The Pink Kit is now known as Birthing Better online birth classes… Our Trust receives many Birth Stories. After you read this one, let me comment about it. This is actually from a friend of mine. Since I don’t live in the area where this family is I did not know their relatives had not given them what was previously known as The PKPackage. This story is told from the viewpoint of the husband.
‘The antenatal class teacher gave some serious promotion to the Pink Kit and N. gave it serious consideration but by then we were not sure it would arrive before the birth. We should have gone ahead anyway because the baby was 10 days late!!’
The birth was interesting. N. is very small and I think everyone thought it would be a C section, including N., but it was considered important that she have a try. Her membranes ruptured on Friday morning and she was asked to come into the hospital. They linked her up to monitors and then just waited for a few hours. At about 1 pm they inserted gel to see if that would get labour started as nothing was going on. At about 7 pm they decided to use a drip and csyto….whatever to get labour going.
The strange thing was that she was already dilated to 3 cms with no contractions. She went until midnight with no obvious contractions though the monitors suggested she was having contractions. An internal showed she was still at 3cm dilation. At this point it was suggested I go home to look after the treasured dog and as nothing was expected until the next day I agreed. I left at 12.30 am and she was just beginning to wonder if the tightening she was feeling was actually the start of contractions.
At 3 am I got a phone call to say she was fully dilated and did I want to come in. G. was finally born at 5.35 am after 2 1/2 hours of pushing. The baby weighed in at 3640gms, much bigger than expected, a big first baby for such a small girl.
They were close to medical intervention but the doctor was a good sort and N. was the only one in labour at that point so he gave her all the help and encouragement he could while still keeping her safe. Needless to say, she is thrilled she had a natural birth and still finds it hard to believe such a big baby came out of her tummy naturally. But she is a bit sore and she did need 2 stitches. So, to answer your question, it was a short labour as far as felt contractions went but the pushing was a marathon. But all are good and both are doing very well’.
Well. Over a 35 year period, there are very few births that I actually get a knee-jerk reaction to the medical system but this one was.
As you notice, the person telling the story keeps talking about this woman being ‘small’. This is ONE of the big issues that we wanted to know what was true and what was the assumption. That is why we learned to Map Our Pelvis.
This is what we discovered. Our height, weight, the width of hips had absolutely nothing to do with how big or small the hole in our pelvis was. Once we knew what the front to back and side to side dimensions were (This information is in the DVD of The Pink Kit Package and Pink Kit) then we could determine how big our baby was relative to our hole.
Then we could figure out how to make more space by doing The Pelvic Clock and reducing any internal tension and actually moving bones in Hip Lifts, Sacral Manoeuvre (both in DV) and Kate’s Cat (Companion Guide)
So ‘small’ is not a visually apparent reality. Once we learned about our own bodies, it gave us confidence. If we were ‘bigger’ than we thought then we felt more relaxed. If we were ‘smaller’ than we thought, we spent time creating internal relaxation. Actually creating internal relaxation was something we all did regardless of size.
The other thing about this birth is that this woman was one of the very rare and lucky women who basically have no pain and yet her labour was augmented. Curious that they wanted the labour to start right away rather than give her 24 hours to spontaneously go into labour but who knows.
Anyway, here’s a woman who feels no pain and she is made to feel that there is a ‘problem’. That is sad.
She is also one of the 30% of women who dilate quickly at the end of labour. This is rarely recognized by people in the medical profession but recognized by ourselves. For all of us, and I am one of them, whose labour contractions get closer together, last longer and usually are more intense but we don’t dilate. Then bang and suddenly our cervix flies open.
So this woman had no pain and quickly dilated. What we learned about this was to watch out next birth … it would be quick but not necessarily painless. And we’d probably do the same thing … dilate quickly but at the end of labour. In my births, I went from 2 cm to baby out in 45 minutes and that was after about 7 hours of ‘labour’ with no dilation just changes in the contractions.
The long pushing stage is directly due to this woman not doing the Internal Work on the CD in The Pink Kit Package or Pink Kit. The other thing we learned had to do with what position we were in and that’s on the DVD.
Bluntly. When we had the skills then we internally observed what was happening and adjusting based on the messages we had. As one woman said: ‘I didn’t waste one contraction.’
As another woman said: ‘I could tell which position my baby liked. They were always the ones I liked because the labour got more intense but then I realized who was I doing this for .. me or my baby. Once I realized I was doing the labour for my baby, then I got into positions he liked and my labour moved along.’
See you again.
Birthing Better is housed in Common Knowledge Trust