5 Reasons Why I Love My Hospital Transfer Birth

Sometimes, it is our most vulnerable places that we can draw the most strength from.

It was fast.

It was one phone call with my midwife that turned my entire birth plan on its head. In a matter of hours, I had figured out my waters ruptured about a week prior (which fueled an onslaught of furious prodromal labor), I spiked a temperature, and I noticed an off-color of the fluid that leaked out of me. We all knew it was time to get in gear and head to the hospital. 

At first, I wanted none of it. 

From the beginning of my fascination (aka obsession) with all things birth and babies, I had followed the “home birth movement” closely. As a teen, I poured over the pages of Spiritual Midwifery, feeling the wheel of my heart turn at each tender story of a babe born at home. 

Even knowing that cesarean and medicated births are amazing and beautiful, for myself I wanted something else: I wanted the experience of staying at home, of low lighting and my own bathtub and my midwife there at my side. I wanted that birth I had read about so many times.  

This is my story. This was not written to be a guide, give advice, or claim my experience is the best or only kind there is. Not every hospital birth feels like mine did.  Not every hospital is baby and birthing person friendly. Herein lies layers of privilege, white supremacy, and classicism. The privilege of having a supportive partner. It has taken me until now and through many forms of counsel to sit here and write this, and feel waves of  love  and badassery for my medicated hospital transfer birth.  Here are the reasons why:

5. The epidural

 Epidurals are a powerful tool to utilize during a hospital birth. They can sometimes be the exact thing needed to give a birthing person rest and allow their muscles to relax and help baby move through. After being awake for 3 days with prodromal (start and stop) labor, I utilized an epidural at 8.5 cm dilation, slept for an hour, and then had plenty of energy to push my son earthside. 

When choosing to enjoy an epidural, there are a few things that I feel make the experience most impactful. First, if you know you want one, do it! There is no reason that an epidural makes you less active or involved in the birth of your child. It is not “the easy way out”. Labor does not have to be painful in order for it to be meaningful, active, and empowered. Second, if you aren’t sure and feel you might want one, set some healthy boundaries for yourself and have your support team help those be honored. Sometimes waiting until active labor to get an epidural means it’s less likely for momentum to stall. Third, decide what kind of epidural you want to have. Anesthesiologists all have their own style of administering an epidural, with some being more heavy handed than others. You will be in charge of how much medicine you will get after the epidural is placed. Sometimes they are just right, enough where the birthing person can move their legs and still get into many different labor positions. 

4. Getting to know the local hospital

As a community-centered doula, I draw a great deal of importance for connecting with the local hospital and it’s providers. Those relationships are crucial to build, and are the make-or-break between collaborative relationships and tense ones. 

Going to the hospital as a doula is just one lens to witness and connect with the hospital ecosystem; the nurses, doctors, midwives, anesthesiologists, lactation consultants, how families are treated, how partners are included, what the food is like, etc. Going there to give birth to my son allowed me to grow my understanding of the hospital in a whole new way. 

I now know on a deep level which nurses I feel support families best, what the environment is like for breastfeeding, and how well birth plans and preferences are honored. It has given me a great gift that I continue to give to the families I serve. 

3. Being taken care of

In the 3 day hospital stay after my son was born, we took over our postpartum room as if it was our home. We walked around naked, put up our own decorations, and said no or yes to people coming into our space. We also had all our needs taken care of as far as food, rest, and postpartum care goes. 

The first few hours and days after having a baby are a special kind of magic and fuckery that only new parents will experience. The psychedelic coming-back-to-earth feeling of having just brought a human into the world fueled by being awake every 1-3 hours to feed said human, and then still take care of the basic human needs like food and rest, is wild. Possible, but wild. 

I to this day thank those postpartum nurses for helping change my pads and the hospital cafeteria for providing food for my partner and I. It wasn’t my aunties making homemade fesenjun and nan, but it filled us during a vulnerable time nonetheless. Once we got home, it became very obvious how much that helped with bonding with our newborn son. 

2. Connection with other mothers

So many people know that experience down to their bones of having a birth that did not go how they wanted. It is a strong running vein, a cultural thread that weaves together the many-hued quilt of our collective birthing experience. Phrases like “all our bodies are made to give birth” and “natural birth is the only way” have successfully silenced and shamed the voices of mothers who have not found that to be true. They have created a language of have and have not, of success and failure, of ableism and all of the ways that can get into our psyches.

Because of my story, I now have a new level of empathy that has allowed me to connect even deeper to mothers that have unintended outcomes from their births. 

There is a whole lot of birth-centric media out there. Instagram accounts, teachers, movements… it is all there at our fingertips. It was important for me after my birth to find the kind of media that uplifted, empowered, listened to, and helped integrate my experience. The same went for friends. I appreciated more than ever the friends and colleagues that could sit and hear my story in a non judgmental and understanding way.  It is a gift I bring again and again into my client’s homes, into their birthing rooms, and beyond.

11. It’s my story

And nothing will change that. Our birth stories are our tender places, our strengths, our ancestral patterns, our yearnings, our biggest fears, our greatest moments of softness and our little victories of the wildest courage. They are ours…not the hospital’s, not extended family’s, not our expectations, manifestations, or representations of who we are or what we are. 

And we do not need to love them.

We can curse them out at the top of our lungs. We can put them in a time capsule to work with later. We can be angry at that one nurse forever. We can fall in love every time we relive them. We can cry. We can have whatever combinations of feelings we want. Sometimes, this is what integration looks like.

Sometimes, that is what loving our birth looks like: not loving it at all. And that’s okay. It’s ours.