Homebirth complications?
Does anyone have a birth story of a homebirth where there was a complication or transfer. Involving either mom or baby, or both? Hemmorage, neonatal recusitation, heavy meconium, shoulder dystocia etc
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He was given to me straight away, which was awesome & even though they cut the cord much sooner than I wanted (they wanted to do some tests because he was coughing up mucous), they did ask me before doing it & they let my husband cut the cord. Then after the placenta was delivered, they apparently removed 4 blood clots from my cervix (by hand) - I had no idea what was being done to me at this point, only that it hurt (less than what I'd been feeling for the last 36 hours, but still a lot. Then someone shoved the gas thingy in my face & suddenly one of the doctors was shoving things up my bum (no-one ever actually explained to me what they were exactly or why they did it, but that plus the blood loss caused me to get a fever later that day). Aside from the gas then (which made me feel really loopy, but only lasted a minute) & the local for the stitches, it was a drug free birth.
Then they let me hold Gabe for a few minutes (& he started feeding) before rushing him off to the nursery for more tests. My husband went with him, but I had to get cleaned up & prodded more, so I didn't get to see him for another 2 hours. I did manage to express some colostrum for him & got to feed him again when I went to visit him.
After much jabbing him with needles, one of his tests came back a bit funny & that MIGHT mean that he had an infection (OR it meant that he was stressed... I know which seems more likely to me!). So, despite his pediatrician saying that he seems perfectly healthy (aside from some very mild jaundice) & had no signs of infection, or of anything being even remotely wrong & that if it was up to him, that would be it, the supervisor (who had never met Gabe, let alone examined him) said that because we don't know for certain that he doesn't have an infection, he needs to be on antibiotics for 5 days. So then they gave him an IV.
When attempting to put the IV in, the hospital staff bruised my baby so much that his "very mild" jaundice turned into real jaundice & he had to spend a day under UV lights. Then the next day his test results came back & showed that he did not have an infection at all & they had just overreacted & made a healthy baby sick. *Sigh*.
On the plus side, because I kept questioning everything they did, they realised that they had screwed up & that I knew it, so they officially changed their policy not to check the test results before the recommended time & that if something *did* show up early, they would call it a "transitional period" & monitor the baby instead of just assuming it's an infection. So yeah, my son changed their policy!
Would I plan another homebirth next time? YES! After that experience, nothing could ever convince me to plan a hospital birth unless I had a *very* high risk pregnancy!
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Both of us are now perfectly healthy & have been ever since we left the hospital! Gabe still has a few bruises & puncture wounds, but he's otherwise great. My mum managed to catch some nasty bug from the hospital though (she's better now)!
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THank you for sharing!
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heres one thing i can find on it. but i dont agree that it should be used as a prevention.
http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0689/is_4_52/ai_100171277/
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The conversation usually went like this:
Hospital midwife (checking on my fever & noting the fact that I was on IV antibiotics): "So, how did you get this fever? Did you get/do you have an infection?"
Me: "Nope! They told me the antibiotics are a preventative measure because they had to manually remove a bunch of clots. Then they put something up my bum, but I don't know what it was."
Hospital midwife: "Hmmm... *checks chart* Oh, that stuff! *Annoyed look at chart* Yeah, that'd do it! Especially with that amount of blood loss, that would most definitely cause the fever! *Sigh*"
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