The Apprentice Adventures
Stories of a Mississippi Midwife
Saturday, May 9, 2015
Midwives Delivered The Royal Baby!!
Friday, April 24, 2015
CHDs and Homebirth
Baby G
The next time I would encounter a CHD baby would be just over a month later.
Baby W
Early on a Saturday in May my mom woke me up to tell me that we needed to head to our client's house that was about two hours away because she was in labor. After we had only been on the road for about 30 minutes the Doula called and said she saw the head!! Needless to say, I floored it! I know for a fact that I got up to 110mph, and I might have been going faster. While I drove like a maniac, mom got ready to walk the dad through delivering the baby if it came to that, and we all prayed like crazy that we would make it in time for the birth. When we finally arrived we flew into the house, (we even forgot to close the car doors!) and found the mom lying down on the floor of her bathroom, thankfully without a baby. This mom had really wanted a water birth, but my mom had advised that she stay out of the water if her husband was going to end up catching the baby, so when we got there she went ahead and got in the birth pool. Not even five minuets later, we had a baby!! Let me tell you that was the calmest baby I have ever seen! She came up out of the water and gave one little cry, and then settled on her mom's chest and just looked at everyone! After we cut the cord and got mamma and baby out of the water we proceeded with her newborn check and everything looked and sounded normal. Two days later the mom called to ask us to pray as they were headed to the ER with the baby after she had had a really big cry and then her responses had slowed . When they got to the hospital the doctors found that the left side of her heart hadn't developed!! They quickly life flighted her to a heart specialist hospital and she had the first of her life saving heart surgeries. She is now doing well.Unfortunately Baby W's story isn't as rare as you would think. Every year 1 in 100 babies is born with a Congenital Heart Defect (CHD) and many of them have no outward symptoms, and prenatal ultrasounds don't always detect them. The CDC even addresses that fact, "Some babies born with a critical CHD appear healthy at first, and they may be sent home before their heart defect is detected. These babies are at risk of having serious complications within the first few days or weeks of life, and often require emergency care."1
So what are we supposed to do to prevent these normal appearing, but critically ill, newborns from slipping through the cracks until it is too late?
The answer is a simple test that can be incorporated into the normal newborn exam. The CDC's website explains, "Newborn screening for critical CHDs involves a simple bedside test called pulse oximetry. This test estimates the amount of oxygen in a baby’s blood. Low levels of oxygen in the blood can be a sign of a critical CHD. The test is done using a machine called a pulse oximeter, with sensors placed on the baby's skin. The test is painless and takes only a few minutes.
Pulse oximetry screening does not replace a complete history and physical examination, which sometimes can detect a critical CHD before oxygen levels in the blood become low. Pulse oximetry screening, therefore, should be used along with the physical examination"2
Now that we know how to check for CHDs it is critical that we get that information out there! I really didn't know much about CHDs before these births. I have a cousin who was born with a CHD, but his was caught on a prenatal ultrasound, so I didn't really pay a lot of attention to how easily they are missed until it happened to me. You can ask your midwife, or doctor, how they check for CHDs, and if they don't, refer them to pulse oximiters. It could be a matter of life and death, and it is too simple to justify skipping it.
1&2 lhttp://www.cdc.gov/ncbddd/heartdefects/cchd-facts.html
Wednesday, January 14, 2015
A Textbook Overview
My First Book Critique
Wednesday, April 16, 2014
We Are Made To Give Birth
Further on in the book she recalls the history of how we got to the modern idea of birth, and says that if we forget all of those ideas and just "let our monkey do it" we will be better off. I agree that we need to come to birth with the assumption that birth is a normal process, but we aren't descended from monkeys, so I would say that you just need to trust that God made your body just fine, and you need to let your body work the way it was created to work. Another thing she says is that "imagining yourself as a powerful mammal can help you feel empowered". I think it is helpful to look at animals and see that they give birth just fine, usually without any help at all, and say to yourself "if God designed animals to have babies just fine, then I know I can have a baby without unnecessary intervention." But to imagine that you, who are created in the image of God, is just an animal is, in my opinion, wrong.
I would recommend that instead of trying to let your monkey do it, or imagining you are an animal, you should memorize Isaiah 66:9 "Shall I bring to the birth, and not cause to bring forth? saith the LORD: Shall I cause to bring forth and shut the womb? saith thy God." I found that verse completely by accident one day, but I wrote it down because it is a great promise to remember when you are pregnant, or in labor. I remembered it earlier as I was trying to critically read through and find what I disagreed with, and why.
I realized then, that while she was right in stating that we need to get our thinking brain out of the way of our acting brain, attributing natural birth to a primitive evolutionary instinct that we need to tap into is wrong. What we need to tap into is the fact that God designed us to give birth and that we need to not try and "play god" with our unnecessary medical interventions.
This post is not to say that all medical advancements are bad. I've never said that, and I never will. It was simply an intriguing thought to me that you could have the correct knowledge and attribute it to the wrong source.
Monday, November 25, 2013
The Game of Hurry up and Wait...
On Thursday November 21st I got off work, checked my phone, and found 6 missed calls, a new voice mail, and several text messages, all from Mom and Dad. Whoops! I called Mom back to find out what was going on, turns out that she was on her way to pick up some extra equipment from the cottage in Mississippi when she had a blowout!! Thankfully Dad was able to go rescue her because shortly after he got to where she was the call came in that our Mother To Be (Hence forth MTB) was having contractions three hours away. At this point I'm still in Alabama so I pulled up the GPS on my phone to find the routes that we could take that would meetup somewhere so that we didn't have to take two cars all the way to the birth. After confirming the routes with Mom I got on the road, and an hour and a half later we met up and left her car in a parking lot.
Now comes the hurry part! On my way to the rendezvous I was only driving 80mph, but after I picked up Mom, and her bag of instruments that would legitimize our speeding if we were pulled over, I bumped it up to around 85-90mph. Well when we were 50 miles from our destination the MTB calls to tell us that her water has just broken!! After that I floored it!! At one point I was doing 105mph!! And I'm not gonna lie, it was FUN! :) Thankfully I didn't get pulled over, and we made that last 50 miles in about 30 minutes.
Then the wait... When we finally got to the house around 5:30 the MTB was doing well and was progressing, but was only about half way dilated. So after Mom checked the baby's heart tones we sat in the living room and waited, Mom had a magazine and I scrolled Pinterest.
Wednesday, October 23, 2013
Guest Post from the Senior Midwife a.k.a. My Momma :)
The Predicted Rise In Maternal Mortality Rates Is Sadly Here
The Maternal Mortality rate was quietly rising back in 2007. The widely published book Pushed said solid numbers were soon to come1. I hate to tell you, but they're here. In 2010 California reported the number of women dying from birth had tripled. Florida and New York have since followed suit.2
The context, the cover-up and the uncanny about these statistics:
Context
Maternal mortality reported rates are 21 deaths per 10,000 births nation-wide. 3 This is double digit losses amid thousands of births. The increase over a generation is single digit. Likely, you will never personally experience the mountain of grief behind these cold facts.
Heart-numbing context aside, two things should be keeping Americans up at night:
Cover Up
New York, California and Florida are likely the only regions conveying the truth. The serious situation in other areas is lost to inconsistent data collection. Maternal mortality reporting in the US is so poor that Amnesty International called it a human rights violation in 2010.
Uncanny
This very same scenario has unfolded before. In 1918 a strange piece of news surfaced. Counties were seeing scattered increases in maternal mortality rates.4 This trend spread over the next two years. It was not until 1932 that a national level hearing was convened to determine the cause!! 5
Sadly, we have repeated our mistakes. Digging back, we find the earliest rumblings of mounting risks to modern birthing woman. They were heard back in 19946. The rescue is way overdue!
Notes:
1. Pushed by Jennifer Block, 2007 Da Capo Press. Page 119
2. Birth Matters by Ina May Gaskin, 2011 Seven Stories Press. Page 126
3. http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SH.STA.MMRT retrieved 10/18/13
4. Lying-in: A History of Childbirth in America by Richard W. Wertz, 1989 Yale University Press Page 155
5. Lying-in “ Page 161
6. Birth Matters by Ina May Gaskin, 2011 Seven Stories Press. Page 126
Next posts in the series:
Your Safe Haven In The Midst Of the Storm
Could a Maternity Solution Birth a Cure for Our Nation’s Healthcare?