Lead into gold: the alchemist's journey

The youngest in our family is 14 years old today.

Eliza is five foot and 8 ¼ inches. I’m ‘just’ 5.7! She was 55cm long at birth, and weighed ten pounds, four ounces. She was always going to be a strapping girl.

Her early days on this Earth still break my heart, and it’s inevitable that a mother replays the birth story at least once a year!

My beautiful baby was born “blue”: not breathing. Unlike my first pregnancy, which culminated in an ecstatic, gentle and easy waterbirth by candlelight in our bedroom, to find ourselves in the sterile and heartless, not to mention adrenalin-inducing, resuscitation room was deeply distressing.
The differences between my first and second pregnancy were huge. My first midwife was very woman centred, and she believed in the power of a woman to birth easily and effortlessly. She also worked independently of other midwives, and would come to our home for antenatal visits. It was a very personal and intimate relationship.

My second midwife was part of, and answerable to, a collective of midwives who were governed by all sorts of policies. We sometimes met at the collective, and other times met in a hospital examination room (despite planning a homebirth!). Throughout my pregnancy I would see the ‘what to do if a baby needs resuscitating’ sign, and my heart would sink! The thought that a tiny baby would be subjected to that was horrifying to me, and alien to our experience of a gentle birth. Still, the images sank right into the depth of my being whether I liked it or not.

The first mistake I made in pregnancy was changing midwives, because we’d moved to a different part of town. If I’d known the homebirth ‘failure’ rate that the midwife for Eliza’s birth carried in her midwifery bag (and to every birth she attended), I’d never have taken her on. You can tell a lot about what a midwife truly believes about birth by looking at her midwifery history.

Hindsight! Shame it only comes into its own after an event!

My daughters liked gestation and hanging out in my womb after the elusive 40 week due date! Midwives who work in a collective get twitchy once 40 weeks comes and goes. An independent midwife, like the one we had for Bethany, trusts that the baby will come when she is ready. She doesn’t interfere.

What I’ve learnt since Eliza’s birth is that even if a midwife tells you it is ‘illegal’ to have a homebirth after a certain date, (which is simply NOT true), you can override any midwifery or hospital policies and sign a disclaimer. Live and learn. The main thing is not to be bullied by your birthcare professional.

Letting yourself to be induced is one of the worst mistakes birthing women make. Induction changes the course of labour ~ and never for the better!
My gentle labour at home that morning was vastly different after I was induced in hospital. It instantly became fast and furious. My baby wasn’t ready to be born at such speed, and now she was being expelled from the womb. I laboured in water, but it was a very different experience from first time around.

Eliza was born with shoulder dystocia (dislocated shoulder), as she got stuck during her ‘forced’ fast entry into the world. She was pulled from my birth canal, and her floppy blue body was taken to the resuscitation table. Emergency calls were put out through the hospital and within seconds the room was filled with panicked, fear-filled strangers. I kept calling out and asking if my baby was dead, but no-one would answer me.

Eliza was given a drug that should only be given to a baby if the mother has been drugged in labour. I had a drug-free birth. The drug made her lungs produce fresh, frothy blood.

I was taken to a trolley, and, without permission, injected to expel the placenta. I wasn’t allowed to stand with my baby, so Paul stood there with her ~ about two metres from me. He stood by her side as she was being resuscitated, dripping, in his wet underwear (he’d been in the birth pool with me) and singing to her. I begged him to sing, talk, touch her. Goodness knows what the staff made of us!

It was decided that Eliza should be transferred to another hospital, so we endured a journey across town in the middle of the night. She was taken by ambulance. On arrival, we were horrified to find a nurse taking a photo of our screaming baby (her tiny dislocated shoulder causing her immense pain). I ordered the nurse to stop. “I don’t want a photo to remind me of my distraught baby!” Clearly I was the first person to ever express this sentiment, as she just didn’t ‘get’ it.

Morphine was administered to my baby, and then three days of hell followed. The staff insisted that she receive IV antibiotics to counteract the lung infection she was likely to get from her waterbirth. They assumed she must have gulped water and that this was the cause of her being born blue. Ridiculous. I told them over and over that she wasn’t born in water, and that I’d only laboured in the pool. Even if she had been born in water, a baby’s reflex stops them from gulping water.

Eliza was attached to all sorts of beeping, noisy machines in a room full of bright lights. They had trouble getting a line into her tiny veins, and she was jabbed over and over again. They wanted to put a needle into her head! (I was out of the room at the time, but Paul made it very clear to them that they’d only be able to do that over my dead body). They discontinued the IV antibiotics at that point ~ but the damage done wouldn’t be noticeable until her first teeth emerged: black and already disintegrating! And then of course there’s the damage to her sense of being touched, and sensitivity to pain or discomfort of any description.

Paul and I kept a 24/7 vigil at Eliza’s bedside; talking, singing, touching. I still can’t bear to think of her little lips spending three days rooting around for my breast and not being ‘allowed’ to breastfeed (due to the mystery lung infection from the gulped water which never happened!). Staff wanted to put a dummy in her mouth. Agggh. Instead, I asked my mother to let Eliza suckle on her nipples (empty breasts) so she could keep her sucking reflex and not be confused by an artificial device.

The whole situation seemed so cruel. My breasts were huge and leaking milk. I expressed milk for when they’d “allow” her to be fed by tube. I wanted to rip the stupid Breastfeeding-Friendly Hospital posters from the walls, and never more so than when they suggested giving her some formula to ‘top her up’! The babies in that unit weren’t being breastfed. Look at my breasts, I said. I have enough milk here to feed every baby. Just let me feed my baby!

We doused Eliza’s feet in Rescue Remedy and didn’t leave her side. Our ‘angel’ cranial osteopath, Madhu Bhana, came and treated Eliza in her crib, much to the horror of the medical staff, but it made all the difference to her health and well-being. (If you live in Auckland, New Zealand, I can't recommend Madhu highly enough).

I asked staff where the other parents were, and was told they didn’t need to be there as ‘there was nothing they could do’. BULLSHIT! Regardless of the medical care an infant needs, the most important care is parental nurturing and attachment: touch, love, words, affection. I have since learnt that any medical condition can be attended to while the baby is in mother’s arms. They don’t need to be in a crib ~ this is purely for the convenience of the staff!

Each of the babies in the Neonatal Intensive Care could have fitted in the palm of an adult’s hand: all of them, except Eliza! At 10lb 4oz, she looked like a whale compared to the premature babies. Despite the grief and upset, it seemed pretty clear that she’d probably survive this challenging time. Our baby was robust.

For Paul and I, this was a time of great growth and a steep learning curve.
Alchemists turn lead into gold, and the only way to heal a traumatic birth is to do psycho-spiritual healing. You can’t do one without the other.

The spiritual growth takes you upwards, and the psychological growth invites you downwards! Down, down, down and deep into the dark night of the soul. You can’t avoid the pain of the descent. It’s essential. Combining them both is what brings healing: lead into gold.

We still see the consequences for Eliza of those first few days when she was denied her biological right to breastfeed and be held in arms. People who stupidly say ‘at least the doctors saved her’ are ignorant of the damage the medical profession can do, and the potentially lifelong impact of their decisions. They don’t see the effect of their actions and how they play out years later.

So, on this, her fourteenth birthday, what is the gold?

My learning about birth, and the impact of an interfered-with birth, not to mention the disempowerment even strong parents can feel when in an alien environment, has fired my passion to teach as many parents and would-be parents as possible about standing their ground; to teach that birth is a co-creation, not just between parent and child, but between them and the birth care professionals they employ. The gold is that we can either heal our experiences by having another birth, or by teaching others what we’ve learned through hindsight (and kindsight).

The gold from Eliza’s early days manifests in the form of The Mother magazine and the birth stories we share, and the educational pieces on birth psychology, as well as my book, The Birthkeepers.

My baby, whose life hung in the balance, is now on the verge of becoming a young lady. What joy she’s brought to my life with her kind heart, giving soul, and infectious smile. This week she’s had her best friend come to visit from down south. They and Bethany enjoyed a meal out together last night away from adults, and today Bethany and I baked a luscious lemon birthday cake.

An undrugged birthing mother always remembers her children’s birth stories. They form important chapters in her emotional makeup. Eliza’s birth was a time that felt heavy, and the medical disasters surrounding her first few days were like lead on our hearts; but Eliza was, and has always been, the gold in our life.