolved into you connecting with them when they come back for their visits. I’ve had quite a few people who I’ve seen for 20, 30, 35 years annually. That became a much more than just doing a pelvic exam, blah, blah, blah. It became a connection. It was a communication of, “What’s going on in your life? What’s happening?” Meagan: A true friendship. Dr. Darrell Martin: Yes. Meagan: It became true friendships with these parents and these mothers. I think that says a lot about you as a provider. Yeah. That makes us feel more connected and safe. Dr. Darrell Martin: Yeah. I desperately miss that. I still miss that as a vocation and that connection. I would look forward to it. I would look on the schedule, “Who’s coming in?” I could remember things about them that we would deal with for 15 years or more. One client of mine who, we would begin by, “How are you doing?” We would still go back to when her son was at a college in Florida and was on a bicycle and got hit and killed. We were relating and discussing that 15 years later. It was a place where she knew that we would go back to that point and talk a little bit about her feelings and it’s much more important to me. If everything’s fine doing a breast exam and doing a pelvic exam, listening to the heart and lungs, that’s all normal and perfunctory. It’s important, but what’s really important is that connection. My goal also was, if I could, to leave the person as they went out the door laughing and to try to say something to cheer them up, to be entertaining, not to make light of their situation if obviously they had a bad problem, but still to say as they would leave with a smile on their face or a little laugh, but the funny one, I still remember this. We had instituted all of these forms. It would drive me crazy if I went to the doctor. We had all of these forms with all of these questions. They were repetitive every year. You just couldn’t say that it was the same. She came in. She was laughing. She said, “These forms are crazy. It’s asking me do I have a gun at home?” I said, thinking about it, in my ignorance, I hadn’t reviewed every single question of these 15 pages that they were going to get. I’m sure it was about depression and to pick up on depression if they have a gun at home. She laughed. She said, “The young lady who was asking me the questions said, ‘Do you have a gun at home?’ I said, ‘No, I have it right here in my purse. Would you like to see it?’” Meagan: Oh my gosh. Dr. Darrell Martin: So it was just joking about how she really got the person flustered who was asking the question. Sometimes we ask questions in those forms that are a little over the top. Meagan: Yeah. What I’m noticing is that you spent time with your patients not even just to get to know them, but you really wanted to get to know them. You didn’t just do the checked boxes and the forms. It was to really get to know them. We talked about finding a good practice last time. What does that look like? What can we do? What are things to do? What is the routine that is normal for every provider’s office or is there a normal routine for every provider’s office? From someone coming in and wanting an experience like what you provide, how can we look for that? How can we seek that?Dr. Darrell Martin: Well, what you’re saying and particularly when it evolves into having a chat, is first trust. you want to trust your provider. If you don’t trust, you’re anxious. We know that anxiety can produce a lot of issues. I would often tell a client who was already pregnant let’s say as opposed to what should be done before they get pregnant. I would say they are getting ready to take a big test, and that test is having a baby. I said, “It’s like a pass/fail. You’re all going to pass. What do you want to have happen? You need to be comfortable and learn as much as you can and have people alongside you that you trust so that it is a great experience.” The second one, I’m sure you’ve seen this is that sometimes you just worry that people get so rigid in what they want, and then they feel like a failure if it doesn’t happen. We want to avoid that because that can lead to a lot of postpartum depression and things that last. They feel like a failure. That should never happen. That should never happen. They should understand that they have a pathway and a plan. If they trust who’s there with them, what ends up happening is okay. It’s not that they’ve been misled which is then where the plan is altered by not a good reason maybe, but it’s been altered and it really throws them for a loop. Meagan: Yeah. Dr. Darrell Martin: I think in preparation, first they’ve got to know what their surroundings are. They start off. Ideally, someone’s thinking about getting pregnant before they get pregnant. I’ve had enough clients who, when we start talking about birth control, and I’ll say, “Are you sexually active?” “Yes.” “Are you using anything for birth control?” “No, I don’t want to use anything for birth control.” I said, “Do you want to get pregnant?” “No.” I said, “Well, that’s not equal. A, you’re not having intercourse and B, you’re not using anything, so eventually, you’re going to get pregnant. You need to start planning for that outcome, but the prep work ahead of time is to know your surrounding. You’ve got to know what you know and you’ve got to know what you want. You really should be seeking some advice of close friends who you trust who have been through and experienced it in a positive way. You’ve got to know what your town where you live is like. Is there one hospital or two hospitals? What are the hospitals like?” Someone told me one time that I should just write a book about what to do before you get pregnant. Meagan: Yeah, well it’s a big deal. Before you get pregnant is what really can set us up for the end too because if we don’t prep and we’re not educating ourselves before, and we don’t know what we’re getting into, we don’t know our options. That can set us up for a less-ideal position. Dr. Darrell Martin: Yeah. I think that’s where the role of a doula can come into play. I hate to say it this way, but if they’re going to go to the provider’s office, they’re not going to get that kind of exchange in that length of time to really settle in to what it is what that plan is going to be like. To be honest, most of the providers are not going to spend the time to do that. Meagan: Mhmm, yeah. The experience that you gave in getting to know people on that level is not as likely these days. OBs are limited to 7-10 minutes per visit?Dr. Darrell Martin: That’s on a good day probably. Meagan: See? Yeah. Dr. Darrell Martin: You’re being really kind right there. You’re being really kind. It’s just amazing. Sometimes you’re a victim of your own success. If you’re spending more time, and you’re involved with that, then you’ve got to make a decision in your practice of how many people you’re going to see. If you’re seeing a certain amount, then the more you see, what’s going to happen to them? You have control of your own situation, but then often you feel the need to have other partners and other associates, and then it gets too business-like. Smaller, to me, is better. The only problem with small with obstetrics is we know that if it’s a solo practice, for example, someone will say, “I’m going to this doctor here because I want to see he or she the whole time.” I say, “You’ve got to think about that. Is that person going to be on-call 365 days a year?” Then what happens later on in the pregnancy when that becomes more of a concern to the client, they’ll ask. They’ll say, “Well, I’m on-call every Thursday and one weekend out of four.” They freak out. They get really anxious. “What’s going to happen? I just know you.” They’ll say, “I’m on-call on Thursday. I do inductions on Thursday.” So it leads into that path of wanting that provider. So then to get that provider, they're going to be induced. And we know that that at least doubles the rate of C-sections, at least, depending on how patient or not patient they are.Meagan: I was going to say they've got this little ARRIVE trial saying, "Oh, it doesn't. It lowers it. But what people don't really know is how much time these ARRIVE trial patients were really given. And so when you say that time is what is not given, but it's needed for a vaginal birth a lot of the times with these inductions.Dr. Darrell Martin: Yes, yes, if the induction is even indicated to begin with because the quality assurance, a lot of hospitals, you have to justify the induction. But it doesn't really happen that way. I mean, if there's a group of physicians that are all doing the same thing, they're not going to call each other out.Meagan: Yeah.Dr. Darrell Martin: It's just going to continue to happen is there're 39 weeks. I love how exactly they know how big the baby's going to be. But even more importantly, how big can this person have? I mean, there are no correlations. There are no real correlations. I can remember before ultrasound, we were taught pelvimetry. the old X-ray and you see what the inner spinous distance is, but you still don't know for sure what size has going to come through there.Meagan: Oh right. Well, and we know that through movement, which what you were seeing in the beginning of your OB days in your schooling, they didn't move. They put them in the bed. They put them in a bed and sat them in the bed. So now we're seeing movement, but there's still a lack of education in position of baby. And so we're getting the CPD diagnosis left and right and being told that we'll never get a baby out of our pelvis or our baby's too large to fit through it, when in a lot of situations it's just movement and changing it up and recognizing a baby in a poor position. An asynclitic baby is not going to have as easy as a time as a baby coming down in an OA, nice, tucked position. Right?Dr. Darrell Martin: Exactly. Exactly. There was the old Friedman Curve and if you went off the Friedman Curve, I was always remarked it's 1.2 centimeters, I think prime at 1.5 per hour. But I can never figure out what 0.2 two was when you do a pelvic exam. What is that really? Is the head applied against the cervix? So it's all relative. It's not that exact. But no, I think that if a person could find a person they trust who knows the environment, I think that's where the value of a really good doula can help because they're emotionally connected to the couple, but they're not as connected as husband and wife are or someone else.Meagan: Or a sister or a friend.Dr. Darrell Martin: Yes. And that may be their first shot at that sister of being in a room like that other maybe her own child. It's nice to have someone with a lot more experience that can stand in the gap when they're emotionally distraught, maybe the husband is. He's sweating it out. He's afraid of what he's going to say sometimes. And then she's hurting and she needs that person who can be just subjective to  stand in the gap for her when they're trying to push the buttons in the wrong direction or play on their emotions a little too much.Meagan: Yeah. I love that you pointed that out. We actually talked about that in our course because a lot of people are like, "Oh, no, it's okay. I can just hire my friend or my sister." And although those people are so wonderful, there is something very different about having a doula who is trained and educated and can connect with you, but also disconnect and see other options over here.So we just kind of were going a little bit into induction and things like that. And when we talked a couple weeks ago, we talked about why less is better when it comes to giving medicine or induction to VBAC or not. We talked about it impeding the natural process. Can you elaborate more on that? On both. Why less is more, but then also VBAC and induction. What's ideal for that? What did you use back then?Dr. Darrell Martin: Well, we're going back a long time.Meagan: No, I know, I know.Dr. Darrell Martin: We're going back a long time. See, that would be like what you just did was give me about three questions in one that would be like being on a defensive stand on trial. And then you're trying to figure out where the attorney going, and he sets you up with three questions in one, and then you know you're in trouble when he does that.Meagan: I'm finding that I'm really good at doing that. Asking one question with three questions or five questions?Dr. Darrell Martin: Yes.Meagan: So, okay, let's talk about less is more. Why is less more?Dr. Darrell Martin: Well, first of all, you can observe the natural process of labor. Anytime you intervene with whatever medication-wise or epidural-wise, you're altering the natural course. I mean, that to me it just makes sense. I mean, those things never occurred years ago. So you are intervening in a natural course. And you then have got to factor that in to see how much is that hindering the labor process? Would it have been hindered if you hadn't done that? If you'd allow them to walk, if you allowed them to move? The natural observation of labor makes a lot more sense than the intervention where you've then got to figure out, is the cause of the arrest of labor, so to speak, is it because of the intervention or was it really going to occur?Meagan: Light bulb.Dr. Darrell Martin: Yes.Meagan: That's an interesting concept to think about.Dr. Darrell Martin: Yeah. And you want to be careful because it's another little joke. I say you just don't want to give the client/patient a silver bullet. Often I've had husbands say, "Well, they don't need any medicines." You have to be careful what you're saying because you're not the one in labor. But I wouldn't say that quite to them. But they got the picture really quickly when their wife, their spouse, lashed back out at them.Meagan: Yeah.Dr. Darrell Martin: So you can come over here and sit and see how you like it. I can still remember doing a Lamaze class with Sandy, and we also did Bradley class because I wanted to experience it all. She was the first person to deliver at Vanderbilt without any medication using those techniques. And when we would do that little bit of teaching, I can remember doing that when they would try to show a guy by pinching him for like 30 seconds and increasing the intensities to do their breathing, maybe they should have had something else pinched to make them realize-- Meagan: How intense.Dr. Darrell Martin: Yeah. How intense it isMeagan: Yeah.Dr. Darrell Martin: We can't totally experience it. So we have to be empathetic and balance that. And that's where, to me, having that other person can be helpful because I'm sure that that person who is the doula would be meeting and with them multiple times in the antepartum course as opposed to they go into labor and if there's a physician delivery, chances are their support person is going to be a nurse they've never met before or maybe multiple ones who come in and out and in and out and in and out, and they're not there like someone else would be. To me that's suboptimal, but that's the way it works. And I observed the first birth. I didn't tell the people at the hospital for my daughter-in-law that I was an obstetrician.Meagan: And yeah you guys, a little backstory. He was a doula at his daughter-in-law's birth.Dr. Darrell Martin: Yes. But her first birth did not turn out that well at an unnamed hospital. She didn't want to come to my practice because they weren't married that long and that's getting into their business a little bit. Plus, she lived on the north side of town and I was on the south side. So she chose, a midwifery group, but the midwife was not in there very much. I mean, she was responsible. They were doing probably 15 to 20 births per midwife.Meagan: Wow.Dr. Darrell Martin: They were becoming like a resident, really. They were not doing anything a whole lot differently. And then she had a fourth degree, and she then, in my opinion, got chased out of the hospital the next day and ended up turning around a day later and coming back with preeclampsia. I heard she had some family history of hypertension. I had to be careful because I'm the father-in-law. I'm saying, "Well, maybe you shouldn't go home." And then she ends up going back. And she didn't have HELLP syndrome, but she was pretty sick there for a day or two. That was unfortunate because she went home, and then she had to go right back and there's the baby at home because the baby can't go back into the hospital. And so her second birth, because it was such a traumatic experience with the fourth degree, she elected to use our group and wanted one of my partners to electively section her. She did the trauma of that fourth degree. That was so great. So she did. But obviously, she had a proven pelvis because she had a first vaginal delivery. And then she came to me and she said, "I want to do a VBAC." And so I said, "Oh, that's great." And so one of my partners was there with her, but my son got a little bit antsy and a little bit sick, so he kind of left the room. I was the support person through the delivery. That was my opportunity to be a doula. And of course, she delivered without any medication and without an episiotomy and did fine. Meagan: Awesome.Dr. Darrell Martin: And a bigger baby than the one that was first time.Meagan: Hey, see? That's awesome. I love that.Dr. Darrell Martin: Yes.Meagan: So it happens.So we talked a little bit about midwives, and we talked about right here "A Doctor's Story of Breaking Barriers for Midwifery". Talk to us about breaking barriers for midwifery. And what are your thoughts one on midwives, but two, midwives being restricted to support VBAC?Dr. Darrell Martin: Okay, that's two questions again.Meagan: Yep. Count on me to do that to you.Dr. Darrell Martin: I'll flip to the second one there. I think it's illogical to not allow a midwife to be involved with a VBAC. That makes no sense to me at all because if anybody needs more observation in the birth process, it would potentially or theoretically actually be someone who's had a prior C-section. Right? There's a little bit more risk for a rupture that needs more observation, doesn't need someone in and out, in and out of the room. The physician is going to be required to be in-house or at least when we were doing them, they were required to be in house and there was the ability to do a section pretty quickly. But observation can really mitigate that rush, rush, rush, rush, rush. I've had midwives do breeches with me and I've had them do vaginal twins. If I'm there, they can do it just as well as I can. I'm observing everything that's happening and they should know how to do shoulder dystocia. One thing that you cannot be totally predictive of and doctors don't have to be in the hospital for the most part in hospitals. Hopefully, there probably are some where they're required, but it makes no sense and they're able to do those. So if I'm there observing because the hospital is going to require that, and I think that's not a bad thing. I never would be opposed or would never advocate that I shouldn't be there for a VBAC. But I think to have the support person and that be the midwife is going to continue and do the delivery, I think that's great. There's no logic of what they're going to do unless that doctor is just going to decide that they're going to play a midwife role and that they're going to be there in that room. They're advocating that role to a nurse or multiple nurses who the person doesn't know, never met them before, and so that trust is not there. They're already stressed. The family's stressed. There are probably some in-laws or relatives out there and they say, "Well, you're crazy. Why are you doing this for? Why don't you just have a section?" Everybody has an opinion, right? So there's a lot of family. I would observe that they're sitting out there and we've got into that even back then that's a society that some of them don't want to be there, but they feel obliged to be out there waiting for a birth to occur. Right. When four hours goes by, "Oh, oh, there must be a problem. Why aren't they doing something?" You hear that all the time. I try to say, "Well, first labor can be 16 to 20 hours." "16 to 20 hours?" and then they think, "I'm going to be here for that long."Meagan: Yeah.Dr. Darrell Martin: So there's always that push at times from family about things aren't moving quickly.Meagan: Right.Dr. Darrell Martin: They're moving naturally, but their frame of reference is not appropriate for what's occurring. They don't really understand. And so that's the answer. Yes. I think that it makes no sense that midwives are not involved. That does not make any sense at all.So the first part of the question was what happened with me and midwives?Meagan: Well, breaking barriers for midwifery. There are so many people out there who are still restricted to not be able to support VBAC. I mean, we have hospital midwives here in Utah that can't even support VBAC. The OBs are just completely restricting them. What do you mean when you say breaking barriers for midwifery and birth rights?Dr. Darrell Martin: Okay, what I meant was this is now in late 1970, 79, 80. And I'd observe midwifery care because as residents, we were taking care of individuals at three different hospitals, one of which was Nashville General, which was a hospital where predominantly that was indigent care, women with no insurance. And we had a program there with midwives.Dr. Darrell Martin: And so we were their backup. I was their backup for my senior residency, chief residency, and subsequently, as an attending because I was an attending teaching medical students and residents and really not teaching midwives, just observing them if they needed anything, within the house most of the time, principally for the medical students and the junior residents. But I saw their outcomes, how great they were. I saw the connection that occurred. We didn't have a residency program where you saw the same people every time then. It was just purely a rotation. You would catch people and it just became seeing 50 or 75 people and just try to get them in and out. But then you observe over here and watch what happens with the midwifery group and the lack of intervention and the great outcomes because they had to keep statistics to prove what they were doing. Right? Meagan: Yeah, yeah. I'm sure. Dr. Darrell Martin: They were required to do that, and you would see that the outcomes were so much better. Then it evolved because a lot of those women over the course of the years prior to me being there and has evolved while I was there, I was befriended by one midwife. She was a nurse in labor and delivery who then went on to midwifery school. We became really close friends. Her family and my family became very close. They had people, first of all, physicians' wives who wanted to use them and friends in the neighborhood who wanted to use them, but they had insurance and people that had delivered there who then were able to get a job and had insurance and wanted to use them again, but they couldn't at the indigent hospital. You had to not have insurance. So there was no vehicle for them in Nashville to do birth. We advocated for a new program at Vanderbilt where they could do that and at the same time do something that's finally occurring now and that's how midwives teach medical students and teach residents normal birth because that's the way you develop the connection that moves on into private practice is they see their validity at that level and that becomes a really essentially part of what they want to do when they leave. They don't see them as competition as much. Still, sometimes it's competition. So anyhow, at that point, our third hospital was relatively new. The Baptist private hospital run by the private doctors where the deliveries at that point were the typical ones with amnesiac, no father in the room, an episiotomy, and forceps. So when we tried to do the program, the chairman-- and we subsequently found some of this information out. It wasn't totally aware at the time. They were given a choice by the private hospital. Either you continue to have residents at the private hospital or you have the midwifery private program at Vanderbilt. But you can't have both. If you're going to do that, you can't have residence over here. So they were using the political pressure to stop it from happening. Then I said, they approached myself and the two doctors, partners, I was working with in Hendersonville which is a little suburb north of town. We had just had a new hospital start there and we were the only group so that gave us a lot of liberties. I mean, we started a program for children of birth with birthing rooms, no routine episiotomies, all walking in labor, and all the things you couldn't do downtown. Well, the problem was we wanted midwives in into practice but we didn't have the money to pay them. We were brand new. So we had a discussion and they said, "Well, we want to start our own business." And I said, "Oh." And I kind of joked, I said, "Well that's fine, I can be your employee then." And that was fine for us. I mean, we had no problem being their consultant because someone asked, "Well, how can you let that happen?" I said, "We still have control of the medical issues. We can still have a discussion and they can't run crazy. They're not going to do things that we don't agree with just because they're paying for the receptionists and they're taking ownership of their practice." So they opened their doors on Music Row in Nashville.Meagan: Awesome.Dr. Darrell Martin: But as soon as that started happening and they announced it, at that time, the only insurance carrier for malpractice in the state of Georgia was State Volunteer Mutual which was physician-owned because of the crisis so they couldn't get any insurance the other way a physician couldn't unless it was through the physician-owned carrier. Well, one of the persons who was just appointed to the board was a, well I would call an establishment old-guard, obstetrician/gynecologist from Nashville. And he said in front of multiple people that he was going to set midwifery back 100 years, and he was going to get my malpractice insurance. He was going to take my malpractice insurance away.Meagan: Wow.Dr. Darrell Martin: For practicing with midwife. And that was in the spring of the year. Well, by October of that year, he did take my malpractice insurance. They did.Meagan: Wow. For working with midwives? Dr. Darrell Martin: For risks of undue proportion. Yes. The Congressman for one of the midwives was Al Gore, and in December of that year we had a congressional hearing in D.C. where we testified. The Federal Trade Commission got involved. The Federal Trade Commission had them required the malpractice carrier to open their books for five years. And what that did was it stopped attacks across the United States. There were multiple attacks going on all across the country trying to block midwives from practicing independently or otherwise. And so from 1980-83, when subsequently a litigation was settled, the malpractice carrier, including the physicians who were involved, all admitted guilt before it went to the Supreme Court. I went through a few years there and that's where you see some of those stories where I was blackballed and had to figure out a place where I was going to work. I almost went back to school. This is a little funny story. I was pointed in the direction of Dr. Miller who was the head of Maternal Child Health at Chapel Hill University of North Carolina. I didn't realize that then two months later, he testified before Congress as well because he wanted me to come there. I interviewed and then I would get my PhD and do the studies that would disprove all the routine things that physicians were doing to couples. I would run those studies. It was a safe space. It was a safe place, a beautiful place in Chapel Hill. So he told me, he said, "You need to meet with my manager assistant and she'll talk to you about your stipend, etc." Now I had three children under four years of age.Meagan: Wow, you were busy.Dr. Darrell Martin: Well, the first one was adopted through one of the friends I was in school with, so we had two children seven months apart because Sandy was pregnant and had like four or five miscarriages before.Meagan: Wow.Dr. Darrell Martin: So I had three under four. So she proceeded to say, "Well Dr. Martin, this is great. Here's your stipend and I have some good news for you." I said, "Well, what's that?" He said, "Well, you're going to get qualified for food stamps." That's good news? Okay. So I'm trying to support my three children and my wife. I said, "I can't do that. As much as I would love to go to this safe place," and Chapel Hill would have been a safe place because it would have been an academia, but then I had to find a place to work. So it was just how through my faith, it got to the point where know ending up in Atlanta, I was able to not only do everything I wanted to do, but one of the midwives that I worked with, Vicki Henderson Bursman won the award from the midwifery college. And the year after, I received the Lewis Hellman Award for supporting midwives from ACOG and AC&M. But we prayed. We said, "One day we're going to work together." And this was 1980. In 93, when we settled the lawsuit, we reconnected. I was chairman of a private school, and we hired her husband to come to Atlanta to work at the school. Two weeks, three weeks later, I get a call from the administrator of the hospital in Emory who was running the indigent project at the hospital we were working at teaching residents. They said that they wanted to double the money. Their contract was up and they wanted double what they had been given. So the hospital refused and they asked me to do the program. We didn't have any other place to go. And then what was happening? Well, Rick was coming to Atlanta, but so was Vicki. So Vicki, who I hadn't worked with for 13 years, never was able to work, came and for the next 20 years, worked in Atlanta with me. And we did. She ran basically the women's community care project, and then also worked in the private practice. And then the last person, Susie Soshmore, who was the other midwife, really couldn't leave Nashville. She was much, much more, and rightly so, she was bitter about what happened and never practiced midwifery. Her husband was retiring. She decided since they were going to Florida to Panama City, that she wanted to get back and actually start doing midwifery, but she needed to be re-credentialed. So she came and spent six months with us in Atlanta as we re-credentialed her and she worked with us. So ultimately we all three did get to work together.Meagan: That's awesome. Wow. What a journey. What a journey you have been on.Dr. Darrell Martin: Yeah, it was quite a journey.Meagan: Yeah. It's so crazy to me to hear that someone would actively try to make sure that midwifery care wasn't a thing. It's just so crazy to me, and I think it's probably still happening. It's probably still happening here in 2024. I don't know why midwives get such a bad rap, but like you said, you saw with the studies, their outcomes were typically better. Dr. Darrell Martin: Yeah.Meagan: Why are we ignoring that?Dr. Darrell Martin: Doctors were pretty cocky back then. They may be more subtle about what they do now because to overtly say they're going to get your malpractice insurance, that's restricted trade.Meagan: Yeah. That's intense.Dr. Darrell Martin: Intense. Well, it's illegal to start with.Meagan: Yeah, yeah, yeah, right?Dr. Darrell Martin: If you attack the doctor, you get the midwife. They tried to attack the policies and procedures. That was the other thing they were threatening to do was, "Well, if you still come here, we're going to close the birthing room. We're going to require women to stay flat in bed. We require episiotomies. We require preps and enemas." Well, they wouldn't require episiotomies, but certainly preps and enemas and continuous monitoring just to make it uncomfortable and another way to have midwives not want to work there.Meagan:  Yes. I just want to Do a big eye-roll with all of that. Oh my goodness. Well, thank you so much for taking the time and sharing your history and these stories and giving some tips on trusting our providers and hiring a doula. I mean, we love OBs too, but definitely check out midwives and midwives, if you're out there and you're listening and you want to learn how to get involved in your community, get involved with supportive OBs like Dr. Martin and you never know, there could be another change. You could open a whole other practice, but still advocate for yourself.I'm trying to think. Are there any final tips that you have for our listeners for them on their journey to VBAC?Dr. Darrell Martin: Well, pre-pregnancy that next time around, we know very quickly that the weight of the baby is controlled by heredity which you really essentially have no control over that including who your husband is. If he's 6'5", 245, their odds are going to be that the baby might be a little bigger. However, you do have control what your pre-pregnancy weight is, and if you get your BMI into a lower range, we know statistically that the baby's probably going to be a little bit smaller, and that gives you a better shot. You don't have control of when you deliver, but you do have control of your weight gain during the pregnancy and you do have control of what your pre-pregnancy weight, which are also factors in the size of the baby. So control what you can control, and trust the rest that it's going to work out the way it should.Meagan:  Yeah, I think just being healthy, being active, getting educated like you said, pre-pregnancy. It is empowering to be educated and prepared both physically, emotionally, and logistically like where you're going, and who you're seeing. All of that before you become pregnant. It really is such a huge benefit. So thank you again for being here with us today. Can you tell us where we can find your book?Dr. Darrell Martin: Yeah, it's available on Amazon. It’s available at Books A Million. It's available at Barnes and Noble. So all three of the major sources.Meagan:  Some of the major sources. Yeah. We'll make sure to link those in the show notes. If you guys want to hear more about Dr. Martin's journey and everything that he's got going on in that book, we will have those links right there so you can click and purchase. Thank you so much for your time today.Dr. Darrell Martin: Thank you. I enjoyed it and it went very quickly. It was enjoyable talking to you.Meagan:  It did, didn't it? Just chatting. It's so fun to hear that history of what birth used to be like, and actually how there are still some similarities even here in 2024. We have a lot to improve on. Dr. Darrell Martin: Absolutely, yes. Meagan:  But it's so good to hear and thank you so much for being there for your clients and your customers and patients, whatever anyone wants to call them, along the way, because it sounds like you were really such a great advocate for them.Dr. Darrell Martin: Well, we tried. We tried. It was important that they received the proper care, and that we served them appropriately, and to then they fulfill whatever dream they had for that birth experience or be something they would really enjoy.Meagan:  Yes. Well, thank you again so much.Dr. Darrell Martin: Okay, thank you. I enjoyed talking to you. Good luck, and have fun.Meagan: Thank you.Dr. Darrell Martin: Bye-bye.Meagan: Thank you. You too. Bye.ClosingWould you like to be a guest on the podcast? Tell us about your experience at thevbaclink.com/share. For more information on all things VBAC including online and in-person VBAC classes, The VBAC Link blog, and Meagan’s bio, head over to thevbaclink.com. Congratulations on starting your journey of learning and discovery with The VBAC Link.Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/the-vbac-link/donationsAdvertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands

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  58:25
• Episode 374 ​​Julia's HBAC with Labor Beginning at Almost 43 Weeks + The Evidence on Postdates

  Julia knew something was off during her first pregnancy and birth experience. She knew she didn’t feel right about consenting to a Cesarean, but it wasn’t until she started diving into research that she realized how much her care lacked informed consent. She discovered options that should have been offered to her that never were.Julia’s research led her to choosing the midwifery model of care in a home birth setting. She felt in control of her experience and free to birth the way she felt she needed to. Meagan and Julia discuss stats on uterine rupture, stillbirth, continuous fetal monitoring, induction, due dates, and how our birthing culture can highly influence what we think is safe versus what scientific evidence actually tells us. Evidence-Based Birth: The Evidence on Due DatesThe Business of Being BornNeeded WebsiteHow to VBAC: The Ultimate Prep Course for ParentsFull Transcript under Episode Details Meagan: Hello. Women of Strength I am so excited for today's guest. Our friend, Julia, is from Texas. She is a wife and a stay-at-home mother living in, it Spring, Texas, Julia?Julia: Spring, Texas.Meagan: Close to Houston, yes, with her two sons. And she has had a Cesarean and then an HBAC. We get a lot of questions in our inbox every day, but a really common question is dates. "Hey, I'm 40 weeks. My doctor is telling me I had to have my baby by tomorrow or even approaching 39 weeks." People are being told they have to have their babies or really bad things will happen. And Julia's story is proof that you don't have to have a baby by 40 weeks or 41 weeks, would you say? Almost 42 weeks is what you were. So we are excited to hear this story. And I know if you are one that goes past your due date and you're getting that pressure, you're definitely gonna wanna listen. Julia: Thank you so much for having me, Meagan, I'm really, really happy to be here.Meagan: I'm so happy that you are here. I would just love to have you share your stories.Julia: Okay, so my firstborn, he came during the height of the COVID pandemic. It was August 2020.I just saw my OB who I had been seeing for regular gynecology visits. And from the very first appointment, it just, I just kind of got an off feeling. She had seen a small subchorionic hematoma on my ultrasound at my very first appointment at eight weeks. And she just told me, "Don't Google this. It's going to scare you." She basically just said, "Just enjoy being pregnant now because when you come back next week, you may not be." So as a first-time mom, it was obviously pretty upsetting and caused a lot of anxiety. When I went back for my next appointment, she just kind of shrugged it off after she saw the ultrasound. She just said, "It cleared up on its own." There really wasn't any explanation of how it resolved.But that being said, that start to my prenatal care kind of set the tone for the rest of that pregnancy and birth. From then on there was just a lot of fear-mongering going on, and a lot of problems were brought up that really never turned out to be an issue. Around 20 weeks at the anatomy scan, they saw that my son was in the bottom 10th percentile.She had said that she classified that as IUGR, intrauterine growth restriction. We had a lot of extra testing done. Everything was normal. I felt confident and very comfortable just waiting it out. And that really wasn't what she wanted.Actually, starting around 35 weeks, she had started talking about delivering early. I was pressured at each appointment by my OB and the nurses to stay that day and deliver solely because of his size, even though everything was looking great on the monitors. Keep in mind, you know, during COVID, I wasn't able to have my husband or anyone with me during these appointments. And so just being asked that question each time I came in as a first-time mom by myself was just really hard and made me second guess a lot of things and second guess my intuition. I had explained that, "I think he's just a small baby. He needs more time to grow."She basically just said at my 38-week appointment if I didn't deliver that day, it would not be her fault if my baby died and that she or the hospital was--Meagan: What?! Julie: Right?Meagan: She said that she or the hospital, if I walk out that day, they're not liable if something happens because I'm going against her recommendations. I was even seeing a high-risk doctor as well at that point. And even he was saying, "Everything's looking fine. There's no problem with waiting if you want to."The reason she wanted to schedule the C-section because he was breech. I knew that I wasn't even going to have the opportunity to go into spontaneous labor. There were really no alternatives presented at the time. I knew nothing about out-of-hospital birth or about midwives. She offered an ECV, but she said she didn't recommend it because of his size.She didn't really explain why. So I just kind of felt backed into a corner. I remember I had left the office that day at 38 weeks and called my husband immediately and explained what she had said. We felt like, "Okay, well, I guess, we obviously don't want our baby to die, so maybe we need to just stay." I remember pushing my gut feeling aside the whole time. As they were prepping me, I just felt, This isn't right." I wanted to give my baby more time to grow and also to flip so that I wouldn't be backed into a C-section. Had I known then what I know now, I definitely would have opted for a home birth with my midwife who's trained in breach delivery.Just at the time with COVID, I didn't have the resources or the information, so we went through with the C-section that ended in a four-day hospital stay. I didn't sleep at all. Meagan, I'm not even kidding you. I did not sleep those four days. The nurses were really concerned about the baby's size, even though he was growing. He was actually back to his birth weight by the time we were discharged.But I'll never forget this one-Meagan: That's quick!Julie: Right? I know. And so there was so much fear-mongering, so much uncertainty by medical staff, despite how great my baby was doing. And I remember this nurse frantically coming into the room just a few hours after my C-section with this Medella hospital-grade pump. She was just like, "You need to start pumping now on top of breastfeeding because your baby's small. He's not going to grow."It just kind of left me feeling like, I feel confident in what I'm doing, but now all these medical professionals are telling me like, I'm in danger, my baby's in danger. It triggered a lot of feelings of postpartum anxiety. I really struggled that first year. And so it wasn't a very good experience.I just felt like my power had been taken away in the birthing process and felt defeated and like I didn't have a say for my first birth.Meagan: Yeah, I was just listening to an episode the other day, not on our podcast, on another podcast about that experience after baby is born and that postpartum within the hospital and how crazy it is that sleep is one of the best things we can get when it comes to energy, milk production, getting our babies fed and helping them grow, and doing all these things. But then we're not allowed that time. And then on top of it, it's all the fear-mongering and the doubt when it's like we should be being built up like, "Oh my gosh, look how good you're doing. Look how good this baby's doing. Look how good you're doing. Let's keep doing this." Instead of making you doubt that what you're doing isn't good enough and not letting you sleep and doing all these things. It's just weird to me. It doesn't make sense.Julia: Right, and as a first-time mom, you're just like, okay, they know what's best, obviously. I'm going to listen to them and what do I know about birth? They're the doctors. But yeah, it was just really eye-opening, and I really knew I wanted a completely different experience the next time around.Meagan: Yeah, I don't blame you. I don't blame you for wanting a different experience.Julia: So after I had my C section, pretty soon after that, I started digging and doing a lot of research and realized I felt really cheated by the lack of informed consent. I had mentioned that my doctor just had said, "You need a C-section because he's breech."I had no idea that there were even midwives and out-of-hospital birth options where they delivered breech vaginally and not only that, but were highly trained and qualified to do so. I had no idea that in other parts of the world of similar economic status to the US that they were routinely delivering breech babies vaginally with better outcomes than we have here in the US hospitals. So I really didn't feel like there was informed consent there. Even the fact that she didn't even want to try the ECV was upsetting to me. I just felt like I really wish I would have done more research at the time. But I just put all my energy into this next birth. I knew even before I got pregnant that I wanted a VBAC.Pretty early on in the process of my research, I became really fascinated with physiological birth and I knew that I really wanted to experience that. For someone who may not be familiar with that term, physiological birth is natural unmedicated childbirth with no intervention unless medically necessary. It sees birth as a safe biological function rather than a medical event or something that that's inherently dangerous which is how I felt I was treated my whole first pregnancy and birth. I felt like a walking hazard, to be honest, when in reality I was an extremely healthy 25-year-old, first-time mom with a healthy baby with no issues. So the fact that I was gaslit into thinking there was a lot of danger was sad. So I knew that for my next birth I wanted to do a physiological birth and I knew that it would kind of be a fight to achieve in the hospital. I did a lot of research, I watched The Business of Being Born. I read a lot of natural childbirth books. I also knew that on top of the regular hospital policies, I would have some excess restrictions because of the fact that I was a VBAC.Meagan: Yeah, yeah. Julia: I did go back to that same OB at first. I presented my birth plan early on to her and it included things like I didn't want an IV. I wanted freedom to eat or drink. I didn't want any drugs whatsoever for pain relief. I didn't want them pushing an epidural. I would have liked a water birth, but I knew that wouldn't have been possible in the hospital. But I at least would have liked water immersion in labor, minimal cervical checks. I wanted to go into spontaneous labor. I wanted no coached pushing and fully delayed cord clamping.I could tell, right away she was more so just VBAC-tolerant rather than supportive. She really used a lot of fear-mongering. Right away she mentioned the uterine rupture risk. She had said, I think she had said she had just had a mom die from a VBAC not too long ago.Meagan: Goodness. Holy moly.Julia: Without any explanation. Who knows where she was going with that? But she had also said, it may be better to just have a repeat C-section because with the risk of rupture, you may need a hysterectomy after giving birth. She commonly used the word TOLAC which also I didn't really like. I didn't want to feel like I was having to try. I felt like I'm planning a VBAC. I don't need to try for it. It is what it is. I wanted someone to encourage me. She really also highly, highly recommended I got an epidural because she said, "Well, with your increased risk of rupture, if something should happen, then they're just gonna have to knock me out."She also said, "Unmedicated moms tear the worst," which was not at all the case for me. She was saying that because it hurts so bad that you just can't control your pushing. I knew all of this was not true. I was kind of in a funny position because I didn't want to be fighting with her, but I knew the evidence in the back of my mind and all of that scary language. I knew it was not evidence-based. I really wanted someone on my team who was really going to believe in me, who knew the evidence, and who believed in my ability to have a VBAC.  I didn't want to spend all of my energy and labor fighting for this VBAC and for this birth experience that I knew was possible and that I knew that I deserved.My heart really had always deep down been set on a home birth from the very beginning. I loved watching home birth videos and hearing positive home birth stories. I just loved everything about it and also about the midwifery model of care and how much more comprehensive that was. I had heard about a local group of midwives on a Facebook group that I'm in for holistic moms in my area. I found out that this group of midwives offered a HypnoBirthing class. So my husband and I signed up for that. We took the six-week course and we just never looked back after that. We knew that a home birth VBAC would be the way to go. I felt deep in my heart confident about it and that's really what I wanted. I just knew I had found my dream birth team.My midwife was just amazing and I just really couldn't imagine birthing anywhere other than in my own home with her and my husband by my side and someone that didn't look at me differently because of my previous Cesarean.Meagan: Right. And I love that you just pointed that out. Someone who didn't look at me differently because of my previous Cesarean. This is the problem, not the problem. It's one of one of the many problems when it comes to providers looking at VBAC moms. We talk about this in our VBAC course. We should just be someone going in and having a baby, but we are not viewed that way. And it's extremely frustrating because not only do they not view us that way, they make us know and feel that they don't view us that way.Julia: Right, right.Meagan: It's just, it feels crummy.Julia: Absolutely. We knew we were making the right decision. I was really excited about the whole thing. That was another thing that I talked to my OB about. I was like, "I'm excited to be in labor. I want to welcome all these sensations of birth. I know it's going to be hard work, but that experience means something to me and I want that." And she had said, "Well, if you ask other moms who had been through labor, they would say it's painful, it's hard." She was basically saying, I shouldn't want this birth experience. I just didn't want to be fighting that or dealing with someone who had this view on birth that it's just this dangerous medical event. I didn't want to go through feeling defeated like I did last time.Meagan: Absolutely. Good for you for recognizing that and then doing what you needed to do to not have that experience.Julia: Right? Thank you.So I had mentioned that I really wanted to go into spontaneous labor. I didn't want to be induced at all. That's another reason why I'm so thankful that I was with my midwife because I went almost all the way to 43 weeks pregnant. I went into labor at 42 weeks and 5 days in the middle of the night. Had I had been with my OB, I'm positive that I would have had to deliver much earlier and I would have probably been scheduled for a repeat C-section. So I'm just really happy that I was with my midwife and I felt really confident about waiting. I had NSTs and BPPs, non-stress tests and biophysical profiles done daily starting at 42 weeks just to monitor baby's health and to make sure that everything is normal and it was.So we just opted to wait for spontaneous labor. I'm really glad that I did so that I could go through with the home birth.Meagan: Absolutely. What you were saying, yeah, I know I probably would have been scheduled Cesarean and definitely would have been pressured. I mean, even if you would have said no, the pressure would have been thick, especially going over 41 weeks.Julia: Right.Meagan: And then, let alone 42.Julia: Right. Yeah. The pressure was there. Everyone was well intentioned, asking, "Have you had your baby yet?" But I was getting these questions as early as like 38 weeks, 39 weeks. I'm like, "Whoa, I'm not even at my due date yet."Everyone was just excited to meet the baby and had friends asking about that. But my immediate family was so supportive and I'm so, so happy that I had that support because just feeling that from my midwife and from my parents and my husband, knowing that they all really believed in me and we were confident with waiting. As long as everything looked good with baby, that was really what was most important. So I just kind of tuned everything else out and tried to relax as much as possible.We just went out to dinner a few times and cherished these last couple weeks as a family of three. It finally happened in the middle of the night at 42 weeks and 5 days. I remember when the contractions were first starting. I'd had some contractions on and off for the past few weeks, but nothing consistent. So I just kind of thought, okay, well, this is just some Braxton Hicks or something like that.I noticed that around 2:00 AM, they started getting more consistent. I told my husband and they were getting more intense and a little closer together. We called our midwife around 6:00 AM and she was like, "Yeah. Sounds like you're in early labor." I was just so, so happy and grateful to be in labor.Yes, it was hard work, but I can honestly say I really enjoyed the experience. I thought it was extremely empowering. I just remember thanking God through the surges. We called them surges in HypnoBirthing. Just knowing the awesome work that my body was doing from within to give birth to my baby. I really, really enjoyed the freedom of just being able to eat and drink in labor freely wherever I wanted in my home without any restricting policies. I wasn't tethered to any IVs or monitors. I think that's another thing. In the hospital, that would have added anxiety seeing the monitor constantly. We know that continuous fetal monitoring isn't really evidence-based and leads to more C-sections. I knew in the hospital that would have been something that would have been required so I'm really glad that that wasn't the case at home. I just think the freedom and the autonomy is really what helped my labor to progress so smoothly without any complications.There weren't people coming in and out of my room, and I just really enjoyed the whole experience. Listening to birth affirmations helped me. I was swaying through the surges. My husband had helped me put up twinkle fairy lights in our room, and we had some flickering votive candles on my dresser. It just created this really nice ambiance and a calming atmosphere.It just felt so good to know that my husband really, truly believed in my ability to do this. I mean, I really have to give him a shout-out because he was right there with me not only through all of labor, but when I knew that I wanted a VBAC from the very beginning, he was right there with me reading all the natural childbirth books, doing all the research on VBAC with me.He was just really supportive. That's something I would say is very important for a VBAC mom is to have a support person who's not just present, but truly supportive of you and knows what you're going to need and does the work with you ahead of time so that you can just focus on laboring and they can be there to make sure you have water, and you're fed if you're hungry, so I was really blessed to have him and to have his full support.Meagan: Absolutely.My husband told me, he said, "I just don't understand." He just didn't understand. I get that he didn't understand, but I love hearing this where we're learning together. I want to say to couples or to partners, even if you don't understand, understand and trust that it's important to your partner and be there for them because, like you were saying, it can make such a big impact in the way you feel, the way you view your birth, and your overall experience.Julia: Right. No, and that's so true because I feel like, most people's support person is their husband, and a lot of men feel like maybe they can't really help as much or just say, "Well, the doctor knows what to do. I'm just here, like, for emotional support."But it's so much more than that. My husband learned ahead of time how to do counter pressure, and I actually really didn't need it. I think he had done it once, but what really helped me the most was just leaning on him. I did that most of the time. Just leaning into him, and letting him support my weight. He also did a really great job of reminding me to just focus on my breathing techniques and just relaxing between the surges.All of those natural pain relief remedies were really, really helpful. I bought a TENS machine and a heating pad, but I ended up not needing any of those.Meagan: But you at least were prepared with them.Julia: I was. Yeah, I was definitely prepared. We also had hung up all my birth affirmations. We had done a lot of meditation and visualization exercises throughout pregnancy, and so I used some of those as well. He was really great at reminding me just saying, "I love you. You're doing it. You're doing a great job." That was very helpful just feeling him there.Meagan: Yeah, absolutely.So with postpartum, this is also another common question. Is it better postpartum from my Cesarean versus my VBAC? What would you say? And any tips that you have for healing through your VBAC?Julia: Yeah, so my postpartum experience this time around is so much better. It's a night and day difference, not just physically healing like that. My VBAC is nothing compared to the C section. I think a lot of people fail to realize that a C-section is major, major abdominal surgery. Anyone else who had major abdominal surgery would be sent home to be on bed rest for weeks and you have to care for a newborn on top of that. With my C-section, I was a first-time mom. It was so overwhelming. Everything was new to me. I had a lot of pain with breastfeeding at first. I attribute a lot of that to the nurses making me pump. I was never sized for flanges. I just used the ones that came with the Medella and they weren't sized to me.I think that caused a lot of nipple damage. I ended up getting mastitis at two weeks postpartum the first time around and had to go back into the hospital for that and just had so much pain with latching that I ended up exclusively pumping for my son. I'm really proud because I was able to do that for two years, so he had breastmilk for two years.Meagan: That is a commitment.Julia: Yes, it was such a commitment. But I'm really, really happy that I did it and it was worth it to me. I just didn't want that negative experience of the birth and all that damage that happened early on from the pump to affect this because I really knew I wanted to breastfeed, and I was able to do it with exclusive pumping.And then this time around, it was just so much better. Breastfeeding is going great, and I've seen some research on that too. When you have a positive birth experience, that can also affect breastfeeding and even the first latch and everything.Just your emotions surrounding postpartum, when you go through something like that and you feel supported and in charge of your birth, you go into motherhood feeling the same way.Meagan: Yeah.Julia: I can't explain how much better it is this time around. That's why I really encourage all moms to know that you can do your own research and especially VBAC moms, there's so much out there about uterine rupture, and when you look at the relative risk versus the absolute risk, these are the kinds of things that you may not know to do because your doctor is just going to present the statistics one way. But we know that the way that those statistics are presented really greatly impacts what decision you make. And it's important to understand that.And so I would say my biggest tip for VBAC moms is to just really do your own research and find a provider who you feel like in your gut is going to be there for you, and is going to really believe in you. Meagan: Absolutely. Absolutely. And that's what I was looking for with my crazy interview process was someone who I didn't just think would be there to be there, but be there to support me and really root for me and really be on my team, not just be there. I just think it makes such a big, big difference. And kind of going away from provider but coming into due dates and waiting longer. When I say longer, past the traditional 39 to 41 weeks. Now you were mentioning, people were even saying at 38 weeks, "Hey, have you had your baby? When are you gonna have your baby?" Oh my gosh. And these people, most of the time, I would say 99% of the time, they really just are excited for you to have your baby. And so if you're listening and maybe you have this situation, do say things like, "Hey, oh my gosh, I'm just so excited for you," not like, "When are you going toa have this baby?" Because it does start taking a toll sometimes on mom's mental health at the end.I wanted to also talk a little bit about due dates because Evidence Based Birth-- Rebecca Dekker, she's incredible. If you guys don't know them yet, go check out Evidence Based Birth. They've got a lot of really great blogs. But there is just a little part of a large blog that I wanted to read about and her little bullet point says, "Is the traditional due date really your due date?" I think this just fits so well here because you were 42 weeks and which day again?Julia: 42 weeks and 5 days.Meagan: 5 days, that's what I was thinking. So 42 weeks and 5 days. So obviously your traditional due date that you were given weeks before wasn't really true. Right? So it says, "Based on the best evidence, there is no such thing as an exact due date, and the estimated due date of 40 weeks is not accurate. Instead, it would be more appropriate to say that there is a normal range of time in which most people give birth. About half of all pregnant people will go into labor on their own by 40 weeks and 5 days for first-time mothers or 40 weeks and 3 days for mothers who have given birth before. The other half will not." Then it says, "Are there some things that can make your pregnancy longer? By far, the most important predictor of a longer pregnancy is family history of long pregnancies, including your own personal history, your mother, your sisters, etc. and the history of the baby's biological father's family history as well." In 2013, there was a large study that was looked at with more than 475,000 Swedish births, most of which were dated with an ultrasound before 20 weeks in that they found that genetics had an increasingly strong influence on your chance of giving birth after 42 weeks. Okay, there's so much more you guys. It talks about if you've had a post-term birth before, you have a 4.4 times more likely chance of having another post-term, if I can read, with the same partner. If you've had post-term birth before, then you switch partners, you have 3.4 times the chance of having another post- term birth with your new partner. And if your sister had a post-term birth, you have a 1.8 times the chance of having a post-term birth. You guys, it goes on and on and on. This is such a great article and eye opening in my opinion. I'm going to attach it in the show notes and it does continue to go on for risk for mothers, risk for infants.What about stillbirth? We know that is a huge topic when it comes to going past your due date just like uterine rupture is a huge topic for VBAC. I feel like when due dates come in, it's stillbirth. And she actually says that. It says up until the 1980s, some research thought that the risk of stillbirth past 41 to 42 weeks was similar to the risk of stillbirth earlier. She's going to go back and talk with how it definitely is a different measurement here, but the stats are there. The evidence is there. But look at you. You went. You trusted your body. You went with your body. You did what you needed to do to take extra precautions and had a beautiful, beautiful experience.Julia: Yeah, I'm really happy that I did trust my intuition and I did the research. All those things that you were talking about like risk of stillbirth and everything that you hear, there's a common thing that goes around social media like, "Oh, nothing good happens past 40 weeks." But that's just not the case.If you look at other countries that are like very similar in economic status to us in the US, due dates are calculated differently everywhere, so who's to say that this mythical 40-week due date is the end all be all? A lot of other countries won't even induce prior to 42 weeks unless there's like an issue. In the US, we see so many people routinely getting induced at 39 weeks, so I just think's it's really a cultural thing, so we we come to believe that it's the safest thing.But when you step back and do your own research, you can get a full picture and you can see, why are we inducing without any, any contraindication? Like why are people being presented Cesarean section as if it's just a minor procedure?I feel like in the Business of Being Born documentary, if you haven't seen it, I would highly recommend everybody watching it really, because it shows how C-sections have become so much more popular and the reasons why they think that is and just the flaws in the medical system. It was just really eye opening and really encouraged me on my VBAC journey. It gave me a lot of tips and information and led me to find other resources. VBAC Facts was another really great thing that I referenced a lot. Evidence Based Birth like you had mentioned, and then of course, listening to The VBAC Link Podcast and podcasts of moms who have really positive VBAC stories because you only hear the negative a lot of the time.With birth in general, I feel like, it's just presented as such a scary thing. I really want to encourage women to know that birth is made to be this way. It doesn't have to be some scary out of control thing where you're at the mercy of a doctor or a provider telling you when to push or telling you to do something that you don't feel comfortable doing. When we trust nature and we surrender to the power of labor, it's really sacred. It's beautiful. It's normal, and most of all, it's safe in most cases.We don't have to fight it or medicalize it. And in the words of Ricky Lake, who gave birth in her bathtub in that stellar documentary Business of Being Born, she had said, "Birth is not an illness. It's not something that needed to be numbed. It needed to be experienced." For anyone who's planning or would like to plan an unmedicated birth, you can get a lot of resistance or people who don't understand. But I really encourage you to know that you can do it, that women have been doing it for generations. And just keep those affirmations in your mind and believe in yourself. You have to do that.Meagan: Exactly. I love that you pointed that out. There are so many times that we do treat birth as this medical event, this illness, this problem, and it's just not. It's not. It's not. I don't know what else to say. It is not. And we have to change our view. And just like you were re saying, it's a cultural thing. We have to change or it's just not going to get better. It could get worse. We're seeing the Cesarean rate. We're seeing these things happen. And there's a problem. There's a problem out there. We have to start stepping back and realizing that birth is not that medical event and we can trust this process. And our bodies were meant to do this. And they do it every day. Every day, all over the world. Every single day, a baby is born, probably thousands. I don't even know the exact number. But we can do this. We don't have to, we don't have to treat it like that.Julia: Right. That's what I really liked about the midwifery model of care. It was just so different to my experience with, with my OB. I think a lot of people fail to realize that in most other parts of the world, low-risk women are attended by midwives and the obstetricians are there to take care of the percentage of women who are having issues. With home birth, you can think, oh well, what if something goes wrong and you're not in the hospital setting?But what a lot of people don't realize is that oftentimes these interventions that are routinely done in the hospital that most of the time they don't even ask for permission to do, or they present it in a way that they're helping you actually lead to some of these devastating consequences, like low-risk women going in and then ending up with a C-section for reasons that they often can't even understand.And so that's something that I really feel passionately about is just encouraging women to advocate for yourself and to know ahead of time, what is routine and why are they offering this? Is this for your benefit or for the doctor's benefit? With all these risks of these different things that can happen, like Pitocin, which is commonly used to induce or augment labor, you might not need that. Or did you know that if they started that you can ask for them to shut it off?You should be in charge of your birth. When you're in that setting, it can be intimidating and you might feel like you don't have a voice, especially when you're already in a vulnerable position in labor. So I was really confident with my midwives' ability to look out for anything that may go wrong. But I love her hands-off approach. She didn't intervene. She just stood back and was just there to witness. There was no telling me when to push. I was able to experience the fetal ejection reflex which was really cool. I just felt my body pushing for me and surrendered to that. She was there to make sure that everything was going smoothly. I was the one who picked my baby up out of the water and she just stood back while my husband and my baby and I met each other for the first time. It was just all really special. That's something I want to say. With the risk of uterine rupture that you hear about with VBAC, that wasn't even in my mind. I didn't have someone there constantly telling me, "Oh, well, we're seeing this on the monitor," or scaring me with the very, very slim chance of rupture.Meagan: Exactly. Oh, so many good tips, such a great story. I am just so grateful that you are here today sharing it with us.Julia: I'm really grateful to be here and to share my story with everybody.ClosingWould you like to be a guest on the podcast? Tell us about your experience at thevbaclink.com/share. For more information on all things VBAC including online and in-person VBAC classes, The VBAC Link blog, and Meagan’s bio, head over to thevbaclink.com. Congratulations on starting your journey of learning and discovery with The VBAC Link.Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/the-vbac-link/donationsAdvertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands

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• Episode 373 Brielle's VBAC Homebirth Transfer in the Dominican Republic + Tools to Prepare for Birth

  Brielle Brasil is a mama’s coach, breathwork facilitator, and somatic trauma resolution therapist. She shares her two birth stories as a foreigner living in the Dominican Republic. Brielle’s first birth was an unexpected, traumatic C-section. After putting in the work to heal, Brielle felt ready to explore birth options that she thought were unattainable. She was creative and intuitive throughout the entire process.Julie and Brielle also dive deeper into how trauma is stored in the body, how somatic trauma resolution can help, and why it’s important not to try to heal trauma on your own.How to VBAC: The Ultimate Prep Course for ParentsFull Transcript under Episode Details COTERIE: Code VBAC20 - Code belowhttps://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/episode-370-sheryls-2vbacs-the-unpredictability-of-birth/id1394742573?i=1000684059728 Julie: All right, Women of Strength. You are listening to The VBAC Link Podcast. This is Julie and I am here with a very special guest today, Brielle. I am really excited to hear her stories. She gave birth in the Dominican Republic twice, both her C-section and her VBAC. We were just talking about that because my previous guest who I just recorded with in episode 370 also lived in the Dominican Republic. She had her babies back in the States. She flew back to the States. It was just such a coincidence. I am mind-blown. What are the chances?Brielle: So wild. Julie: I know. Brielle had both of her babies there. I’m so excited to hear about her stories and her experience, but before we do that, I am going to read a Review of the Week that Meagan texted me this morning if I can find it in all of our text messages. Okay, here it is. This review is on Apple Podcasts from janaerachelle. She says, “I am so happy I found this incredible podcast. After having two prior C-sections, I was convinced I would have to have another C-section for my birth this November. I feel empowered, educated, and hopeful I can do this. Thank you for all of the true facts in a safe space where we can all talk about our birth trauma in a space where we don’t sound ‘crazy’ for doing something that God created our bodies to do.” I love that so much. I think that the birth world is so interesting in lots of different ways and lots of different things. It can be incredibly wild to desire something that can be considered outside of the box. I’m glad that VBAC is becoming more and more common and that we are talking about it more. Sometimes, when I’m so deep in this VBAC world, it can be easy to forget that some people think it is the wildest thing ever. Brielle: Yeah. Absolutely. People in the Dominican Republic for sure fall into that box of, “What? You can actually have a baby vaginally after having a C-section?” People didn’t know that was an option.Julie: Yeah. People just don’t know. All right, let’s get to it. I am so excited to hear your stories. I am really on the edge of my seat right now. Before I have you get into those, I’m just going to introduce you a little bit. This is Brielle. She is a Mama’s Coach, breathwork facilitator, and somatic trauma resolution therapist. She helps postpartum and pregnant women heal from their previous birth trauma, forgive themslves, their bodies, their babies, and their previous team so they can go into their next birth confident, free, and in tune with their motherly intuition fully trusting themselves, their bodies, their babies, and birth.I have lots to say about this, but I’m going to wait until the end because I don’t want to start going off on too many tangents too soon. But I’m excited. I want to hear more. We will definitely talk about that after the birth stories, and I’m super excited. She lives in Virginia, and we are both commiserating about how things are shifting to the chilly side of the weather today, but I am going to sit here cozy in my blanket while I am listening to Brielle’s stories giving birth in the Dominican Republic. Go ahead, Brielle. Take it away, and I am excited to hear. Brielle: Awesome. Well, first of all, thank you so much for having me on here. It’s such an honor, and it feels really surreal because I listened to this podcast a ton during my second pregnancy. Yes. I am not Dominican. I am American, and I was a foreigner having both of my babies in a foreign country. As you mentioned about the woman you recorded with earlier, most foreigners who are in the Dominican Republic don’t have their babies in the Dominican Republic. I was part of an international community, and my husband was an international teacher. It was just assumed that if you are not Dominican, you are going to go back to wherever your home country was to give birth. Right after that, the fact that I was deciding both pregnancies to give birth there because the most important person for me to have at my birth was my husband and the only way to have him at my birth, because it wasn’t a summer baby and he was a teacher. It was an April baby, and then a May baby the next time. The only way to have him there was to have our babies i the Dominican Republic. I’ll just start off with the first birth. I went into it very fearful having a baby abroad where the language spoken is not my first language. Spanish is not my first language. It was fearful solely for the fact that I was doing it in a foreign country not even really realizing the fears that I had around birth itself until later. I found a doula, and I really liked her. I didn’t know much about the OB/GYNs there. She had recommended a couple of them to me and the one that she had used for her births which were all Cesareans, but she said he was a great doctor and he spoke English fluently. I went to him. I stuck with him. Right away, I didn’t feel anything initially wrong. He was very knowledgeable. He was up to date on what seemed like a lot of research. But then as things would progress, he would start to question me asking questions to him which was odd, but at the same time, I was like, “Well, he’s fluent in English. I feel comfortable in that regard. My doula recommended him.” It was my first time doing this, I was just going to stick with him. Then at about 37-38 weeks pregnant, I started to get the real red flags. Red flags as in him starting to talk about induction already and I’m only 37-38 weeks pregnant. At that point, I just felt like, “Well, okay.” It was clear to me that these were red flags, but I also felt like I didn’t have another option. I felt like at that point I was too far along. It was too late in the game. I had seen him my whole pregnancy. I just needed to stay with him. I had prodromal labor for about a week. During that week, this was weeks 39-40. During that week, I went into that office every other day. It was a lot. We were just a little bit obsessive over the time and the clock and everything. I went in several times. I got three membrane sweeps which were all pretty painful. We were trying to “get things to start naturally” and as natural as possible. I know membrane sweeps aren’t really, but we were trying to help things along because I was having that prodromal labor. I would have contractions for hours, and they would stop for hours. Also, my husband and I were trying to have things happen naturally as well, so we were having a lot of sex that last week around the clock. Somewhere, I think, from probably the amount of sex we were having and making sure to go to the bathroom right after, I ended up getting a UTI. I think it was the day before my due date when I started to get sick. I started to get a fever. I started to get a high fever. My husband was like, “We need to go into the doctor.” I didn’t want to because I was fearful of knowing what he was going to say. At that point, I didn’t feel like I trusted him because of the red flags that were coming up. I begged my husband, “Let’s not go. Let’s see if it goes away.” We waited 24 hours, and it didn’t. He was like, “I don’t feel comfortable.” I was like, “I get it. Okay, we’ll go.” We went in. Of course, they checked the baby’s heart rate which was a little bit high. I just felt pretty much like shit. The fever kept coming and going. Because I had the contractions going on and off, he was like, “We need to get labor underway.” They didn’t know yet it was a UTI. They were like, “We need to test and see why you’re sick and run labs.” He was like, “I recommend that you go to the hospital and get induced. We will run all of the tests.”He was afraid I had COVID actually, but it wasn’t that. He was like, “We just need to run the tests, get you induced, and get this thing going on because that shouldn’t be happening.” I didn’t know anything about prodromal labor or any of that. I was scared. I was in a foreign country. I just wanted my baby to be healthy. I was like, “Okay, yeah. Let’s go.” We all went. I got induced that morning. Looking back on it and having done the healing work I did, I can see that I just wasn’t ready. My body wasn’t fully ready yet. My baby wasn’t ready yet. It was just a rushed timing scenario because I got induced that morning. They did the test. They found that I had a UTI, so they were treating me with antibiotics while pumping me with Pitocin. On and off all day long, my fever would go away, then it would come back, then it would go away, and then it would come back. I would pick up contractions and be in labor. That was hard to deal with when I was sick. I felt zero energy hardly at that point being sick. That was at 9:00 in the morning. I got induced. It went on and off all day. The contractions were doing the same thing all day. They would pick up for a few hours, then they would stop for a long while. What was interesting, I noticed, is that every time my doctor would come into the room to check me, my contractions would completely stop around him. Looking back, I can tell I didn’t feel safe with him. I just had past trauma with males. I shouldn’t have ever had a male provider personally. I could tell those things in hindsight, but it was just all happening. By the end of the day in the evening, he was like, “You haven’t made any progression dilation-wise. The baby’s heart rate’s really high, so I suggest we go into a C-section.” My husband and I were just like, “Yeah.” Like I said, we wanted our baby to be healthy. We were fearful. We went into C-section, and we had him. I was just numb through the whole experience because I had really desired everything of my first birth to be natural. I actually wanted a home birth my first go around, but I thought it was illegal in the DR because I didn’t know there were any midwives. There were no birthing centers in the DR. Nobody I had ever talked to had ever had a home birth in the DR, and I was actually told, and my doula actually thought home birth was illegal because it was so, so, so, so rare in the DR. I was just under the impression that it was illegal, so I didn’t plan a home birth. But I tried to plan a hospital birth that would hopefully be as natural as possible. Instead, I got the opposite. I had a lot of the cascade of interventions that I didn’t want to have at all. I wanted things to happen spontaneously and to have minimal time in the hospital. I wanted that skin-to-skin right after, and my baby was taken away from me right after he was born which was very traumatic. I had to work really hard to heal all of that. But nonetheless, he was born. He had pooped himself inside of my womb, so there was meconium there. They told me that his cord was wrapped in a way that he couldn’t progress, and that’s why I wasn’t dilating and he wasn’t descending. It’s like they tried to give me some reasons why that was the right way. It’s not that I don’t believe that, but in hindsight and after a lot of the healing work I did, I can see why everything went down the path it did because I felt rushed at the end of the day. I felt like that word “induction” was being thrown around so much and I didn’t want that. I had to take matters into my own hands and try to do all of the “natural” inductions. Also, at the end of the day, my son was born the week before Semana Fante in the Dominican Republic which is Holy Week which is a huge, huge holiday week, so I did also find out that some of the members of the birth team had plans for Easter week and travel plans, so I knew that there was a bit of a rush from that end which made me feel rushed and just made the whole process one that I needed to heal from in big, big ways. So after I had my son, postpartum was really, really hard. Breastfeeding was hard. Everything was hard. I realize everything was so hard not only because I was a new mom and didn’t have the support I needed, but because my birth was incredibly traumatic– and I didn’t think of it that way at first because I was like, “My son is born. He is healthy.” But then 6 months after I had my son, I was still having physical pain at my scar site. I got it checked out. Nothing medically or physically was wrong with it, but what I know being in the line of trauma work that I do is that our body holds trauma, and everything is connected physically and emotionally within our bodies and within ourselves. About 6 months after I had him, I was still having that pain. I decided to work on my birth trauma. I worked on it from all different levels. I worked on it from the physical level. I started seeing an osteopath who I worked with for the next several months. Within a matter of weeks, a lot of the pain was gone. I also started working on it with a traumatic somatic trauma coach who is also a birth attendant. I found her because she was in the same trauma certification group that I went through. I worked with her for 6 months to heal everything from that birth and all of the trauma that it caused to forgive myself, to forgive my baby, to forgive my team, to feel safe again in my body, to feel at peace, to feel at home in my body, to connect back to my body, to connect to my baby, and just a number of things that we did together somatically and through breathwork to really peel back all of the layers of my birth, and not just my birth, but all of the births that came before me in my lineage to heal and heal deeply. It was a big, big work that we did together. It was not a small undertaking, but I will say that I feel. I feel that the work that I did to heal my first birth spiritually, emotionally, mentally, and physically was the best catalyst I could have had on my side for my next pregnancy and my next birth. So I got pregnant in August of 2022, or sorry, 2023. It’s interesting because I had thought about home birth the first time, and because of the timing, we were again going to have our baby in the DR. Is home birth a thing there? Sure enough, you put it out in the universe, and I started to meet people who were having home birth, mostly foreigners who were having home births in the DR. I think three, which was huge because before, I had not even heard of it. I was like, “​​Wow, okay. This is happening here. This is allowed here. This is legal here. What are you guys doing? What are you guys going through?” I started getting the right contacts of the right people and found out that there is a midwife in Fountaindomingo, one. I met with her. I was so excited because I was like, “​​This is great. She gets to be my midwife.” Then she told me that her dad was sick at the time, and she was going to be helping him. She told me, “I’m not going to be working during the time of your due date.” I was like, “​​Okay, so we just need to look at other options.” Right off the bat, everything I did for my second pregnancy was a 360 from my first one. With my first one, I was like, “Okay, it’s this one guy. It has to be.” I was very narrow because I was scared.With the second one, I was like, “​​Okay, it’s not her. I’m going to keep my options open. I’m going to keep my mind open. We’ll find someone.” My husband just did a Google search of traveling midwives in the US. We had a call with my midwife, Brittany, who is from Texas. Right after the Zoom call, I looked at my husband. I was crying because I felt such a connection with her. I was like, “​​She’s it. She’s the person who has to be at my birth. I feel so safe with her. I feel so seen and supported. She’s everything I would look for in someone to deliver my baby. She’s both nurturing and has a calming presence, but she’s also direct and not going to sugarcoat things. I need a beautiful blend of both.” I was really excited. We ended up signing a contract with her, and in the meantime, I got my prenatal care from an OB/GYN office throughout my pregnancy, and of course, to have a backup option in place. I switched OB/GYNs three times this pregnancy, and the last time I switched, I think, was as late as 32 weeks pregnant. I had been with the second gal. The first two OB/GYNs I was with– they were all women– were from recommendations from the midwife who wouldn’t be working during my birth. She had recommended the first two. The first one, I loved, but she wasn’t fluent in English, so neither one of us felt comfortable in terms of communication and being able to fully communicate when it comes to birth. I was bummed, but that one didn’t work out. I went to the second one she recommended. This one was a lot more fluent in English. I could communicate with her fine, and she was direct, but her bedside manner was so direct that she didn’t have that calming and nurturing confidence. She was confident, but she didn’t have the calming, nurturing side that I also wanted. She said a couple of things that didn’t vibe very well with me. It was so direct that it was hurtful. At 32 weeks, I was like, “​​You know what, babe? I love my first choice for my team, but if something happens, I don’t love my second choice.” I was determined. I just kept looking, and through one of the girls who had a home birth, she had heard of the woman that I went to as my third option. She had recommended, “If you decide to have it in the hospital, here are a couple of people I have heard good things about through friends.” I went to this woman, Lini Capalon, from 32 weeks. I didn’t tell her I was planning a home birth. I decided not to tell her. I told the second lady. She had gotten a little iffy about it because it’s not illegal there, but again, it’s so uncommon there that it’s hard for them to wrap their head around it basically. I’ll put it that way.With the third woman, I didn’t tell her, but she knew I wanted to have a VBAC. She had done a number of VBACs herself, and she had told me before I even started talking to her, she was like, “​​Look. We want this birth to be as natural as possible for your highest chance at VBAC.” She was like, “​​You need to go into labor spontaneously. We don’t want to interfere at all. I don’t want to interfere with you. I don’t want to give any interventions.” She was like, “​​You can go until you’re 42 weeks and 3 days before we’ll then talk about induction.”I was floored because I didn’t think this existed in an OB/GYN in the DR. First of all, that they’re doing VBAC, and secondly, that they’re for it. We were talking about this, Julie, a little bit before we hopped on that the C-section rate in the Dominican Republic is 90%. 9-0 in private hospitals, and public hospitals are really, really not great. If you have the choice, you wouldn’t want to birth in a public hospital. You are already going into a private hospital with a 90% chance of a C-section.Julie: That is so wild. It is so wild. Brielle: Yeah. Yep. Yeah. I learned that through the midwife who was in Santo Domingo. Julie: Well, and I almost wonder if the 10% who are not Cesareans are the ones who go so fast or are on accident. Do you know what I mean? Brielle: Yeah. Yeah. Or just everything progresses, I don’t want to say normally, but quickly.Julie: Quickly, yeah.Brielle: Quickly. You’re not “late” at all. I did have a friend who actually had a vaginal birth in the DR about a month after me. That was very hard for me as well and very triggering because she also had the same doctor as me the first go-around.Julie: Oh no. That’s hard.Brielle: That was a big part of my healing journey too. But yeah, her water broke. She went into labor. She progressed quickly and had the baby. There was not anything out of the “norm”. Anyway, that’s how it needs to happen if you’re going to have a chance. The fact that I had found her, then she was pro-VBAC and had VBAC experience was really rare because I was also saying that VBACs are unheard of in the DR. After I had my second baby, people were like, “​​What? You had your baby vaginally? Didn’t you have a C-section before?” They didn’t know that was possible.I went with her for my backup option. Then, here we go. I was 38 weeks and 5 days pregnant. My midwife is scheduled to come. She has her flight booked for the day before my due date. I’m still 10 days out before she’s supposed to come. I lose my mucus plug, and I have my bloody show. Of course, I message her. She’s like, “​​Well, here’s the thing. You could go into labor anytime now. It could be tomorrow, and it could be 2 weeks from now. We just don’t have any way to predict that.” I was like, “Okay, cool. Great.” But another thing that I had worked largely on this pregnancy and a big reason why I kept changing OB/GYNs and a big reason why I said no to a lot of things during my pregnancy and started speaking my voice is because I found my intuition or re-found it, and really listened to it every step of the way. Any time anything felt the slightest bit off, I was like, “​​Nope. We’re not doing that.” It took an incredible amount of tuning everything out, tuning out all of the noise and opinions and everything that’s out there and really just listening within. After that happened, I lost my mucus plug. She wasn’t supposed to come for 10 days. She tells me, “It could be tomorrow. It could be 2 weeks.” I slept on it, and then the next day, I was like, “​​Brittany, I think you need to get here sooner. When’s the soonest you can come?” This was Friday. She was like, “I can come this Sunday in two days.” I was like, “​​Great. Can you change your flight?” She was like, “​​Yeah. Can you pay the difference?” I’m like, “​​Yeah, that’s fine.” She changes her flight to Sunday. Her Airbnb was on the street that I live on. She gets to her AirBnB at 3:00 PM on Sunday. That night, I had about three or four days of prodromal labor before that. That night, at 7-8:00 PM is when I finally started having regular contractions, and my water broke that night at about 11:00 PM the day that she got there. Julie: Your baby was waiting. They just knew. Brielle: They knew. I knew. I was like, “​​You’ve got to get here sooner.” Baby Alana was waiting. Everything was happening in perfect timing. I told her that my water broke. She came over. Labor started. My contractions were regular. I let my husband sleep because I also didn’t know how long it was going to be because I had prodromal with this one too. I had it for a week before. I’m like, “​​I don’t really know for sure if it’s the real thing. I’m going to let him sleep for now. He supposedly has to work tomorrow, but we’ll see.” Things were regular, active, and intense all night long. He ended up waking up at 4:00 AM and coming up and setting up the birthing tub at that point. I didn’t know if I wanted a water birth or not, but I knew I wanted to have it as a comfort option and I wanted the option should I want to birth in there when the time came. So he set up the tub, and my doula came over. I had pretty intense contractions until Monday morning. Our nanny came over because my son, my 2.5-year-old was just 2 at the time, he woke up and he had school. She was getting him ready for school. He woke up, and even though the nanny was with him, that slowed my contractions down a little bit because it’s hard when your son’s not there to be in mom mode somewhat. Things slowed down a little bit while he was getting ready for school. He went to school. I was feeling a little frustrated because things had slowed down. My husband was like, “​​Let’s go outside. Let’s go for a walk.” We left the apartment. We went for a walk. My husband had me doing squats which I wish in hindsight I had reserved that energy. I didn’t know how long labor would go on. I was hunched over. Cars were stopping, “Are you okay?” as we were walking down the street and people were on their way to work because things were picking up again.I’m like, “​​Okay, I think we need to get back to the apartment.” He helped me. We get back to the apartment. We get back inside. Things got really intense again. It was Monday morning. I’m in and out of the birthtub. I’m on the birth ball listening to HypnoBirthing tracks using my breath. I’m a breathwork facilitator, so it wasn’t hard for me to tune into different breath patterns that were feeling good and supporting the intensity of everything. Monday afternoon came. My son got off to school. He came home. The same thing happened. They slowed down a bit while he got lunch and got ready for his nap. He went for his nap, then things really picked up. My midwife knew I didn’t want to be checked because of the whole thing before of, “You’re 1 centimeter,” and a week later, “You’re 1.5 centimeters. You’re not progressing,” type thing. I knew I didn’t want to be checked, but I think she could tell by the intensity and by the look in my eyes that I must be close to needing to push.She said, “I know you don’t want to be checked, but do you mind if I check you and not tell you the number just to see where things are at?” This was Monday afternoon. I’m like, “​​Sure, that’s fine.” She checked me. I was like, “​​You can tell my husband where I’m at, and he can decide if I should know.She checked me, and then a bunch more of my water gushes out, and then she blurts out, “You’re fully dilated. You’re ready to push.” I was like, “​​Really? That’s awesome. Great. Sounds great to me.” It had been a little over 12 hours at this point. I was like, “​​Okay.” But I also told her, “Really? I don’t feel the urge to push. I don’t feel like I need to push.” She explained to me that VBAC patients sometimes don’t feel that urge. That’s possible that you might not feel the urge. I was like, “​​Okay.” I leaned on her a little bit more for what positions to try and stuff like that and the actual mode of how to push because again, it wasn’t coming naturally. It wasn’t coming instinctively because I didn’t feel that urge. For the next, I think, 4 or 5 hours, I pushed at home. I pushed in the tub. I pushed out of the tub. I pushed on my bed. I pushed on the floor. I pushed in kneeling, hands and knees. You name the position. I feel like I probably tried it. I was absolutely exhausted because, of course, I didn’t sleep the night before. Eating was hard. I wasn’t getting what I needed nutritionally to keep up energetically with how long the labor was getting and how long the pushing was getting, but I also didn’t want to eat. I felt like I couldn’t get hydrated. I was exhausted. There were a number of times I looked at my husband, and I looked at my doula, “I can’t do this anymore.” They were encouraging me, “Yes, you can.” I got on my hands and knees and prayed. I was listening to my tracks. I had my crystals that I work with, and I’m just talking to my spirit guides and all of this stuff. After 4 or 5 hours, I was beat. I was so defeated. I was beat. My midwife was like, “​​Why don’t we give it a rest for a little bit?” She was intermittently checking our baby’s heart rate and checking me. All of that was fine. The baby was fine. I was fine the whole time, so she kept saying, “Both of you are fine. You can stay here longer. There is no rush because both of you are fine. There is no need to go to the hospital if you don’t want to. If you want to, that’s an option, and it’s fine.” I was like, “​​No. I’m just going to take a break from pushing, and try to rest.” Of course, I’m in active labor, so trying to rest is hard, but I just stopped with trying to push for a couple of hours, then it was getting into Monday night. My son had gone to bed for the night. It had been a few hours of this “resting”, but really intense contractions, and she asked me, “Do you want me to check you again? Do you not? Just to see what’s going on. I don’t know what’s happened.” She checked me.She said, “I have bad news.” I was like, “​​Okay, give it to me, I guess.” She explained to me that there are two layers of the cervix, the outer and the inner. When she had checked me before I pushed for that 4 or 5 hours, she realized she could only feel one layer. The layer that she felt was fully dilated, but then when she was checking me this time Monday night, she was feeling the other layer, and it wasn’t fully dilated. It was around a 7. She said that was why our baby– she had been sitting so low for this whole time. She was there, but couldn’t get around that other layer which is why the pushing wasn’t really doing anything to get her out. I was like, “​​Okay.” It was hard to hear, but also kind of relieving to hear in a way because I was like, “​​Well, I just did all of that work for nothing? What?” That’s what it felt like, but then it also felt like, “Okay, well, at least there is a reason why I was pushing, and it wasn’t happening. It just wasn’t.” I trusted the timing. I was so trusting in this birth. I was so trusting of the timing. I was so trusting of my baby. I was so trusting of my body and myself. I had done so much work around that to trust myself. I was like, “​​Okay.” I rested some more. Everything was fine. I continued to labor at home until about midnight. I was in the birthing tub, and at about midnight, I started to feel absolutely terrible, just incredibly weak. I had now been up for over two days and had two nights with no sleep. The four days before that was bad sleep because it was prodromal labor. My body was really exhausted. I was emotionally exhausted and mentally exhausted in every way.It was midnight. I was going through the second night now. I was just like, “​​Guys, I don’t feel well. I feel really bad.” She checked my vitals. Everything was fine. I was like, “​​I feel like my blood pressure was really low. I felt like I was going to pass out.” She was like, “​​Have you eaten any protein today?” I had eaten a lot of carbs and was staying hydrated. I was like, “​​No, I guess not.” She was like, “​​Let’s try some protein.” I absolutely didn’t want that, but my husband was force-feeding me a ton of chicken. My husband does acupuncture as a side thing. I was like, “​​Can you give me acupuncture to progress things or help with this terrible feeling I have to give me some energy?” He did acupuncture on me. He was force-feeding me chicken. Right after that, I got back in the birthing tub. I projectile vomited everywhere. After I threw up, I was like, “​​Oh, I feel better now.” It was so bizarre. I was going through a whirlwind at this point. I was like, “​​I feel better. I feel like I can continue now.” This was midnight now. My midwife said, “Okay, you can continue.” I continued the next four hours in and out of the tub, on the birthing ball. My husband was asleep at this point. My doula had to leave because her daughter was sick. I’m dozing off in the tub between every contraction which was only every 15 seconds because I was so tired, then the contractions would come. They’d be level 100, insane intensity. They’d be a minute and a half, then I’d get to fall asleep for 15 seconds then wake back up and do it again, and do it again on repeat for 4 or 5 hours. Then it’s 4:30 AM. I know it’s getting close to rush hour. There’s a lot of traffic during rush hour in Santo Domingo. If we tried to go to the hospital during rush hour, it probably would have taken us 2, maybe 3 hours to get there. I told my midwife at 4:30 AM, “Can you check me?” She checked me, and that same layer was still at a 7. It was maybe a 7.5. I told her, “I’m ready to throw in the towel.” What I meant by that was, “I’m ready to surrender to this process,” which means I’m not going to do it here at home anymore. Intuitively, that felt very right to me to go. It was time to try something different. I had been home for 35 hours at labor. We had worked with everything that was there. I had all of my tools that I had, and I felt like something needed to change.Julie: You were so tired. You worked so hard for so long. An exhausted body is just exhausted and not effective at laboring.Brielle: No, not at all.My midwife and my husband packed up my bag. My midwife ended up having to stay at our house because my son was sleeping. Our nanny couldn’t get there until 6:00 or 7:00 AM. My doula, her kid was sick, and she had to go home. My husband and I had to go to the hospital. The next two hours were insane. Once I decided I was going to the hospital, I basically had no breaks in my contractions. The time that they were packing my bags, and then we were going down to the car and driving to the hospital which was quick because there was no traffic at 5:00 AM. Those 15 minutes, we thought we were going to have the baby in the car. At this point, I was having zero breaks. The intensity was through the roof. We walk into the hospital. My husband has to do paperwork, so I’m all by myself. I’m just roaring like a lion at this point. I’m barreled over. This is so intense. I don’t have my tub or my ball or anything at this point. I didn’t have any pain relief medically, but I didn’t even have the things I had at home to help me. I’m just barreled over and roaring and screaming and super primal. My doctor finally showed up. He finishes the paperwork. That whole thing was probably 2 hours of me not having any type of relief, really, just to get to the hospital. That was the toughest part, I think.Then my OB/GYN, Leni, comes in. She checks me, and she’s like, “​​You’re fully dilated. You’re ready to push.” She didn’t know I had been at home. She didn’t know everything that was going on and that I was planning a home birth. I said, “I am not pushing this baby out right now.” I said, “I pushed at home for 5 hours. I’ve been in labor for 35 hours. I haven’t slept in 3 days. I projectile vomited everything.” I’m not saying this. I was huffing and puffing through this, but I looked at her, and I’m just like, “​​Give me an epidural now. I’m not doing this anymore.” She was like, “​​Technically, we’re not supposed to. You’re fully dilated.” She was like, “​​Okay, all right. We’ll get you the epidural.” They wheeled me up. They gave me the epidural. My husband didn’t go into the room with me. I thought I was just getting the epidural in this room, but it was the birthing room. I didn’t know because I hadn’t done the full tour of things beforehand. I mean, I did a little bit, but I didn’t put it together at the time where I was getting the epidural. I thought I was going to have a break to take a nap. I was going to get the epidural, then I was going to take a nap, then I was going to push the baby out. That’s not how it went. They were like, “​​All right, whenever you feel the next contraction.” I’m like, “No, I can’t. Where’s my husband? My husband’s not here.” They were like, “​​It’s hospital policy. Nobody can be in here with you.” I was like, “​​What?”Julie: No.Brielle: Yeah. I lost my shit. I lost my shit. I am like, “​​Absolutely not. Get him in here now! I’m not doing this without him. He’s been here every minute beside me for the last 35 hours, but also for the last 7 years of my life. I’m not doing this without him.” They were all looking at each other, like, “​​Look, when it gets close and when he is crowning, we will bring him in.” I was like, “​​Okay,” so I pushed when the contractions came. I was surprised I could still feel the contraction, but after the epidural, thank God. It was what my body needed at that point. I was like, “​​Thank you for modern medicine. There is a reason it exists.” But after 30 minutes of pushing, they just randomly asked me, “Do you have a doula?” I didn’t say anything about my actual doula, but I said, “My husband is my doula. Get him in here.” They were like, “​​Okay, okay. We’re going to bring him in now.” They brought him in. He started coaching me like a drill sergeant or a CrossFit coach or something, but he was like, “Just do it!” He knew me so well, and he knew in that moment that I wanted a VBAC so badly, and he also knew everything I had been through that previous 35 hours. He knew we needed to do this. He knew we needed to get on with it. He was coaching me and basically screaming at me. It was exactly what I needed in that moment. After he came in, 30 minutes later, I pushed her out. She was born. They brought her to my chest. Everything my OB/GYN told me, she stuck by her word. She was like, “​​You will have skin-to-skin. You will have that hour.” They asked me, “Can we take her to do x, y, and z?” I was like, “​​No, not yet. Don’t take her yet.” They did the things they needed to while she was on top of me. Everything they had promised, they fulfilled. That, I feel like, was why I just felt intuitively really good about both options, my first option and my backup option. I went with that, and it was exactly the way it was supposed to be. Julie: Yeah, I love that. I think being able to trust is such an important thing in the birth space, being able to trust yourself, your care team, your partner, all of your different options, your birth location, and all of that is just so connected to how our bodies can work and trust that process, and yeah. That was great. So good. Brielle: Yeah, that was a huge part of my experience. It was learning to trust myself, the timing, my baby, and my body fully. Healing my experience and just following my intuition completely.Julie: Yeah, I love that so much. Do you want to talk a little bit more about what you did to prepare with the breathwork and the somatic trauma work? I mean, did you get into that before or after? I’m assuming before because your baby is pretty young. How old is your baby now?Brielle: My baby was 5 months the other day. In between pregnancies, and I was not pregnant. I was 6 months postpartum from the first one that I started doing it personally for myself. Do you mean as a practitioner when I got into the work? Julie: Mhmm. Brielle: As a practitioner, I got into this work 5-6 years ago. I was already facilitating breathwork and coaching people for trauma, but not birth trauma. I had gotten my trauma resolution coaching certification and my trauma-informed breathwork certification before I ever had kids. I was really excited to get to use my breathwork and all of my tools and everything for my first birth, but that ended up going a completely different way. I did still use it, but it looked a lot different than I thought it would. I got into this work. I was coaching people on their trauma through a somatic way. Basically, trauma lives in the cells of our body, and it stays in the cells of our body unless we somatically move it through our physiology. There are two major ways we can do that. One is through a type of somatic coaching that I do, and the other is through breathwork. They are both somatic practices, but one is using the breath in a very intentional and activating way to help move that trauma through our cells and out. The other one is using a very hands-on– they are both body-based, but one is more of a visualization. I take you through an experience where you are feeling where things are living in your body. Basically, you are attuning to where there are certain activations in your body as I take you through a lived, traumatic experience. We are finding where that trauma lives in your body with a somatic coaching so I’m able to use a lot of tools to help you visualize it and then move that out.Then with breathwork, it’s similar, but we are using the breath. The breath is automatically going to the spaces energetically where the trauma is living to help move it out.Julie: Yeah. I love that. I love that so much. It reminds me. I’ve done a lot of therapy work. My therapist would ask. I’ve done lots of group therapy, individual sessions, and all of the things. One of my therapists who would lead our group sessions would say, “What do you feel and where are you feeling it?” We would take turns identifying what in their body needs to be addressed. You’ve got to describe it. What does it feel like? Does it have a sensation or a taste or a smell? Is it heavy or is it light? Does it have a color? Where in the body is it?I hated it, to be honest. It was the worst thing ever. Brielle: It’s really deep.Julie: It’s crunchy. Yeah. It’s deep, and you have to be comfortable getting uncomfortable, and reaching and stopping and being in tune with your body. I hated it so bad for a very long time, but even now, I don’t do those group sessions or anything or anymore. Every once in a while, I’ll scan my body. “Okay, what do I feel and where am I doing it?” I try to get my kids to do it, and they’re like, “I don’t know what the freak you mean, Mom.” They’re still young, but I know what you are talking about with that work. What is it? Moving it out, how to release it. That’s so important. Brielle: It’s so great. It transcends as I work with a client. They feel it. They see it in a certain way. It has textures, colors, and shapes, and we stay with it. We don’t stay with it beyond the point that they feel they can stay with it. If that’s super uncomfortable for them, we go back to our resource which I do at the beginning of the session.I’m not taking them through an experience in a way that is beyond their capacity to move through it. The body won’t ever take them through something that they don’t feel ready to handle. I think that’s really important to specify because if you’re just talking about this work and you have never heard of it, that can sound really scary.It is deep work, but at the same time, because of my trainings and with breathwork as well being trauma-informed, I never take a client to a place that their body is not actually physiologically ready to go into. Julie: Yeah, that’s really important. It’s such an intuitive thing. You talked a lot about intuition too. One thing I wanted to say before we close out the episode is that you mentioned earlier in the episode about learning to forgive yourself. That was something I don’t think we talk about a lot or think about a lot, but it’s something that I had to go through as well after my C-section. My thing was forgiving myself for not knowing what I didn’t know going into my birthIt can sound kind of silly. What do I need to forgive myself for? But sometimes, we focus a lot on forgiving others in the situation and our team or our partner or whatever, but we don’t often direct that inward. I think that’s such an important part to give yourself grace and mercy and love and forgiveness and go through and not judge yourself too harshly or hold yourself to an unrealistic standard especially when you didn’t have the information then that you have now.So I think that’s an important part of the process as well.Brielle: That’s a big amount of the work I do with my clients as well is that self-forgiveness piece and really forgiving their bodies because a lot of them feel like, “My body failed me or my body is broken.” That was a lot of work I had to do myself personally after my first birth to realize, “No, my body didn’t fail me. My body’s not broken. Nothing was wrong with me.” But if we don’t do that forgiveness work for your body to yourself, that trauma is still going to be living in ourselves and still expecting. I’m not going to say it’s going to give you a repeat experience, but we’re still having that physiological presence where like attracts like. That’s still in there. That’s still the drawing factor of something that your body is expecting. It’s still holding that past experience.Julie: Right. Yep. That makes a lot of sense. I encourage everybody to do the work, but also, I think’s important to mention this a little bit is to find somebody trusted that you can do it with. It’s important to not dig too deeply into past traumas or things like that unless you have a solid support around you like a therapist, any mental health professional, an energy worker or people like that to help guide you through it so you don’t get too deep into things that you are not prepared to handle or heal.Brielle: Absolutely. That’s what I do as well through the lens of breathwork and somatic coaching. Julie: So where can people find you?Brielle: Yeah, it’s definitely not something I recommend doing on your own. Have somebody to hold that space for you who knows what they're doing. People can find me on Instagram. It’s just my name at Brielle Brasil. Brasil is with an S. You can reach out through there, and that’s where I’ll be.Julie: Perfect. We’ll link that information in the show notes for anybody who wants to go give her a follow as well.All right, well thank you so much for sharing your story. I really appreciate it.Brielle: Thank you so much. Julie: It’s so cool to hear your story and your journey and your process. Thanks for being here. Brielle: Awesome. I appreciate you. Thank you so much. It was an honor.ClosingWould you like to be a guest on the podcast? Tell us about your experience at thevbaclink.com/share. For more information on all things VBAC including online and in-person VBAC classes, The VBAC Link blog, and Meagan’s bio, head over to thevbaclink.com. Congratulations on starting your journey of learning and discovery with The VBAC Link.Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/the-vbac-link/donationsAdvertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands

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• Episode 372 Ali’s VBAC + Fear Release and Advocacy (166 REBROADCAST)

  We are so excited to be joined today by our friend, Ali Levine. You will instantly feel her bright energy as she shares her awesome VBAC story with us.A celebrity stylist and TV personality, Ali is no stranger to being in the limelight. With her first pregnancy, she had glamorous photoshoots, went to flashy events, and made a dreamy birth plan. When the natural water birth of her dreams quickly turned into a traumatic and invasive C-section, Ali was left confused, disappointed, and depressed. Ali drastically changed her approach to birth with her second pregnancy. Once she began researching VBAC, Ali was determined, intentional, and never looked back.Ali’s VBAC journey is one of a life-changing, spiritual awakening that we absolutely love and know you will love too. You can also listen to Ali’s HBAC story on Episode 264!Additional linksAli’s Podcast: Everything with Ali Levine How to VBAC: The Ultimate Preparation Course for ParentsFull Transcript under Episode Details Julie: You are listening to The VBAC Link podcast and we are so excited. We have been chitchatting with Ali today and she has a really amazing birth story to tell. We cannot wait for you to hear it. I am sitting here in my dentist’s parking lot. I literally just got done getting a filling. I had to rush out so that I could be on the call to listen to Ali’s story today. And so before we do that, Meagan is going to go ahead and give us a Review of the Week.Meagan: Yes, I am. Oh my gosh, you guys are in for a treat. Ali is so fun. We have just been talking to her for like, five minutes and I am just already giddy to hear her story. She has got such a fun, live personality to her. It’s going to be awesome. This review is from jovannaf1 and in parentheses, it says “Germany.” So, I am wondering if she is either in Germany or her name is German.Julie: Ooh, that would be fun.Meagan: I know, right? Her title is “Love it.” This is from Apple Podcasts. It says, “Thank you so much for spreading such an important message, ladies. I am currently pregnant with my third child and your podcast has given me so much help and resources to know that VBA2C is possible. I find women’s stories so inspiring. Thank you.”And we want to thank you for leaving that awesome review and thank all of you who are listening and support us along this journey. This podcast has been absolutely so much fun. We are so excited to be able to continue offering all of the stories and continue to get submissions. We get submissions all the time and it is always just so awesome to read them even if they are not all shared. We read every single one. They are all incredible. So, thank you, thank you, thank you and if you haven’t already, please drop us a review. It means the world to us and we will read it on a podcast one day.Julie: Do you know what is so funny? My mom, I don’t even think she knows what a podcast is still. It is so funny because sometimes when we are chatting, I will say, “You know, Mom? Look. Look at these reviews. See? I am actually helping people with what I do. I am really making a difference.” She looks at me and she smiles and she is like, “I know you are.” I am like, “No but really, Mom. Look at all my reviews!”It’s just so fun. We really do love them and thank you guys for helping my mom know that I am actually helping people.Meagan: Okay, so we are going to jump into this episode because like I said, you guys are in for a treat. You’re going to notice right off the bat, Ali is just such a fun person to listen to. She has had a VBAC and we just need to give her a little introduction if you would not mind, Ali. First of all, can I just tell you? Maybe you’ve heard this before. This is not VBAC-related. This is in regards to your Instagram page. I don’t know why. So, it is Ali Levine and I always read it like “Avril Lavigne” every single time. When you started to contact us, I was like, “Avril Lavigne is contacting us?!”Julie: “He was a skater boy. She said, ‘See you later boy.’”Meagan: I was like, “Oh my gosh.” So, it is not Avril Lavigne. It is Ali Levine and, is it LaVINE or LaVEEN?Ali: No, it’s LaVEEN. It is so funny because I have had this said to me several times. People will be like, “So, do you know her?” I am like, “I think she is a distant cousin.” Same with Adam. You know what I mean? It’s so funny. I have actually styled Adam back in the day when I was styling different celebrities. It is just so funny when people say that to me because I crack up. So, yes, no. I am not Avril Lavigne, but I bring the same kind of flavor, I think, as she does.Meagan: You are so awesome. Yeah, it is just so funny. It is just how it reads. It just automatically goes to Avril Lavigne in my mind, but you are so awesome. We think you are awesome. And, yeah. As you were saying, you are a celebrity stylist, which, how cool is that? Motherhood, fashion, lifestyle expert, and TV personality. I mean, you are going to hear it coming out right here. You are going to see it on her Instagram page. If you haven’t, go right now. It is @alilevinedesign. So, it is @alilevinedesign. Go check her out. It is super fun. I think you actually have a couple, like Everything with Ali Levine, right? Like, you have a couple of pages.Ali: Yes, that’s my podcast.Meagan: That’s your podcast.Ali: Everything with Ali Levine is my podcast, yes.Meagan: Yes. Ali Levine. So, go listen to her. It is just so fun. So, okay. I am just going to read your bio. Is that okay?Ali: Whatever you want.Meagan: Whatever I want, all right. So it says, “Ali Levine believes that no matter where you roam, from the laundry room to the red carpet, authenticity is your superpower and confidence is your best accessory.”I love that. The week your podcast goes on, we need to make a little word blurb and put that and put your name in that. It’s amazing.Julie: I can make a shirt. I want to make a shirt.Meagan: Do it. Let’s do it. “The New York-hotshot-turned-Hollywood style maven delivers a real, raw look at her own motherhood journey amid the treasures she’s uncovered in the universal search for authenticity, spiritual wholeness, and happiness.”Seriously, so excited to have you. I know that you have two beautiful daughters. We are excited to hear about both of their births. So, before I take up all the time ranting and raving about how awesome you are, let’s let everyone hear about how awesome you are from you and your awesome story.Ali: Aw. Well, thank you so much for having me. I was telling you before we started recording-- truly, I am so honored to be here tonight. I listen to you guys literally every day still, now. I was listening my entire pregnancy. My doula, Stacey, has given your podcast to so many different clients when she is like, “Hey, this client is struggling. What should I have them listen to?” And I am like, “Have them listen to The VBAC Link.” You guys have been such a godsend, truly. Especially during the pandemic, and everything that was going on with my birth, and plans changing every day, the only solid piece I had was with you guys. I literally had you in my ear as much as humanly possible to keep putting the intention that I was going to get my VBAC and I did with my second daughter. It was so freaking magical and healing. It makes me cry still.Meagan: Well, I love it because one of the things that I feel sometimes weird about even though it’s my own podcast is, I still go back and listen to all the stories. I am not having babies anymore. I am not preparing for a VBAC, but all of these stories are just so inspiring. And honestly, they help me because I can send these to my clients. So many of these are powerful and educational for my own clients, so I am excited to hear that both you and your doula are still with us. You’re still hanging out with us even though you rocked your VBAC and, yeah. We are just so excited that you are with us.Ali: Well, thank you. I agree with you completely and if there is anything I have learned from my social media and my own podcast, it is that beautiful authenticity, that sharing of that real and rawness, and being able to be vulnerable and share all of that. Not only is it so healing and beautiful for the individual, but it is so empowering for the other women listening and for the moms that are going through it. It is like, we are all there for each other and in that sense, we are all really going for our VBAC and when you get to hear these other stories-- like, during my pregnancy, I remember finding you guys randomly when I was searching for VBAC support and I was listening. I just started falling in love with the stories and I was like, “Oh my gosh. I could picture myself in that position. Oh my gosh.” And to feel like I could do it, it was such an empowering feeling. So, kudos to you guys, truly, for this show.Meagan: Oh, thank you so much. Thank you. It has been so rewarding. It truly has.Ali: That’s amazing.Julie: Yeah, thank you. It is fun to come full circle, where we have people who were listening to the podcast and are on the podcast. I just feel like it is really cool when you were listening to the stories, and you were getting inspired by the stories, and then you get to share your story now and inspire other people. Then, we have this domino effect where people are listening to the podcast, and then sharing their stories, and then others are listening to their stories and then sharing their stories. It is just this really cool community and platform that we have built. It just makes me really happy.Ali: No, I love it. And you can hear that with you guys. Like, truly. Every time you listen, you hear that happiness and how much you guys celebrate everyone who is on and their stories and it is like-- something that I have learned with my second daughter is, birth is truly beautiful. It is something that I honestly with my first, especially after having quite a traumatic C-section, I really was in a fear-based place. I am so grateful that I switched from that fear to that love, and that transformation, and all that because it really is. As intense as it can be, the more you can be intentional, the more you can empower yourself, no matter what the circumstance, it is transformational and it is life-changing and so many ways. Not just in, of course, the fact that you give birth, but in my opinion, you are reborn. There is a spiritual awakening, at least for myself. It has just been so magical for me to get to really, really dive into it. And so, I am excited to share it with you guys.Meagan: Well, we are excited to hear it.Ali: All right, so going back to Amelia. When I got pregnant-- we talked about the fact that I am a celebrity stylist and I do a lot with television and Hollywood and all of that. And so, when I got pregnant, I had just come off of being on a show on Bravo, so people nationally knew my pregnancy. A lot more eyeballs were watching my pregnancy than I expected them to be and watching my journey, which was really amazing and cool, but also a lot of pressure at the same time.I really didn’t realize how much it played into my actual pregnancy and birth. When I was in the midst of thinking about what I wanted to have for a birth plan, I was of course very much in the mindset of like, “I really want to have a natural birth, and I want to have a tub birth, and I want it to be beautiful, and I want flowers, and I want this, and I want that.” I am a more natural person in general in how I like to do things. I like to seek out natural options before I go to something else. And so for me, it felt like it really aligned and it was what I wanted to do.I honestly didn’t really do my research or homework into what that looked like. I got a midwife. I got a doula, but I didn’t do research beyond that. I didn’t really look into what it potentially could be. It was more just like I made sure I had my team and I made sure I had a backup doctor with that team in case things didn’t go that way just to make sure I was safe, and that was it. I didn’t really do much research I guess I would say.And so, once it came time for me when I went into labor-- First off, I will share that I was getting really fed up with everybody asking me when I was going to pop when I was going to have the baby. My parents were sitting and looking at me like this balloon that was going to pop and I am like, “Oh my gosh. It is okay. I am fine. They checked. The baby is fine. I am fine.” But every two seconds it was like, “Why haven’t you gone into labor? How come she hasn’t come yet?” I was like, “I don’t know.” It was a lot of pressure, honestly. I got so fed up at around-- I think it was at 40 weeks and I said to my husband, “I can’t deal anymore. If one more person asks me, I am going to lose it.” So, I took castor oil, which I don’t advise.Meagan: I did that with my first birth too.Ali: Did you? Okay.Meagan: Yes, and everyone was asking me the same questions. I had one coworker who was like, “Do I need to get you a wheelbarrow to wheel you around the office?” I am like, “Shut up.”Ali: Right. Nobody wants to hear that. It is funny for a minute and then you are like, “Please, just let me be because clearly, I am uncomfortable, and I am trying to be at peace with this, and I am trying to allow my baby to come when they are supposed to come,” which, you know. It is easier said than done. And then you’re sitting there and they are like, “Well, you haven’t popped yet.” My mom was like, “Well, I had you and they had to induce me. Well, what if that is what you need? What is going on?” And I was like, “Oh my gosh. Let’s just leave all of the pressures off of me please and let my body do its thing.” I couldn’t deal.So, I took castor oil. It did definitely jumpstart something because all of a sudden, five hours later, my water broke and I was going into labor. But I went into pre-labor and pre-contractions because of the castor oil. And so, we think that now, obviously in hindsight, that it probably pushed her too fast and she wasn’t ready. Because first off, it made me feel really uncomfortable. I went into my birth center to my midwife and I wasn’t really dilated past even a 3, and so she sent me home and was like, “You know, go home and go to sleep. Try to do this and try to do that.” Of course, I couldn’t do any of those things. I was losing it at home trying to stay calm and wait for her to come. We went back to my birth center and then I was finally progressing a little bit more. I still wasn’t active, but she took me because I think she felt bad that I was struggling.And so, we go to my midwife’s birth center and we are there. Hours of really hardcore, manual, full-blown natural labor, really doing the work. Squatting, on the toilet, on the ball, in the shower, in the bed, on all fours, just constant, constant, and it was a good day of full-blown movement trying to get my body to do what I needed to do, and progress, and make things happen.I finally started getting too active and she was like, “All right. Let’s transition you to the tub so that we can get you ready and get you comfortable if that’s where you want to be. I got in the tub and I immediately felt super sick, and super overwhelmed, and dehydrated, and also nauseous. I threw up. She was like, “All right. Let’s get you out.” So, I got back on the ball. I got back on the toilet and I felt awful.So then, they lowered the water in the tub and everything. My doula was putting a washcloth on me, and essential oils, and trying to calm me. I could feel that I just felt off. We went back into the tub because I told her that I really wanted to give birth there and so she was like, “All right. Let’s breathe, and take our time, and see where we are.” At that point, I was in the tub and I was almost at 30 hours of being in labor. She was like, “You know, you are only at the beginning of active labor. I think I was technically at 6-6.5, something like that. I wasn’t fully progressing. She was getting concerned that things weren’t really fully progressing and I was really losing my stamina and my strength because I had been pushing and moving for so long.She was like, “Let’s talk about interventions.” Of course, being someone who did want natural and had a “birth plan” and all that, I wanted nothing to do with that. I was like, “No, no, no. I want to just stay here. Let me just progress. Leave it alone.” She stepped out of the room, my midwife, and made a phone call to the backup doctor at the hospital to let him know what she was thinking. I guess, of course, they advised each other that I should go in. And so, they got me out of the tub. That was a whole scene in itself. That could have been on a freaking reality show. It was like, getting me out, my parents are in the waiting room. We asked them not to be there, and they’re pacing, and they’re flipping, and everything is a mess. Everyone is flipping out. “Am I okay? What is happening?” It was just so much pressure.I get into my husband’s truck. I am fine. I am in active labor, but I am totally fine. Baby is safe and I am fine. We drive over to the hospital. I get there and they check me in and I get to my room. They checked me and they were like, “All right. You progressed a little bit more, but she is stuck in the birth canal at this point. So we are going to give you some Pitocin to ramp things up and try to move her.” They put me on-- I think it was 15, I think, is the highest you can be? I didn’t go from a small amount. It was like literally, they cranked me up and I went from full-blown natural-- it was awful. I went from full-blown natural at the birth center in the dark with my music, with my oils, all of that to bright lights, fluorescent, hospital, screaming, panic, everybody in your shit if you will. It was just crazy and then it was like oh, and then this Pitocin that was cranked to no end. I couldn’t handle it. I immediately was like, “Oh my gosh. I can’t breathe. I feel uncomfortable.” I’m like, crying. I was really struggling. So then they were like, “All right. Well, let’s give her an epidural.” They cranked that all the way up. I went from feeling like I couldn’t handle it to I couldn’t feel anything and then I felt super sick.I threw up again. I just felt awful. I just remember in that moment feeling so down and feeling like I failed at what I was trying to do. I remember even now, that heavy moment of, “What just happened? Why am I here? What is all of this? This is nothing of what I wanted. I was so overwhelmed.” And so fast forward, I got to 40 hours. We spent 10 more hours at the hospital. We got to 40 hours. My doctor came in and was like, “All right. Well, at least you have progressed now to basically complete. We are going to give this a go and have you really push and make this happen.” I am like, “Okay.” And so I am pushing, but I really couldn’t feel it to be honest. The epidural, they said, was supposed to wear off, but it was like I really could not-- I just could not feel it.They were like, “Push. Push. Push.” I am pushing. I am pushing. They are like, “Push harder.” I am pushing as much as I could. She comes down. I obviously, really couldn’t see her, but everybody else could and they were like, “But then she shot back up in the back birth canal,” which I obviously didn’t even know was a thing. And so, she shot down, and then she shot back up. Then they were like, “All right. We are going to go again.” She shot down again. He went to grab her and she shot back up. I just remember my doctor looking at me and being like, “Okay. We are going to take a break and then I will be back.”He went and actually said to me, “I am going to go get dinner and then come back.” At first, I was like, “Oh, that is so rude,” but my doula and midwife advised me because they were still there with me. They advised me that the reason he did that was to buy me more time because if he wasn’t present technically there shouldn’t have had me had a baby without him unless it was an emergency.So they were like, “He is buying you time.” So I was like, “Okay.” I didn’t realize at that time that there were a lot of decisions that needed to be made. What are we going to do? What are we going to keep trying? Are we going to do something else? C-section hadn’t even been in my mind because I hadn’t even been talked to about a C-section, prepped around a C-section, like nothing. So I was not thinking that at all. I was just thinking, “We are just going to wait longer. I am going to rest and we are going to go again.” Everybody leaves the room. My husband sits with me and he turns to me. We were at almost 42 hours at this point. He looks at me and he goes, “Don’t you want to meet her now?” I started bawling. I am like, “Are you kidding me? Like, are you kidding me? Of course, I want to meet her now, but I have done so much work. I want things to go the way I want them to go. They weren’t already going the way I wanted them to go when we were at the birth center.”He’s like, “I know, but you are so tired. You have been such a warrior. Don’t you just want to meet her and let yourself rest? We will have her.” Of course, I burst into tears and I was just like, “Fine, I guess.” I just let go. I remember being so upset and feeling so defeated in that moment because I got to those 42 hours and I had gotten to basically complete. So much had played out and I was convinced that “Okay. At least I was going to have her vaginally in a hospital.” And then it was just like, “Nope.” I get rolled Into the OR and have my C-section. Thank God, it was so fast. It was probably not even 10 minutes. They were really, really quick and she was right there. I have to say that they did an amazing job and I was so grateful. But it was just so not obviously what I envisioned or imagined. I just remember after getting back in the room and the initial shock and then putting me with her and everything, I just remember feeling like, “Oh my god, I am so happy to have her in my arms,” but I just felt like I had failed and my body had failed.It was such a debilitating feeling. I felt so numb in me, even though I was so blissfully happy about her. It was like a wild rollercoaster of emotions, you know? Because I was so happy to have her and so excited to finally hold my baby, but at the same time, I was almost dead inside. Like, what happened? Why did things play out like that? What is that? Do you know?For those that have followed my story, you know shortly after having my first daughter, I had pretty heavy postpartum depression. I do believe a lot of my birth played into that. When I got pregnant again with Arley, I really made the intention of, “I really don’t want to go through that again if I don’t have to. I really want to be smart about doing my research this time around my birth. What can I do to prepare my body? How can I be more intentional internally and not externally?” Because I felt like with Amelia-- again, I was a new mom. I had no idea what I was getting into, so to me, it was like, “Oh, you just give birth. No big deal. Everybody does it.” I didn’t prep my body. I didn’t do anything. The only thing I did was take maternity photoshoots that were glamorous. I just did all of the checkboxes of the things in the external world and all the glam. With Arley, I was like, “No.” I am going to be so intentional about what I am going to do, what I need to do, and do my research and talk to my birth communities around me now that I know them from sharing my experience and everything with Amelia.Luckily, I had so many incredible people around me who advised me to get a chiropractor right when I got pregnant to get my body aligned. So I found a chiropractor who specialized in VBACs and aligned with her right at three weeks when I was pregnant. I stayed with her my entire pregnancy. I found people who could do labor stimulation massage for later in the game and a doula that had also been a part of VBACs. Just all of these different entities that I didn’t realize were so important. And then most importantly, when I got pregnant with Arley, I went to my regular prenatal doctor, and the first thing she says to me after “Congratulations” is, “Okay, now let’s schedule your C-section.” I looked at her and I said, “Whoa. First off, I am just swallowing the fact that I am pregnant again. Secondly, I don’t want to do a C-section.” She was like, “Well since you already had one, I am advising you to have one.”I was like, “Well, with all due respect, I know that I can have a VBAC.” She was like, “Well, I really don’t advise it. I really think you should have a C-section.”Julie: Wow.Ali: Isn’t that wild? That was my reaction. Julie: Like, right off the bat, even. Not even discussing anything.Ali: Nope. No discussion. It was like, “I know better. Here is this information.” Gave me a folder, the whole nine yards of my risks, the whole thing, the whole fear-mongering. Thank God I had so many people around me in the birth community from Amelia that they had all told me that just wasn’t true and that the success rate was way higher than people realize and discuss. It was funny because I actually learned about VBACs when I was on Berlin’s podcast. I’m spacing on his name. Dr. Berlin.Meagan: Elliot? Elliot Berlin?Ali: Yes, thank you. Yes. And so, I was on his podcast and he wanted to share my birth story with Amelia. After I was on it, he turned to me and he goes, “You know, you could still have another baby vaginally.” I was like, “No, I can’t.” He was like, “Yeah, you can.” I was like, “What do you mean?” He was like, “It’s called a VBAC. They happen all the time.” He was like, “It has nothing to do with the way--” and this and that. It was like this reality of what had been told to me and preached to me all of a sudden just burst in front of me. It was like, “Wait. Unlearn everything you were just told and pay attention. Zoom in to what you’re being told now and learn.” And so, I did. Once I got pregnant with Arley, I knew I wanted to at least attempt a VBAC and get myself aligned body-wise, intentionally, mind-wise, soul, everything to do that. Once that doctor said that to me, I was like, “Well, I am sorry but I am not going to stay with you because you are not for me if you are not going to at least try to let me have a VBAC.” And so, I parted ways with her. I was so grateful she showed me her true colors right from the beginning because I know some doctors can bait and switch from what I have heard. She let me know right from the beginning and so then I started reaching out to different doulas and people to give me references. I landed on Dr. Brock who is in Los Angeles who is literally known as “The VBAC King”. You guys will appreciate that.That’s literally what people call him. “The VBAC King”.Julie: I want to know more about The VBAC King, but it’s okay.Ali: Totally fine. It’s all good. So actually, it is funny that you guys bring up Elliot because Elliot and he have actually worked together in several births. Because a lot of people in LA go to him, if a baby is breech, they go to Dr. Brock because he is the only doctor known in Los Angeles to turn a breech baby. He is amazing. And so, I went to him. I asked for a referral to go see him because he is really hard to get into. I sit with him and I am twiddling my thumbs when he comes in. I am pregnant and he is like, “What is going on with you? Why are you so nervous?” I remember looking at him and I said quietly to him, “I want to discuss a VBAC.” He is like, “What?” “I want to discuss having a VBAC.” And he is like, “What is there to discuss?” He was like, “I did three this morning. What is the problem?”Meagan: Oh my gosh! Yeah.Julie: Best feeling ever.Ali: It was the best feeling ever. I looked at him and I was like, “Oh my gosh, that’s it?” Because I felt so shamed and wronged with that other doctor. And so, when he was so open to me and he was just like, “Yeah.” The nurse was so funny that was in there. She was taking my stats and she was like, “He does them literally every day and sometimes three times. It is not a big deal.” I was like, “Oh my gosh.”He was like, “Yeah. We will just monitor you. We are going to check your scar and make sure everything is together. As long as everything looks good, we will plan to do it, and if things down the road change, we will have a conversation.” He was like, “But I don’t see why not. You look like a great VBAC candidate.” He was all for it day one. I was so grateful that he was so supportive and his team and everything. And so fast forward, he checked my scars several times and everything looked good, thank God. Baby was growing great and everything was happening. We get to when the pandemic hits. The world changes. I went from, “Okay, you can’t have your doula” to “Now, you can’t have your husband at the hospital.” It was becoming really intense for me because here I am, I really want to go for my VBAC and I want to have my support system, and now I’m not going to even have anybody. How is this going to work? Am I going to be able to have my VBAC? I am not going to lie, I was in a lot of fight-or-flight mode. I started researching home birth and HBACs at home. I started really doing research and talking to midwives and other people who were home doctors in case my husband couldn’t be with me. Because to me, it was one thing not to have Stacey, my doula, but it was another not to have my husband. I just felt like he had been through so much with me through Amelia that I couldn’t imagine not having him with Arley. Thank God, I think Arley knew. She held on because she literally came right at 42 weeks and they had just opened the hospitals back up a week before. And so, my husband was allowed to come and be with me. I really felt like she held out for him. But it was funny the week before, actually a week and a half probably before, Dr. Brock, as great as he was, he is still a doctor. Near the end, especially with the pandemic and everything, he was just like, “Well, you know, you’re getting close and you still haven’t gone into labor. Maybe we should just induce.”I was like, “No. I don’t want to. I really want to give my body a shot.” He kept pushing me. He was like, “Well, let’s do a sweep. Let’s do this. Let’s do that.” I finally got a sweep a week before. Nothing happened. It was just painful for me. He was like, “All right.” We did another sweep a few days later and nothing was happening. He was like, “Let me just induce you. Let me just--” and I was like, “Dr. Brock. With all due respect, you have been so supportive of me through this whole experience. Please, just let me get to the final mark, and if things don’t happen then, then fine. We will do it.” I think it was maybe four or five days before and he kind of, not went back on his word, but I think he had moments because all of this was going on with the pandemic. He was just like, “Look.” He was like, “I am going to schedule the induction. It is going to be tomorrow,” and this and that. I remember leaving there and I felt really powerless. I was really upset and I came home. It was my eight-year anniversary with my husband. I turned to him and I was like, “I don’t want to do it. I don’t want to go in tomorrow.” He was like, “All right. Let’s talk through it.”He is very logical and he was like, “Let’s talk through it. What’s going on? Why don’t you want to?” I just told him, I was like, “It just doesn’t feel right. I have worked so hard to be so intentional around this birth from my chiropractor to finding a supportive doctor, to the right doula, to even different workouts, meditation, The VBAC Link podcast, just all kinds of things that I really surrounded myself with material-wise and tool-wise.” So I was like, “It just doesn’t feel right. It doesn’t align.”He was like, “All right. Well, if you feel that way, then don’t go.” I called my doula and she was like, “Look. At the end of the day, you would be your own advocate. Everything is good with you and the baby. They run tests. Everything is cool. So at this point, it is really just a waiting game. So if you really don’t want to, then you voice that. You call and you cancel and you cancel the induction.” I remember calling Cedars-Sinai and canceling. I called and they were like, “Oh, we don’t even have your name on the list.” I was like, “Oh.” They were like, “But we will let Dr. Brock know.” It was funny because it was such a build-up to call. I felt like I was being a bad kid in school. So I was so nervous to call and cancel. I was dancing in my room for hours to call. I finally called and they were like, “Oh, you’re not even on the schedule.” I was like, “Oh, okay. Well, just let them know I am not coming.”The next day, I got a call from my doctor and Dr. Brock is like, “Come in. I want to do a nonstress test on you.” So I go in, everything is cool. He was like, “All right, so you pushed against me.” He was like, “Message received. You’re not doing it.” I am like, “No. I am not.” And he is like, “All right.” He is like, “It is fine.” He is like, “Everything is good. Tests are good. I just thought you’d want to have her birthday. Don’t you want to have her already?” I am like, “I do want her here, but I want her here on her terms. If there is anything I learned from my first birth, it’s not about me. I don’t want to do it on my terms.” He was like, “Okay, fine. It is fair.” So then he was like, “If you don’t go--” because now, I was at the end of 41 weeks and 8 days or whatever. You know, when you get close to 42. He was like, “This weekend if you don’t go, on Monday, we are going to schedule the induction.” I was like, “Fine. That is fair.”So that weekend came and it was Friday. I wasn’t getting any kinds of signs of going into labor. I was getting a lot of that prodromal labor that you guys always talk about which is the start-and-go, and you actually contract, and you think you’re in labor, but then it stalls out. That was happening for weeks to me. I was like, “What is this?” It kept happening and happening. That happened again on Friday and it just like-- nothing. My doula sent me to get acupuncture. I did that to stimulate things. That actually, I think, really helped. I did that Friday and I did that on Saturday. I went back-to-back and it really stimulated things and moved things around, I think, from what I could feel. My husband was also doing acupressure with my points at home that she had shown me.At this point, my doula had said to me, “Okay. In my opinion, I feel like there is something more to this than your body.” It reminded me of one episode, well, many episodes I listened to with you guys, but there was one specifically where you guys really hone in on fear releasing. She was like, “I really feel like there’s something going on with you and we need to work through it.” So we did a recording of my birth story of Amelia‘s birth with her, just her and I recording everything, getting it out. She was like, “Okay. Now it is out. Let’s process it. Let’s release it. Wrap it up in a pretty bow and that’s it. We are going to move past it.” I was like, “Okay.” We did that on Friday. And then, we did some more rebozo and this and that. We met up outside at a park and everything and talked things through. Saturday came and she was like, “All right. I know you are getting close and you are getting concerned.” She was like, “What else can we do to help you release this?” I was like, “I don’t know. I am just so afraid of a C-section. I am so afraid of this. I am so afraid of that.” She was like, “All right.” She goes, “When you get home, you are going to write down--” And I remember learning this from you guys. She said, “You are going to write down what you told me you listened to on The VBAC Link, which was to write down your fears and release them.” She was like, “I want you to do that because I feel like there is more to this.” And so, I went back and listened to a bunch of your guys’ episodes and I wrote down on pieces of paper all of the different things I was afraid of. Getting an induction, stalling out, getting a C-section, getting stuck in the birth canal, all of the things. Being on Pitocin, getting an epidural, all of the things I was truly afraid of and I burned each and every one of them. There was such a relief when I burned them. I felt it in my energy and in my body. I started crying. I just felt so good.So then, my husband and I took a walk with our toddler, Amelia. We went around the block and we were just talking and he started talking me through stuff. He was like, “What do you think it is?” I was like, “I don’t know. I think I’m just afraid to wind up in another crazy, traumatic birth.” He was like, “Okay. And if God forbid, that happened, what is the worst thing? We come home. You heal. We have our second daughter. It is the four of us as a family. The overall things are fine and we have our girl.” This and that, you know, putting things into perspective for me. I was like, “Yeah, no. You are right.” He is a golfer, a really good golfer. And so, he was walking me through all the strategies for a big tournament and comparing it to getting ready for a birth of the mentality and this and that, but actually, it was really helpful for me. So we come home and we have dinner and he was like, “Let’s hang out, and just stay up late, and have a good time.” So we have a little dance party with Amelia. We are playing music videos and just having a good time, dancing and laughing. And then, I go to lay down in bed. I turned on my essential oils and I do a little more acupressure. I say a little prayer. I got in bed and I put meditation in my ears and get the room really dark. I am meditating. I am like, “I am going to go into labor. Things are going to happen. Things are going to happen.” I wake up a couple of times in the middle of the night, nothing is happening. I am getting a little crushed. But I am like, “No. I am going to let it go. Let it go.”I started getting hungry and I was like, “I’m going to go downstairs for a snack.” It was probably around 1:30, maybe 2:00. I start walking down my stairs and I feel this cramp and I am like, “Ooh,” and then I feel it again. I am like, “Ooh.” I get down and I am like, “Ooh, ooh, ooh,” and I can’t. I get down on my knees and I can’t get up.Julie: I love that.Ali: I am like, “Oh, maybe I’m not going to have a snack.” And so, I crawled up my stairs and I’m like, “Oh, okay. Could this be?” I honestly didn’t believe it because I had had so much prodromal labor. I had had so much start-and-go that it was like, “Oh, here we go again.” So I am just like, “Okay. I am just going to go lay back down.” I am crawling, but as I am crawling, it is getting more and more intense. More tightening and I am barely able to crawl. And so, I get up my stairs. I get in my room. My husband is sleeping and snoring. I am like, “Okay. I’m not going to wake him because I have told him so many times that this could be it and nothing is happening.” So I am like, “I am just going to chill.”So I call my doula. I could barely get the words out because I am in quite a bit of squeezing pain, feeling the surges, and she was like, “All right. Do me a favor. Draw your bathtub. Get in the tub. Put in a little bit of your oils and call me back. Let me just hear your breathing.” So I turned the tub on and I had this overwhelming feeling while I was sitting there in my room, just talking to myself of going into Amelia‘s room. I didn’t know why. So I crawled into her room and I opened the door and crawl in. She is asleep. I crawl into her chair. I’m sitting there and I start bursting into tears. I am hysterical out of nowhere and I just start babbling and I am like, “I love you. I hope I can be a good mom when I am a mom of two. I have made such an amazing relationship between the two of us so far. I don’t want to fail you.” I am just pouring my heart out. She is passed out. I am just crying and crying, just sharing my heart with her and my fear of being a mom of two. I don’t want to let her down.And then I remember I said to her, “Okay. I think your baby sister is coming. So the next time I see you, she is going to be here.” I was hysterical. Then I crawl back out, crawled into my tub. I think this was maybe 2:30 or 3:00 at this point. I get in my tub and I call my doula. I start breathing and she was like, “All right. Let’s do some meditation.” I had also done some HypnoBirthing between learning for Amelia’s birth and then for Arley’s birth. So I am doing HypnoBirthing in the tub. She is guiding me. My contractions were 11 minutes apart, so they weren’t that close. So she was like, “Okay. We are just going to let you stay in the tub. Meditate. Stay in your zone. Let’s see what happens.”Shortly after, not even an hour, she was like, “Okay. You are eight minutes. You’re seven. Oh, okay.” She was like, “Okay, Ali. You need to wake Justin up. You are getting to be close to six minutes apart. You have got to get ready to go.” I was like, “Wait, what?” You know, because I was so in the zone at that point. I wasn’t even listening to her count. I was so in my zone in the tub, in the darkness, meditating, really bringing the affirmations of having my VBAC and talking to Arley. I was just so in it, more so than I think I even realized I was. And so she was like, “You need to get out. You need to get up. You need to get to the hospital.” Justin, of course, doesn’t know. My husband doesn’t hear me. He is sleeping and snoring. I am screaming from the bathtub and he doesn’t hear me. I’m like, “Babe. Babe! I am in labor. We have to go to the hospital.” He doesn’t hear me, so my doula calls him and wakes him up. He is like, “What is going on?” She is like, “Ali is in labor. You have got to get ready to go.” He goes into the bathroom and of course, he is making fun of me as he usually does and his sarcasm. He is like, “Oh, I hear a ghost or something.” I am like, “Oh my god.” He literally is like, “Oooh. Ooooh. What is that noise? Ooooh.” I am like, “Ha, ha. That is so you.” I am like, “Come over here and squeeze my hands. I am losing my shit.” That is his personality, by the way. He gets me out. We are getting everything ready to go and getting everything in the truck to leave. My doula ended up coming down to make sure I was okay, but also because my friend was supposed to be here for Amelia had I gone into labor in the middle of the night, but wasn’t picking up her phone because they probably just thought, “Oh, I am going to hear my phone go off.” And so, my doula came rushing out so that we could leave so that somebody could watch her since we couldn’t bring her, especially with COVID and everything.She comes and she sees me off. I get in the truck and I am in full-blown active labor. I am transitioning. I am shaking. I’m convulsing. I am screaming. I’m trying to stay zen. I am screaming while I am meditating. This whole thing in his truck. We arrive there. I am screaming when we get out of his truck. They pull up. They bring the wheelchair. I won’t forget. They put me in a wheelchair and they were shoving this mask in my face. I am screaming through the mask. I am trying to rip the mask off because I’m screaming. It was a whole thing.I get into the room. They get me in and my doula was immediately on my FaceTime. Stacey was like, “Okay.” Thank God for her. She was like, “Turn the lights down. Let’s get it to be zen for her again. Get her out of the bright lights. Let’s calm things down. Justin put out her crystals. Let’s get her intention cards up. Get the little lights up.” Stacey is orchestrating everything from FaceTime. Justin is getting everything together and I am sitting there and breathing through. I am still natural at this point. I am just breathing through my contractions as much as I can and screaming at all of that. They checked me and I am 6.5. They’re like, “All right. Well, you’re definitely active and ready to go. You are progressing, so we are going to let you progress.” I think I got to almost a 7, or out of 7, and I really was having a hard time. I was really having a hard time breathing. It was getting really intense. Stacey was like, “Look. If you want to get an epidural, just get the epidural.”But, I had so much fear around getting an epidural because of Amelia‘s birth. I was like, “I don’t want to. I am too afraid. I don’t want to get stuck. Let me just keep going.” But I wasn’t fully progressing because I was struggling. I was like, “Okay. I’m going to get an epidural.” Luckily at Cedars-- I know some hospitals don’t have this, but Cedars does. I had been advised by a couple of other doulas to get a walking epidural if I could, even though I wouldn’t be walking anywhere, obviously, because of the world, but I could walk in my room. And so, I got a walking epidural and for me, that was just enough to take the edge off, but not enough to numb where I could walk around and I could be on the ball. I could do hip exercises on the side of the bed. I could get on all fours. I could keep switching positions. Even when I was in the bed, I had a peanut ball being switched between my legs. I was moving constantly. I was never still. I think that was a really big game changer and helpful for me when it came to progressing because shortly after, I was at complete.We arrived at the hospital around 6:00 a.m. and by noon, I was complete. It was pretty fast for me compared to Amelia. It was like, “Oh, wow. This is happening. I have got to complete.” The doctor comes in. Dr. Brock is like, “All right. You are complete, but you are not--” I forget the stations when you are at the last station, but you’re not fully there where the baby can come out. What is that called?Julie: Yeah, like +2 or +3 station.Meagan: Yeah, or even +4.Ali: Yes. Yeah, whatever it was, like the lowest one. I was almost there, but I wasn’t there yet. He had said that. I was like, “Oh, okay.” He was like, “But don’t worry. We are going to figure out getting her down. Let’s get you to move more. Let’s do some more pushing. Let’s do this.” You know, I didn’t realize that because of Amelia‘s birth, even though the labor was so intense with her, my body remembered that, which is wild. The muscle memory of that.I hadn’t really fully pushed with Amelia, so it was pushing like a new mom, which I didn’t expect to go through. I pushed for 2.5 hours after we had been told I was ready to go and was complete. I was really working, working. I had the squat bar. I was pushing. I was on the ground. I was on all fours. I was doing everything possible to move her, and keep going, and move her down and everything.She was just right there, but just wasn’t happening and then I spiked a fever. Dr. Brock came in and he was like, “Okay. I was all for everything you were doing, but now you spiked a fever. I am concerned for you and the baby. I am sure everything is fine, but I don’t want to take any chances, so these are the last pushes and then we are going to have to figure something out because I am not going to let you go longer because of the fever.” Of course, they had given me medication at this point to bring the fever down.And so, he had turned to me and he was like, “All right. We are going to do a vacuum to try and help you get her out. Once I get the vacuum, you are going to have to push with all your might. It is just going to be to assist and then you’re going to have to push her out.” He was like, “When I tell you to push, I mean you’d better push with every single thing in you and push until you can’t breathe.” I was like “Oh, okay.” I remember being in the bed, and looking at Justin, and even reflecting on it myself, and being like, “Oh my gosh. I cannot believe I got this far and here we are again. I am freaking going to have a C-section.” I was really starting to go into fight-or-flight. I was getting really, really upset. My doula was trying to calm me over FaceTime. She was like, “It’s okay. We are still in control. It’s okay. Breathe. Just allow things to play,” and I am in total panic at this point. I looked at Justin and I said, “Can I have my earbuds please?” I put them in my ear. I turned on one of my fear-releasing meditations. I shut my eyes. I remember praying really, really hard and just being really intentional. Like, “I can make this happen. This is going to happen. I can do this. Come on, Ali. You can do this.”Before I knew it, it was like, “Push.” I pushed so hard and the next thing I knew, there she was on my chest, screaming. I was hysterically crying. I couldn’t even believe that she was there. I honestly didn’t even feel her fully come out because everything was happening. It was so wild. I remember them putting her on my chest and I was bawling because I was like, “Oh my god, I did it. Oh my god. Oh my god. She’s here. Oh my god.” It was the most surreal experience and so healing in that moment for me of just being like, “Holy crap. I did it. My body did it.” Even now, I get choked up because I still can’t believe it happened.Meagan: I’m sure in that whole moment there was just such that rush.Julie: Yeah, wild.Meagan: Yeah, okay. I have to do this right now. And then, boom. You did it.Julie: Yeah. It sounds like she came so fast when it was time.Ali: Yeah, well once he put the vacuum on and was like, “Okay, push.” He gave me that bar--Meagan: The assistance, yes.Ali: Yeah, the assistance and gave me that bar and was like, “Push down.” I just remember I pushed with everything in me. I pushed and holy crap. She was here. She was 9 pounds, 3 ounces, by the way.Meagan: Yeah, girl!Ali: Amelia was 8 pounds, 7 ounces and I thought that was big. Arley was 23.5 inches long so it was like, oh my gosh. I couldn’t believe that I got her out. It was truly amazing to me. It was so empowering. It was like, “Holy crap. My body did it.” It was so amazing. After having her on my chest and holding her, I was just bawling. I just couldn’t even believe it happened.Meagan: Yeah. I’m sure it was just such an amazing moment. It sounds like she just needed to come into that pubic bone and then she was there. Oh, well congratulations.Ali: Thank you.Meagan: So awesome.Ali: It was so magical. It really was. I just felt so much support around me through my whole pregnancy. It’s funny you say the pubic bone too because my chiropractor-- she kept adjusting me. Even the day before I went into labor, she adjusted me. She kept adjusting me and adjusting my hips and doing this, and my sciatica and everything to make sure I was as aligned as possible. But I think in a way it was kind of like me being tested, like how bad do you want this thing? Because when you guys were saying “the rush”, I felt like I could have either gone into fight-or-flight and I could have been like, “Oh my gosh,” in panic and allowed myself to not have that release that you guys talk about all the time, but I think because I did release, and I did allow her to come, and I got really intentional and listened to the fear releasing in my ears, I think it was all divine. And there she was.Julie: Yeah. It’s incredible what can happen when you have that release of emotions. Fear in the birth space is real and it can really hold you up if you let it.Ali: Mhmm, yeah. You’re right.Meagan: So awesome. Now, she is just crawling around and being such a big girl.Julie: Oh, such a fun age.Ali: It is wild how fast. I feel like I just had her and I am like, “Oh my gosh, she is already crawling everywhere.” I literally turn around and she is down the hallway and I am like, “Oh, hey girlfriend.” It is crazy.Julie: Wow.Ali: You know, but in a wild way, this whole thing with the pandemic and 2020, for me, is such a blessing because it has been such a healing time for me between my VBAC, and having the family time, and having my husband home to be there with me with my girls, and truly not experience postpartum depression. I am just so grateful for it.Julie: That’s awesome. That is really cool. We are living in a really crazy world right now and whenever we hear incredible birth stories coming out of this pandemic, it warms my heart. I don’t know. I could go off on five or six different tangents right now, but Meagan, what should we talk about? What should we talk about for an educational piece?Meagan: Well, I love that she talked about fear releasing and self-advocacy. One of the things that I love that your doula did-- so birth workers, listen up if you are listening. They sat and they recorded. I love that she was like, “We are going to wrap it up, and seal it with a bow, and send it off.” That is so cool. It is such a powerful way, just talking about it, and getting it out there, and hearing yourself say it, and then maybe even watching it, and then saying, “Okay. That is how I felt and this is how I feel. This is why I am moving on from this fear because of this.” And then of course moving on and doing the other activities. It is so powerful.I know I probably have talked about this until I’m blue in the face, but it really came down for me-- like, I had worked through so much and there was still stuff that I found in the very moment of labor that I didn’t realize that I had worked through. It’s just so, I don’t know. It is just so crazy how you think you have worked through it, and then it comes up, and you are like, “Oh, wait. That didn’t come up during my pregnancy,” and you have to work through it again. But if you have practiced and worked really, really hard processing during your pregnancy, then it won’t be so foreign. That’s the word that is coming to my mind and maybe that’s the wrong word.Julie: Unfamiliar, maybe?Meagan: Yeah. It just won’t be so unfamiliar and foreign in the moment to process. I know it would make processing during that time easier.Julie: Yeah. I agree, 100%. Gosh, I mean, Meagan and I have both seen the same thing with our individual doula clients and working with parents through our VBAC preparation course. I actually just had a one-on-one consult with somebody preparing for VBAC a couple of weeks ago. Most of the time when we get hung up, and when there are things holding us back, and we feel like something’s not quite right, it is stemming from fear. When you can take out that fear, and write it out, and tear it up, and break it apart, and figure out where it is coming from, that is when you can really move past it in order to create a really, really clear birth space that is conducive to a nice, peaceful birth that is just happy and that you can look back on with really fond memories.Ali: Yeah. I love that. I think it is so well beautifully said and so true. You know, it is so crazy because again, when we were talking at the beginning of this podcast, with Amelia, it was obviously a normal world. I was at events and doing all of this glamorous stuff. I was doing maternity photoshoots and all of these things. And you know, fast forward to Arley and it was like, stuck at home and especially in California, very much locked down. You know, everything. It was so wild how different in that sense the world was, but yet, even in such a chaotic world, it really was such a peaceful birth. And then in such a normal world, Amelia was such a chaotic birth. So I just find that, like you were just saying, so telling when it comes to that fear and that processing of all of that and the actual intention around it. It really does, in my opinion, make such a difference. I have seen it in my own birth.Julie: Yeah. It absolutely does. Well, Ali, not Avril. It was so great to talk to you. Oh my gosh, I feel like we could just sit here and chat about everything for hours. I feel like we are friends. I just love at the end of the episode, all these podcast episodes that we do where sometimes, it’s really hard to say goodbye. It’s like, “No, you hang up.” “No, you hang up.” “No, you hang up.”Meagan: I know. It is so true. So true. We are like, “Wait. Can we hang out, like, tomorrow?”Ali: Right?Julie: Let’s go to lunch. Where do you live again?Meagan: California.Ali: Yes, please. When we are open and normal, please do. I mean, I am so honored to be here. I truly love everything you guys are doing with your show and everything at The VBAC Link. I truly, like I said, still listen. I tell everyone to listen. I just think it is such an amazing space for women who need that kind of support. Especially women who really do want to have a VBAC and don’t have those kinds of resources. I think that too many times we are told so much in birth, but especially with VBAC, “No,” and they put the fear around it from the beginning.I was so grateful that when that woman tried to really instill the fear in me that I knew better and that I was able to work past it because I feel for so many who just don’t have that. That’s why I was so grateful when I landed on The VBAC Link podcast because I was like, “Oh my gosh. Look at all of these amazing stories. I could be one of them too.” And like, holy crap. Here I am.Meagan: You are one of them.Julie: Full circle. I love it.Ali: Yes. Yes.ClosingWould you like to be a guest on the podcast? Head over to thevbaclink.com/share and submit your story. For all things VBAC, including online and in-person VBAC classes, The VBAC Link blog, and Julie and Meagan’s bios, head over to thevbaclink.com. Congratulations on starting your journey of learning and discovery with The VBAC Link.Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/the-vbac-link/donationsAdvertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands

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• Episode 371 Aisha's Special Scar VBA2C After "Failure to Progress" + Uterine Dehiscence

  Aisha’s episode is full of wisdom and inspiration! With her first two births, Aisha worked so hard to deliver vaginally, but ultimately had two undesired Cesareans. She was told in the operating room that she had uterine dehiscence, was given a special scar, and should never try to deliver vaginally. But her intuition was telling her a different story. She dove into research. She found a community and listened to podcasts like The VBAC Link. She knew a VBA2C was possible, and she knew she had to try. Aisha’s VBA2C journey involved interacting with supportive and very unsupportive providers, hiring a fantastic doula, being proactive with labor comfort measures, planning for the unexpected, staying firm in her desires, asynclitic positioning, and pushing her baby boy out in just 45 minutes with a nuchal hand!Aisha's WebsiteThe VBAC Link Blog: VBA2CNeeded WebsiteHow to VBAC: The Ultimate Prep Course for ParentsFull Transcript under Episode Details Meagan: Hello, Women of Strength. It’s The VBAC Link, and we have a VBA2C story coming your way. Have you ever wondered what VBA2C means? If you haven’t noticed, in the VBAC world, there are a lot of acronyms. VBA2C is one of them. That means vaginal birth after two Cesareans, meaning that you have had two Cesareans and want to go for a vaginal birth. Big question, what are the chances of having a vaginal birth after two Cesareans? Is it possible? The answer is simply, yes. It is totally possible. Myself and Aisha are living proof today that it is possible. In fact, your chances of a successful VBA2C are similar to those of just a VBAC with one Cesarean. ACOG recommends that VBA2C is a safe option, so today, I want to quickly go over a little bit more instead of a review about some education on vaginal birth after two Cesareans and share a little bit more of our blog. Like I said, ACOG recommends that vaginal birth after two Cesareans is actually a safe option. They say, “It is reasonable to consider women with two previous low transverse Cesarean deliveries to be candidates for TOLAC.” Now, again, there’s another one of those acronyms. TOLAC- trial of labor after a Cesarean. I know that is triggering for some. It is pretty much just the medical term of saying that you are having a trial of labor after a Cesarean, so try not to let it impact you too much. But, “for TOLAC and to counsel them based off of the combination of other factors that affect their probability of achieving a VBAC.” There are lots of things that people might go look through to see if you are eligible for a VBAC after two Cesareans. Now, I’m sure you have probably heard this before, but proven pelvis. If you haven’t had a proven pelvis, meaning that your baby has come out vaginally before you’ve had a vaginal birth or a Cesarean– now when I say this, sometimes we have a vaginal birth, then we will have two Cesareans, and someone wants to go for a VBAC again, so they would be considered a proven pelvis or cervix to a medical staff. But if you haven’t had a “proven pelvis”, I hope you guys can imagine my air quotes right now, that doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t be considered as someone who should have a VBAC. It says in our blog, “More important to note, there is no mention of a requirement to have had that previous vaginal delivery.” I wanted to point out that it really is not a necessary thing. I hadn’t had a vaginal birth before. My cervix also hadn’t made it to 10 centimeters before, so just know that it is still possible. Quickly, there are things that you can do to reduce uterine rupture, and there are also things you can do to increase your chances of VBAC. Again, it’s going to be in our blog. I’m going to send you over there after the episode so you can go and read more about it, but some of the things that you can do to minimize the risk of uterine rupture is staying away from induction. Now, can VBAC be induced? Yes, they can. Yes, yes, yes, yes, you can, so I don’t want you to totally freak out right now. But, staying away from induction for VBAC is better than going to get induced. It does increase our chance of uterine rupture, and it does increase our chances of other things like interventions that are unnecessary. Unless it’s absolutely necessary or totally desired, try to stay away from induction. Avoid augmentation of labor so things like Pitocin and other drugs to cause the uterus to contract more than it naturally would. Okay, let’s see. Avoid providers who aggressively intervene or want to manage your labor or come at you with fearmongering tactics. You guys are going to hear some of that here, and honestly, I think it’s a common thing with these stories. We are getting a lot of fearmongering here. Providers, if you are listening, knock it off. Goodness gracious, we do not need to add fear to something that has been looming over us because VBAC has such a bad rap in the world, and it’s so scary. Again, air quotes, guys. Just stop with the fearmongering. Avoid providers who are going to build you up with things– I should say tear you down, but fill you up with things like, “Your baby is looking too big. I don’t know. We should probably induce. I don’t know if your baby is going to be able to come out because you are really small, and that baby is looking really big. Oh my gosh, you have to have an epidural. Oh my gosh, you have to have your baby by 39 weeks.” There are so many things. It’s annoying. Okay, going back to avoiding rupture. Avoid or delay things like getting an epidural until at least the end if possible because we do know that sometimes when we get an epidural early in labor, it can bring things like interventions, and we are getting Pitocin that is too high and other things like that. There are so many other things here, you guys. I’m going to make sure that the link is in the show notes. I don’t want to take too much of our time, so we can make sure that Aisha can share her beautiful VBAC after two Cesarean stories and all that she had done to lead up to this experience. You guys, it’s a good one. Something that is very different about this episode is that she actually had a dehiscence with her second which in a lot of the studies and literature for rupture, a dehiscence is often confused or combined with uterine rupture.I really love that this is a different type of story here, so gear up and enjoy. All right, Aisha. Thank you again so much for being here. As we were talking about earlier, VBAC after two Cesareans is so highly requested in our community. So without further ado, I want to turn the time over to you. Aisha: Thank you so much for having me. This is surreal. I feel like this pushed me in some ways. It was a goal of mine. I’m like, “If I make it and do my VBAC after two Cesareans, I’m going to send my story to The VBAC Link.” Yeah. I’ve listened to you guys. It’s been literally almost four years listening to you guys all of the time trying to visualize my birth after hearing other people’s stories. It’s such a blessing, and I’m honored to be here to be honest. Meagan: Well, thank you so much. Aisha: Of course. Yeah. I mean, if we start from the beginning with my whole birthing journey, I got pregnant in 2018. I really wanted to try out the whole natural route, so I went with a midwife here in Canada. It’s covered by the government so whether you go to a midwife or OB/GYN, it’s honestly the same thing. It depends on what type of care you want to have. I chose to go with the midwife, and I chose to give birth at a birthing center for my firstborn. Labor started. I never ended up giving birth naturally obviously. I ended up having a 60-hour labor. Yeah. After 60 hours, they declared me failure to progress, and I think my cervix was a bit swollen at that point. The baby had made the meconium in my tummy. Meagan: Oh, yeah. Stressing out is common. Babies poop sometimes, and it doesn’t always mean an emergency or anything like that, but when it’s happening and other things are happening–Aisha: Exactly. I think I started having a fever and other things like that. At that point, they came to see me. They were like, “Before things turn into an emergency, let’s go and have a simple C-section.” I felt very defeated. I worked very hard for a natural birth. I did 40 of those 60 hours all-natural, but after seeing I wasn’t progressing– when I was with my midwife, I was 2 centimeters after 40 hours, and at that point, I requested to be transferred to the hospital to get an epidural. When I got the epidural, it worked a little bit on half of my body, but I was having back labor. My baby was posterior, so it did not do much for those pains there. I can say in the moment, I was quite relieved to have the C-section, so everything could be over, but I know afterward, I know womanhood is not defined by how you birth your baby, but I think at that point because that’s what I envisioned, I never envisioned a C-section ever in my life, and it affected me. It affected my self-esteem a little bit. Right after that, me being me, I’m such a planner and such a researcher. I researched to see if it’s possible to have a vaginal birth after a Cesarean, and I discovered the whole VBAC world. I signed up in all of the Facebook groups that I could find about VBACs all around the world. I was reading stories. I discovered The VBAC Link at that point. I started listening to the podcast. I also requested, through my midwife, my notes to see what happened. Meagan: Your op reports. Yes. Aisha: I’m like, “Okay. I need to know why I had a Cesarean, why a Cesarean was made, etc.” I checked. I sat down with my midwife at six weeks postpartum. Honestly, it wasn’t anything really. They just said it was failure to progress. I had dilated to a 7, and that was that. She was like, “Okay. You can come back when you get pregnant again. You need to wait 2 years or 18 months before you get pregnant again.” Meagan: Mhmm. That’s very common.Aisha: That’s what I did. I got pregnant when my firstborn, I think, was 15 months. I gave birth exactly two years later almost to the dot. That labor started. Everything was going great. I remember for that pregnancy, I tried to always sit leaning forward, doing all of those exercises because my baby was posterior. I wanted a good posture. I did all of the things. It was in winter here, and in winter, Canada is not the best. I wasn’t walking as much and it was COVID too. It was the COVID lockdown. With my first, I was going to the mall a lot, but during the lockdown in 2021, all of the malls were closed. I wasn’t going outside much, but I was doing rounds in my house going up and down the stairs and stuff like that. When labor started, I really tried to focus. I think I was doula-ing myself. I never got a doula, but I was doula-ing with all of my research what I knew to do. At some point, I felt like it was time to go to the midwife. I was going there. They checked me. I was at 2 centimeters again. After laboring for 15 hours, then I was a bit defeated. I was like, “No, the same story is going to happen twice.” I continued laboring there. At some point, the contractions were back-to-back with no breaks. At that point, I was like, “Let me be a smart girl and get the epidural again.” She checked me. I was at 3 centimeters. I wasn’t progressing fast enough for me. I think I was just in too much pain. I wasn’t getting any breaks.I went to the hospital. I think the car ride there did something because it was a 20-minute car ride from the birthing center to the hospital. I was 7 centimeters. Meagan: Whoa. You went from a 3 to a 7 in 20 minutes? Aisha: In 20 minutes. Then I was like, “Okay, it’s happening.” I got there. My midwife had already called the hospital and sent my papers. The anesthesiologist was waiting for me. I got the epidural within 5 minutes. They checked me. I was at a 9. Yeah, it went really fast. I was like, “I’m getting this VBAC.” Everybody was excited. I was giggling and laughing. My midwife came in. We were waiting for the last little bit. They checked me. I was 9.5, but baby was stationed pretty high. They were like, “Okay, let’s try to bring baby down.” They made me change positions, but as they were doing that, the baby’s heart rate dropped. It wasn’t picking back up. At that point, it turned into an emergency C-section. The doctor looked at me. She was like, “Your baby is in distress. We don’t know why. Nothing is going on. Nothing is changing. We are bringing you to the OR and get baby out. We don’t have a choice.” I was so sad. I was at 9.5. I was almost there, but it did not happen. When I was in the operating room, the doctor screamed to me, “Aisha, never do this again.” I’m like, “Why?” She never gave me any more explanation, so me being me, when I was done giving birth, I requested the notes again.Meagan: Hey, listen. This is what I would suggest for anybody and everybody who has had a C-section. Go get your notes. Go get your notes. Aisha: They give so much insight because nobody knows unless this is the only thing that remains with you. You don’t have the people to talk to. I saw the notes. I saw that my C-section scar had started to open. I think they called it a dehiscence. Meagan: Dehiscence? It was past a window. It wasn’t just stretched. It actually had dehissed. Aisha: Yes. My midwife was like, “Probably that’s the reason why she told you to never do this again and not to go for a VBAC again because the uterus had started to open.” Because it had started to open, when she cut me up, it gave me a J-scar so my scar–Meagan: You have a special scar too. Aisha: I have a special scar too. At that point, I’m like, “Okay.” My midwife told me, “If you have a third baby, unfortunately here, we can only follow a VBAC after one Cesarean. We cannot follow a VBAC after two C-sections so you will have to go the OB/GYN route.” Then I got scared because I’m like, “My God, I’m going to have to go to the medical professionals. They’re going to turn me down,” and stuff like that. Me being me, I contacted my own personal OB/GYN. I went to see her. I wasn’t pregnant or nothing. I wasn’t planned on being pregnant anytime soon, but I knew I wanted a third child. I went to him. I was like, “Listen. This is my story. This is my situation. I really want to try for a vaginal birth. I know it can happen.” I went on the Facebook groups again. I registered in all of the VBAC after multiple Cesareans. I went and checked VBAC special scars. I went into all of those groups. I saw it was possible. Women were doing it all over the world. I was like, “Why not me? My body is also capable. Plus, I got to 9.5. That means my body is working. I just had unfortunate circumstances.” That’s what I thought. My doctor was like, “You know what? Get pregnant. Come back, and we’ll talk about it.” She wasn’t closed off to the idea. Fast forward, I got pregnant earlier in 2023. I lost that baby due to miscarriage. I got pregnant again in September. That was a surprise pregnancy. I wasn’t really planning for it. When I got pregnant, I was like, “Okay, this is it. This is it. We’re going to try to do everything we can to make it happen.” I know for the first 20 weeks, I also tried to relax and release. I felt like my body held so much tension, and I feel like that can hold up to birth. I was trying to go and deal with all of those traumas and things like that that I hadn’t dealt with in my previous births. Meagan: Traumas, triggers, past experiences, the tension that is being harbored in our body. It’s weird to think that, but really, we can harbor tension whether we relate to it as trauma or not, and it can really impact us. Aisha: It can really impact us. After my second birth, I had gone to pelvic floor therapy. I had been to that for a couple of months, then stopped 6 months prior to getting pregnant officially with my last baby. When I got pregnant, I went back to see my pelvic floor therapist. I’m like, “Listen. I’m pregnant. This is what we are planning. Right now, I just want to make sure that my muscles down there are okay. I want to do the exercises. I don’t want to do too much, but just prep my body slowly and surely.” We did exercises. That was the first 20 weeks. The second 20 weeks, I’m like, “Okay. Now is the time to ask the questions.” I would see her every 6 weeks, and within those 6 weeks, every question that would come in my head, I would write in down in my notes and go and ask her the questions so she could answer. I asked her to review my op reports so I could have another opinion. I was asking her a lot of questions about VBAC after two Cesareans. I got that my doctor wasn’t VBAC-friendly, but I think she’s pro-women’s choice. She goes with what you want, and she supports you wholeheartedly in your decisions. I remember asking her questions about VBACs after two C-sections. She kept telling me, “Aisha, I think you need to realize that new studies have shown that there is not much risk after one or two Cesareans. It’s almost the same. The percentage doesn’t go up. There’s not much difference. If you’ve had a C-section, you have the same chances as if you’ve had a second C-section. That’s what the studies are showing.”I asked her about my dehiscence, and she’s like, “A lot of women who didn’t have a C-section can have a dehiscence, but with some women, we don’t see it because they’re not getting opened up.” She’s like, “It happens more than you think. It doesn’t mean that it’s because of your scar that you had the dehiscence. It could have been that’s just how your body reacted.” After all of those affirmations, that reassured me a little bit. I was not risking my baby. At the same time, you read stories, and you just don’t want to make foolish decisions even though in your heart, you know what you want. When you listen to the outside world, it can influence a little bit of how you are thinking, and you are trying to make a wise decision. That was me in that second part of my pregnancy. However, the one thing she told me was, “The one thing that can make or break your VBAC, though, is getting a doula.” Every time she would see me, she was like, “Did you get your doula? Did you get your doula? Did you get your doula?” So I went. I got a doula who also had a VBAC. It was very important to have someone who had the experience of having a VBAC. I feel like when your team knows how badly you want it and what it means to you, I feel like it changes a lot for your game. I remember having my little prebirth classes with her, and she kept telling me, “You need to build a team who believes in your goal more than you believe in your goal because at some point during the birth, you’re going to doubt yourself, and you need people who are going to reinforce you with confidence and positivity.” Meagan: Positivity, yes. Aisha: Yes, and that you can do it and that your body was meant for this. Of course, within that too, we also prepped for the occasion of a possible C-section, how to have a gentle C-section, and things I wanted to have. For me, it was very important for me to see my baby’s being born. That’s something I never experienced with both of my daughters. I heard them cry, but it was this wall in front of me. I never saw them come out of me. We also prepped for that, but yeah. We did a lot of prepping. She suggested that I go see an osteopath. With my second daughter, and my first VBAC, I had seen a chiropractor, but she told me that an osteopath might help loosen up some muscles. I went to see that person. It felt good, then I did acupuncture at the same time which I think was maybe just to release and relax and let go. I think there were a lot of little things that I did in order to just not hold on to all of the stress– writing letters and closing up chapters. I feel like it allowed me to just let go of the traumas that I had. Fast forward to my due date for my second baby. I lose a good part of my mucus plug. I sent it to my doula. She was like, “Okay, I think your body is starting to work.” Now, I can say I was starting to have contractions, but my way that I think I handled this birth was denial. The whole time that I was having those contractions, I kept saying, “They are painful Braxton Hicks. They are painful Braxton Hicks, and that’s what we are going to do.” I kept walking a lot and every day, I was taking an hour walk. During those hour walks, that’s when I was listening to the podcast and listening to stories and literally looking for VBAC after two Cesarean stories and hearing what women went through and their tips and tricks. That happened at my 40-week due date. Then the contractions kept going. During the daytime, they would spread out a little bit. At night time, they would be every 10-15 minutes. They would wake me up from sleeping, so I knew deep down that something was going on, but I was not trying to put my heart into it. I’m like, “They are just Braxton Hicks.” That kept on going for two days. At 40 weeks and 3 days, I had my doctor’s appointment. I remember waking up that morning and being like, “Oh, those Braxton Hicks are really pushing.” I remember my husband was like, “Do you think we should go and drop of the girls at their godmother’s?” I’m like, “You know what? No. I don’t think this is it.”I had my appointment that afternoon. I have a friend of mine who lives next to my doctor’s office. She had a 6-month-old baby at that time. I’m like, “Let’s drop the girls off at my friend’s, then afterward, I can snuggle up the baby because I heard oxytocin might help everything get going.” I went to see my doctor. My doctor asked if I wanted to get checked. That’s one thing too, I went through the whole pregnancy not wanting to get checked. I knew that dilation means nothing. Meagan: Yes. Aisha: There is also how effaced you are and the baby’s station. Those are also other things that you must know. You can be at a 10 and be stationed at a -2. It doesn’t mean your baby is still coming. There are a lot of little details that I discovered. Meagan: We don’t talk about it. We don’t talk about it. We focus so highly on that big 10 number when there is so much more. It’s funny because with my clients, they’ll be like, “Oh, I got checked, and I was only this centimeter.” I’m like, “I don’t even care about the centimeter. What were you effaced?” They’re like, “I don’t know. They didn’t say anything.” Next time you get checked, ask because that number is a cooler number. Let’s get effaced. Let’s do that. Even then, we know that can change. We can go from thick, hard, and posterior to completely open and thin. It all varies, and it varies quickly, but there are so many other things to focus on than just that big 10 number. Aisha: Exactly. That’s why I never asked to get checked the whole time. I’m like, “I’m going to go like that without checking. That will be bad.” When I got there, my doctor knew. She was like, “You’re not getting checked, right?” At every appointment, she would ask, and I’m like, “No, I’m not getting checked today.” She asked, “Are you having contractions?” I’m like, “I lost my mucus plug last night. I’m having painful Braxton Hicks.” She’s like, “How painful?” I’m like, “Well, people contract and call it Braxton Hicks.” She’s like, “Keep doing what you’re doing, however, when you go to the hospital if ever you don’t give birth by 41 weeks, we have to send you to do a non-stress test to the baby, and the hospital will read your report, and they’re going to force you to have a C-section. Be ready.” She was prepping me. She was like, “I’m going to write in your file that it’s VBAC after two Cesareans. We’ve talked about it. You’re going to do a trial of labor. I’m letting it go.” She was okay with letting me to go at least 41+5 and 42 weeks. Meagan: Or what evidence shows, okay. Aisha: She wasn’t giving me any stress. She told me that the one thing that was giving me confidence was the fact that my body went into labor twice, and my body knows what to do. I left that appointment. I went to my friend’s house. I snuggled up with the baby. Every time I would take the baby, my contractions, the painful Braxton Hicks, would be every 5 minutes. They would come more often than not. The moment we left her house, I’m like, “Okay, I don’t have the baby no more, but the painful Braxton Hicks keep going.” In the car ride, it was a 20-minute car ride to my house. I got to my house. I didn’t say nothing to my husband. I took my daughters. I went to give them a bath. I was showering with them actually. It was a shower. I was showering with them. I was on my knees, and at some point, I had to stop and be like, “Okay. Those Braxton Hicks are quite painful.” I gave the girls a shower. I dressed them up. They went to bed. I came downstairs to my husband and was like, “You know what? Yeah. The Braxton Hicks are becoming more and more painful.” He was like, “Okay. Do you want me to pack up the car?” I’m like, “No, they are still Braxton Hicks. We are not there yet.” Then what really made me believe that I was in labor was whenever I am in labor are my bowel movements. I think my body releases and cleans out.Meagan: Common. That’s very common. Aisha: I went to the bathroom twice in the span of 30 minutes. I looked at him, and I was like, “I think we’re in labor.” That’s the moment I used contractions for the first time. The contractions were there. I just went to the bathroom twice. Okay. Eat and drink because those are two things I never did with my previous labors. One thing my doula told me during the prep was, “You need to hydrate your body because the muscle that is dehydrated is a muscle that is going to contract even more. Maybe that’s why you were contracting and your contractions with your second labor were back to back with no breaks.” I’m like, “Yeah, I wasn’t drinking water. I was so dehydrated. My lips were all cracked. I was not drinking an ounce of water.” When my husband heard, “Okay, labor is starting,” we started drinking. I ate dinner. It was around 9:00 PM. We bought those maple waters because we heard maple water is filled with electrolytes. I started drinking that. Then we went upstairs. I’m like, “I’m going to get some rest and try to sleep a little bit since it’s nighttime.” I went to bed. It wasn’t comfortable. I stayed for 15 minutes, then I’m like, “Okay, I’m going to go in the shower.” My husband ran a shower. It wasn’t helping. We ran a bath. I went in the bath. I stayed there for maybe 30 minutes. It was not comfortable, then I got up. I went to pee, and then I had my bloody show. Everything was out. I sent a photo to my midwife and my doula. She was like, “Okay. Get ready. I think your body is really doing a lot right now.” In my head, I’m like, “Since my body is doing its work right now, let me help it. I’m going to sit on the toilet.” I heard it’s a dilation station, so I’m like, “I’m going to sit there, then hopefully, if I’m in pain, let me make it effective.” I go. I sit there. Believe me or not, that was the best position for me. Meagan: I loved it too. I loved it too. Aisha: I loved it. I was at peace. I had the light turned off, the rain sound going, and I was literally sleeping. When I say sleeping, I was snoring. I was waking up slightly just for contractions, then I was going back to bed. I never timed any of my contractions. We were not going to focus on timing. We were going to go with how we feel, and the sounds and stuff like that. Yeah. I stayed there, I think, for 2.5 hours or 3 hours on the toilet. Meagan: Wow.Aisha: It felt so good. I had a pillow. I slept there. At some point, you can hear in my sound that it was a bit more there. My doula was hearing me. She told my husband, “You know what? I think this is time. You guys need to pack up the kids and go to the hospital.” We are about 35-40 minutes away from the hospital, so we had quite a drive. My husband packed up the car, and around 2:00 AM, we left to the hospital. I remember prior to labor, I told myself, “I’m going to give myself a coping mechanism. As long as I’m home, I’m just going to do nothing and try to take it in.” Once I’m in the car, I bought those combs. I was going to have the combs in my hand for the car ride, then once contractions are really unbearable, I’m going to grab the second comb. In the car ride, I had that one comb. I took it.  We went to the hospital, but the contractions were so great. I had time to do curbside walking around the hospital when we got there. My girls' godmother came and met us at the hospital so we could transfer the girls. While they were doing that transfer, I was doing curbside walking. I was taking photos. I was like, “I need to take photos of my girls.” I was in such a happy mood. The contractions were spread out which was a first for me because with all of my other labors, the moment I got to the hospital, it was an emergency and I could not control myself. We got there. We got to the hospital. I was able to give them my name and fill out my papers. I was really clear-minded. I went into triage and I was a bit scared because with my other labors, when I got checked, I was at 1 centimeter or 2 centimeters. I was going to see what I am, but you know what? We can handle it because the contractions were still spread apart. If I was a 2, I would still be good. I lay down. I got checked, and they told me I was at 5 centimeters. I thought, “Oh my god.” I asked, “What is the station and how effaced am I?” Then they were like, “You are 80% effaced, and you’re at the station -2.” I’m like, “Okay. This is it. We’re doing it.” They were like, “We are admitting you. You’re not going to go home.” I was so excited. However, that’s when the battle started. They took my file and came back. Meagan: Darn it. Aisha: They said, “We see you had two Cesareans already. Usually, you need to have a C-section after two C-sections.” I’m like, “I discussed with my doctor, and she was okay with me doing a trial of labor. They were like, “Well, no. This is not usually how things go. We usually don’t do that. There’s a lot of risk for your baby.” I’m like, “Yeah. I know the risk and I’m okay with it. It’s something my doctor and I discussed. We are very at peace with it.” Then they sent me the doctor on call. The doctor came, and she was like, “I need to explain to you the dangers of what you are about to do. Your baby might die when you have a second C-section.” Then they brought up the dehiscence. “After a trial of labor, you had a dehiscence. This is not good for your body to have a dehiscence. You are more prone to uterine rupture.” All of those notes were observed by my doctor, and she was completely fine with it. Literally, the doctor looked at me, and she was like, “I can see nothing I’m going to say will change your mind. You’re quite informed.” I’m like, “Yeah.” She was like, “I’m going to have you sign these release papers so you can release the hospital of anything.” At that moment, you feel like you’re doing something not great because you’re like, “They’re making me sign this paper.”Meagan: Yeah, you feel like you’re pushing against everyone in the professional world who have done multiple years of school and what they are suggesting. It feels off. Aisha: It feels off, but you what? That’s why I was talking about releasing and really listening to me. That made me feel so much more at peace because I’m like, “I have to listen to that voice inside. Aisha, you can do this. You have prepped for this literally for four years in the making since your first C-section. You’re educated. You know the risks. This paper is not going to make the risks change. You were okay with it before they presented that paper to you. You can still be okay with it after.”They gave me the paper. I signed everything, and then they asked me, “Well, we need to keep you monitored, however. We need to keep you monitored, and we need to have the easy access port installed in case.”Meagan: The hep lock, mhmm.Aisha: I told them that I didn’t want it because it wasn’t in my birth plan. I was like, “I don’t want that.” I also had a super cute pink, floral hospital gown. I was like, “I’m going to wear that. I don’t want to wear their hospital gown.” I think it was just mentally to feel like you are the birther, and you are the principal actor in the event. I didn’t want to feel like a patient.They came. They were like, “You need to change.” I’m like, “I don’t want to change. I want to keep my gown.” I had to sign a release paper that it was okay if they cut off my gown. I said, “Listen, the gown is made for that. There are buttons all around the back, but if you have to cut it off, cut it off, but I’m keeping this on.” At the end, I felt like I had to be somewhat political a little bit and give them a little so they could stop bugging me because they were breaking my bubble with the constant questions and the constant arguing.Within all of that, I was still having contractions. I’m like, “You know what? I’m going to let them monitor the baby, and I’m going to let them do the easy port so they can stop casting their opinions on my VBAC.” I know my doula was a bit scared especially for the monitoring because they were like, “The second the heart rate drops, they’re going to use it as a way to send you to the operating room.” I know the second they put the monitor on, the baby’s heart rate went down during the contractions, and it went right back up after. One of the nurses was like, “See? Your baby’s heart rate is already going down. This is why we need to keep it.” I had the doula on the other line. She was coming to the hospital. I asked, “The baby’s heart is going down.” She was like, “Aisha, it’s normal that your baby’s heart rate is going down during a contraction. He’s literally getting squeezed. It’s just normal practice. If it comes back up, it’s completely fine.” Every time, they would pass those comments. The baby’s heart rate dropped a couple of times, probably 7-8 times over the whole labor process, but every time, they would make a comment, “Oh, see? It dropped again. Oh, see? It dropped again.” But it kept picking back up the whole time.Anyway, I got admitted to my room. They tried to do the easy access port. I have small veins, so it literally took the anesthesiologist to do it. The whole nursing team failed to do it. I kept telling them to do it in one spot that people usually have better luck. They did it everywhere else, and in the end, it was that part that functioned.By the time they did the easy port access, it was around 7:00 AM. I got to the hospital around 4:00. It was around 7:00 AM. I asked to be checked again because, at that point, I was doing dances. The contractions were so intense, I was not happy. I was not laughing no more. I was still having breaks between them, but it was really taking everything out of me. At that point, the whole time before that, I was really enjoying the contractions. They were coming. I was like, “Oh, this is nice. I’m getting to meet my baby.” I loved the feeling to be honest. People find me weird when I say that I love contractions, but at that point, it was not fun anymore. I was going against the wall and doing those squat dances and moving my body left to right. I requested doing a check. They checked me. They were like, “Oh, you’re at 9.5 and 100%.” However, baby was still stationed at -2. I’m like, “Oh no, baby is pretty high up.” My doula and I started to do some positions to get baby down. We did those for 30 minutes, but like I said, the contractions were really, really, really pushing it. I requested to get checked again. I know my doula was like, “Nothing probably happened.” She was right. Nothing happened. It was still the same, 9.5 and effaced at 100%, and still stationed to -2. At that point, I’m like, “Okay, I’m going to request the epidural.” I was seeing stars. Every time I would go through a contraction, I would see stars. At that point, I was literally, I think, mentally checked out. I was fighting against the contractions because every time a contraction would start, I would tell myself, “Okay, now you need to survive this next one.” It was no longer about enjoying it. Meagan: Surviving it, yeah. Aisha: It wasn’t, “You know what, Aisha? It’s four breaths. Take four deep breaths and it’s done.” It was more of a survival mindset. I was like, “I’m going to take the epidural and be calm and be good.” They came. They gave it to me. They gave me a very tidbit because I was still walking. I could still feel. Yeah. I was still walking with the epidural. I could still feel everything. It just took off the edge. I think the contractions and the pain was in the front of my belly, and the back pain was gone, but I could still feel the pressure. While the anesthesiologist was giving me the epidural, my body was starting to push. I would have that feeling and everything. I think he gave me a tiny bit. Anyway, the second epidural was done, it was already shift change, so the night nurses were gone. The new nurses were in, and I think when I say the team makes a difference, they were angels sent. They were so kind. My doula went to see who was the doctor on call for the daytime, and she came to see me. She was like, “If you didn’t have your own personal OB/GYN, this is the one who you would have wanted to have. This one here, that doctor here.” Then she came. She was super happy.She was like, “Okay, I see you’re trying for a VBAC. The whole floor, when I heard about your case, they were saying that you had a uterine rupture. I’m like, ‘That’s not right. Her doctor wouldn’t have let her do a trial of labor after a rupture.’ I went through your file, and I saw that you only had a dehiscence. It’s very common.” She literally repeated the same thing that my doctor said. She was like, “A lot of women who didn’t even have a C-section end up having a lot of dehiscence. It’s just that we never know because they are never opened for a C-section to mark it down.” She was like, “It’s completely common. We’re going to do this.” She was like, “You’ve been at 9.5 for 2-3 hours, and your baby’s station hasn’t descended. Let’s see what’s going on.” She brought an ultrasound machine, and she performed the ultrasound on me. She literally saw that it was the baby’s head’s position. His head was slightly crooked to the left. Meagan: Asynclitic, mhmm. Aisha: Exactly. That’s when I’m telling you that I love these people. I’m still having butterflies thinking about them. They came with the Miles Circuit. They came with the sheet with the images, and they’re like, “We’re going to do those.” I’m like, “The Miles Circuit!” They’re like, “Yes.” I’m like, “Oh my god. You guys are my people.” We started doing the Miles Circuit. I did every movement for 30 minutes. I held it for 30 minutes. I did the cowgirl, I think they call it. Meagan: The flying cowgirl. Aisha: Exactly. Then after that, they came back. My doctor thought the baby’s position had changed, but my water hadn’t broken yet. She was like, “I’m going to break your water. The worst case scenario is that your baby’s heart doesn’t handle it, but I think that’s going to make us go to the next level.” She broke my water. Literally, within the time she broke it and went to check, I was ready to go. That was literally all it took. She was like, “Okay, we’re going to start pushing.” I know in my birth plan, I said that I was not going to push on my back lying down. I went on my four knees. I went first in my knees. I was holding onto the bed, and I was pushing that way. But I was so tired. I hadn’t eaten in a while. I was still drinking, so drinking was good, but I hadn’t eaten. My doula gave me candy. That helped me, but I remember in that exact moment, in my thoughts, “Aisha, your baby did it. This is your time now to help your baby. This is it. You’ve waited four years for this moment. This is it. This is all you’ve wanted. You need to find strength somewhere and make it happen.” I looked at them. I’m like, “I’m going to lie down.” I laid down, and my doula gave me this blanket. They attached this. Meagan: Mhmm, some tug-of-war. You did some tug-of-war, mhmm. Aisha: I was pulling on it when I was pushing, and my mom and a nurse were pushing my legs up. Yeah, then I pushed. I pushed. I pushed, and at some point, my body was pushing automatically whenever the contraction would come. It would literally do that. I would bear down by myself. I know the doctor kept looking at me. She was like, “Wow. This is awesome.” Yeah. I think I pushed for 45 minutes, and then he was born. My husband is actually the one who caught the baby. Meagan: Oh, yay. Aisha: That’s what we wanted. We caught him. We did not know the gender, so it was really fun to see that it was a boy after two daughters. Once he was born, they put him on my chest. Everybody was crying. I know the nurses were crying. The doctor was crying. I’ve never had a hug from a doctor, and she literally came to my bedside and hugged me. She was like, “This is the moment. We don’t see this often, so thank you for letting us experience this.”I know for a lot of the nurses, it was almost the shift change. It was almost 3:00 PM when he was born. One of the nurses looked at me. She was like, “My shift is ending in about 30 minutes. I need to see this. I need to witness this happening.” Then, yeah. He was born, and I think I had a first-degree tear, but it was on the outer labia. It was because when he was born–Meagan: Superficial. Aisha: Yeah, he had his hand on his face like a Superman. Meagan: Oh my goodness, so you had a nuchal hand, too? Oh my gosh.Aisha: Yeah, in the photos of it, it’s so precious. My doula took photos, and you can literally see his hand coming out. Yeah. It was great because that evening, that night, the doctor came back on her shift. She heard that I gave birth. She came to apologize, literally. She was like, “I heard that you gave birth vaginally. Congratulations. I’m so sorry for not supporting you in that sense. There is a risk, and not every woman ends up having great stories like yours.”Meagan: Oh gosh. Aisha: “But we are happy for you.” I was just happy that I proved them wrong and that I made history in that hospital having a VBAC after two Cesareans. It happens. It’s possible. I’m just happy that I listened to that voice inside, and that all of the noise around me did not affect my initial desires. Meagan: Yeah, and overall, your final decision, right? We’ve talked about this. I call it static. There’s a lot of static that, I feel like, looms over VBAC moms. At least it did for me, and I do see it sometimes with my clients. It’s their friends, their family, their providers, or whoever it may be, they are looming with this unnecessary static. Aisha: Yes. Meagan: A lot of it is, “Well, there’s risk and what if’s.” Oh, you name it. So many of these things, and really, I took a whole bunch of notes of little nuggets of your story. I can relate in a lot of ways with your story. It’s similar to mine with how things unfolded. From the very beginning, you started off right. You started off right. You found the provider. You found the team. You got the support. You got the education. You dove in, and like you said, this was four years in the making. It took you four years to learn and grow and have this experience that you wanted. Sometimes, it takes one time to try. I say “try” with quotes, but to go and have a trial of labor, and it maybe not work out like mine and your situation. And then, okay, we learned from those two situations. Now how can we learn and grow from those situations and change and develop this next situation? It’s so weird. My mind right now is really heavy on my daughter’s reflections. They do reflections at school. It’s a big art thing. Her topic is overcoming imperfections. Sometimes, in the birth world and especially as women, as you were saying earlier in your story, we have this thing that if we don’t do it this way or if it doesn’t happen this way, maybe our motherhood is stripped away, or we failed, or our baby failed. We can go as far as our baby failed us or whatever it may be. Overall, no situation is perfect. There are just always imperfections, and what do we do with the situation to grow and transform?I mean, really. I went over some of it, and then just learning more about hydration and how important food is and fueling our bodies. Aisha: Yes, yes. It’s a marathon. You cannot run a marathon without an ounce of water or without food. You see it when you see people doing half marathons. There are people on the sidelines giving them water. Meagan: They’re fueling. Aisha: Right. They’re fueling. It is important and necessary. Knowing that the providers, as much as yes, we do have faith in them, they are there to help us, and they are there. I don’t want to say this in a bad way, but they are working with us and for us. Do you know what I mean? They don’t have the final say. We have the final say. That doctor who was there, when I told you about the dream team, she never ever does hospital rounds. She usually just does prenatals. Even the nurses said, “We usually see her once or twice a year. She never comes.” That ended up being the one time a year that she came. She looked at me and said that she is a pro-choice woman. She was like, “When a woman makes a choice, even if they fail, she will be happier, and she will be able to cope with the results way better than if someone strips her of that choice and obliges her to do something she did not consent to do. The outcome of that will be way harder to overcome than if she is the one who made the decision regardless of the result. That is way better.” Meagan: It’s so true. Aisha: I wholeheartedly believe that. I know I had to really see in myself if that doesn’t work. I know sometimes, we go into labor very naively. I feel like every first-time mom and even second-time sometimes, that can happen especially if let’s say you were going for a vaginal birth, then you have a C-section, then you’re trying for another vaginal birth, it’s still in some sense the first time that you are going to experience this sort of experience. You’re still going into it naively and blindly. Like I said, I never knew a C-section could be an option. The second time, I’m like, “It cannot happen to me twice.” After it happened to me twice, I planned for it. I planned in the circumstance that there would be a C-section, what do I want to happen? I knew I had my guidelines, and at least it wouldn’t be a shocker and a hard pill to swallow. I would have been okay because I had my trial of labor.At the end of the day, your baby does decide how they want to be born. I feel like one thing I would advise all mamas and even fathers or partners, we need to include them to that. I feel like talking to your baby makes a whole lot of a difference. I got that advice from my osteopath where he told me a story about his wife about to be wheeled into a C-section. He came. He spoke to their daughter who was in the womb. He was like, “This is your moment. You decide. If you want to go to a C-section, do it. If not, this is the moment to change things.” His wife ended up having a vaginal birth right at the moment that they were going to. I pulled my husband up at some point I remember when I was starting to push. He came and saw the baby, then he was like, “This is your moment. You decide how you want to be born. You choose, and your mama is going to help you do this.” I feel like having that communication, our babies sense everything, so being connected to that too is so important. It’s so important. Meagan: Absolutely. Absolutely. Circling back really quickly, if we do all of the things, if we take the VBAC education course, listen to the stories, learn more, read more, learn the stats, hire the team, and all of the things, we do our fear clearing processing about past experiences and all of that, and then we go in and be fearmongered like they were trying with you, and fearmongering by definition is that “it causes fear by exaggerated rumors of impending dangers”. There were big things that were said, but if you hadn’t done the research and the education, you easily may have been fearmongered. Sometimes, it’s even easy to be fearmongered even with the education. I will say that straight up. When you are being told that your baby could die, that word is very, very triggering. But you were able to have the education and be like, “No. I understand what you are saying. I respect what you are saying. I am going to continue moving forward this way.” But if we would be fearmongered and not have the education and then later learn the education, overall, our experience and view and our feelings postpartum would be a little bit rougher because we are learning these things that we could have learned before. That’s why education is one of the biggest tips that we can give because you need to be educated along the way because it is easy for someone to come in. Look at you, Aisha, “No, no, no, no.” How many times did you have to say, “I understand, but no, no, no, no.” It sucks that that’s the reality, and trust me, it ticks me off so much. Aisha: It is. Meagan: I wish it would change, but if we aren’t educated and armed with that team, with that power, with our experience, then we are more likely going to fold in those situations. Aisha: It is completely true. At some point, even one of the nurses told me when they were trying to do the easy port that I needed to stop moving because this was going to end up with a C-section, and they really need to do the easy port. I had to tell her to never repeat the word “C-section” in front of my face. It sucks that for women or people experiencing multiple Cesareans or even one Cesarean when they are trying to do a vaginal birth that they need to constantly fight for it. Meagan: Yes.Aisha: But you do need to stand your ground and really focus on what you want. The fears will come, but that’s a moment where you need to rely on the education that you have and all of the process. You spent 9 months preparing yourself, and all of those months must count for something. You’re not going to be that one person. That’s what I was telling myself. In the case that yes, the unfortunate happens, I was at the best place at the best time, and I had the best team. That was my thing. I trusted in my team that everything would be fine. But no, definitely. Yeah. You need to believe in yourself and in your project. Meagan: Yes. Oh my gosh. Well, this episode is just jampacked with all of the nuggets of information, guidance, suggestions, and empowering feelings. Oh my gosh. Thank you so much for being here with us today and sharing with us your beautiful story.Aisha: Thank you. Thank you for having me. Thank you so much. It’s a dream. Meagan: Oh my gosh. Well, congratulations again.Aisha: Thank you so much.ClosingWould you like to be a guest on the podcast? Tell us about your experience at thevbaclink.com/share. For more information on all things VBAC including online and in-person VBAC classes, The VBAC Link blog, and Meagan’s bio, head over to thevbaclink.com. Congratulations on starting your journey of learning and discovery with The VBAC Link.  Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/the-vbac-link/donationsAdvertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands

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