During my entire pregnancy, I never felt any real contractions. I never even felt the Braxton Hicks contractions where you’re supposed to feel a tightening in the abdomen area. People would tell me that I should be happy about it because they can be uncomfortable, but I took it as a sign that my little one was still far from ready to come out. Even when my due date came, the closest thing I had come to feeling a contraction was a very mild cramping feeling. I barely noticed it though. On my due date at the doctor’s office, the doctor said I was 1-2 cm dilated and about 50% effaced. I was at this measurement for the past 2 weeks prior to this. I knew they would start bringing up induction, but since I’m all about doing things the natural way and I’m anti-Pitocin, I was going to do my best to fight it unless the baby’s condition showed otherwise. I also had another reason I wasn’t ready to be induced just yet: I knew that my due date was wrong by at least 2 weeks. Because of my history with the blocked tubes and HSG, I kept records of everything, including when the deed was done, and I knew that the earliest possible date of conception would be at least 2 weeks after my given due date. The due date they told me was impossible because that would have meant that I got pregnant BEFORE the HSG, but I was infertile at the time with two blocked fallopian tubes. Yet, most of the doctors in the practice I went to didn’t want to hear my “excuses.” Only one doctor there truly listened to me and honored my wishes to postpone induction when I was a week overdue.

Once I was a week overdue, I had to get a Non-Stress Test (NST) and ultrasound about every 3 days to make sure the baby wasn’t stressed and to make sure my amniotic fluid levels were good. The baby did excellent during these tests. Even the doctors who wanted me induced ASAP couldn’t say anything negative after seeing the results and said that the baby did actually seem to be doing great in there still. As a patient I really felt vulnerable and upset because I totally felt like my rights were being violated from being pressured by the doctors to get induced. My baby was doing excellent and I knew that my due date was wrong, so I saw no good reason to push nature just yet. Our culture has become so obsessed with rushing delivery just because of convenience, the mother’s comfort, or charts and time tables. I felt like I needed an advocate or something! So I became my own advocate and literally fought with some of the doctors. One woman said she was scheduling me for an induction for when I was 9 days overdue, but at my next appointment I had a different doctor (the one I like), and he had it changed for me, as long as I agreed to keep getting the non-stress tests. He said that I am in control of my pregnancy and that the decision is mine. He suggested that I not go more than 14 days overdue though, and that I agreed with. I said that 14 days would be my limit, unless the NST’s showed that I needed it earlier. I was still feeling great, still going to the gym, and sleeping well. Why rush something when I was obviously doing fine? I then heard about that documentary that Ricki Lake did, “The Business of Being Born,” which was about the same issues I was having! It made me feel relieved that I wasn’t the only one in America feeling this way.

I was just about 37 weeks pregnant and the baby was still breech. People stopped saying to me that she has plenty of time to turn, because we were running out of time. The doctor mentioned that if the baby was still breech for the next appointment, then he’ll try external version which is when they try to turn the baby from pushing on your stomach (which I hear is pretty painful and doesn’t always work). My hospital doesn’t attempt vaginal births for breech babies. I began to get desperate and didn’t want to play the waiting game any longer so I started to research what I can do. I found a list of a variety of things and I pretty much did ALL of them. The funniest of which were the different physical positions, like laying on your back on the floor with your legs up against the couch sticking straight up in the air (breech tilt). Or getting on all fours and laying your arms and top-half of your body on the ground, so that your butt is sticking up to the highest point possible (cat stretch-ah, how I hope the mailman didn’t see me those days). Or laying on your back with your knees bent and putting 3 huge pillows under your butt (pelvic tilt). Or trying to do this choreographed “crawl” around my entire house on hands and knees (on hardwood floors), which gave me a lovely array of knee bruises.  I also sat on my exercise ball and would rotate my hips around in a circle for about 30 minutes at a time.

The less physical methods included meditation and focused thinking, such as picturing my baby turning; putting an ice pack on my stomach; very light self-massages in a circle motion on my belly. I would shine a flashlight on my belly from up high and slowly move the light down to where the head _should_ be; the idea being that the baby wants to follow the light with its eyes/head. I would sit at work and do this in between my work assignments. I would also do the same thing with tapping my hand, instead of using a flashlight, hoping the baby would follow the noise. My husband would talk to my pelvic area in hopes that the baby would follow the sound. But the method I used the most was playing music from my mp3 player and putting the headphones up to my pelvic area. I found myself using a set mix of about 10 songs, mostly softer-sounding alternative rock-type songs, and a few slow pop songs.  I tended to use higher pitch songs since I heard that babies seem to like high pitched voices. My song list included “Dizzy”, “Meet Me in the Tower”, and “Places” by Ours (these became my “staple” songs throughout my pregnancy), “The Frail” by Nine Inch Nails, most of the “Ok Computer” album by Radiohead, “Angel” and “I Love You” by Sarah McLachlan, “Turn My Head” by Live, “Angel Standing By” by Jewel, and “I Grieve” by Peter Gabriel. I also put some original songs from my husband on my mp3 player, one which included both of us singing, and played them to the baby down low, since she would prefer our voices over anyone else’s. One day I finally got some validation that the baby could hear the music. I didn’t realize that my mp3 player was up on full volume and I started to play a song to her, while holding the earbud down very low in the pelvic area. When the music started (very loudly), I felt the baby jump. I scared her! I felt bad, but then I was elated, because I knew for a fact she could hear. After that day I made sure the volume was on a better level.

I had read that being so far along in my pregnancy, you can feel if and when the baby turns. Some women said they totally felt the baby flip, and that it was the biggest baby movement ever. My baby had always kicked/moved a lot and you could see her moving if you looked at my belly. But during this period of trying to get her to turn, I felt nothing like a huge movement and was convinced that she was still breech when I walked into my Week 38 doctor’s appointment. I was shocked when the doctor felt my belly and said she turned! I don’t know which of the 20 or so methods did it, or if it just happened anyway, but I was thrilled! So to all those women carrying breech babies…don’t give up. And keep trying these methods you hear about, because I am one case where it DID work, so stay positive and get on all 4’s girl! haha.

A few days after I found out that my baby was breech, I had my final Childbirth Preparation Class. I felt a little defeated going into the class since I had spent the last 4 weeks psyching myself up for natural childbirth and practicing my Lamaze techniques, squats, etc. Ironically, the beginning of the lesson was about unplanned issues during labor & delivery and how we always have to be ready to “flip our cards” of what we expect or want. They briefly talked about Breech presentations and asked if anyone knew if their baby was currently breech, so I raised my hand. The instructor could tell I was disappointed, and she tried to make me feel better by telling me more about laboring positions that can sometimes help turn the baby during delivery. I didn’t want to stay breech up until delivery though…I was hoping to flip my baby around before that point.

The second half of the class covered the topic that all Middle School and High School students dread most in Health class: the delivery video. Only this was worse because back then you just said to yourself you’re NEVER having kids. Now the issue becomes real and you know you’re indeed having a baby and that everything you see in that video might just happen to you. Yes I did want my delivery to be natural (which was the case for a few women in the video), but what made watching it unbearable wasn’t the look of pain on their faces, or the graphic nature of the video…..it was watching the video WITH my husband. I don’t think I’ve ever been more embarrassed. There were about 10 other couples in the class, and only my husband was the one to squeal like a little girl, gasp loudly, make jerky movements, and physically cover his eyes with his hands. You would have thought we WERE in Middle School. The rest of the class couldn’t stop laughing at him. There was even a point when he kept repeating like a chant, “omg, omg, omg,” and he stood up and paced around his chair! Ah..I remember thinking that if this is foreshadowing to what the big day was going to be like, then I was in trouble. What a good coach, huh?