Allison Grace’s Birth Story

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Our little girl Allison Grace was born at home on 40 weeks and 3 days gestation. September 2nd, 2024 at 5:37 PM. She weighed 8lb 15oz and was 20” in length. Dorothy, Brea and Rachel were there to assist.

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A week or so prior I had been feeling crampy but it didn’t really bother me too much so I knew it wasn’t the real deal so I would just go on with my day.

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My labor started off with mild contractions Friday evening, I was able to sleep but by morning they had picked up and I was starting to lose my mucus plug so I knew things were happening. I tried to keep on with my work during the day, made a list, cooked some favorite food and tried to stay active. By evening they had become intense enough that I couldn't really sleep so I tried showering and taking a soak but they still intensified. Sunday morning things were still slow so I did the miles circuit to try and get things positioned better, it kept progressing on Sunday and I was having some very long contractions but irregular so I asked Brea to come just to make sure that baby was ok etc. She checked things over and the baby was ok and surprisingly I was dilated to 5 cm so I was hopeful that we were getting somewhere. Breanna was very encouraging and told me to rest if possible and to stay hydrated and eat. They really picked up in intensity toward evening and were so hard but also really irregular so I didn't feel like they were making progress. We started going the stairs, doing different things to help position things better and by midnight things had picked up enough that Conrad called Brea and told her to come. Brea, Dorothy and Rachel came and checked in, Dorothy came and prayed with us. We spent a long night, no sleep and still seemingly no progress. By morning Allison’s heart rate had become too high because I wasn't drinking enough liquids so they had to give me IV to stabilize that but if not we would have to transfer and thankfully that brought her heart rate down and gave me energy as well.

 

Around 8:00 AM we did exercises through contractions and spinning babies etc to help move her into a better position because she was posterior and I had barely dilated anything more from the day prior. I won’t sugarcoat this, doing those exercises during contractions was absolutely awful but they helped and by noon they said they could break my water if that is what I would choose to do. We decided to go ahead with that and after that things picked up and I was trying to use the tens unit for pain relief if I wasn’t in the birth pool. I was trying anything to help relieve the pain. (I think I broke a tooth off the birthing comb that I was clenching) I was feeling very low in energy and had not eaten for at least a day, so usually after every contraction Conrad would try to get me to drink water or body armor. Around 4:30 my body started bearing down and I felt like pushing so my body just took over and did what it had to do at that point. I was also so tired that I started sleeping in-between pushing and contractions. I remember Brea and Dorothy encouraging me to take deep breaths and controlled pushes and finally they started saying that they see her head and after a few more pushes she was born at 5:37 and the excitement and joy was so great but also the thought that this part is over!

 

Pretty soon after she was born the placenta came out with contractions I got out of the birth pool because I wanted to relax in bed and hold Allison and all the blood was grossing me out, I didn’t know if that was normal to lose that much blood but I just wanted to get out of there. I'm not sure what all happened in this time. I was so out of it and exhausted and was trying to hold Allison and get her started on nursing and I could barely hold her because I was so low in energy. In the meantime I started hemorrhaging, they gave me pitocin, IV and some other stuff but it didn't seem to be helping. In the meantime they were doing the newborn exam on Allison and she was having problems with breathing. I started feeling faint and lightheaded and they tried to get me to drink some juice and eat something that gave me a little distraction but soon after I started feeling like passing out again and they laid me back and took my blood pressure again which was around 72/42 and at that point they decided to make the call for a transfer for both Allison and I. At that point I wasn’t sure what was going on anymore and I was laying in bed and bleeding and not really in any shape to try and go anywhere, Dorothy tried to clean me up a little and helped me to get a gown on and we were trying to figure out what we needed to take along. The Paramedics got there and somehow managed to get the stretcher into our room, Allison went in one ambulance with Brea and I was in the other one with Dorothy and Conrad had to follow us. It felt like a nightmare that I couldn’t wake up from. I started blaming myself for everything that went wrong and I remember that Dorothy very adamantly told me that it was nothing I did that made this all happen. They were going to try and keep us together but we ended up in different rooms. Conrad was trying to go between the two rooms and eventually he stayed in Allisons because they weren't working on me as actively. I just remember them coming in and saying that they are going to transfer Allison down to Devos with AeroMed because the team at Ludington couldn’t get an IV line started on her and that was almost more than I could handle. I didn't expect it would come to that. Dot was trying to get someone to come and take care of me, I needed to be catheterized to help with the bleeding but it wasn’t happening as. I lay there for quite a while till someone finally came, they came and catheterized me and I finally stopped bleeding as much, they wanted to stabilize me so that we could go over to Allison’s room to spend some time with her before the life flight got there. I got to be in her room a little bit before they discharged me after making sure I was stable and we were able to watch the life flight take her. We weren't able to go down with her for the night because we were so worn out so we stayed back at home and Conrad's parents drove down to be there with her for the night. 

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When we came home around 1:00 AM or so I was still feeling lightheaded, I would hear this strange buzzing sound in my ears and was asking Conrad if he heard it too. He tried to get me distracted because he was worried I would start feeling faint again. I ate something and finally went and took a shower and fell into bed exhausted but not being able to sleep right away because to me it was all just so messed up and I was supposed to have my baby beside me. We slowly packed our things up the next morning with hopes that we would only be in the NICU for a little. We heard that she was off the CPAP that morning so that was hopeful. When we got there we were able to hold her for a bit but I was so tired I could barely do anything and soon we were trying to get her to nurse because she needed to be doing that pretty good in order to be released. Trying to learn how to nurse a baby for the first time in the NICU isn’t great, and they would take her blood sugar every time before I nursed her and it hurt her so she would scream so much sometimes that she would wear herself out and just give up and not want to nurse anymore. I was also not so comfortable around the one nurse and I didn’t want to nurse when she was in the room so I started just trying to sneak a feeding in sometimes before they would do the blood sugar test. We finally got a few feedings in and by that evening the night shift nurse had started lowering her IV fluid intake. By the next morning she was off of all IVs and they just had to do a few tests and if she passed they would start the discharge process. By noon they were starting to discharge her, we met with the doctor and he said everything was good to go. So we packed everything up and headed home. Trying to recover from a rough labor and delivery in the NICU was pretty awful to be honest, sleeping on a hard recliner for a bed and having to walk the halls to get to the restroom was not ideal at all with all the blood I lost. I tried to keep it together because I knew the sooner Allison was feeding well we could all go home so I just tried to mentally block everything out as much as possible. There is a lot that I learned from this experience and one thing that is so important is if you go through trauma like this, talk about it, own it that it was hard, it wasn’t how you envisioned it to be and that’s ok.  I was so exhausted but not able to sleep at night because of having panic attacks, it would be from 9:00-12:00 approximately every evening, I soon realized this was a pattern and those hours were when we headed to the ER etc.  If there is trauma please talk to someone about it, don’t brush it aside even if others will downplay it. Thankfully Brea and Dorothy saw the signs and they recommended that I reach out to someone to help me with it and I was able to work through that. We tend to romanticize birth and how we are told it can be a pain free experience, this is a big trend on social media and I will be the first to say it's not pain free but it is worth the pain. Birth is a miracle, and how God designed it is so amazing!  It won’t always go as expected and the outcome might be different than what we had planned. I will always be thankful for all the help that my husband Conrad, Brea, Dorothy and Rachel were, they did everything they possibly could to make things go smoothly and they were as angels in a very difficult time!