Who could have seen that coming?
Remember Maura? She’s the woman whose in utero single footling breech daughter “told her” to go to Bali for her homebirth? Despite being counselled by everyone and their midwives that homebirth was not a safe option in her situation, Maura “knew” that it was the right choice. Of course it was the wrong choice and Maura nearly killed her daughter in the attempt. Ultimately she had an emergency C-section and Lila survived.
Cognitive dissonance is hard. That’s what happens when reality does not comport with your most cherished beliefs. You have two choices in that situation: you could change your beliefs or you could changed reality. Maura is currently attempting to change reality in a truly remarkable blog post, 42 Days and 42 Nights: The Joy and Grief of a Cesarean Birth. I urge you to read it in full. Nothing I write could truly capture the pretzel like contortions of logic that allow Maura to conclude that despite being wrong about every single thing she predicted for this birth, she was actually right.
But the internet never forgets even if Maura does.
Back in August, Maura wrote this:
[pullquote align=”right” color=”#67a7f1″]Her in utero single footling breech daughter “told her” to go to Bali for her homebirth.[/pullquote]
… Lila, our divine little one, things have taken a “turn”. As many of you know, we have long planned a water birth at home (actually outside) and we came to Asia to birth her because she literally asked us to. We sold our homes and cars and furniture and embarked on this journey for her sake. Doing so required an impossible amount of trust and openheartedness. Offering her a chance at natural birth at home here in Bali is something we feel incredibly strongly about … Lila, however, has decided she prefers to meditate sitting up, rather than relaxing on her head like most babies. This means she is breech. Now, I am all about having a breech home birth and have no qualms whatsoever about having her come through me butt first. I even created a new dance called the breech booty boogie to celebrate her choice on how she wants to enter the world 🙂
But others did have qualms including the Balinese midwives and doctors; every single one recommended an elective C-section at 38 weeks. No matter. Maura paid for a New Zealand midwife to spend a month in Bali and attend her in labor. Labor didn’t start until 43 weeks.
What happened?
It was just as Maura had envisioned … at first.
We had a beautiful 16 hour long outdoor labor under the palm trees and it was truly an ecstatic journey. Andrew was an epic labor partner! Our journey began at 4 am walking through the rice fields together under Lila’s birth stars and watching the sun rise over the ricefields as the first rushes came on. I labored in a warm pool sprinkled with rose petals under a sacred palm tree and sparkling blue skies and under a thatched roof looking out over the rice fields. I dilated to four centimeters quite quickly and baby was doing awesome throughout our wild day of laboring in the water and sun.
But then:
Sometime late in the day, Lila inserted one of her feet into my pelvis and my dilation reversed back to 1 cm. At that point after her waters had been broken for 18 hours, and she had switched from frank breech to footling breech, our midwife recommended that we go to the hospital for an emergency cesarean…
You might think that Maura would conclude that her vaunted intuition had failed her. You would be wrong. Maura believes her intuition saved Lila’s life:
She was still doing fine when we arrived at the hospital and no one was in a hurry to do anything. They took the monitor off. An hour after we arrived I had a bad feeling and asked the nurses to check her heart rate. It had plummeted! She was in severe distress and no one would have caught it if I had not asked them to check her… As they brought me into the operating room I was really worried that we were going to lose her. And Andrew didn’t even know where I was or what was happening. I was alone in a frantic operating room of people speaking foreign languages. Within 7 minutes of noticing the distress, I was cut open and Lila was born… There were no sounds, no cries for five minutes after I felt them pull her out. I did not know for the first five minutes after her birth whether she had survived. It was the longest five minutes of my life…
They determined that the cause of all of the abnormalities was a very short cord that didn’t allow her to turn and suspended her high in the uterus and eventually stretched to where it distressed her oxygen supply… Lila could never have been born by way of the birth canal and any further efforts to turn her or birth her would have killed her.
So did Maura make a mistake when she chose to believe that Lila could be born vaginally? Surely you jest!
If I had known Lila had a short cord and could not be born vaginally, I still would have chosen to wait until I went into labor and endure a trial of labor before having a c-section. There are so many benefits to going through some labor before a cesarean. For one, it indicates that the baby is ready to be born. Even at a bona fide 43 weeks, our baby was still quite small and she needed the extra time in the womb. Babies absolutely know when it is the right time to come out. Secondly, a trial of labor allows the baby to experience uterine contractions, which help their lungs and circulation prepare for entry into the world. If we had followed medical advice, Lila would have born five weeks earlier, would have weighed about 4 pounds. Not only would her lungs have been underdeveloped, but they would not have been primed by our labor together and she would have been very likely to have breathing problems.
Ummm, Maura, didn’t you tell us that “Lila is a very small baby estimated at only 4.8 pounds at 36 weeks.” Babies gain about a 1/2 pound per week at this point in pregnancy, so she would have been about 5 1/2 pounds, but what’s a little exaggeration when you are trying to make yourself the hero of your daughter’s birth story.
The truth is that Maura was wrong about nearly everything and Lila almost died as a result, but that’s not how Maura is spinning it:
When I first showed resistance to having a 38-week scheduled c-section just because our baby was breech, I got the line “how you birth doesn’t really matter, having a healthy baby in the end is all that really matters”. Something about that statement made me feel ill. After my experience, I say that yes, the most important thing is having a healthy baby at the end… But that doesn’t mean that that statement is true or that it isn’t dangerous. Statements like this are used to push cesarean on mothers with very insidious bits of guilt, shame, and an illusion of control. They imply that having a cesarean guarantees something. But scheduling a cesarean birth guarantees nothing. It does not guarantee that your baby will live.
Actually, Maura, it does guarantee that your baby will live; that’s the reason it’s done.
Despite having been wrong about nearly everything, Maura has learned nothing:
The other thing that I wish for you is a deep trust in your own intuition. Your perfect body and deep subconscious created your baby, and you and the baby can be trusted to finish the journey. It was my intuition that told me to insist on an internal exam when I did. It was my intuition that told me to go to the hospital when my midwife gave me the choice of hospital or trying to sleep for a few hours at home. And finally, it was my intuition that demanded that I insist for the baby’s heart rate to be checked when she went into distress. Each of these conspired to save Lila’s life. Our bodies know, and we can trust ourselves.
Maura’s intuition told her to go to Bali, told her that she should have a vaginal birth, told her not to alter her plans despite the baby’s breech position and told her to let Lila nearly die. Not to put too fine a point on it, but her intuition sucked! But not in Maura’s mind.
Maura isn’t the least bit chastened by her experience. She’s rewritten reality so that she can preen about being right all along.
If I would have listened to hospital staff over my own internal voice, my baby would be dead. It was not the hospital that made the choice that got her out alive. It was me. It was my body’s knowing. It was the same principle that could be trusted to keep a floating microscopic ball of cells safe for two weeks in my womb. It was the same principle that could be trusted to make 33 perfect vertebrae. My final words to you are that you can afford to trust yourself. You, yourself, are a miracle and a miracle maker and you can be trusted.
Trust birth like Maura? I hope not.
Wow, this from the woman who accused La Leche League of bullying!
Dr. Amy is blunt on-line, but that doesn’t mean this woman Maura didn’t have several very silly ideas. It reads like bad fanfic, too. For heaven’s sake, she’s upset that she intentionally went to a foreign country to have her baby and no one in the OR spoke English.
I don’t believe for a minute that the palm tree she labored near was “sacred.”
Like Heather Dexter, the baby / children are only a prop in her spiritual journey. her experience is more imporatnt than the child’s life.
Unbelievable. J wouldn’t be a CNM for all the tea in china. Patients lime this are the reason for skyrocketing g malpractice premiums.
Well first you need a High school diploma or GED in order to even apply for the exam let alone been able to sit the Certification Exam
I looked in every licensing. Registry and Certification Board for CPM and Jill duggar/ Dillard is not on any midwife list
Anywhere
I was referring to my own career path. However your point about educating daughters is spot on.
Good for you for doing such noble and responsible work!! It takes a special person to be a midwife. Best of luck to you and I hope there are more like you that are interested in this profession!
I’m a nurse practitioner. Different career path in advanced practice nursing. Thanks for the compliment anyway.
Why would they have turned the monitors off? She had a c section in minutes amd was awake to hear whether the baby cried? did she already have an epidural?
I don’t know that the narrative is all that lucid. The major theme seems to be that lucky for the baby, she was tuned in to baby and baby therefore lived.
As I read it, actual events are being tortured into position to fit the narrative, rather than the narrative reflecting actual events.
“No-one was in a hurry to do anything”, but “Within 7 minutes of noticing the distress, I was cut open”.
Sure – they all snapped to it once the Labor Tourist clicked ber fingers…
Quite. And I do understand the drama of being seriously ill and a fish out of water, but she never, in her narrative of the event-inconvenient ‘foreign’ language aside-for one moment is anything other than the one driving the narrative.
Ah, yes, those foreign medical professionals who only speak foreign.
That ‘foreign’ is a hard one to get your tongue around…
How rude of them, they knew that she doesn’t speak any Foreignese and carried on just the same.
Maura should sue them, that is a slam and dunk case …hopefully they have the same litigation-driven system over there that will enable her to file a complaint over such negligent care.
You would think, from Maura’s writing, that the hospital had never handled a birth before. But then, you would think no one ever had a baby before. I think she went pretty much straight to OR, because husband was still doing admission paperwork and wasn’t with her.
I am totally a layperson in obstetrics but I am puzzled about this scene… labouring mother, broken membranes for over 18 hours, footling baby with one foot out of the womb already, and they were taking their time to perform the cesarean and not even monitoring the baby’s heart rate? Is this normal?
In some sort of horrible way this article is a wonderful kind of therapy. Every time I think I’m a terrible Mother… I’ll think of her:
There are so many reasons not to have a cesarean! First, there was a risk to me as the mother in this birth. Cesarean section can be a fatal surgery.
To reassure myself that at no point ever during and since my son’s arrival did I put myself before him.
I love that c-sections are supposedly traumatic for babies but having your foot stuck in a pelvis for x amount of time is apparently fine as is being distressed/ starved of oxygen. Having been almost choked into unconsciousness myself, I can assure her that’s traumatic alright and I’d rather cut myself open than put a child through that.
OT, but I recently heard a radio ad by lawyers looking for parents of autistic and learning disabled children, saying that oxygen deprivation at birth might be the cause. I’ve read several comments here throughout the years about the possibility that these homebirths where the baby is born blue and not breathing but “pinks up quickly” might end up with learning disabilities later, so that ad really jumped out at me. It will be interesting to see how this turns out.
Lawyers generally won’t take home birth cases, because home birth midwives generally don’t have liability insurance and if you sue them they just declare bankruptcy to get out of it. Because they care about their patients so much…
My civ pro professor always said a judgement is only good if they can pay it; otherwise you just have a worthless piece of paper that cost you thousands to own!!!
Exactly.
I’m an attorney. Who used to take medical malpractice cases. These cases are extremely expensive to bring (just to begin with, experts charge several hundred dollars per hour, minimum- and they charge to review medical records, which are usually voluminous, write reports, be deposed for hours, traveling (many times from out of state), sit in the courthouse waiting to testify, testifying, etc.) There’s many other expenses, too, which means expenses usually total well over $10,000 per case (with many reaching $20,000 or more). These expenses are all paid by the attorney, who is gambling that they’ll get paid back at the end.
A midwife doesn’t have $50,000+ (if the baby lived with significant damage and high ongoing medical bills, a court ordered award could be $1 million or more.) Midwives don’t carry malpractice insurance (with possibly very few exceptions) to pay such an amount. They don’t work for a hospital to use, either. And as Daleth noted, if a midwife loses, she can simply file bankruptcy (bankruptcy was** my other area of practice), and if the case was in the local news, move to another state and even change her name, as many other midwives have already been known to do. (I think name changing may be illegal in this situation, but can be easily done, nonetheless).
So any attorney advertising as you described is most definitely looking for babies delivered by doctors in hospitals. Preferably born to women who had consistent prenatal care, and received all the recommended testing, etc. This mostly excludes emergency transfers, although at least one homebirth transfer case against the delivering doctor and hospital has been successful (for delay in c-section after she arrived unexpectedly in the ER during a busy time. The judge would not allow any mention of the homebirth attempt during the trial, so the jury didn’t have the whole story. I don’t think this would happen very often.)
In fact, the case I mentioned above was sent back for another trial, as reported in the Baltimore Sun:
July 10, 2013 By Andrea K. Walker, The Baltimore Sun
“The Maryland Court of Special Appeals overturned a multimillion-dollar judgment against Johns Hopkins Hospital in a case that accused its doctors of causing severe and irreversible brain damage to a baby born at the hospital.
The judges ordered the case sent back to a lower court for retrial. They ruled that Hopkins should have been allowed to give more testimony about the role a midwife might have played in the baby’s injuries.”
Thanks for sharing this-sometimes the court system takes a little while to get its story straight, and it’s good to see that in that case the whole story might now come out.
My father does med mal; I just graduated from law school, and am staying far far away from it!!! I do love watching the battle of the experts though. I’ve met several of the experts my father has used, and it always cracks me up when they brag about “their large verdicts,” No, the attorney won the verdict because he or she knew how to qualify you, which questions to ask, how to cross the opposing expert, and knew which credentials a jury would find impressive!! I know this doesn’t have much to do with this thread, but my hat goes off to you for taking med mal cases bc I know how hard they are to try.
How did Maura know that the baby had stuck one of her feet into Maura’s pelvis without monitoring equipment?
The baby told her so, I’m sure.
I couldn’t make it past the rose petals.
When I went into labor with my first, my divine intuition told me to go to the hospital quickly rather than wait at home. My baby whispered softly to me through my placenta that I should let the doctors continuously monitor me at this first-rate obstetrics unit. When his tones were not reassuring, my darling child signaled that he could no longer peacefully meditate in my womb. And when the doctors suggested a c-section, my child sent a wave of peace over my body and mind, telling me from inside that I was making the most motherly choice of all, to put his life above all else. (Ok, it wasn’t divine inspiration, it was a foundation of trust in science and a firm grasp on managing risk that led to my first c-section.)
I have to say, my second C-section (you know, one of those “horrid” ones planned at 38 weeks) was awesome. Choosing, ahead of time, to give my child the best chance at surviving birth, and having control over the conditions of that gift to my child, was incredibly empowering.
I’m a spiritual person, which to some might seem like a different form of woo, but the part where it ends for me is when we are talking about health. Spirituality should remain in the realm of the soul. So my fetus can “talk” to me about what she wants her name to be, but my doctor gets to make decision about her delivery process.
My divine intuition told me my body was functioning normally, but the little pee sticks said “hey, look at all this protein in your urine!”
That woman actually sounds mentally ill.
I’ve known schizophrenics in better touch with reality. There’s mental illness and then there’s being delusional by choice. While the former is hard to treat, the latter is impossible. This is the latter.
Good point. My comment was in no way meant to insult those with mental illness (I suffer from depression myself) But is someone like that fit to raise a child? No.
It was me… My body knowing… My intuition… blah-blah-blah. Why is she so obsessed with the whole thing being ONLY her merit? God, why not honestly say: “I f**cked up and behaved like a total idiot but luck was on my side and the doctors did a great job and rescued me and my daughter! But don’t EVER EVER EVER do like I did”. I would respect her if she actually had had the courage to say so. Otherwise it’s just pathetic.
Least self-aware person thinks she is the most self-aware. Child turns two years old and eats her own boogers and smears poop on the wall. Will she still think the baby is “divine”? When does that delusion wear off?
Oh, the baby doesn’t matter once it’s born, doncha know?
I didn’t! Is that why they don’t vaccinate? Ha. Seriously though, I wonder what baby number two will be like for her. Will she still think it’s divine and take it to these extremes?
She’ll listen for it to tell her where it wants to be born, of course.
I feel as though this woman’s idiocy is a slap in the face to every woman who has lost her life, her baby, or both during childbirth.
Baby making – pregnancy, loss, pregnancy, birth and motherhood – has been the most humbling experience of my life. It showed me my powerlessness in the face of nature. It taught me to release control, accept that I am not the boss of my life. It forced me to let go of pretensions.
Women like this make me physically ill. To be so selfish, so narcissistic, so unabashedly power hungry over forces that should be respected – but never trusted or taken for granted – is to not only refuse the life lessons inherent in the experiences, but to defiantly throw away the wisdom life is offering you. It’s disgusting.
I thought the same just based on my WIFE’s pregnancy, children’s birth and childhood. Completely humbling. I can’t imagine having to put loss on top of it.
Nothing to add, just wanted to say: Yes! Yes! Yes! This!! 1000x!!
There is absolutely nothing to add to this – you’ve said it all.
I so agree with you. I am an ex-home birth fanatic and I think it is borderline criminal the way these “Crunchy Mamas” preach to “trust your body” and “you were built to birth” and “you know how to give birth, it’s instinctual.”
UH no. I “trusted” my instinct and it almost got myself and my kid killed. Sudden onset preeclampsia and my baby had IUGR with the cord wrapped twice around her neck. I could feel her kick and move, I had no idea there was anything wrong because why would I ever need an ultrasound when the doppler can pick up a heart beat and my fundal height is perfectly normal?
I had deep pitting edema in both legs and feet, high blood pressure, and I gained 17 lbs in a week. My midwives suggested herbs, and homeopathic medicine, and never said I had preeclampsia. They said it was the heat. They asked how I felt. I said “I’m a little uncomfortable, but I feel fine. I feel the baby move all the time. I feel strongly that she will go over term.”
My “intuition” was COMPLETELY WRONG. Because I have no expertise to back it up. When I saw my first medical doctor to address my daughter’s IUGR (about two weeks before my preeclampsia hit), he said, “Well, we should schedule an induction, since you’ll probably get preeclampsia.” I was so angry – “My blood pressure is perfect! I have no swelling! How can you just pull that out of your hat!?” Because he knew that if there is something wrong with the placenta causing IUGR, that “something wrong” will likely also cause preeclampsia. He was SAVING me, SAVING my baby, and I practically spit in his face. HIS intuition (the one based on years of experience in MFM and helping deliver hundreds of high risk babies safely) is the one that I should have trusted, not mine.
This Maura woman is exactly what is wrong with the natural birth movement. She places so much emphasis on the PROCESS, that she forgets that pregnancy and birth are a moment. Your baby is forever, your baby is why you got pregnant. In five seconds you’ll be stressing about breastfeeding and which diapers to use, then five minutes after that, she’ll be eating dinosaur shaped chicken nuggets and using the toilet and that stuff won’t matter either. How your labor went, what type of birth you had, none of that is important when your child is 14 and going through his first heartbreak. Does she think her kid who has profound physical and mental disability because she deprived her of oxygen during labor will be comforted when she says, “But I labored in rose petal water under sacred stars and you came out of my vagina near a rice field! That makes you perfect!”
I cried through my entire surgery, begged it not to happen, and yet, my perfect 4 pound (yes, Maura, 4 pounds! and no breathing problems whatsoever) daughter was in no way harmed. She is smart and healthy and hitting her milestones now at 7 months. All things considered, I am glad of the way she came because it taught me an important lesson about natural birth. Nature is cruel, and thank god for obstetricians.
“My final words to you are that you can afford to trust yourself. You, yourself, are a miracle and a miracle maker and you can be trusted.”
This is the typical sh*t you hear from homebirthers/lactivists and religion. YOU have the power to make your baby’s birth go well. YOU have the power to heal your [insert chronic or terminal medical condition here]. If you Trust Birth, everything will go well. If you Trust God, everything will go well. And if it doesn’t, it’s YOUR fault. Because you didn’t Trust Birth and/or you didn’t Trust God. Maybe you think you did, but clearly you didn’t otherwise everything wouldn’t have gone all to hell.
I’m sure it’s quite wonderful when things go right, because you get to feel like you played some divine part in the outcome. “God heard my prayers and saved my child.” “I trusted birth, and my baby was born healthy.” But when things go wrong, now you’ve compounded the grief. You’ve lost your child, and if that isn’t enough, it was your fault because you didn’t TRUST enough.
“a frantic operating room of people speaking foreign languages.”
SHe was in Bali. SHE was speaking the foreign language. The hubris is ASTOUNDING.
That struck me too.
I was left wondering if she even knows what language is spoken in Bali. Of course, from the start, I was wondering how her baby knew to be born in a tropical paradise. More particularly, I was wondering how her baby knew to choose a tropical paradise that’s popular with tourists.
I am surprised that the baby girl was not translating in real time from the womb.
You would think that if the baby told her to go to Bali to give birth to her, that the baby could have also mentioned that she had a short cord and would not be able to be born vaginally….
Funny how these babies always tell the parents what they want to hear.
Maybe the baby told her in a “foreign language” and she didn’t understand. But she did want a Bali baby.
Yeah, maybe she misheard. “Bali” could have been “hospital”..
Maybe she speaks Turkish. The Turkish word for “hospital is “bakimevi,” which let’s face it, sounds a little bit like “Bali, have me.”
I doubt she speaks Turkish. That would be a “foreign language”. The only valid language, in her world, is English, no matter where she is in the world.
Don’t mean to put this woman on blast buuuuut she publicised her birth soooo um yeah.. Is it just me or do these women think that the world revolves around their earth goddess selves? I swear I feel like some women on,y have babies because “yay. A person part me! I rock!” This woman had a water birth with her daughter in the birth pool. (Eww?) At one point she starts splashing and the dad tells her to stop and shows her how to rub moms back during cont actions. Stumbled across her on Instagram by accident and here’s her birth (warning nudity) http://youtu.be/C1RdCkYpQls
Wow. And everyone there was totally okay with it. Hubby and toddler in the water as baby is born. (Besides that, I don’t understand people who want their children to watch them give birth. I truly don’t. Just. Why? BUT in the water, too??)
I wonder what would have happened if it didn’t go so well? If that baby got stuck?
Plus, how many people were there to give her – and it’s clearly all about her, the mother- the perfect birth? At least a Videographer (a good one, at that) and a photographer (each probably with at least one assistant), plus several birth attendants (wearing black shirts- ??) It’s *at least* the number of people who were in the room when I gave birth to my first. In the hospital. completely “natural” (no pain meds, but pictocin added at some point, not induced.)
I nearly hurled watching The Miracle of Life. If I’d had to watch my mother give birth, I wouldn’t have slept again for years.
If my mother hadn’t miscarried her last two pregnancies, the plan was for me to be there. I was a lot older than a toddler though, and interested in being there.
I mean I understand if the sibling is a willing participant… and *not* in the water contaminated with who knows what (we all know how dirty that can get.) But something about this one didn’t seem like… “oh I want to include my other child in this process,” it seemed more like, “this is just another person who needs to be in MY orbit because everything needs to go exactly as I want because of the goddess I am and the world is revolving around me right now… also… rub my back kid.” : /
And I am really sorry to hear about your mother’s miscarriages Wren.
yes, this is exactly why it bothered me. Thank you for explaining it better than I could.
Yes, that’s different if the child wants to be there. I also want to clarify: I don’t have a problem with a sibling being present at a birth- I just personally wouldn’t do it and don’t understand why, unless the child is old enough to *want* to be there. (This toddler was in the pool, and right at her mother’s vagina as she gave birth.)
It was a broadcasted event clearly. Her statement in regards to WHY she would share this intimate and private moment was “To normalize birth.” … Because birth hasn’t been done for I don’t know.. forever? The part with the little girl splashing and then being told to stop and shown how to rub her mom’s back instead made me sad though. “Stop being a child AND PLAYING because you’re in a pool and instead concentrate on how great your mom is.” The social media accounts that are hers are clearly all about her as well. sigh.
I was present at the births of my siblings, and I don’t feel scarred at all, but I chose not to have my son present at my daughter’s recent birth. Every kid and mom are different. For me, I know I’m noisy when I’m having a baby, and I also know the bad things that can happen very quickly. I didn’t want to expose him to those sights and sounds. My mom didn’t think about the bad stuff so she didn’t mind me being there, is my guess.
I want to clarify: I don’t have a problem with a sibling being present at a birth- I just personally wouldn’t do it. (i do think this video – with a toddler age sibling in the pool as she gave birth- was inappropriate.)
Yeah, I really don’t think it’s a good idea for children to watch their mother give birth.
OT: it’d be nice if the Cleveland clinic fertility obs and my main provider obs were less than a week apart on my due date estimate.
How far out are they?
Can’t your main provider just chalk it up to user error, given you did IVF and you know exactly when the gametes met?
I exaggerated a little; they’re 6 days different. The provider decided the measurements were smallish, so pushed it back. They thought the boy was small at this stage too, but there was even less doubt about him and we insisted on it.
They’re both from the same IVF round nearly 3 years ago, but I know they let the other 9 embryos mature a bit more after the fresh implant (at 5 days) before they tossed one and froze the rest. Don’t know how long thawing takes, but the nurse told me one was hatching and the other was an “expanded blastocyst”( if I have that straight), when they were transferred. So, about 6 days past fertilization?
Six days is totally within user error.
Always nice to get those early pictures to make it real.
Are you feeling any better?
‘pends. I’m not nauseated all day long, but lots and lots of things still set me off. Including cooking shows.
On the other hand, I’m amusing my husband by wanting chana saag in a burrito wrap.
That sounds pretty yummy actually. Glad it’s not all day nausea anymore, that’s freaking exhausting.
Nothing like checking out the coments on SOB and wondering how they got to Indian food!
Hey, isn’t it nice to talk about yummy food instead of arguing with trolls!
Give it a few weeks and we’ll probably have a SOB holiday recipe swap…
A certain pregnant commenter has a craving.
Which is only getting worse, you fiends!!
Trust your baby!
It has ancient wisdom!
Be glad yours likes vegetables….once the nausea settled # 2 liked McDonalds Vanilla Milkshakes and kosher pickles…the latter dipped in the former. Not at all appealing now…
I have always loved fresh fries dipped in McDonalds chocolate milkshakes, so good.
I agree with Mishimoo, that sounds darn tasty.
Nowt wrong with chana.
What is it?
Chickpeas.
Chickpea curry. It’s delish.
Saag is a spinach sauce. Indian of some stripe or other. (Our local shop likes serving food from all over the subcontinent, I think). It is lovely
Chickpea and spinach curry.
Here’s my handy Hindi food guide:
Dal: lentils
Chana: chickpeas
Saag: spinach
Ghobi: cauliflower
Saag: spinach
Aloo: potato
Brinjal: aubergine/eggplant
Paneer: Indian cheese
That will get you through most of the menu at an Indian restaurant, bearing in mind everything will be served spiced or curried.
Aloo ghobi, for example is a popular curryhouse side dish of curried potato and cauliflower.
I like Indian food.
I have to look up the names each time I get a takeaway. I clearly have not been assimilated yet. I prefer Chinese takeaway. Hubby like curry.
I always figure, Thai food is what you start getting when Chinese gets too boring. Indian is a different ballgame.
Our local community has a couple of Thai places, a couple of Indian places, a few Japanese places. Not bad for small land-locked midwestern place. There are a few Chinese places around, but nobody I know pays too much attention to them.
Also:
Matar = green peas.
Naan = soft, puffy flatbread
Roti = unleavened flatbread
Samosa = delicious stuffed dumpling-pastry thing
Biryani = mixed rice dish
Lassi = yogurt drink
How can you list all that stuff and forget the most important:
gulab jamun – DESSERT!!!!
Personally, I like kheer, which is a rice pudding with cardamom and rose petals, and something I ate EVERY SINGLE DAY in Indiia, for the entire month I was there.
The nicest food I ate in India was idli and the guava covered in salt and chilli our driver bought for us on our last day.
Also the chicken fried rice at the Chinese restaurant our hosts took us to as a special treat. We decided not to question it, it seemed to be run by Tibetan refugees.
Restaurant Indian food is not the same in the UK, but I still love it, especially the Nepalese restaurant near us.
But restaurant Indian in the UK is still a revelation compare to what you can get in the US. I’m having occasional fantasies about taking my kids to London someday, to show them history and theatre and feed them curry.
I am sad now.
Is American curry not good?
Can you get something like Spice Tailor kits and make it yourself?
Or if you’re really commited, a Madhur Jaffrey cookbook and a load of spices?
When we first went to our local one, there were a couple Indians eating there, which we hope was a good sign.
I’ve had fantastic Indian food in the US. But I was born in Chicago and live in the SF Bay Area, so I think I have better options than a lot of places. I do think the Indian food I’ve had here was better than what I had in London, but I would love the opportunity to try more places there. 😀
I wouldn’t know personally, but I’ve been told mine is particularly good.
Show us the recipe! Unless it is a family secret and revealing it means you will have to kill us all.
No, no, not my cooking! My local indian restaurant! lol Sorry for the confusion
Well that’s disappointing (for me): great you’ve got a good local though!
Because it was a menu guide, and I haven’t seen that on the menus around here.
It’s on the menus here
mmm garlic naan
You’re making me hungry! Hubby and I will be going to India in January (via Ireland – big trip to show mini monkey off to the grandparents/great grandparents/aunts/uncles etc) and we’ve already been fantasising about all the things we’re going to eat.
So… Barry’s tea, Tayto cheese&onion, chocolate, barmbrack, champ and sodas…
And then whatever lovely food your in-laws make for you!
PS, for my daughter’s birthday this year’s we went to Tayto Park. It has a zoo, a playground and Europe’s biggest wooden roller coaster. And you get a six pack of Tayto crisps and can look at them making crisps in the factory. Would recommend!
I like it too. We got into it when we lived in the UK, and there are some good places here now. And I make curries pretty regularly, a great way to feed a crowd. Thai food is everywhere here, also delicious.
We also eat Indian pretty regularly in Japan-when dying for a vegetable hit, or when I can’t face one more bowl of ramen, there is nothing like an indian curry to reset the taste buds.
I think Matar is peas. Love India Garden’s Aloo Matar. 🙂
Can I suggest if you ignore any estimates the baby happens to provide you with, you’ll probably do fine?
Hope the nausea goes away soon. And I don’t think that channa burrito thing sounds at all bad.
Perhaps this reigning queen, wife to her “consort” Andrew, should have initiated a supernatural contact with her predecessor-in-law by the name of Victoria, Empress of quite a portion of the world, and ask why SHE didn’t go to a nice exotic location to give birth to her all-knowing children and instead clung to pain relief like a rosary.
Un-fucking-lievable. She’s so deep into it. I just can’t.
Little Lila already lying and trying to manipulate mom and she’s not even born. “Trust me Mom…” Teenage years are going to be interesting 🙂
“And they tell me only afterwards that they recommend I wait at least 2 years to get pregnant again!”
Would she have re thought the c-section if they had given her that information before??? Sacrifice this child for the possibility of being able to have another child sooner? Makes no sense to me…
Maybe they didn’t tell her right away because they were speaking a ‘foreign’ language.
I’m shocked, shocked, that with all the thorough ‘research’ she had done before deciding to avoid C-sections at all costs, she hadn’t come across that.
It might if you remember that many of them aren’t this good with numbers. God, an Abby level of maths CAN lead to someone sacrificing their baby under similar circumstances.
Silly, don’t you know that children are fungible?
…I can’t even follow these mental gymnastics. I’m lucky as hell that my pre-term baby didn’t require a NICU stay. My body didn’t “know” what to do. Not only did my water break early, my contractions stopped about 2 hours later. My baby didn’t “know how to be born,” she was breech and her head was crammed against my ribcage. The moment my baby was confirmed to be breech, I agreed to a c-section. The only reason it was delayed is because the nurses had tremendous difficulty in getting an IV started. How narcissistic do you have to be to put your child’s life at risk for some magic “birth experience”?
I find it absolutely terrifying that this woman is responsible for the health and well-being of a helpless child.
If it makes you feel any better my MIL is six different types of idiot and somehow managed to raise four healthy adult children without any major physically scarring.
I feel for you. My MIL is a woo nut, but raised two sensible and intelligent sons.
Sometimes it feels like a violation of my intellect to read the prattle of a homebirth devotee trying to justify her willful ignorance. I think I need to throw up just to rid my self of the toxicity of her inner thoughts.
How about a cookie instead? Cheese flavoured rice cakes help my nausea.
there are reasons why I didn’t go to her blog.
Reading her story made me think of twinkling stars, Tinkerbell and unicorns! How absolutely delightful! So glad that her memories of this near tragedy equal a visit to Pixie Hollow in Disney World.
Reading her account, you’d never think that ELCS is loads safer than EMCS.
OT completely, for those with bigger kids, when did you move from baths to showers? And any tips to get them to enjoy showers?
At the moment I run bath for #1, stick a bath bomb in it and let her muck about in the bath while I bath #2 in the tummy tub on the floor beside her. Once he is out and dry and dressed I wash #1’s waist length hair and rinse the shampoo off with the hand held shower attachment.
Life would be easier if I could just get her to shower while I bath the baby.
At the moment she’s not having it. This is a child who screamed with every bath from birth until age 2, and really dislikes getting water on her face. # 2 loves baths so far, so at least I don’t have to bathe another screaming infant.
Oh, and the waist length hair is her choice, not mine, and since she co-operates with haircuts, washing, drying, brushing and plaiting in order to keep it, I’m ok with it. She knows that the deal is that if she doesn’t do her part in keeping it nice, she’s getting a bob. I blame a combination of watching Tangled and hearing the story of Samson within a week of each other when she was 3.
Our 6 yo showers by himself. So before that.
Our 5 yo showers, but needs help getting the water going (although we are working on that) and washing his hair. But he is in the shower by himself. He’s done it for a couple of years. He likes to play in the shower.
We do more showers than baths these days, but mostly because of time constraints. I don’t know when we switched to mostly baths, but we started with showers together. I would hold them in the shower. It was the way to get them used to having water in their face.
Our younger guy still puts a cloth over his face for rinsing his hair.
Kiddo can’t reach the shower controls, but I’m thinking that goggles and a washcloth, maybe sitting on a stool with her back to the spray might be workable to start with.
Showering at the swimming pool usually ends up with me standing between her and the spray, so we’ll have to work up to it.
She can swim, but really only enjoys backstroke, with goggles.
The water on the face hatred is a big thing.
Don’t know why, but seems to have been consistent from pretty much day one.
Someone above suggested goggles. We have done that, too
My 8 year old has the waist length hair, so I get that. It’s her choice too. It’s one reason I made her start showering. We began with rinsing off after swim class at 5, but it was still baths most of the time. I had her shower with me a couple of times a week for a while, mainly because she couldn’t really handle rinsing without a lot of supervision anyway. She now mostly showers, though she takes after mum and enjoys a nice relaxing bath from time to time.
I assume you’ve worked out that plaits overnight is a good idea to cut down on the work. Mean mum that I am I made my daughter learn to do her own starting at 6 or 7.
I am not a hair person.
Ponytails and bunches are as fancy as I get in the morning, so plaits are *only* done at night or if we have lots of time before we have to be somewhere. Her daycare do plaits, face painting and paint nails when the kids get hyper as a method of subtly enforced quiet time, which I think is genius.
The days I pick her up and the kids have sparkly nails, French plaits or their faces painted are the days I know the staff have earned their paycheques the hard way!
Of course, they do her hair much better than me, so I try to keep those fancy braids in as long as possible!
I’m with you on hair skills, but my daughter went to a girls’ school and somewhere along the way learnt to french plait her own hair without a mirror.
Mine gave herself a pixie cut with a pair of craft scissors. Turned out to be win-win and she looked super cute.
mine’s getting a haircut today. He was *not* pleased last time
I’m much the same, so I’m really glad for youtube tutorials. My girls get to learn about make-up and hair stuff (which they’re interested in) from someone with lots of experience. They can pause/rewind endlessly, and none of us get frustrated. It’s pretty cool.
I make mine wear braids to bed, too
About 3-ish for my girls, they love playing in the rain and realised that the shower is like warm rain. It is so much easier to have one shower while you bathe the other, so I hope you can convince her to try it.
If it doesn’t interfere too much with shampooing, you could try swim goggles to keep water out of her eyes. It helped my 3-year old… He started showering (with help) at 3.
A friend of mine still does that… and he’s almost 30! I possibly should, since I seem to be incapable of showering without getting soap in my eyes at some point.
My (just turned) 7 year old daughter has recently started taking showers exclusively. When we asked her why, she said she likes playing in the shower — but only while sitting on my (new) shower chair (it’s a really simple one). (I’ve had some falls & multiple neurosurgeries due to Chiari, tethered cord, etc. ). We have a hand shower, which she likes- so just adding in a seat so she can sit (“like a bath” she said) gave her “the best of both worlds!” For you, any little (appropriately sized) plastic stool or seat would probably work My DD also has really long hair and we still help with rinsing sometimes, using this, from Amazon. (Both my children really like this since it actually keeps water off their faces.) Lil Rinser Splashguard in Blue and Pink
http://www.amazon.com/Lil-Rinser-Splashguard-Blue-Pink/dp/B001B1FHIC/ref=pd_sim_75_5?ie=UTF8&dpID=515NMgm3iEL&dpSrc=sims&preST=_AC_UL160_SR124%2C160_&refRID=1DDE3BWP88TCXG22CCCH
My daughter wouldn’t let me brush her hair at all. Yup, she got a bob. My hair is a pixie cut now so she seems to think that short hair is awesome (I mean, it is…if that’s what you want). I’ve asked her if she wants to grow it and she says no, so that’s fine.
We always put the boys together in the bath (after they were big enough to sit—we had these bath seats) and around age 5, we started making them shower. They usually still go in there together, they are almost 7…probably will want to take separate showers soon, I guess.
We just chuck both kids in the bath…
Two month old bobble headed baby, I do not trust myself to hold him in the bath as my height and my back means holding a small baby in a bath is a physical challenge for me. The tummy tub is basically a bucket that keeps him in the foetal position with his head above the water level, and I can put it at a convenient height, so it works much better.
My husband, lovely though he is, is not a help at bath time. He’s even clumsier than I am, and doesn’t multi-task.
My foreverkids are 2.5 years apart, and when the youngest was around 4 months, we started bathing them both, together, in the Eurotub (it’s huge!), which has one baby side and one toddler side. one of the pictures in the comments on Amazon show 2 kids, like we did. It really holds the little one safely. Your kids have to be close enough in age, though. we did use it (by request, and safely- it’s really sturdy) well past whatever age limit it says.
http://www.amazon.com/Primo-340W-PRIMO-EuroBath-Pearl/dp/B000056OV0/ref=sr_1_13?ie=UTF8&qid=1447543624&sr=8-13&keywords=Baby+bath
We love this tub too! Glad to hear it works well with two. I’ll be using it that way once the little lady is born.
Our 2 and 4 year old shower (with help) and have been doing so since the little one turned 2. We got them to go for it by telling them (a) they have to learn to shower if they want to go to the swimming pool, (b) blowing bubbles into the shower (mostly against the walls to keep them from slipping), and (c) letting them bring lots of different kinds of cups and similar toys in with them. Bathing the kids is SO MUCH BETTER this way.
Oh, and we also got the kids cute bath robes (my favorites are from RH baby & child), and told them they get to use them for when they step out of the shower.
I have no idea, but I’m there with you. The new thing is I bathe them both at once. Infant loves to watch big sis so that helps pass the time.
My kids didn’t want to switch to showers until they were nearly 8. So my time saving tip was to bathe them very seldom.
Funnels! My kids stick their fingers in the bottom and catch the falling water and then let it whoosh out all at once. You can get a three pack at the dollar store. We moved to showers at about 3 for my oldest and 15 months with my youngest. I put three, ages 1.5 to 6, in the shower together with three funnels and a couple of empty shampoo bottles and a beach shovel. Everyone loves it. We still take bathes a couple times a month for fun. Kids love bathes. Try starting showers as an extra time to play in the water before replacing bathes. Good luck and it is totally worth the effort.
We showered with them while still little, the middle child got held as a baby while mom took a shower so that we could both get clean, this started in one of those desperate newborn days of poop explosion on everyone situations. Then we taught the next one to take showers by having him join us when he could stand up. But don’t worry about it too much, the simplest thing is to bathe them at the same time as soon as baby gets big enough to sit up on his own. And also to do it as infrequently as possible.
“If I had known Lila had a short cord and could not be born vaginally, I still would have chosen to wait until I went into labor and endure a trial of labor before having a c-section.”
So even if she had known for sure that her daughter wouldn’t survive vaginal birth, she would’ve tried it anyway?!? I can’t even form words for this.
And isn’t it the final squeeze anyway that is supposed to help the baby’s lungs clear? I didn’t think it was the labor itself that was supposed to help, particularly nonproductive labor with a breech baby.
There are some thoughts that the stress hormones produced in labor help the baby’s lungs “prime” for breathing. So there are some advocates for waiting for labor before a planned c-section. In reality that is not always very safe- rupture risks with a repeat CS, how do you know how long to labor/how fast you are dilating, placenta previa risks, etc, etc, etc
Considering that the only neonatal lung complication that is more common (but not exclusive to) cesarean birth is TTN – which essentially means “faster breathing for a short time”, and there are no long-term consequences, this “squeeziing lungs” thing seems to be grossly over-rated.
Has the higher cesarean rate in recent decades resulted in an epidemic of “never got squeezed” lung pathology? Don’t think so.
Sure, the thing is that you have to balance that against the other advantages offered by ELCS as against EMCS.
Man, that poor baby. The mom seems convinced that the baby would have been underweight/underdeveloped at 38 weeks, based on the weight at 43 weeks. How likely is that? I guess if there was IUGR maybe, but then the baby would have been better out at 38 weeks, no? Is it possible that a baby loses weight as it goes overdue, if the placenta is failing? We don’t know enough about this story, but perhaps the baby would have been 7.5lbs at 38 or 40 weeks. She’s lucky that baby didn’t just die in utero from being post-date.
IIRC, babies tend to be their biggest at about 40 weeks and start losing weight after that, probably because of failing placenta. (Though I’m not an OB and could have it wrong.)
My understanding is overdue babies lose weight from placental failure. Also, I don’t know if one should trust the estimates she was getting from her illegal foreign homebirth midwife she shipped in from NZ to her rice field hut in nowhere, Bali.
Errrrrr, aside from the whole “Natural birth nearly killed my kid, but I’m too deep into woo to see that” thing, who could seriously think it was a good idea to sell off all your worldly possessions for a one time event? I like an excuse to go to Bali as much as the next girl, but birth is one day. How were they planning on providing for the kid once she was born and wee financially responsible for her for at least the next 18 years?
Well, obviously baby Lila will have a plan and will tell her parents what they need to do.
“Come on, kid! You got us here, you get us out!”
Of course. How silly of me.
Finding out this couple is from Boulder, CO explains a lot. The woo is heavy there. I am guessing one or the other or both of them is a trust fund baby as well as they seem to have money to burn and no particular skills. I am also guessing that Maura has a lot of power in the relationship and that hubby is more than a little dazzled by her, in the way that some men get dazzled by women with personality disorders.
PeggySue, the husband should not get off scot-free here. He’s a complete loony bin. One only has to google to see that he’s an “occult transpersonal therapist”… whatever that means. But yes. white hippie woo.
I agree he shouldn’t get off scot-free. They are both deep in the woo and too privileged for words. I looked at the blog and he writes about being depressed in Bali (before the birth) and not being able to figure out why. Maybe some part of him was aware that they were doing something completely insane?
Oh, Boulder. That explains it.
I have never been in natural labor so forgive the comparison, but the worst sickness that I have endured has been the stomach flu. One round of that has me naked on the tile next to the toilet begging the GI gods to make the pain stop. There is no part of me that wants prettier scenery. Labor for sure is worse than the stomach flu, just extrapolating I am going to say that magical palm trees are the absolute last thing I would care about. It is idiotic to risk your life and the life of your child to be surrounded by pretty things.
Having been through two labors now, I think it’s a fair comparison. My second labor was a combo stomach flu/contractions, and the kid came so fast that my epidural hadn’t taken effect. The pain was excruciating, and literally the only thing I could think of was “get this kid out of me!”
Perhaps the scenery would be nice in early labor, but as L&D progressed, the setting was about the last thing from my mind.
I don’t get it either. Even during my easiest labor (where I only had real contractions for one hour) I just wanted it over with. I can’t even notice my surroundings in labor because the pain just takes over.
I have to say that unless the palm trees are outside my hospital window, they would be freaking me out. when I’m in excruciating pain the only thing I want is a clean very medical looking room with lots of professional medical types around so that they can administer lots of lots of unnatural medicine to help me with the pain. I say this as someone who has gone through labor 3 times and had gallstone attacks.
Wow, okay, the crazy is not limited to this experience. She also almost died on her honeymoon:
http://jamesmoro.com/blog/maura-bohemian-bridal-fashion-shoot/
“On the fourth day I caught a wave on the boogie board that was destined toward massive destruction in the form of shore break. I caught air and gained tremendous speed just before the wave grabbed me and thrust my head into the Earth with such force that my soul left my body and felt the insistent pull of death, dragging me down a black tunnel as a white bolt of lightning thundered through my body. lt was LOVE, my friends, that glowing powerful true nature of all and my deep love for Andrew, my consort, that pulled me, snatching, dragging, heaving back out of that tube of death and poured my soul back into my body. Things are different now (but aren’t they always?). Andrew rescued me and laid me out on the land. With the blood on my face and the shocks of hot electricity that were reverberating through my hands and face, we weren’t sure for a while if they were my last moments. It seemed more than likely that my spine was broken. The pain was the most intense I have endured.We were lucky to have our friend Scotty poppins there and he swam out into the deep ocean to flag one of the last boats of the evening on summer solstice. They called the coastguard who dispatched Rescue 1, Kauai’s rescue helicopter at the last possible moment on the longest day of the year. They transported me with my head and feet hanging clear out of the open copter through a storm of great magnitude:helicopter dropping through blackness, blades kicking raindrops onto my hands and feet in a fiery fury. I stayed three days in the inpatient unit of the hospital where I was made aware of the grace that my spine is intact though I have sustained a serious spinal cord injury and a traumatic brain injury.”
Man, she is the queen of purple prose. “I got a little too ambitious for my skill level, did a massive faceplant, got airlifted and luckily didn’t get paralyzed”?
Really thinks a lot of herself, this one, right?
It does make me wonder, though, if this is what she means when she says she doesn’t have two years to wait to have another kid.
probably she will be advanced maternal age (>35) or something like that. and therefore more difficult to get her HBAC
That must be it.
or the next kid has already told her its time
Her ovaries are speaking to her.
Do you think the father’s testicles are included in the decision making?
Well, in all fairness if pregnancy is an excuse to go to Bali, I probably would be apt to get pregnant more frequently as well. 🙂
Based on her wedding pics, she’s pushing 40.
:::snort::: “Andrew, my consort”
Honey, you’re not the Duchess of York!
Every day I thank the internet gods that my romantic post nuptial dribblings were not posted on public forum.
She seems to think she is.
TBI with frontal lobe damage might explain a few things…
Nah. Check out the wedding pictures. She was wacky before the honeymoon.
Just found them. The dress looks like pretty standard Kleinfeld’s fare. But the headdress! I wouldn’t have thought there was a market for Mardi-Gras-meets-the-Knights-Who-Say-Ni, but apparently there is.
It’s… a very….festive…look.
I re-watched Monty Python and the Holy Grail this afternoon. What a perfect description.
Her consort? This is not the 16th century!
And she sure as he’ll isn’t the reigning queen, at least except in her own mind.
Well, she did sweep into the hospital and those lowly creatures speaking a foreign language obeyed her commands, including taking the monitor off and then saving her baby anyway. I’d say that’s pretty queenly.
It might be part of her religion, I know a few people who refer to themselves as Goddess and their partner “consort” for that reason. It would explain the whole divine child thing.
Tell us more about the goddesses and their consorts…
Oh, a lot of them seem to be an extension of the NCB/attachment parenting ‘mama’-roles with a heavy dose of appropriation and a metric tonne of woo. “All wombyn are goddesses, we need to reconnect with our sacred power” and “I bring offerings to a worthy goddess” (gifts for a friend). The consort is an afterthought, generally only mentioned when flaunting the deep spiritual connection they have. Being that she is reportedly a family and marriage counselor, her relationship needs to be shown off a bit more so she can earn a living.
The problem is that it hurts pagans and wiccans who are a lot more pragmatic about their faith and traditions, and who respect other cultures. It’s a bit like fundamentalists giving whatever religion they belong to a bad name.
Bali is nice.
It’s got country clubs and spas and fancy rehab and detox places.
It also has a large expat population, mostly of Aussies and Americans, most of whom are either burned out financiers, burning through the trust fund or just beach bums enjoying the Hawaii lifestyle at Indonesian prices. Many are deep into woo, un-ironically finding themselves and have more money than sense.
By Balinese standards, she won’t have been the craziest expat they’ve seen, not by a long shot.
Has no one pointed out to her that IUGR babies (let’s call “a bit small” what it really is) don’t need longer in utero. They do better outside, with oxygen and milk on demand, and not having to rely on a crappy placenta and suboptimal cord.
I worry about these children. When your parents literally think you are a divine being, with ancient wisdom and feel that they can predict your personality and know your wishes before you’re even born, I worry about how they will actually cope with an ordinary baby with colic, or a tantrum-throwing toddler, or a teenager who flouts their curfew and experiments with sex and drugs. I can’t see top notch parenting happening.
Well that is when you get twits writing open letters on the internet to their kids chastising them for their lack of perfection.
And wailing about all their sacrifices. I suspect teenage kiddo would have preferred her parent to have not sold the house and to have not burned through the money living out her birth goddess fantasies in Bali.
Yep. “Honey – you can’t have any shoes because we blew the lot on giving you the best ever birth experience. You DO remember it, don’t you?”
I would bet one million dollars it will all be blamed on the c-section. But I agree it would be hard to parent a divine being. I heard an interview on NPR with a former child goddess from Nepal (believed to be the living embodiment of the goddess until puberty, if I recall correctly). I think it mentioned that the transition back to regular society can be rough.
“believed to be the living embodiment of the goddess until puberty”
Like puberty doesn’t suck enough already.
They’re called Kumari. Fun fact.
I actually looked it up using the calculator we use at my hospital since the weight sounded a little off to me. 2 percentile. She should have had an elective c-section at 37 weeks if you follow protocols (or at least in my hospital she would have had that). But hey, waiting to 43 weeks and labouring for 18 hours with ruptured membranes and no antibiotics is always a great way to start parenting.
“I worry about these children. When your parents literally think you are a
divine being, with ancient wisdom and feel that they can predict your
personality and know your wishes before you’re even born, I worry about
how they will actually cope with an ordinary baby with colic, or a
tantrum-throwing toddler, or a teenager who flouts their curfew and
experiments with sex and drugs. I can’t see top notch parenting
happening.”
That or how they will cope with the child being, you know, just who they are and nowhere near who parents like these envision them to be.
Bring put on a pedestal isn’t good for anyone, least of all a very young child.
My son had IUGR and I remember having that exact conversation with my doctors when they told me he’d have to be born at 37 weeks. They explained that they didn’t think my placenta would hold out until term, and it was far safer for him to be born a little early, even if it meant a possible NICU stay.
Plus an increasing number of baby-boomers who have little retirement savings (friends’ Dad was a contract sheep shearer) who can afford a decent lifestyle in Bali that they can’t in Australia/NZ.
Thailand is another popular destination as well so I hear.
“She was still doing fine when we arrived at the hospital and no one was
in a hurry to do anything. They took the monitor off. An hour after we
arrived I had a bad feeling and asked the nurses to check her heart
rate.”
Sorry to burst her bubble, but the monitor being taken off after initial admittance examination or being without monitoring for an hour is standard of care in low resource settings. This was in no way proof that either she, or her baby, or both of them were fine.
Bali with 58-71 per 100 000 maternal mortality rate between 2010 and 2014 is a low resource setting, and no one in their right mind who has access to better care elsewhere will deliberately go there and have a high risk stunt birth that lands them in a Bali hospital.
http://balimedicaljournal.org/index.php/bmj/article/viewFile/127/226
I was baffled by my inability to even lift my feet off the floor for days after the surgery. Six weeks after the surgery I am still bleeding from my yoni. I couldn’t carry Lila in a carrier for the first month. Learning how to nurse and hold Lila was seriously complicated by my wound.
Uhhh wut? Isn’t six weeks of vaginal bleeding post-partum (regardless of mode of birth) within the normal range?
I also don’t understand the inability to lift her feet off the floor or carry her baby. I mean, I wasn’t out going for hikes or speedwalking or anything like that only days after my sections, but don’t hospitals usually try to have you up and moving around after the first day? There’s all kinds of advice out there about positions for nursing, holding, and carrying baby after a C-section as well. She probably would have had a much easier time immediately following the birth if she wasn’t so anti-prescription painkillers.
With our first, my wife bled for about 12 weeks. For the second, I think it was more like 6. Both c-sections.
I had three vaginal births, my first bled quite a while after but the other two it tapered off fairly quickly. I wonder if the uterus doesn’t clamp down and get everything stopped as fast with the cut muscle. Just speculating.
It can’t have helped that she had an emergency C-section after a lot of out-of-hospital labor and the transport, instead of a nice peaceful scheduled one…
Yes, and given the circumstances she might have had a classical incision. That’s probably harder to recover from (stomach muscles cut, etc.).
My CS was scheduled, but I was hauling my 8-pound kiddo around for a walk (admittedly, just a mile, and a slowish one) exactly one week later.
Bled for about 2 weeks, light staining thereafter.
Nursing problems aplenty, but none of them caused by the incision. The incision was just above my pelvis, and my boobs are rather above my pelvis, as they are in a lot of women. 😉 And I’m not exceptionally tall–quite the opposite, at 5’2″ and a bit.
And while rolling over was no joke due to not having stomach muscles, I was walking, if a bit slowly and bent over, the next day.
But then, I wasn’t going for a stunt Balinese footling breech birth, so there ya go.
“My boobs are rather above my pelvis, as they are in a lot of women.” Sadly, mine are getting closer and closer to my pelvis every year. 😉
Ditto. My only consolation is that my granny-boobs are too small ever to get there (I’m 5’7″). 😀
I think she means carry her baby in the sling rather than carry her per se. I also found it too sore to carry my baby in a sling six weeks post EMCS, despite having been able to mobilise pretty quickly and being able to walk normally by that point, so am inclined to believe her on that one. If your abdomen is still tender quite high up, it hurts.
Good point. I shouldn’t assume that just because I didn’t have a problem using a carrier after my c-sections that others don’t.
It may just be my enormous boobs, but I’ve only ever needed two nursing positions, simple cradle hold while sitting very upright and side lying. Neither was particularly difficult after CS.
Lochia can persist for 4-6 weeks after delivery, but after a few days it should be scanty and brownish, like the end of a period, not heavy and bright red for weeks on end.
Given her exaggeration and outright lying about almost everything else, calling light staining ‘bleeding’ might just be par for the course.
If not, then she should be at the hospital, getting sorted.
When I started hæmorrhaging after my daughter’s birth, the GP thought that I was exaggerating, and instead of coming out to see me immediately he waited until after morning surgery, several hours later*.
When he pulled back the covers to see the bright red stuff squirting across the pile of towels my husband had placed strategically, all 6’4″ of him collapsed to the floor, Doc-Martin-style. It’s only amusing in hindsight, since I survived.
~~~~~~~~~~
*The ambulance service was on a work-to-rule, and would only come out if called by a doctor, not a member of the public. I heard the GP verbally fighting with the 999 operator, because they thought that he was exaggerating…
Yoni?! And I thought I was taking liberties with imaginative names for body parts.
http://www.skepticalob.com/2015/08/honor-your-yoni.html
Omg. I am actually offended and dumber having read that on her blog. “I was at peace not knowing if my child would live, by virtue of creating life, I accepted hr inevitable death?” WTF I feel so sorry for this child… When I suffered a terrible postpartum hemorrhage I was NOT at peace with it and you bet your ass I was fighting tooth and nail to survive, doing whatever the doctors told me, letting them do every thing they needed to do to me to help me survive to be a mom. Even though it meant manual placenta removal FOUR times, no pain meds. And blood transfusions, That was the goal right? To be a mom, and have a healthy safe baby?! Natural birth almost killed ME, and I would feel horrible, unimaginable guilt if my uninformed decision hurt my daughter in any way. I’m glad I’m the one who suffered the consequences and not her. This nimwit is moaning and complaining about a c section??! Be thankful you are alive to complain lady! To lay down your life for someone, that is love, I would lay down my life for my family, they could cut me up a million times, I could nearly bleed out every labor, and I’d still be glad it was me and not the baby. This woman doesn’t know what love is. I guarantee she will try a VBAC and think nothing of it.
She wouldn’t have been so peaceful and accepting if it had been her life in danger. I worry about her poor child growing up with such a narcissistic, deranged mother. She seems like the kind of person who will someday let her daughter suffer from whooping cough for months and congratulate herself if the child manages to survive.
GAH. So “she arrived on my heartspace 10 minutes after birth” and her husband “was allowed to meet her 45 minutes later.” Whereas in my inducted, epiduraled, US hospital birth, my husband was right there in the room, commented on her resemblance to my older child between delivery of head and body, cut the cord, and she was in my arms seconds after her birth. I swear, these people are cutting off their noses to spite their faces. If she’d had a planned CS, her husband could have been there with her!
My births were similar. #1 in the U.S. was placed directly on me following L&D w/ an epidural, and #2 here in Canada was placed directly on me for close to an hour following a L&D and epidural that hadn’t taken effect. With #2 in particular, he was with me 24/7 the entire hospital stay.
DH was the one who cut both cords.
“Arrived on my heartspace??” Gah. I kind of hate to think how she will teach Lila the names of body parts.
“This is my heartspace. These are my milkcushions. I hear you with my listeningpetals and look at you with my visionpools…”
Was it the baby who told her to go to Bali, or the voices in her head?
Also, do you think this sort of thing often happens in Balinese hospitals?
“Dr. Surya, you’re needed in room 205. An American woman. 43 weeks along. Needs an emergency cesarean.”
“What? Another one? What’s this one’s story?”
“Just got off the plane from the USA last night. She says the baby told her that she wanted to be born in Bali. The mother was in labor for 16 hours on the beach. She’s been ranting about all ‘too many strangers speaking foreign languages’ for the last ten minutes.”
:Sigh: “Let’s get started. Then let’s order a psych consult.”
Having skimmed through another story on her blog, I was wondering about bipolar disorder.
She doesn’t read as “calm and put-together”.
Apparently she is a Family and Marriage Therapist.
Scary.
This woman has responsibility over *patients*? Yikes! That’s going to replace “never went to a college class and the exam is tomorrow” in my nightmares
Oh, my.
… and people wonder why I gave up talk therapy in favor of just my meds. Egawds.
always make sure your therapist is less crazy than you are. …says the person with a clinically insane psychologist stepfather.
She has some issues, for sure. My “something isn’t right with this person” bells were ringing while reading her story.
histrionic personality disorder. I mean, if we’re armchair dx from the internet, which I would never do, because I’m certainly not qualified.
You should read about her honeymoon. Wowsa. It was epic and extraordinary, except for the part where she almost died and had to be airlifted off their private island and treated for traumatic brain injury and near-paralysis. Also, they talk about the “occult” (their words), “shamanistic journeys” and “transpersonal therapy” enough to make me think that they are into some serious new age woo.
I bet they were absolutely delighted to be obliged to use scarce resources on some privileged first worlder who’d chosen to impose both herself and the emergency on them.
With some luck they charged her at US prices for everything and are now deciding what equipment to buy with the proceeds of the craziness.
I just imagine the doctor saying “damnit! again?”
Spot on, Lizzy!
LMAO!
She claims she “felt it all” during the C-section because the epidural hadn’t been in long enough. Is that a thing? C-sections without anesthesia? Really? Because during my first C-section things went on so long that the spinal started to wear off, and when I started to feel pain they knocked me the hell out with Ketamine. Like, freaking immediately. If she truly felt the pain of surgery with no anesthesia then I really, really feel for her. Even her truly awful decisions don’t justify that.
i think she’s lucky there were epidurals at whatever rural Balinese hospital she was in. Out in a thatched hut in the middle of the rice fields, indeed!
I’m pretty sure she is an exaggerator/liar. A quick google of the names on their blog revealed all kinds of other posts by her and big picture is someone who isn’t truthful and paints herself as a victim.
That’s a nice way to say it. Or “drama queen”
She claims her fetus literally told her to go to Bali. We know that’s not true, either.
Mine used to tell me to go for a nap all the time.
Mine told me to eat spicy food and green apples. They also dictated that I visit a bathroom all the time because they insisted on using my bladder as a trampoline.
Mine told me to eat chocolate…
Mine are both telling me to eat chocolate now. Even though they both came earthside quite a while ago.
Mine had a thing for sriracha in particular. This time around its cereal and eggs (so much for being vegan during this pregnancy!)
It’s funny what we crave. I remember that just two years ago, I couldn’t get enough of the “cake batter” or “birthday cake” flavor stuff: ice cream, Oreos, frozen yogurt. It doesn’t interest me in the slightest now. Also McDonalds cheeseburgers that I would bring home and stuff jalapeños into. I blame the baby….he TOLD me to do that.
That’s clearly your own fault for spoiling the child so early on.
Mine told me to nap. Also to eat coconut flavored anything. Constantly.
Mine all told me to eat pickled onions as if they were Smarties (M&Ms?) a couple of days before I went into labour.
Those have been the only occasions I’ve eaten them since my own childhood; I totally lost the taste for them in my teens, but I could eat a whole jar of them at a sitting when the craving hit.
And mine would also tell me to nap – usually just before doing their exercising. 😀
Pretty sure that if she “felt it all” that she would have been screaming in pain, and they would have had to tie her down in order to operate, the way they did in the 18th century.
Is she talking about feeling the pulling and tugging and the like?
Yeah, probably.
When I had my wisdom tooth taken out, I felt it all. There was no pain, but I could ‘feel’ the cutting and pushing and pulling.
Epidurals can fail. I’d expect that if she was really feeling the full pain of surgery, they would have knocked her out.
I think being awake and aware of people cutting into you would be more traumatizing then “I felt it all.” I doubt she really felt that.
My mother had a failed spinal with her second CS, and ended up with a GA, but only after they started cutting… And she started screaming.
The way she tells it, it’s funny, not traumatic, but I’m guessing this is because she wanted to give my sister a nice birth story. I’m pretty sure it was actually horrific.
Is your mum Irish? I seems to be a trait to laugh about scary and tragic circumstances. You should hear the hilarious story of my Dad falling unconscious from petrol fumes after siphoning petrol from one of the work trucks (farm).. Amongst others…
My mum is a half Jewish White Zimbabwean, which is not a big demographic, so I can’t speak to their typical coping mechanism.
My dad is Irish, and he has plenty of funny stories about people narrowly avoiding death or serious injury, so it has probably rubbed off on her.
Laughing so you don’t cry is indeed a popular Irish coping mechanism.
My husband’s side is from your neck of the woods. Agree re laughing so you don’t cry. I’ve always thought there’s a doctoral thesis in examining jokes and humour mechanisms people used to get through the awfulness of the Troubles.
Good lord. That must have been awful.
It’s plausible, although my guess is that she’s exaggerating. Turns out epidurals don’t work especially well on me, so I was in a lot of pain during my C-section. Didn’t feel the incision, but I felt all the maneuvering they had to do on my upper abdomen to coax my breech baby out. It hurt like hell. Once the anesthesiologist accepted that I wasn’t just feeling “pushing and tugging,” he gave me laughing gas and the option of general anesthesia.
That sounds awful! I’m sorry you had to go through that.
I felt tugging and pulling, but not pain. If she’d felt the pain fully, I would expect more about that.
When I had my tooth out this week, I stopped them when I felt pain. The dentist is like, “Is it tugging? Or pain?” And I’m like, “PAIN!” As in, when they blow air on it (that’s not tugging). By the time I was numb enough, I could feel the tugging, twisting, and all the creepy stuff, but not pain.
I can believe she found the tugging and pulling unpleasant and that’s turned into painful in the retelling.
Yeah, that would make more sense. It is a weird feeling for sure.
Same here. It didn’t hurt exactly, but the rummaging around felt SO weird. I think the closest I had to pain was when someone pushed on my stomach while they pulled my kid out. It was more like really hard pressure, and they warned me before they did it.
I don’t let my fetus “tell me” my birth plans, same way I don’t let my four year old “tell me” we’re having lollipops for dinner.
You don’t? I’m shocked!
Have some empathy for your children, Allie P. Bad mom! Shame on you!
Haha, my two-year-old “tells me” things like that all the time. Sadly for him, telling me doesn’t actually mean it’s going to happen.
I mean, at least your four-year-old can in fact speak those words (and mean them!). So, it’s not quite the *same* way 🙂
I have a feeling Maura is going to change her tune as soon as her daughter actually can tell her things.
Well, at that point it will just be the schizophrenia from the C-section talking, so Maura can ignore it.
The poor baby. She’s going to have a hell of a life.
Or vaccine damage…from all the shedding.
I do hold my hands up to letting my foetuses decide what was for dinner on a pretty regular basis.
Me too. Mine says saltines are evil but chili is delightful. Weird proto-child.
This line wins her the “Mother of the Year” award:
“Coming to terms with my own child’s mortality and eventual death really helped me to make well-informed choices and to be at peace throughout the process that I went through.”
Amazing how that sounds like it was lifted from a blog of a parent who lost a child to an incurable illness rather than an airheaded-twit whose daughter survived in spite of her mom’s stupidity.
I feel like coming to terms with mortality before birth would historically have been a good idea. That’s a very sobering thought to me.
And it wouldn’t have been just your own child’s mortality you’d have to come to terms with. We’re so spoiled.
I recently came across the will that my great-grandmother made in expectation of the labor/delivery of her fifth child. It was, indeed, sobering.
The Roman philosopher Seneca said something like that. He believed that no one should have a child without accepting the possibility that the child could die at any time. Since 50% of Ancient Roman children were dead by age ten, that wasn’t such bad advice.
In a weird way, maybe her intuition did lead her to the right place. If she had birthed in the US she would presumably have gone with a home birth, and thus a CPM. Most CPMs would not have pushed her to go to the hospital when she needed it, so her daughter would have died.
OT, but it looks like there’s a bill in the House of Representatives that would require all public school children to be vaccinated unless they have a real medical exemption (HR2232). The antivaxxers are trying to organize against it. Fingers crossed it will be as much of a success as California’s law!
Awesome! Perhaps they can use Heather Dexter’s story to illustrate how important it is that they pass the bill.
Heather’s children specifically would not have been affected because they’re homeschooled, but it would certainly send the message that this is the basic minimum of responsibility if you’re going to be around other people – and perhaps bump herd immunity a bit, so the children of freeloaders like Heather don’t suffer as much. I agree, I really hope this passes, despite the current anti-vax sentiment in the GOP leadership.
Man, Maura is going to have a tough time when her kid actually learns to speak and can literally “literally ask” Maura to do stuff, instead of Maura deciding what she wants to do and then making up a little story about the baby “literally” asking her to do it.
Except for the dolphin birth, selling your house and all your stuff so you can give birth in Bali because your unborn baby “said so” is quite possibly the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard.
My kids are actually old enough to speak and I sure as hell wouldn’t sell my house and all my worldly possessions because one of them thought we should move to Bali.
I know I always let a fetus dictate my financial plans.
My kids break the bank plans are never NEARLY so cool as trips to Bali, though, let’s be fair.
Bali is a cheap weekend trip from where I am. Not quite so bank breaking. My friend’s Dad retired there. Not much retirement savings and is spending it watching rugby with other NZ expats.
The fact that her husband supported this, and they’re still together has me convinced they’re a perfect match for each other. Perfect in the perfect storm way.
I love the fact that she of her own free will went to another country to deliver her baby, but has the gall to complain that people in the OR were speaking a “foreign” language. No, sweetie. It’s you that’s the foreigner.
I have to admit, my eyes glazed over halfway through this post, so I missed that part.
But, um, yeah.
Reminds me of Steve Martin
http://www.hark.com/clips/tlhsynmryv-steve-martin
They also state that although they wish Maura hadn’t needed abdominal surgery in a third world country, there was “no way to avoid it.” I guess not moving to a third world foreign country to give birth was completely unavoidable!
Not when your fetus tells you to do it, that is…
I didn’t read it that way. She’s just saying how it felt to be in that situation and why it was scary. It was a foreign language *to her,* and all else being equal, most people probably would be more scared during a medical emergency if their care providers were speaking a foreign language (foreign to the patient) than if they were speaking the patient’s language. It adds to your feelings of helplessness and cluelessness.
I’m sure that’s what she meant. But to me it reads like a privileged first-world whine. She CHOSE to go to a developing nation to deliver her child. She took up scarce resources in this nation.
I imagine she paid for those resources. Many hospitals in countries without universal healthcare won’t treat you without first being paid.
So, they sold all their stuff in a hurry. This paid for their passports, airfare, other assorted AND paid for housing, food, various New Age-y stuff that’s never cheap, AND paid for native midwives AND paid for the NZ midwife after she didn’t like what the native midwives said AND paid for a hospital stay. How much did they own before they left?
I’m sure it did add to the stress, but I’m having trouble coming up with much sympathy given that she voluntarily put herself in a situation where it was quite likely that she would end up in a foreign hospital (given a 40% transfer rate for first time mothers, which I’ve read is about average).
Oh, I totally agree, what she did was crazy and carried a high risk of needing “interventions” up to and including a c-section in a foreign hospital. But if she’d been less crazy and tried a home birth here, her daughter would probably have died because most CPMs would not have pushed her to go to the hospital as her New Zealand midwife did.
Side note: What is the adjective for people from New Zealand? Belgium>Belgian, France>French, New Zealand>? There has to be a better option than “Kiwi.”
New Zealander?
Right, but that’s the noun. You can’t say “a New Zealander midwife,” can you?
Apparently the adjective form is just “New Zealand” as in “a New Zealand midwife”, according to google. Wild. I guess I would go with the old standby, “Kiwi midwife”.
What a stunning indictment of CPMs! There should be no circumstances where selling all your earthly possessions and moving to a developing nation where you don’t speak the language and attempting a footling breech homebirth is a safer plan than delivering with someone certified to deliver babies in the United States.
Hahaha! Sad, isn’t it.
New Zealander.
“I labored in a warm pool sprinkled with rose petals under a sacred palm tree and sparkling blue skies and under a thatched roof looking out over the rice fields.” Nothing more natural than THAT, right? I wonder how any of my patients can even look happy after giving birth in a delivery room after having an epidural and an OB resident to attend the birth. I’m guessing the clouds on my scrub cap are pretty close to the view she describes and that’s how I trick them. Or maybe it’s having a healthy baby in their arms for the first time, but surely that isn’t enough right? When you think you’ve heard it all, they always continue to surprise me. You at least have to give them credit for that.
My dad had 3 scrub shirts with palm trees on them! Another had lobsters, so you could pretend you’re in a Maine pool
Mine has storks with babies and clouds all around. Very appropriate for the delivery room. I also have another one with babies playing a guitar. My mom is having a great time looking for all the cute scrub caps she can find online for me, since she can’t wear them (she is a psychiatrist).
Dad was a respiratory therapist; He’d send me fabric and I’d make the shirt.
Are all palm trees sacred? This is an honest question. I’ve always wondered how they decide inanimate objects are sacred. Was it the location of the tree? Or would any tree be sacred in some way?
Maybe it’s a specific species? I know there’s a type of basil known as Holy Basil.
Coconut Palms are considered holy in Hinduism because they are so useful (which is a really good reason to consider a tree sacred). Bali is a Hindu island. I’m guessing that is it.
Sounds entirely reasonable to me.
I need to lie down. What a load of nonsense!
” Cesarean babies are much more likely to have schizoid personality structures and are likely to have trouble finishing tasks and goals in their lifetimes.”
What?? Schizoid personalities issues finishing tasks? Where did she get this garbage from?
I was going to comment about how silly this is too. Then I got to really thinking about it. Whoever told Maura this did so to make her afraid of CS and choose the ideology of NCB. And it worked. Except, where does this leave Maura and Lila now? I actually kind of feel bad for delusional Maura. She and moms like her, have been told that these ridiculous and awful things happen if they get a CS but what if they really need one? How do they reconcile all these lies they’ve been told when they never thought they’d be the one to have a CS. The alternative to her CS of course was her baby dying, so in her mind she was choosing between a dead baby and a baby with “schizoid personality features.” THIS is why CS is so traumatic for these moms. They’ve been told lies but given no way to deal with them if they are the one who needs the CS. (Sorry, I know that wasn’t very articulate.)
But how does that affect Lila in the future? Maura has a really long list of ways that Lila is going to be royally fucked-up in the future already – I doubt that’s a great parenting strategy.
I’m sure she’ll treat her like she’s expecting all these bad things. Kind of like the mom who said she loves her vaginally born baby more than her CS baby.
Yeah, I’m not sure the birth and the expectations around the birth will be Lila’s number one problem, growing up with those parents.
She’ll probably tell herself that her daughter is fine because she worked SUPER hard (and stupidly spent tons of money) to do all kinds of crazy nonsense to deflect that fate.
She says she’s sure she saved her daughter from further psychic damage by not taking anything but Tylenol during her recovery from the c section. Nobody should feel the need to martyr themselves to that extent.
And this person is a mental health professional? Good grief.
A self – identified mental health professional.
“I labored in a warm pool sprinkled with rose petals under a sacred palm tree and sparkling blue skies and under a thatched roof looking out over the rice fields.”
It sounds like a Poe. Or bad fanfiction. Was the word ‘cerulean’ used?
I just don’t know how you can be so divorced from reality…
I’m pretty sure if she had been in the hospital in the US, they would not have taken the monitor off. It actually wouldn’t surprise me if she took the monitor off herself because what protocol recommends taking the monitor off of a laboring footling breach mother?
Also there are plenty of people that don’t have 33 perfect vertebrae who can use her final statement to prove that perfect babies are not miracles and mothers’ bodies absolutely cannot be trusted. I guess if her body could be trusted it would have made a longer cord right?
Someone above mentioned that she was likely in a very resource poor hospital. So maybe they needed the monitor to check other women?
The delusion is strong with this one. Hurt, it does.
No seriously, WTF? Who sells their life and goes to Bali (BALI OF ALL PLACES???) to have a baby????
Does she not realize that if she’d tried to have a homebirth in the us, her daughter would almost certainly have died??? I give it a 50/50 chance a midwife here wouldve suggested transfer (is she American? She sounds American).
Does she not realize a trial of labor would’ve made a whole lot more sense IN THE HOSPITAL???
Is she going to finally admit that some c-sections ARE necessary? Like REALLY necessary??? If her baby had died, would she have said it was meant to be (because 100 years ago, they were both meant to die)?
And finally…if she’d just scheduled the c-section in the first place, the monitoring wouldn’t have happened and the baby wouldn’t have gone into distress. Her intuition caused the distress. From the very first stupid choice to stunt birth in Bali (seriously wtf…?).
I’m guessing her local hospital doesn’t have palm trees to labor under.