The Birth Lounge Blog

Cesarean Recovery No matter how we bring our children into this world, our bodies will have some healing to do. Bringing a baby earthside is physically taxing, and involves so many different systems of the human body. In the case of cesarean delivery, there are a few more steps added to the recovery process. We tend to neglect these steps when leaving the hospital, but it’s important to know what tools are available in your recovery toolbox. Here are the five most impactful tools that ensure a faster and more complete recovery. Walking - After surgery your epidural or spinal will be removed and over the next few hours the numbness will begin fading away. While you may leave the OR expecting to take it as easy as possible, you will quickly find that the first task on your “to-do list” is getting up and taking a walk through the hospital corridor. While this can be painful and feel like it adds insult to injury, ambulation is imperative to proper recovery. Why? Because it is the action o...

Breech Birth Breech birth is a variation of normal. Hopefully you’ve heard this before, but oftentimes parents carrying breech babes are met with dead ends and discouragement that leaves them with the idea that their baby or body hasn’t done its job properly. Before we go any further, allow me to repeat myself. Breech is a variation of normal, occurring in 3-4% of term pregnancies. Breech fetal presentation means our body, which has answers no text book can teach us, has chosen this position for reasons we may not understand. Remember, things are not inherently bad or dangerous just because we don’t understand them. It just means we have knowledge to gain. What’s important to know is that vaginal breech birth is absolutely possible, and not only that! Vaginal breech birth, when properly supported, can be totally safe. While many providers may push a planned cesarean, you have the right to decline . The Safety Factor If breech presentation is normal, why are discoveries of Breech babie...

Consumer Complaints: Essential To New Wave Maternity Care What Is A Consumer Complaint? Certainly we’ve all received a long awaited package, torn it open out of excitement, and come face to face with disappointment. This product we purchased is not the product we were sold. When faced with this situation, a vast majority of us will go back onto the website we purchased the item from to leave a review explaining why the product does not live up to its advertised quality. We do this not only to let the company know we’re not happy with our service, but also to warn other consumers that this product isn’t worth their time, energy, and money. This is a normal part of life, right? An online consumer’s right of passage, if you will. What if I told you that you can do the same exact thing with Drs, Hospital Staff, and Nurses? What if I told you that doing so doesn’t just warn others that they shouldn’t waste their time and money? instead, it actually sends a clear warning that their body, bab...

The Beginning of Home Birth with Kaitlyn Fusco ( Derived from Episode 142 of the Birth Lounge Podcast ) Today, we are chatting with Katelyn Fusco, Host of Happy Home Birth Podcast. We are covering home birth and how birth has transformed over the years. Katelyn is sharing who is right for home birth and the top home birth myths. We are also diving into stickier topics like the business side of birth and how legislation can impact women’s health. We shine a spotlight on consent and continuity of care as well. I'll hand it over now for Katelyn's thoughts! We are so ingrained now, especially in the United States, to think that birth is a medical event that just has to take place in the hospital. I mean, that's just in our minds. I know growing up, that's how it was for me. My mom had all three of her children as C-sections. So when I was growing up, I thought, 'Okay, well, I'll have C-sections for my babies. Birth is surgery the end'. I don't think I'm ...

Your Responsibility in Labor I am bringing you my takeaway from recent births today on the blog. All of them had a layer of nature that we could not control, which is something I talk about all the time. You can control 90% of labor and birth, but that other 10% is nature. That's life, right? Those are the pieces that no matter how hard we try as humans or even medical professionals, we'll never be able to control nature. Nature will always kind of reign above us, because it's nature. We are the smaller beings when we think about nature and humans, humans actually depend on nature. Nature does not depend on humans. Nature will always have this way of playing its hand in birth. So your responsibility with that 10% is not to give up on it. Your responsibility is to know what could happen within that 10% of birth. To understand what your options are at each of those places. When you find yourself in some of those situations, because remember it's inevitable, nature will a...

Magic Words in Birth Hello, happy 2021 friends. I cannot wait to see what this year holds. And you know what, when I look back over 2020, it hadn't all been bad at, if you look at Episode 121 of The Birth Lounge Podcast , I actually talk about some of the positives that have come up for women's health from Coronavirus, specifically within the birth world. But in general, I think we're going to start to see some positive strides. I know that 2020 has been a hard year for so many people in, in the birth world. I was just actually talking to the birth workers and we were all sharing that collectively things just feel heavier in the birth space. It feels like outcomes aren't as great and that there's a lot more medical manipulation (Check out Episode 136 of the podcast on medical manipulation). Recently, we had a really amazing birth at TBH. It was so beautiful. Total hours was only 11 hours. And this birthing person only pushed for 20 minutes and she had zero tearing ...

Failed Inductions: What You Need to Know When we talk about inductions, we often speak of them like they are 100% guaranteeing us a baby at the end. While this is true most of the time, you’d probably be surprised to learn that indcutins can fail and you may be sent home to wait it out a bit longer. Or, if the option isn’t presented to you, you can ask or take yourself home. It is important to ensure that you and your baby are safe to go home.There are thousands of women each year that experience a failed induction and it can be very hard emotionally.  What is a failed induction? A failed induction is the inability to reach active labor while being induced . There is a certain process we want to take when it comes to induction. I call this your ‘individual induction equation.’ It’s truly individual to you and you get to introduce various induction methods as you see fit which makes your equation unique to you. First we want to ripen the cervix--it needs to be soft. You have options...

The Arrive Study I get asked A LOT about The ARRIVE Study . It’s a hot topic. For some people they are thrilled to hear there is science backing up an induction and some folks are terrified because they feel pressure from their provider and don’t feel aligned with a 39-week induction. Before we dive into the issues with this study. Let’s take a look at the history that you should know.  Around 41% of all pregnant people will have an induction suggested to them and 44% of those will be because you’re close to your due date or ‘full term.’ (quotations because we think one absolute date determines a baby’s readiness to be born and that’s simply not how it works) This means almost half of all labors are suggested to be medically initiated….where has our trust in ourselves gone?!  Let’s take a quick pause for one moment and think about birth for what it actually is--a natural event. Without human intervention, there would be so much less birth trauma, so many less c-sections, far f...

The Bishop Score Have you ever heard of a Bishop Score? This is the ‘rating’ that we give a pregnant person’s cervix in order to determine its readiness for induction. There are a few key flaws in this scoring system and I want to chat it out!  The History of The Bishop Score The original Bishop score (Developed by Dr. Bishop, OBGYN in 1964) is based on 5 criteria: dilation, effacement, station of baby, position of cervix, consistency of cervix. You will be given a score of 0 to 3--0 being not progressed and 3 being the cervix is showing favorable progress-- for each of these criteria(Note: the highest score for position and consistency of cervix is 2). You will be given an overall Bishop Score which will indicate if you are a good candidate for induction or if you are not. The highest score is 13 and any score 9 or above is considered ‘favorable’ for induction meaning the numbers suggest your body will be receptive of induction. (Note: some providers will use 8 and this will be u...

7 Slippery Slopes of Labor How to stay in control during labor is one of the most FAQs that I receive on a daily basis! Good news! So many of the “unknowns” of birth can be alleviated with the proper education and preparation!  But there is a catch here! The catch is.. how you prepare is uber important. Meaning you can read all the books that you have been told to read, but if you're not reading the right books, then it's really not going to prepare you. You can take all of the childbirth ed classes that your hospital has to offer. But, if your hospital isn't presenting you with all of the options during the childbirth ed course, and they're only presenting you with options that they want you to know, this prevents you from being able to truly make an informed and confident choice.  Being able to freely make a decision after open discussion with your doctor is what we call shared decision making . This means you, your medical team and your support people come together t...