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After her first labor stalled and ended in a C-section, Carlee remembers leaving the hospital so grateful for her healthy newborn, but also confused, exhausted, and longing for a “birth redo.” When she became pregnant again, Carlee planned mentally, physically, and emotionally for a dreamy HBAC. She also prepared thoroughly with a super supportive team at a nearby hospital if needed. At the end of her pregnancy, Carlee presented a severe case of cholestasis and her plans suddenly changed. Carlee began her low and slow induction at 37 weeks with no signs of labor and an unfavorable cervix. But the patience of her birth team, the support of her doula, and her ability to make decisions regarding her care all set her up for a nice, healthy VBAC. When plans changed, Carlee’s preparation still set her up for success and empowerment. Carlee is proof that a medically necessary induction doesn’t mean you have to go right to a C-section. When working with an early induction, patience is the key. With the right mindset and a patient birth team, you have a good chance of having a great birth experience and an even better chance of having a VBAC. Additional linksThe VBAC Link onApple PodcastsHow to VBAC: The Ultimate Prep Course for ParentsFull transcriptNote: All transcripts are edited to correct grammar, false starts, and filler words. Meagan: Happy Women of Strength Wednesday. You are listening to The VBAC Link and this is Meagan and Julie and our friend Carlee. She is from Arizona and she is going to be sharing her VBAC story today. There’s something interesting about her VBAC story. If you have never heard of cholestasis, then you want to listen up because we’re going to talk a little bit about it, and what it is, and why it’s important to actually get the baby here sooner rather than later when it is present. We are going to dive into her story. As always though, we have a Review of the Week and Julie will be sharing that with us.Review of the WeekJulie: Yeah. I’m going to share a review. But before I share a review, I’m going to congratulate Meagan for saying “cholestasis” right.Meagan: I know. I always call, in my head, I’m like, “Choleo--”Julie: Cholestasis.Meagan: Yes. And I just, it says it all the time. I’m like, “Choleostasis.”Julie: You didn’t even stutter. It was just nice and smooth off the tongue, so I was very proud of you. I had to let you know.Meagan: Perfect. I am growing up.Julie: The things we mature on by running a podcast. All right, so this review is from Apple Podcasts and it was left by “natashahoff”. This is one we can Facebook stalk, except it was just left a couple of weeks ago. But I am going to read it. The title is, “So empowering.” She said, “I found this podcast after I had a Cesarean birth with my daughter almost two years ago. I knew I wanted a VBAC and I wanted to hear birth stories from women who have had ‘success’. Little did I know all of the incredible, evidence-based information that Julie and Meagan share on each episode and on their blog! I now feel like I have a wealth of information to help me achieve my goal of a VBAC, from choosing supportive providers to preparing my body for birth, all the way to what to do if my plans don’t go the way I would like. I’m so excited now that I am pregnant with my second baby to be able to put these plans into action and begin my journey to a beautiful VBAC in October 2021!Meagan: That’s coming up.Julie: First trimester. I know.“Thank you, Julie and Meagan, and all of the wonderful moms who have shared their stories!Sincerely, Natasha Hoffstater”I love that she signed her name. Gosh, we should have waited to read this until October so we could go to Facebook stalk her and see if she had her VBAC. Oh well, we will come back to you Natasha. I promise.Meagan: Yes, I was going to say. Natasha, keep us posted along the journey because we love hearing. We love it. We truly love when we get the messages and we are like, “Oh wait, you were the one we talked to way back when.”Julie: We are getting old enough now, and I mean mature, not old, although we are old as well. Well, not Meagan. I’m just the old one. But where we are coming full circle with a lot of the stories and it’s really, really fun. It’s really cool because I love when people share that the podcast educated them and helped them have lots of information. Can I do a little shameless plug-in here for our VBAC prep course?Meagan: Yeah.Julie: Because the podcasts are definitely lots and lots of information, but you have to listen to-- what are we at now? 170-something episodes in? That’s 170 hours of information that you have to listen to. That’s why we created our VBAC prep course because it is condensed. It’s just the nitty-gritty, need to know, absolutely everything covered that you need for your VBAC, but hyper-focused in this six-hour course in easily digestible video segments with corresponding text and set up all really nice and easy, so you don’t have to listen to all 170 podcasts. You can just go and instead watch a six-hour course. It’s set up so you can stop and go, and stop and go, and stop and go. It can take you a while or you can do it all in one day. That way, you don’t have to sit and listen through every single podcast. It’s just a nice sweet, Saturday afternoon with your husband and your little toddler running around, and then you can get empowered and educated in one day.Meagan: Yay.Julie: So, I love that. Either way, we’ve got your back. Something for everyone here at The VBAC Link.Carlee’s storyMeagan and Julie: Alright.Julie: Ope, jinx.Meagan: Are you ready to get into this story? I know, right? We are so excited for Carlee’s story and oh my gosh. Okay, Carlee. We are not going to take any more time. This is your time. Let’s turn the time over to you.Carlee: Okay, awesome. Thanks, ladies. I am super excited to share my story and hope that someone can learn something or take something away. Starting from the beginning I guess, growing up, I was never really afraid of birth. My mom had four natural births at the hospital, but nice, smooth, easy birth,s and both of my sisters had natural births at the hospital as well. So I just thought, you know, my grandma, everybody just all had easy, nice, easy, natural births, so I was like, “It’s going to be okay whatever happens to me when the time comes. I will read a couple of books and I will be good.”It turns out it was a little trickier than that. I got pregnant about after seven months of trying. My husband and I started trying after a year and a half of marriage. I was diagnosed with PCOS when I was 16. Doctors always said, “You’ll get pregnant, but most likely with help, with Clomid,” or whatever types of fertility treatment. So after seven months and getting pregnant naturally, I was super excited and super grateful. I remember that first call to the first doctor, “Um, I think I am pregnant. I got the positive on the pee stick. What do I do now?” I don’t know if anyone else has ever done that. But I was just like, “Oh, what do I do?”With that doctor, I had an ultrasound with them, but I didn’t really vibe with the doctor and so I was like, “I think I’m going to switch to someone else,” which I’m super glad I did. I went to a group of midwives that deliver at a more natural hospital here in the area. My sister had used them for her first birth and so I was like, “Okay. They are going to be great.”Throughout the pregnancy, I met all seven of the midwives. I found two that I enjoyed more and felt more connected to and so I had always hoped that they would be on-call when the time came. For the most part, pregnancy went really well. I went to all of the regular appointments. I turned out to be GBS positive, which I hadn’t really looked into, so I was like, “Okay. I guess antibiotics is my fate.”Towards the end of my pregnancy, I was due in September and during the summer, we lived in Boston for my husband’s work. We left out of town and then came home in August to start student teaching at 36 weeks. It was my senior year of college and I didn’t drop out. I just decided to do it. So I student taught from 36 weeks up until I went into labor, and then the plan was to have four weeks off and go back into student teaching. So it was a hectic time of my life for sure. Birth wasn’t quite the forefront of my mind and I do think that definitely played a part.When I was 40 weeks and 1 day, I made it all the way to the end. I started feeling period cramps around 4:00 p.m. and I was like, “What? Am I starting my period? This can’t be.” I don’t feel like anyone ever told me that period cramps are the start of contractions, so that was shocking to me.Around 8:00 p.m., they kicked up again, so I was like, “I am going to go to bed.” At 11:30, I woke up and got in the tub. I was just like, “I am just going to try and relax through this.” 20 minutes later or so, my water broke and that was the craziest sensation. I just remember feeling this “pop” and then a gush of water. I was like, “Uh, I think my water broke.”So, I got back in bed. I knew I shouldn’t rush anything, so I put the blanket down on the bed and laid down and tried to rest, but I was really just on the app counting contractions. Don’t do that, anyone, in the future. It’s not worth it. I just felt like I should have really--Meagan: It’s like watching the pot boil.Carlee: Yes.Meagan: If you just sit and watch it, it never boils. The second you walk away, you’re like, “Oh. What’s that noise? Oh. It’s boiling.” I agree, “Rest. Just rest.”Carlee: Right. So. I wasn’t. I was so giddy and excited. I called the midwife and it was one of my favorite ones. I was so excited and she said, “Take some time.” Contractions were 5-7 minutes apart, which I feel like is kind of close, but I think I was probably counting them wrong. I don’t know. I was all confused right then.So she said, “Take some time, but we do you want to come in to get on the antibiotics so you can get your two doses,” and so, we got in. We went to the hospital around 3:00 a.m. and contractions were pretty good. They were coming. I got to triage, which I think is the worst place ever. I do not like triage. I got checked there and I was 1.5 centimeters. I was just like, “Oh, you have got to be kidding me.” I got into a room. They took my blood. The guy came in to give me an IV and I asked them, I was like, “Hey, I really don’t like needles. Could you be nice to me?” And he was like, “Oh, deal with it,” basically. I was like, “Oh, okay.” So I think right from the get-go, I just did not feel comfortable in the hospital. I felt out of place. I don’t like hospitals to begin with. Just from the get-go, I was like, “Oh, I don’t like this. I don’t feel comfortable.” I think I shut down a little bit. They had tubs there though, in the hospital, that you could labor in, not deliver, but labor. And so, I spent a lot of time in the tub. I didn’t have a doula, so it was just me, and my husband, and the information I had read from Ina May. I just tried to work with what I knew to do, so I would be in the tub, try different positions, change around. The nurses would come in and check baby’s heart rate. The midwife would come in and see how I was doing, but then contractions really just spaced out and after about 15 hours of my waters being ruptured, they suggested Pitocin. I just really wanted to do natural and so I was like, “Maybe not yet.”They decided to give me half of a pill. I don’t remember what it was called.Meagan: Probably Cytotec?Carlee: Yeah, something to help the contractions, I think. Is that what it is?Meagan: Cytotec, yeah. It’s like your cervix wasn’t super primed and ready. It’s, yeah. Something that can help effacement and dilation. The contractions usually kick in a little bit with that as well.Carlee: Okay. I took it orally. Is that the same thing?Meagan: Uh-huh, yeah. They do it vaginally and orally.Carlee: Okay, because I have heard of the vaginal one. But, okay. So that got contractions a little bit closer together, but they still weren’t-- they were 7 to 10 minutes apart. Just not ideal. And then, they checked me and I was 4 centimeters. So still, not really-- progress, but not as much as they wanted, you know? And so, we decided to go ahead and start the Pitocin. Oh my goodness. Wow. Those really amped up. And so, I wanted something, I needed something to help me relax, but I was so against the epidural. So they gave me something. They said, “It will last two hours. It may make you hallucinate. I don’t know what it was called, but it did exactly that.”Meagan: Maybe fentanyl?Julie: Fentanyl?Carlee: Yeah, probably. Okay.Meagan: It makes you feel, a lot of people are like, “I feel high.” And like, “Whoa.” Like out-of-body and sometimes nauseous.Julie: Loopy or drunk.Carlee: Yeah. I was definitely, at one point, I was running down the street in The Lego Movie. I have never seen The Lego Movie, but I was a Lego person running. It was so weird.Julie: Oh my gosh, that’s awesome.Meagan: That’s the cutest.Carlee: It was crazy. So it was the middle of the night. My husband was trying to sleep and I’m trying to get some rest, but you could still feel the contractions. And so, I was getting out of bed every seven minutes and asking my husband, “Come hold my hips. Squeeze them.” So, making him get out of bed and just a rollercoaster of just-- it was awful. Once I woke up out of that hallucination, weird, daydream stuff, the nurse came in and said, “Baby’s heart rate kept dropping while you were on that, so we had to stop the Pitocin, but we want to try it again.”So we tried it again and then baby’s heart rate dropped again. You know, that whole stop and go, stop and go. At this point, I am 7 centimeters. I had stalled at 7 centimeters for a while. I think this was hour 30 and so, that was the first time I really considered a C-section and realizing that this was probably what might get my baby here. I still wanted to wait and they did let me wait. My midwife, I just have this vivid memory of her standing, like leaning against these cupboards, her arms crossed around her chest, her feet, ankles crossed over. She is standing up, leaning against this, and just so leaned back and not even caring. Just kind of like, “Yeah. I mean, we can do this, or we can do this.” Right? I’m just sitting in this bed like, “Oh my gosh, help me.” You know? I’m trying everything I possibly can, but I just don’t know what to do. Me and my husband are just confused, not sure what to do. She was just like, “Yeah.” I was like, “Well, should we try the epidural before a C-section?” She was like, “Yeah, you could, but you’ll probably just end up in a C-section.” I am like, “What? You guys are these natural-minded midwives. What?” I don’t know. So that’s why I was just like, “I guess the epidural won’t really work.” And then, they started saying like, “What if something is wrong with your baby? What if something is stopping your baby from coming like the cord or something like that?” And so at that point, I was like, “Well, I probably shouldn’t keep going. Maybe it just would be better to get her or baby, here safely.” We didn’t know she was a girl yet. Get baby here safely rather than potentially having a crash Cesarean and maybe NICU time or whatever.So we did. We decided to call around 5:30 in the morning and it ended up being about 35 hours from my water breaking to go into the OR. Everything in the OR was great. Everyone was really kind and understanding. The anesthesiologist was super nice and the nurse held me while I got the needle in my back, which I was terrified of. I think probably the lowest point though, was lying naked on that table with the lights. For sure. Like, awful. But my husband came up and he got to be there. The surgeon let us know when baby was coming. We didn’t know the gender, and so we wanted my husband to call out the gender. The surgeon held up the baby and he was like, “It’s a boy, I think.” Everyone just lau…
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