Ask The Pros
Pregnancy Photos
Pregnancy Calendar
Birth Plans
Birth Stories
Bookstore
Boy or Girl
Cesareans
Chat Room
Complications
Doulas
Educators
Episiotomy
FAQs
Feeding Baby
Fertility
Finding a Class
Health
Interactive
Labor
Message Board
Monitoring
Newborns
Newsletter
Postcards
Postpartum
Pregnancy
Reviews/Awards
Search
VBAC
Week by Week
Who We Are

William Harold Kennedy the 2nd's Birth…

By Sherry Kennedy

It was a beautiful Christmas Day. Our family had decided to have a ham this year instead of turkey. I was 21 years old and forty weeks and two days pregnant with my first child. As I was putting the ham into the oven, I thought I felt wetness between my legs. I went to the bathroom to see what it was. There was just some clear fluid. Could my water have broke? I put a panty-liner on just in case. I went back to the kitchen to finish preparing dinner. There were only three of us this year, my husband Bill, his mom Penny and I.

After having a lovely meal with my family, I checked myself again. This time the panty-liner was soaked and there seemed to be a very slight trickle of clear fluid. It had been about four hours since I had first noticed it & about a week since I lost my mucous plug. I was fairly certain my membranes had ruptured. In our childbirth class we were told that we should come into the hospital right away if we thought our membranes had ruptured. So I went back to the dining room. My family was beginning to clear off the table. I told them that maybe we should go to the hospital. Mom asked why and I told her I thought my water had broke. "When?" mom asked. When I told her it had been about four hours she said, "And you didn't tell us!" I could tell she was excited. Mom had been a registered nurse working in labor & delivery for about 15 years or so. She hadn't attended a birth in about ten years because of her heart problems. I think we all knew this would be her last chance to witness the miracle of birth although no one said so.

We got our things together and went to the hospital on base, about three minutes from home. I felt silly going there since I hadn't had a single perceptible contraction so far, but they had said to come in, so we did. The nurses checked us in & informed the doctor on call that we were there. They had me strip down and wear a hospital gown, which opened all the way down the back. I noticed a box of maternity pads in the bathroom so I helped myself. The nurse then took the pad I had been wearing to see if it was amniotic fluid or not. It came back positive, but the doctor wanted to do a vaginal swab anyway to make sure. So they had me lie down with my feet in the stir-ups. The doctor didn't have anything to say to me, but he spoke to the nurse telling her what to do with the samples. Then he said, more to the nurse than to me, that I was 2cm dilated and we'd induce first thing in the morning. The doctor prescribed an oral sedative and I was told to go to sleep, but I didn't get any sleep that night. The slight drizzle of amniotic fluid was more like a constant steady flow at this point and lying down only made it worse. I was up every hour to change my pad until finally, by morning I had gone through all of the pads in the bathroom. Perhaps I should have asked to go home and sleep in my own bed, but the thought had not occurred to me.

Soon it was 6:00 am and time for breakfast. After that a nurse's aid came in and put an IV in my arm. The nurses told me that the induction would begin as soon as the doctor arrived and they expected him there by 7:30 am. I was really excited and looking forward to the birth. So we waited, and waited and waited. 7:30 went by, then 8:30… soon it was 11:30 and still there was no doctor around at all. By this time I was starving and could hardly wait for lunch. It had been five and a half hours since I'd eaten. Finally the doctor came grumbling in, in a bad mood and obviously not really wanting to be there. They started the Pitocin drip and I asked when lunch would be served. The nurse then told me, "Oh. You don't get to have lunch because you're in labor now." I laughed and told her that was ridiculous. I was starving and I wanted food NOW! But she said simply, no I could not eat while on Pitocin. As soon as she left the room I looked at my husband and my mother-in-law and said, "Okay here's the plan. Bill you go to Burger King and get me a large vanilla milkshake, two whoppers and a large order of fries. Mom, you distract the nurses while I eat" They shook their heads and my husband, who can be utterly insensitive at times said, "Now sweetheart, if they told you not to eat you need to listen to them. They must know what is best for you." I was really angry, at the hospital for having this stupid policy & at my family for not feeding me despite the rules. I was sure that starvation was not "best for me" but back then I was not as outspoken as I now am, so I shut up about my hunger for a while and tried not to think about the ache in my stomach.

Soon I felt the first tightenings of uterine contractions and they were very pleasant. The nurses had strapped an Electronic Fetal Monitor around my abdomen and I was confined to bed. Despite the pain of being hungry, I was elated to be there having my baby. I felt joyful with each contraction and had no pain. Mom sat in a chair in the corner, she couldn't help much because of her health, but she offered me kind words and I felt comforted knowing she was there with us. Bill was great. We had learned Lamaze Breathing in class and I had read the book Painless Childbirth, The Lamaze Method. So we did the pyramid breathing for fun. It gave us something to do since we were confined to bed and couldn't do anything else. Bill and I were very happy during this time, watching the baby's heartbeat on the monitor. Often I wasn't sure if I was having a contraction or not because they were so mild, so I'd look at the monitor to see. After a while the nurse came to check my dilation. I was at 3 or 4cm dilation and at -2 station still. The nurse asked if I was having any pain. I told her No, but I was starving, I wanted my lunch, and I had a headache. I asked if I couldn't have food, could I at least have a Tylenol for my headache and she said she'd go and ask the doctor. I know now that it was stupid for me to ask for any medication, even Tylenol. The nurse could not find the doctor because he had gone home to have lunch, breaking hospital policies that said an OB doctor had to be there in case of complications. Finally she got a hold of him on the telephone and he approved the use of a drug, the wrong drug, for me. The nurse came back and gave me Stadol instead of Tylenol, saying it would take the edge off of the contractions. What edge? I wondered. So far I had had no pain whatsoever with the contractions. Almost Immediately I was high and completely delirious. It was as if I was in-between consciousness and unconsciousness and dreaming yet still awake. Then another nurse came in and turned off the Pitocin. I wasn't awae of her turning off the Pitocin but soon the contractions stopped and I could hear Bill and Mom talking seriously. I put aside the dreams in my head to listen to them. They said labor had stopped, the doctor was gone and I could tell Bill was very angry. Suddenly I felt depressed & I turned onto my side and started to cry. It upset me that Bill was angry, that I was still hungry, that I was no longer having contractions & that I was too high to think clearly. I felt like an emotional wreck and completely out of control because of the Stadol.

Five hours later the Nurses had finally gotten in touch with the doctor, who had been ignoring his pager, and he came back to the hospital. The nurses were walking on eggshells it seemed, because the doctor was so angry to have to be there. At about 5:30 p.m. they turned the Pitocin back on and labor began to progress again. I was starving! I had never been so hungry in my life and was feeling fatigued by the hunger. Labor progressed quickly after that. When we finally reached transition I forgot all about the pyramid breathing and grasped the rail of the bed hanging onto it tightly. The contractions were so strong it was as if a gigantic hand was squeezing me around my waist and it was a bit scary. Luckily it wasn't painful just strong. Bill drew my attention back to him and got me to relax and breathe again. The monitor kept shifting so the nurses decided to use an internal monitor instead. I had no idea that they would actually screw it into my baby's head. I had this idea that it was just a wire that was put into the uterus next to the baby. They really should explain such things ahead of time. (Or else I should have done more research on my own.) Soon the nurse checked me and said that I was 9 1/2 cm dilated with just a small lip. She said she'd go and ask the doctor if I could start pushing or if I should wait. The doctor gave the okay to start pushing, without even examining me himself, and so I did just that. It felt good to push and there was no pain.

The end of the bed came off and the bed converted into a birthing bed. It had a squatting bar that I used to pull myself forward and pedals for me to put my feet on while my bottom remained on the edge of the bed. It was a comfortable position for birthing. After about 35 to 40 minutes of pushing the doctor came in and cut an epesiotomy. Then he decided to cut it again because he didn't think he'd cut enough. He ended up totally botching the epesiotomy and he cut directly into my rectum (4th degree epesiotomy). Luckily I couldn't feel him cutting because I had a shot of Lidocaine before he made the cut.

After 44 minutes of pushing, my son William Harold Kennedy the Second was born. As I was taking my first glimpse of him he peed all over the doctor who then handed Bill the scissors to cut the cord. As soon as the cord was cut the doctor handed my screaming son to a nurse who was waiting with a towel. She took him to the warmer across the room. Before Billy was even in the warmer, the doctor began to pull on the umbilical cord, which was attached to the placenta, which was still firmly attached to my uterus. I screamed for him to stop, because it hurt so much. I was in absolute agony and thought I was about to die. He continued to pull until the placenta came out along with my uterus. Then, after doing an external manual removal of the placenta, he proceeded to put my uterus back in place. It was the most painful experience of my life. My whole body felt cold as if my life force were leaving me. My body shook with the cold and the pain, but no one would give me the simple comfort of a blanket. I could hear my son crying across the room, as I lay practically naked on the bed. I wondered who was crying louder, him or me. I told Mom to go to him and to take care of him. I told Bill that I loved him and prepared to say goodbye forever, but then the most extraordinary thing happened. The doctor removed his hands from within me and the pain subsided. I was alive, and amazed to still be breathing after all of that.

Finally I asked Mom what had happened to me, since she's the R.N. in the family. She told me that the doctor had inverted my uterus. I had never heard of an inversion of the uterus so she explained that the doctor had pulled my uterus inside out.

The doctor began stitching up the wound he left from the epesiotomy. My son was born at 1:44 am on the 27th of December 1995. I didn't get to hold him for nearly an hour after he was born. I was almost too tired to hold him at all, but I knew it was important to get him to my breast as soon as possible. He nursed very well right from the start. His APGAR scores were 8 & 9. He weighed 7lbs. 10 ounces and was 19" long with a full head of hair. He was the most beautiful baby I'd ever seen and I loved him right away. He and I each had a low grade fever after the birth and the pediatrician insisted on putting him on IV antibiotics for the first three days. Thankfully the hospital had rooming-in so I got to keep him with me and nurse him on demand. I finally got something to eat after the birth and then I rested for a few hours.

My breasts became engorged on the third day in the hospital while we were waiting to be discharged. I put Billy to my breast as soon as we got home and had to hand express some of the milk to get him to latch on. I knew I wanted to breast-feed him at least a year, and I ended up nursing him 16 months before I began weaning him which took several months.

After Billy's birth I looked up "inversion of the uterus" in Mom's nursing textbook. It said:

"Inversion of the uterus is a rare and highly fatal accident of labor in which, after the birth of the infant, the uterus turns itself inside out. Shock is profound, and hemorrhage may occur, in many cases causing the death of the mother. This rare complication is mentioned here only to stress the two common causes: 1) pulling on the umbilical cord and 2) trying to express the placenta when the uterus is relaxed. In the former case, the traction on the attached placenta simply pulls the uterus inside out, while in the later the hand pushes the relaxed muscular sac inside out. The umbilical cord never should be pulled upon, and the uterus never should be pushed upon unless it is firmly contracted."

I don't think that very many people understand that the third stage of labor, in which the placenta is delivered, is the most dangerous part of childbirth for a woman. I hope that after reading about this birth women will demand a natural delivery of the placenta. No woman should have to suffer the pain my doctor put me through. Also, I don't think this is as rare as one might think. While I was in the hospital I asked one of the nurses if she had ever seen an inversion of the uterus before seeing mine, and she said she had seen it a couple of times since coming to that hospital, and she had only been there two years!

I regained my sexual desire for my husband very quickly after Billy's birth, but was unable to fulfill my needs because I had terrible pain every time we attempted sex for about seven months because of the epesiotomy. I decided that if I were ever to have another baby I would refuse to have an epesiotomy. I felt like a failure as a woman because I got sick four months after Billy was born and I didn't think I was making enough milk and because I could no longer make love to my husband. People talk all the time about how emotionally traumatizing sexual dysfunction (Impotence) is in men, let me be the first to tell you that it is equally hard for a woman to deal with sexual dysfunction. The good news is that my milk supply came back as my health improved, and within eight months of my son's birth my sex life was no longer painful.