Carly's VBAC + COVID Birth Challenges

The only predictable thing about birth is its unpredictability! When Carly felt the urge to push at home, she realized that there wasn’t enough time to make it to her hospital of choice. She would have to have to fight for her VBAC at the closest hospital– the same hospital where she had her traumatic C-section. Though she wasn’t treated with the respect she deserved yet again, this time, Carly held her ground. This time, Carly was in control. This time, Carly birthed her baby how she knew she could. “The first time I became my mom was literally a once-in-a-lifetime experience for me and I felt like that had been stepped on for so many different reasons. The second time around, I was like, ‘I am going to fight for this.’” Additional links The VBAC Link Blog: How to Find a Truly Supportive Provider Mamastefit How to VBAC: The Ultimate Prep Course for Parents Full transcript Note: All transcripts are edited to correct grammar, false starts, and filler words. Meagan: You guys, it is The VBAC Link. We are back. We are so happy. We are four weeks into this and seriously, it is just making me smile every single time we record with another guest. It is Meagan and Julie with The VBAC Link and we have a guest today. Her name is Carly and she will be sharing her VBAC story. You guys, she is pretty stinking amazing. She does all the things. She does cloth diapers, co-sleeps– all the things. I am reading through her bio and I am like, “She is amazing.” You are so amazing. Cloth diapering is a hard thing to do and the fact that you even do it part-time is amazing. So I am excited to get to know you even better and learn more about you. Right before we dive into your amazing story, we have Julie, of course, with the Review of the Week. Review of the Week Julie: Okay. So we already know that I have this weird thing where sometimes I feel like I need to be a singer on the podcast this season. This season, I don’t know what you even call it. In this next review, I am not going to sing, but I really want to just sing because Carly is from Philadelphia. If you know what song is triggering in my mind right now from Philadelphia, I will not sing it. I have been trying to not because I think it is a little bit weird. I don’t want to be weird. I’m really weird. Oh my gosh. I’m weird. Oh my gosh. I’m so weird, you guys. Okay. But anyway, I am just going to read the Review of the Week while you guys can sing the song I am thinking about from Will Smith, and Philadelphia, and all that playground stuff where he spent most of his days. All right, so this review is from Kiley MoMy from Apple Podcasts and it is titled, “Listen If You Are Considering a VBAC.” She said, “My first child was born via emergency C-section and I felt very discouraged and afraid that my next birth could end up being a C-section again. I started listening to this podcast for information and what I got was so much more. The stories shared are so raw, emotional, and amazing. They helped me prioritize a supportive VBAC team, gave me the right questions to ask my providers, and filled me with confidence and knowledge to do what was best for me and my baby. My second child was born via VBAC and I am so grateful to The VBAC Link for helping me overcome the fears I had with my previous birth and helping me to prepare emotionally for my second birth however it turned out.” I love that review. Thank you so much, Kiley. Oh my gosh. All these warm and fuzzies are kind of making me tear up a little bit. I don’t realize, I think, how much I have missed that. Meagan: I know. I know. Yeah. Julie: If you are loving the podcast and you love having it back, we would love to hear from you. So please drop us a review on whatever podcast platform you are listening to. Actually, I think not very many of them you can leave reviews on, but you can leave one on Apple Podcasts for sure. You can go to Google. Just Google The VBAC Link and drop us a review there or you could leave us a review on Facebook because not a lot of people do that anymore. Meagan: That’s true. Julie: It’s so strange. We used to have a ton of Facebook reviews and then all of them kind of tapered off. But I feel like Facebook might be not prioritizing businesses in your newsfeed anymore. Maybe that’s a little bit why. But if you want to show us a little bit of love and show us how grateful you are for having the podcast back if you are, we would love to have a review in either one of these places. It definitely makes our day. My cheeks kind of hurt a little bit from smiling right now from all of this. So thanks so much again, Kiley MoMy, and thank you to everybody that has taken time out of their day to put a smile on our faces. Carly’s Story Meagan: Okay. Let’s dive into Carly‘s story about her two beautiful girls. I am excited to hear both stories. We always say we are excited to hear the VBAC story, but we are also excited to hear your C-section stories too. We are excited to hear about those births because they matter just as much. So Carly, let us s turn the time over to you and talk about that. I’ll just turn the time over. Carly: Okay awesome. Thank you so much for having me. This is amazing. So I will start with my C-section story. I found out that I was pregnant in April 2018. I was finishing up student teaching. I was about to finish graduate school. I was applying for jobs, going on interviews, and putting together my portfolio and demo lessons, so it was a really chaotic time for me. It was stressful, but it was also really exciting. I was wrapping up one period of my life and starting another both in my personal life and my professional life. So I went into the following school year as a first-year teacher and a first-time mom. I was about five and a half months pregnant when I started a new job which was a little overwhelming. Julie: Yeah. Carly: Teaching can be overwhelming as it is, so it was a stressful couple of months. It was an exhausting couple of months for me. I had a normal, healthy pregnancy. I went into labor naturally with my first daughter. It was about nine days before my due date. I was at school and my water broke in the middle of the day. It wasn’t a huge rush . It was kind of like slow gushes throughout the day and I wasn’t having any contractions. I wasn’t even sure at first if it was my water that had broken. So I finished out the school day. I stayed after school for a couple of hours to put some things together for my substitute for the following week and then by the time I got home around 5:00- 5:30, the contractions had started. When they started, they were coming every couple of minutes, so I was having regular contractions once they started. I took a shower. My husband got home and I was like, “Listen, I think I am in labor. We should head to the hospital.” We stopped on the way for him to pick up something for dinner and then by that point, I had called my mom to tell her, “I am in labor. Come whenever you are done.” She was working. “Come whenever you are done with work.” I wanted her in the delivery room with me. At that point, on the way to the hospital, I was timing them. They were coming every three minutes. So I was like, “All right. I am in labor. This is good.” When we arrived at the hospital, that’s when things got a little crazy. We arrived at the hospital during a shift change and they didn’t know what to do with me, so they left me in a wheelchair in the waiting room. When I say they left me, I mean I was out there for about 40 minutes and no one ever really came to get me. Julie: Oh my gosh. Meagan : Good heavens. Carly: My husband had to go in twice. The first time, I thought I was going to be sick, so he went to see if someone could get me a bag or a trash can. The second time, it was like, “Hey. It’s been so much time. We are still out there. Is anyone going to come and get my wife?” They finally came and got me. They took me back to triage. They checked me. I was 6 centimeters. They admitted me. At that point, they gave me an ultrasound to make sure my baby was head down. I just remember my husband being like, “Look! There are her eye sockets. I can see her eye sockets. And I was so out of it that I didn’t see, but I remember him saying that. So at that point– it was a doctor who gave me the ultrasound– we knew that she was posterior. No one ever told me she was posterior. I didn’t really know that was a thing at that point, but you could see her eyesockets. She was face up. So the nurse was like, “All right. We will get you to your room. We will get you your epidural.” I was like, “Hang on a second. I don’t know if I want an epidural.” I had wanted to try to go unmedicated. During my labor class at the hospital, they told me that there were multiple methods of pain relief. They had a shower. You could use the gas or the birthing ball. What I didn’t know was that you had to ask for those things and not even just ask, you would have to fight to get those things. No one offered me any other options. It was like, “Get your epidural and stay in bed.” So that’s exactly what I did. I got my epidural. The anesthesiologist who gave me the epidural was a butt head to put it very nicely. He was really a whole series of expletives that I probably can’t say on your show, so I won’t. He yelled at me at one point. First, he came into the room. He didn’t even introduce himself. He yelled at me after as he was inserting the epidural because I was hunched over in the middle of a contraction. He yelled at me to lie down and when I didn’t, he grabbed me from behind both of my shoulders, / threw me on the bed, and then yelled at me again and was like, “I told you. You need to lay down.” Meagan: What?!!! Carly: And then he left the room. Julie : Whoa. Carly: And that was like— Julie : Expletive, expletive, expletive. Carly: Yeah, exactly. Julie : Oh my gosh. Oh my gosh! Meagan: Oh my gosh. Carly : So it was at that point that I began to feel out of control of what was happening to me. I began to feel like, “This is not what I expected. This is not what I wanted for myself and my baby.” I felt like birth was happening to me. I wasn’t really a part of it. So I labored on my back with an epidural for a while. They brought me a peanut ball eventually. My nurse was amazing. It was freezing in the room. She brought me a couple of extra blankets and we found out later on that the thermostat in my room was set to probably about 44°. It was very cold and no one realized it. No one adjusted the thermostat. We just assumed it was normal. The doctor working was a doctor from my practice who I had never met. She was the only one I had never met and of course, she was the one who was on. So I labored. I dilated to 10 centimeters. I pushed for three hours. At one point in the middle of pushing, I was having really bad heartburn and I had asked a couple of different nurses, I had asked the doctor if I could have an antacid and no one acknowledged really that they had heard me. No one answered me. No one told me, “No. You are not allowed to,” or “We can’t give you that now.” No one came back with an antacid and at one point, they laid me flat on my back, and all the acid in my stomach came up, and I got sick all over the place. The doctor tried to use a vacuum. It didn’t work and at that point, she was like, “It’s been three hours. Nothing is happening.” My baby was still tolerating labor well, so I don’t really know. I guess it was just like, I was on the clock. Time is up. C-section. So they took me back for a C-section. The anesthesiologist there was much nicer and I let him know he was a lot nicer than the first one. They strapped down my arms. I got sick again and I was shaking just so hard. I couldn’t even hold my baby afterward. I remember just feeling totally out of control and just hating the fact that I felt totally out of control. No one explained to me what was going on. And afterward, I asked my doctor, “Hey, what happened? Was baby stuck?” She was like, “Yes. Baby was sunny-side-up and stuck in your pelvis.” I was kind of like, “We knew she was sunny-side-up. You didn’t know that?” I feel like looking back now, even if they had thought she was rotating during labor, at some point when I couldn’t get her out, it might have, I don’t know. This was my own personal– it might have helped for someone to be like, “Hey. Oh yeah. She’s posterior. Maybe we should try a different position where it is easier to get a posterior baby out.” Meagan: Yeah. Sometimes a provider can actually help turn a baby. Carly: Yes, yeah. Meagan : Like actually, manually from the inside. I know it sounds invasive and it is. It is, but they can actually help turn. There is a doctor here in Utah. It’s amazing. He will be like, “Okay, the baby is going to rotate this way.” And during pushing, he will rotate and baby will just be head down and come right underneath the pubic bone. Carly: Yeah. So it felt like there was no communication from when we came into the hospital to my doctor. Meagan: Yeah. Carly: So it felt afterward like I was devastated. I felt like I had been unheard during my stay at the hospital. I felt misled about needing a C-section. I felt like I wasn’t really an active participant in my birth. I wanted to know whether or not I could still have a vaginal birth after that, so I did some googling, and I had talked to my husband‘s cousin who had a C-section and was planning on having a VBAC for her next. She did, actually, five months after I had my C-section. So she was a really great resource to talk to. When I went for my six-week check-up, I had asked my doctor about it and she was like, “Yeah. If there are 18 months between deliveries, it’s no problem.” But a couple of months later, she left the practice, and then I wasn’t sure whether other doctors would still be supportive of that. So fast forward to a little over a year later, my husband and I started trying for baby number two in February 2020. I got pregnant in March 2020 about two weeks into our quarantine for COVID and I immediately began doing research. That’s when I discovered you guys and I listened to you every chance I got. My husband was still working at the time. He is a teacher so he was still working, but he was on a modified schedule. This was the first time they had ever tried to do virtual learning and he is in the city teaching, so a lot of the kids don’t have a computer. They don’t have access to the Internet. So he was available to help me around the house with the little one when I was in the first-trimester exhaustion and nausea. We had a lot of family time during quarantine which was really cool. I still had to go to all of my doctor's appointments alone and as a second-time mom, it was hard so I can’t even imagine first-time moms and what that was like to do that over COVID. I had this fear of COVID, but also still wanted to be social with friends and family after our quarantine had ended, so that was a conflicting time for me as far as trying to balance what was healthy for me and my baby while still wanting to celebrate my pregnancy with my family and my friends. That was a continual thing throughout the rest of my pregnancy. I was healthy. I had a healthy pregnancy. At my 20-week anatomy scan, they had said that my baby’s head had a lemon sign, which is when baby’s head looks like it is shaped like a lemon. It is characteristic of Spina Bifida. So they said they recommended that I go for a level II ultrasound. I was trying not to Google too much and trying to be positive about it. I was also concerned that my dreams of a VBAC might not be able to happen. I went to maternal-fetal medicine to get a level II ultrasound and I went by myself because I wasn’t allowed to have anybody else come with me. Meagan: Yeah. Carly: –which was super stressful. You know, there were other women who were there too and it was kind of like, “Hey. We are alone and in this together.” Meagan : We are in this together, yeah. Carly: My baby ended up being okay which was awesome and I became more determined to get my VBAC after that. I talked to my husband about switching to a midwife because I wasn’t totally sure that my provider was VBAC friendly. He wasn’t necessarily on board at first. I tried to show him a lot of research that I had done. Women all over the world every day give birth with midwives and I feel like we are one of the only, if not the only, countries where it has become so medicalized where the doctors are the ones primarily delivering babies. We talked to one of his former coworkers who had two home births with a midwife and I think she was really the one who helped convince him like, “Hey. Not only is it safe. It might be safer and you get that level of individualized care that you don’t necessarily get with an OBGYN.” So I went to my 24-week appointment with my OB with a list of questions to ask then I was like, “If they answer them the way I think they are going to answer them, they are not really VBAC-friendly.” I have you guys to thank for this because I think this is on one of your blog posts . This has been on your podcast and I have listened to about how to tell if your provider is VBAC tolerant versus VBAC supportive. Julie: Yeah. Yep. We talk about it all day. Carly: Yes. So my doctor answered questions like I thought she would. She started saying, “Well, if your baby isn’t too big,” and I was like, “Well, what qualifies as a big baby?” My first baby was a little over 8 pounds and she was like, “Yeah. Well, she was pretty big. So probably if baby is around the same size, we would recommend a repeat C-section.” Now, my sister and I were both over 11 pounds when we were born. My mother birthed us naturally, vaginally. So to me, 8 pounds is not a big baby. So that threw a red flag for me. There were a couple of other questions I asked that I was like, “That’s a red flag too.” So I went home and I emailed two groups of midwives that week. I had a couple of virtual interviews with them and I picked one that I really liked and I went to see them for my 28-week appointment. I also switched hospitals at that time, the hospital where I would birth that. My appointments went from about five minutes with my OB to 45 minutes with my midwife which was a huge change and I really felt that level of individualized care with them. I was still feeling a little unsure about whether I had made the right decision and I think it was the week I decided to make the change, I had watched the show Call the Midwife on Netflix. It is about a group of nuns who ran the Saint Raymond Nonnatus house. If you don’t know, I am Catholic. If you don’t know, Saint Raymond Nonnatus is the patron saint of midwives and women in labor. My husband had gotten me this daily reflection book for Catholic moms. Later that day, I picked up this book before I went to bed. I hadn’t read it in months and I opened to the day. It was August 31st and it just happened to be the feast day of Saint Raymond Nonnatus. That, for me, was confirmation that I was making the right choice. I had no doubts after that. I had made the right choice. Julie: That’s amazing. Carly: It was amazing. I also, at this time, started seeing a chiropractor. I started Hypnobirthing. I wanted to go fully unmedicated. I was doing Spinning Babies. I was walking every week. I was doing lots of squats. I had made affirmation cards. I read different books. I watched movies. I had a motivational birth song that I listened to which helped pump me up and get excited like, “I can do this. I can do this.” I did a lot of research on the labor process, labor positions, and different stations. I followed this woman on Instagram. Her Instagram account is Mamastefit and I think I found her on your podcast. I’m pretty sure you guys had her on your podcast. Meagan: Yes, Gina! Julie : We love her. Meagan : Gina, we love her . Carly: Yes. She’s amazing. Julie : She is amazing. Carly: I screenshotted a whole bunch of her labor stations, positions for labor if you know where baby is as baby comes through the pelvis, I had screenshotted all of these and printed them out and put them together in this birth binder I had where I had everything I would need to take to the hospital with me. I had my birth affirmations. I had ultrasound pictures. It was motivational but also informational. I didn’t know whether necessarily I would be able to use it during labor, but I thought at least for my husband, maybe, if he needed some help along the way. So during this time, I was looking forward to this pregnancy, my second pregnancy, being a lot less stressful than my first. I was a stay-at-home mom now. I wasn’t teaching anymore. We were living in the city in a duplex. With our neighbors upstairs, the living situation had gone from bad to worse. So we were like, “Let’s look for a house.” So we started househunting at the time. My husband was back to school in the fall, fully virtual. At this point, they had a set schedule, but he was working probably from sun up to sun down for months on end trying to adjust all of his lesson plans to be fully virtual, putting together things on the computer which is totally different than in-person teaching. I was taking care of our toddler. I was pregnant. I was doing all of the mortgage paperwork and looking at houses, and it was not any less stressful than my first pregnancy. We found a house in October. I was hoping to make settlement and move in before baby came. Baby was due in the middle of December. We made settlement the week before Thanksgiving and we found out that we weren’t going to be able to move until after Christmas. So I was really disappointed about that and unsure about moving with a newborn or potentially moving while having baby at the same time. Leading up to birth, I was having prodromal labor off and on all week. My contractions would start at night, run for a couple of hours, and then fizzle out. I went into labor actually the night before my due date. It was about 11:00 at night. I wasn’t sure whether this was real labor or not. So I started timing my contractions. They were about three to four minutes apart. I texted my midwife at maybe 1:00 or 2:00 in the morning and I was like, “Hey. My contractions are about four minutes apart. They texted me back and were like, “Okay. Just try to relax. Try to get some sleep if you can. Lay in the bath. Try not to think about it too much.” I couldn’t get comfortable laying down. I went out to the living room. We were decorated for Christmas, so I put on our Christmas lights. It was quiet. I had put on some music and I just focused on breathing and breathing and breathing. At some point, I got up and I had put on my tens unit which was amazing and really helped, and I went back to just breathing. The hours just flew by and before I knew it, it was about 5:00 in the morning. I remember checking the time and thinking to myself. I had read somewhere along the way that second labors average about six hours and I was like, “It’s been about six hours for me. Maybe I should wake my husband up and let him know that this isn’t false labor. This is really labor. Maybe we should head to the hospital.” The hospital where I was going to deliver was about 40 minutes away. I had to account for that and I wasn’t really sure when I should be leaving for the hospital. I hadn’t been in contact with my midwives since it was the middle of the night, so I wasn’t really sure how far apart my contractions should be or what they should feel like. Around this point, my husband got to the bathroom. He came out and he was like, “Okay. You’re in labor.” I was like, “Yes.” And he was like, “All right. I am going to email my principal. I am going to call your sister.” She was going to come and watch our toddler. I said, “All right. I’m going to jump in the shower real quick.” So I got into the shower. The water just felt so good and then all of a sudden, I felt the urge to push and I was like, “Oh boy. Okay. I was not expecting that.” But I just couldn’t move. The water felt so good. I just wanted to lay in it. Finally, I managed to crawl out of the tub. I was laying on the bathroom floor trying to call for him and he comes running. I am like, “I am pushing! We’ve got to go.” So he runs to get dressed. My poor sister– he called my sister in a panic and he was like, “Yeah. You need to get over here now.” She tried to start the car. There’s ice on the windshield. It was a whole process for her to get to our house. By the time I finally got dressed and had brushed my hair and made it to the front door, she was just coming into the house. And I guess by this point, it was probably around 7:00 in the morning. We’re getting ready to go. My husband calls my midwife and is like, “Hey. Carly is pushing. I don’t think we are going to make it to the hospital. It is 40 minutes away and with rush-hour traffic, it is probably going to be about maybe an hour and a half.” My midwife was like, “Okay. I can come to you guys. Do you want to try to go to a different hospital?” And my husband was like, “I am just going to take her to the closest hospital,” which I knew was the hospital where I had my C-section and I did not want to go there. I was like, “No. I don’t want to go there.” He was like, “We don’t really have a choice. We are not having this baby in the car on the highway on the way to the hospital.” So we got in the car. I ran out the door in between contractions. I ran out the door without my phone. I ran out the door without shoes. I had my hairbrush and my glasses in my hand which were the two things I chose to bring to the hospital with me. My husband had already packed the car. We got there. I jumped out and they took me to the hospital. At the hospital where I was originally supposed to give birth, COVID restrictions for the winter were that when you go into the hospital, you bring everything in with you because you weren’t allowed to leave once you were in including baby‘s car seat. So my husband starts trying to grab everything out of the car to come in and they told him, “Oh no, no, no, no. You are not allowed up yet. They will call down when they are ready for you.” So they took me up by myself and I didn’t have my phone. He had my phone and he was like, “How is she going to call me?” He had my phone. So they took me up. I had about five people ask me on the way. I go in and I am like, “Hey, I am pushing. Baby is coming.” “Have you given birth?” “Yes. I was here. I had a C-section.” “Okay. So you’re having another C-section?” I was like, “No. I am pushing. Baby is coming out.” I had about five different people ask me if I was having another C-section which I thought was ridiculous. And I was all alone in there by myself trying to tell them that, “No. Baby is coming. I am not consenting to a C-section. I am having a VBAC.” Julie: My gosh. Carly: “--and I’m going to push this baby out.” I felt like as soon as I walked in, they put me on the clock. It was like, “You know, we will give you so much time until you have a C-section.” Meagan: Right. Carly: They checked me. I was at a zero station which at this point, I knew what that meant. One of the doctors asked me if I was having an epidural. She said, “Were you planning on having an epidural?” I was like, “No.” And then she laughed at me and she was like, “Good because you are too late.” I was like, “Thank you. Why did you ask me?” Meagan : Then why did you even ask? Julie: Okay. Thank you. Carly: Exactly. Exactly. They finally let my husband up after I was in the delivery room. One of the nurses was talking about a C-section and it felt so good to finally have him because then he could advocate for me. He was like, “No. We are not doing that. She’s having a VBAC.” I had wanted to push in certain positions and I wasn’t making faster progress for them, so of course, I ended up on my back, but I had learned from Gina that if you do push on your back, roll up a towel and put it under your lower back. So I asked them at some point, “Hey, can you put a rolled-up towel under my lower back?” They did and I felt like that gave me more room to get the baby out. They gave me a mirror. I remember looking and seeing the top of her head and being like, “I think she might be face-up,” but I wasn’t sure. When I did push her out, I found out that she was born sunny-side-up. Julie: Wow. Carly: Which for me, I feel totally vindicated because that was the issue I had with my first one. She was sunny-side-up and I couldn’t get her out. So to actually push this baby out felt so amazing to me. I got my skin-to-skin. I had asked the doctor if we could wait to cut the cord. She said to my husband, “Do you want to cut the cord?” And I said, “Hey, can we wait a little bit?” And she just looked at me and she was like, “It’s been two minutes. How long do you want to wait?” Julie: Oh my gosh. What a peach. Carly: Right? And then at that point, the placenta had found its way out. My husband cut the cord. I was just so happy that none of that stuff even mattered to me anymore. I let it all go. So that’s pretty much it. To add to all of that craziness, we moved two weeks later when my baby was just born. To be finally in our house, in our own space, and to get settled in has just been amazing. We have been here for a little over a year. If it’s up to me, I will never give birth at the hospital again. If I have another baby, I will absolutely pursue a homebirth. I won’t give birth in a hospital again unless I absolutely have to. I have heard horror stories that are way worse than anything I have gone through. Meagan : But still, from being thrown on beds, being harassed and asked multiple times if you are doing something that you are clearly not— Carly: Exactly. Meagan: Being like, “Well, isn’t that long enough?” I can understand why where you would be coming from because you haven’t been treated the best. You haven’t had the best experience personally. Carly: No. Yeah, no. Not at all. Meagan: Yeah. Julie: Absolutely. I understand that. That’s why I had home births. It’s really interesting. I was going to read a review on this episode but I couldn’t find it, so I read a different one. I think I am going to read it on the next episode that we do because it is really interesting. It’s actually from a labor and delivery nurse. It talks about how sometimes people who have had a previous Cesarean have an overall mistrust of hospitals, doctors, the system, interventions, and everything like that. She has a really good point because a lot of OBs and nurses really want what is best for you, but then there are experiences like this when there’s just complete lack of respect. Clearly, there is a big reason why a lot of parents are learning and being taught to distrust the system. They are being pushed out of the hospital and feel like they have no other option to be respected except for having a homebirth. Now, we know that homebirth is a safe and reasonable option for low-risk parents. There have been lots of studies that have come out in recent years showing that there is no increase in safety for parents and babies for low-risk parents. Of course, there are times when it is medically necessary for both mom and baby‘s health for babies to be born in a hospital, but the overall mortality rates and health issues for low-risk women and their babies born out-of-hospital are similar between hospital and home birth. I use the word “pushed” out of a hospital system to homebirth, but a lot of parents feel that they don’t have a choice to be respected except for giving birth at home. That’s not good. That’s not good at all. I obviously am a huge advocate for a homebirth, but I want people to feel supported where ever they choose to birth and a hospital birth should be a great option. Homebirth should be a great option too. It is a great option. Both are great as long as you have a trusted space that you feel safe in. You should absolutely feel safe wherever you give birth. The reality of our days is that a lot of women are not feeling respected and safe in a hospital birth. Now there are a lot of really incredible hospitals and really incredible providers and nurses all over the country that are working to make the space safer for birthing families, but we still have a long ways to go. Meagan: We do. We are coming there. We are slowly coming. But I also can relate. After my two C-sections, I chose a birth center birth with a midwife and I don’t think I would have had the same experience the whole time , but I also think it really was a big part of my provider. My provider was someone that could be there for me all the time and I didn’t have all of those different people coming in, asking me different things, and trying to do different things. It was really nice because honestly, I could hardly focus on even getting the baby out let alone anything else going on. So yeah. It’s just important to have a good plan and know who you want to go to. I don’t blame you at all for wanting to experience a home birth. Plus it sounds like– Julie: It sounds like you are a great candidate. I’m all for that. Meagan: Yeah. Trying to get in the icy car, traveling– Carly: All too much work. Meagan : All of that work when you probably could have just honed in and probably had a baby pretty quickly, yeah. Carly: Yeah. Meagan: Yeah. Well, thank you so much. I am so proud of you. We did. We talked about advocacy last week and everything, but I mean really, it sucks. I am sorry that you had to experience it like that, being alone. COVID just sucked. It just sucked. I hate it. I hate what it has done to so many people. We have so many emails in our inbox from people who have experienced trauma and things like that from being left alone. It was a disservice to mental health in so many ways. Carly: Yes. Meagan: I’m sorry that you had to be in that place, but I’m also really happy for you. Carly: But you know what? Thanks to you guys, you kept me informed about options and my rights so that I had the confidence to stand up for myself and be like, “No. This is what I want and I’m going to get it.” Meagan: Yeah. Yeah. Julie: We are proud of you. We are proud of you for taking the time to gain that knowledge and confidence and putting in the work because it clearly paid off. There were still a lot of things that did not go the way you wanted, but I am proud of you for taking that time and getting that confidence, and doing the work because not everybody does that. Not everybody does that. Carly: No, thank you. I feel like for most doctors and nurses in the hospital, it’s routine for them. They see birth every day. They do C-sections every day. But for us, the first time I became my mom was literally a once-in-a-lifetime experience for me and I felt like that had been stepped on for so many different reasons. The second time around, I was like, “I am going to fight for this.” I had a determination. I had a fire in my belly about it. I was informed. I felt confident. I felt confident enough to walk in there and be like, “I know I have the right to say no to you,” instead of just agreeing to whatever they recommended for me. And to have that confidence was pretty empowering. I went in there feeling pretty empowered to be able to stand up for myself. And I am a people pleaser by nature. I am not one to try to ruffle any feathers or rock the boat. So for me, it was huge. It was huge to be like, “I can go in there and I can advocate for myself and my baby and not care what anybody has to say to me about it.” Julie : Yeah. Get it, girl. That’s what I like to hear. We love that. I love that. That’s speaking my language all day long. Meagan: Mhmm. Julie: Oh, awesome. Well again, we are really proud of you and we know that you are going to inspire a lot of people because sometimes, you just need to hear that other people do this too and that it’s okay. It kind of gives you permission to do it for yourself. Carly : Mhmm, yeah. Yeah. Julie: Not that you need permission, but it feels good to know that you are not alone. Carly: Sure. Julie : You’re not the first one to do this and you’re not going to be the last one to do it. Carly: For sure. Julie: So we are again super grateful for you for coming on and sharing your experience with us and with everybody else who is listening right now. Carly : Yeah. Thank you so much for having me. This has been amazing. You guys are amazing. The work you do changes lives. It really does, so we appreciate what you do. Julie: Absolutely. Well, thank you so much. Closing Interested in sharing your VBAC story on the podcast? Submit your story at thevbaclink.com/share. For more information on all things VBAC including online and in-person VBAC classes, The VBAC Link blog, and Julie and Meagan’s bios, head over to thevbaclink.com . Congratulations on starting your journey of learning and discovery with The VBAC Link. Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/the-vbac-link/donations Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands