Willow's Birth Saga--Part Seven

Even as I grew very quickly into my role of mother and nurturer to this tiny body, I still fought with the devastation I felt at the circumstances I had just undergone. I talked a lot about it with Kevin during our few recovery days at the hospital. It helped me a lot when I finally realized that what I was feeling was mourning. I was suffering a very deep loss. Even though it was not the loss of anything physical, it was the loss of an experience that I had held as very, very dear and was looking forward to as if it was already a part of me. A part of me had been cut out along with the baby in that surgery, and it was a part that I would never, could never get back. I tried very hard not to be melancholy, and I was very quickly falling in love with this tiny girl we chose to name Willow, for the elf-like look she had from birth. But I was very glad when they took her to the nursery for some blood tests and Kevin went with them so I was finally alone in my room for half an hour. I finally had a chance to cry without pretending and with out explaining. I didn’t have to tell anyone why I was sad, what grief I was feeling. I wept in great heaving sobs, all alone, until I finally slept in exhaustion. I didn’t feel all better after that, but I didn’t feel as great a need to cry all the time. I still cried when I discussed the experience, and I’m actually crying as I’m writing this right now, but I think that was the beginning of my healing.
I am not glad that I had that experience. I do not think it is necessarily something I needed in order to learn something specific or become who I needed to be, but it is what happened, and I am able to see ways that I have grown emotionally and spiritually because of it, and I am grateful for that. I can go back and analyze all of the points where I would have changed the decision that was made and I believe there is a very great possibility that if things had been handled differently, it would never have come to a C-section. I hold absolutely no animosity toward any of the people involved. I truly believe that they were acting on their best understanding for the best good of the situation. I do fault the hospital procedures that put higher priority on expediency and liability avoidance than on best medical practice (i.e. remote fetal monitoring stations and the requirement of a 10 minute tracing). I am grateful for what I was driven to study and learn about childbirth options—particularly about midwifery and homebirths, and I am even grateful that I was driven/directed to leave the state for the birth of my second child because of the incredible people I was able to find in Utah to help me through my first successful natural birth. I don’t know that I would have made it through successfully if I was here in this medical climate, even if I had not had a previous Caesarean.
But that is another story for another installment—Rhys, my other birth.