Leah Elizabeth Notter 4/10/97
birth center, posterior presentation, cord prolapse
My first daughter Taylor¹s birth was like an advertisement for our local freestanding birth center: start labor at 4 a.m., go to the Center at 10 a.m., walk around a little, eat and drink a little, push the baby out at 1:30 p.m., and go home at 6 p.m. Nine hours, backache to baby. The only bad was part was getting the baby's head out, she came so fast. With a quick and intense first labor, I was prepared for 4-1/2 hour labor with my second. What I was not prepared for was two very disappointing bouts of false labor. I thought, I'm an old hand at this, I know what real labor feels like. Wrong!
So it was with relief that I felt my water break as I was taking a nap around 4 p.m. I knew that the baby was coming now! Since labor hadn¹t started, I had plenty of time to call my midwife, get my husband home (he has an hour commute), call my mother, who lives 8 hours away and wanted to meet the baby "when she¹s still wet", and tell my daughter, now 3, that the baby was coming. I also had a light dinner and starting drinking Gatorade. All the time, I was soaking numerous extra large maxi pads with amniotic fluid. I had no idea there was so much!
I started having light contractions around 6:30 p.m. By 8, they were 90 sec. long and 3 minutes apart. We called Nancy, the midwife on call, and told we¹d meet her at the birth center in half an hour. With my first birth, I dialiated 3 to 10 cm in an hour, so I wanted to be at the center with the midwife when things started to heat up. For the next two hours, we walked around a local running track, coming back in periodically to change clothes? I was still gushing fluid with every contraction. By 10 p.m the contractions were very intense, harder than they¹d ever been during my first birth. Also, the baby's head was very high and she was in a posterior position: facing forward, not back. Her head wasn¹t doing the work it should have been doing to open my cervix, so I was having to work for every centimeter. I got into the jacuzzi, which was wonderful. The warm water really took the edge off some killer contractions. I was also feeling alot of pressure on my rectum, so I would get up, sit on the toilet for a while, get back in the tub, get back out again... At 10:55 p.m., when I was 7 cm, Nancy checked the baby with the doppler, then I went in to sit on the toilet. All the sudden, I felt something fall into my vagina. I knew it was too small to be a head, so my first thought was it was a foot. I put my hand down to feel it, and realized it was a loop of cord.
Said, "Nancy, I feel something." She said, "Good," thinking it was the baby's head coming. I said, "No, it's a cord." She looked, and said "You're right, it's the cord," in the most calm and reasonable voice I've ever heard. I know that if I had the least bit of panic or fear in her voice, I would have completely flipped out. Instead, I walked the few steps over to the bed and said, "What do you want me to do?" I got up on my hands and knees on the bed while the birth assistant tried to find the heartbeat: she couldn't. She went to call 911 while Nancy tried the push the cord back past the baby¹s head. This didn't work because the baby had flipped around to anterior position and was pushing down hard on the cord. It was completely compressed, meaning no oxygen was getting to the baby from the placenta. At that point, I thought the baby was dead. I was pleading with Nancy, "Please, please, you've got to save this baby." All I could think was, the only was to save this baby was to get her out.
