Linda knew that giving birth without any pain meds or labor drugs wouldn't be easy, but she decided to take a deep breath, give up control over her body, and let nature run its course.
Linda's Story
"It was beyond description how excited I was when we found out that we were pregnant."
We had to put our cats to sleep the same weekend that we found out that I was pregnant, so it was the combination of a very emotional high and a very emotional low. We mostly wanted a healthy baby, but both my husband and I had our preference to have a boy first if we had a choice, so we were very happy when we found out that's what we were having.
"Everything radically changed during my pregnancy."
Pregnancy was a really wonderful and interesting experience. I got very involved with prenatal yoga, and I learned so much about pregnancy and about infancy and motherhood from my yoga experience. It made me have a very profound desire to have a natural child birth. Friends of ours and even some of our family reacted as if we were freaks that we wanted to have natural child birth, but that's what we decided we wanted to do.
"At 33 weeks pregnant, I switched healthcare providers."
The ob/gyn that I had been going to for years wasn't the best person for helping me fulfill my wish to have a natural childbirth, and I wanted to have the type of child birth experience that was important to me. So, when I was 33 weeks pregnant, I actually switched health care providers. It definitely caused a little bit of marital strife because my husband was very taken aback, but we had heard very good things about our hospital's midwives. They were part of a practice with obstetricians and they delivered at the hospital, so we knew we'd have back up in the event that an emergency happened. Switching was one of the best decisions I've ever made in my entire life. The midwives were absolutely wonderful, very supportive, and my pregnancy was overall great.
"My water broke at four in the morning, and after that things got incredibly intense."
At 4:40, I was in so much pain. I was starting to feel a lot of pressure on my bowels, like I had to poop, and it was really weird. What I didn't realize at the time was that it was his head pressing against me trying to get out. I went from being two centimeters dilated to him being born in two hours. The hospital had virtually never experienced anything like this, it was so fast. After he was born, he wasn't out of it from any epidural or anything, and he was incredibly alert for being a newborn baby. He actually started crawling up my belly by himself, up to my breasts. It was just amazing, and we had our son, Zachary.
"Getting through the pain really just took a lot of concentration."
I learned in something in yoga - it’s going to sound kind of funky -- called Sat Nam, where you close your eyes and look at what's called your third eye point, which is the point between and above your two eyes, and you focus on that point and say "Sat Nam." With "Sat" you breathe in, and with "Nam" you breathe out. It takes your focus off of everything else, and it really helps you to not think about the pain.
I had been doing what are called ch'i up exercises in yoga for months before giving birth, so I had practiced Sat Nam. We did 3-minute exercises where we did something that was painful and very hard to do. Thirty seconds is no big deal, but three minutes is a long time. By doing the Sat Nam breathing, I realized , "Wow, I can do this." It's really hard, but if you keep at it, three minutes isn't really a long time. I took that attitude with me into the delivery room to get through my contractions, and it worked.
"Being able to have a natural child birth was the most amazing, beautiful, wonderful experience I could have ever imagined."
While it certainly wasn't easy, it was worth it. I was so aware of what was going on with him and in my body, and I was so in tune with it that I experienced the whole thing. I wasn't in a daze, and he came out healthy and alert and we were able to start bonding immediately. It was incredible.
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