Dear Friends:
Just when I thought that hospital birth couldn't get any more disconnected
from physiology, another woman comes to my office for CST with her baby.
When early labor started, she went to the hospital. She was a fingertip
dilated. In the old days, she would have been sent home and told to have a glass
of wine and take a bath and make love and go for a walk and get some rest.
Nowadays, these women are kept at the hospital. Because she was anxious and
unsettled at being in a hospital, they not only gave her an Ambien, but also
"some sort of gas" (direct quote from husband). When labor started the next
day (driven by Pitocin), she was still hung over from the sleeping drugs. The
cascade of interventions continued and she ended up with a cesarean section, a
complete "lack of joy" in her birth, and feeling terrible about not wanting
to respond to her crying baby because she was exhausted, drugged and in pain.
She finds breastfeeding also without joy, and is worn out from following all
the rules for breastfeeding (wake baby every 2-3 hours, guide every latch,
monitor diapers, constantly check latch to make sure "it is right").
Our visit was the longest I've ever spent with a woman. The time passed
quickly in my office and we were both shocked to learn how long we'd worked
together.
My suggestion was that she go home and have a babymoon, keep baby s2s and
discover each other. She hasn't done that yet; doesn't know her baby and can't
understand whar her baby is communicating with its body language.
Now Ambien is deemed relatively safe for babies by LactMed, but untoward
effects and impact on lactation are unknown. And what about that gas?
What is going on? How divorced from emotion can birth be?
warmly,
Nikki Lee RN, BSN, Mother of 2, MS, IBCLC, CCE, CIMI
craniosacral therapy practitioner
_www.myspace.com/adonicalee_ (http://www.myspace.com/adonicalee)
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