Episode 191 Emily’s VBAC + Precipitous Labor

The VBAC Link

Thinking there was no way she would go into labor with her VBAC baby at 37 weeks, Emily and her husband traveled to a family wedding. It was only a four-hour drive away from her birthing place. It was just for one night. She’d be laboring for the first time. Even if labor started, she’d have plenty of time to get back home. Right?

Thanks to her physical, mental, and emotional birth preparation, Emily was able to stay calm and present when her birth took a wild turn. She rode each wave gracefully and allowed her body to take over when it needed to. You are sure to be left feeling inspired by Emily’s impressive strength!

Additional links

Gentle Birth App Meditation and Contraction Timer

The VBAC Link Community

How to VBAC: The Ultimate Prep Course for Parents

Full transcript

Note: All transcripts are edited to correct grammar, false starts, and filler words.

Meagan: Happy Wednesday, everybody. This is Meagan and Julie with The VBAC Link and we are so excited, as always, to share with you another amazing story. We have our friend, Emily, today and she is going to share her VBAC story. She’s actually in New York if I remember correctly and has quite the story to share, you guys.

I kind of feel like we have a celebrity right now on the podcast because her story has seriously been featured everywhere. Like, seriously everywhere. People, USAToday, Inside Edition, Good Morning America, and yours truly, The VBAC Link here now.

Julie: Almost right up there with them.

Meagan: If we were as all of those platforms, then that would be really cool, but yeah. We are so excited to bring this story to you today. We are going to dive into her story really soon, but Julie has a Review of the Week, so we will hurry and do that, and then we’ll dive right in.

Review of the Week

Julie: Yeah, absolutely. I love it. I am so excited to hear this story. I love a good– type of story that this is. I almost gave a spoiler alert. This is my favorite type of birth story, so I can’t wait to hear it.

But yes, our review this week is from Kaytjtvgml on Apple Podcasts.

Meagan: Alphabet soup there.

Julie: It’s called, “Thankful for the timing of this preparation tool! I have been listening to this podcast as well as following along with the Facebook group ‘The VBAC Link Community.’” Plug-in for the Facebook group.

“I desired a VBAC right after having my elective Cesarean but just started off with a little hope and faith. Having tools and knowledge helps me sooo much mentally. I have learned and continue to learn from every episode. Each one makes me feel closer and closer to that victorious moment when my second baby is born vaginally. Even if things don’t work in my favor, I still wouldn’t trade this knowledge for anything. Hoping for a late June (or early July!)” Oh, that’s like right now! “vaginal birth and to be able to share my story.”

Well, we are so excited about your upcoming delivery, and definitely let us know how things go. If you are listening and you haven’t had a chance to leave a review yet, drop us a review on Apple Podcasts, Facebook, or on Google. We just got a couple of Google reviews last week and that made my heart really, really happy. So if we have helped you in any way, please let us know. You can shoot us a message on Instagram or Facebook. I don’t know. You can contact us in all the ways. We love hearing from you and we love knowing how we have helped you along your journey. So thanks so much “Kaytjtvgml” on Apple Podcasts and everyone else who has taken their time to leave us a sweet review.

Emily’s Story

Meagan: Awesome. All right well, let’s get into this story. I’m so excited about this story.

Julie: All right, Emily. Do you want to take it over?

Emily: Sure. Thanks for having me. I just want to say that I listened to The VBAC Link podcast a lot while I was pregnant and I am also a part of the Facebook group and all of that stuff. I actually bought the course as well. I had the book and all of that, so thanks for that.

Julie: Yay. Absolutely.

Emily: I think the best place to start is with my first birth because I won’t go into too much detail with it, but I think because of that birth– obviously, I had the VBAC, but I think because of that birth, I don’t know if I would have had the kind of experience I had if that makes sense. I think I had such a positive experience because it really lit a fire under me. I did so much more research and really prepared myself to the point where I just wanted this VBAC more than anything, so I really ended up having a positive experience.

With my first, I was with midwives. I had a doula. I was planning unmedicated at a birthing center. I felt pretty educated and looking back, I honestly was. I did a lot of research. My doula was fabulous. We had a bunch of prenatal appointments. I was reading all of the books, watching documentaries, and listening to a ton of podcasts, so I felt really good about it, and then it turns out that my son was breech.

For me, I desperately wanted to deliver vaginally. I was very comfortable assessing the risks and benefits of vaginal breech birth and I wanted to do vaginal. But unfortunately, when I found out and when I was due, which was right around Labor Day, anyone who was trained in vaginal breech birth was either on vacation, or they weren’t accepting any more clients, or the hospital put a ban on breech births. At the time of my first birth, I didn’t feel comfortable traveling more than four hours away at that point. So the best decision at the time was a planned C-section.

I’d also like to mention that I did everything under the sun to try to get my son to turn including an ECV and it was not happening. I was seeing a chiropractor. I did lots of moxibustion. I was doing Spinning Babies and actually, even during the ECV, the doctor was able to turn my son head-down actually pretty easy. As soon as the doctor took his hands away, my son scurried back to head-up, butt-down. And then we tried it the other way. Counterclockwise, same thing. He just went right back into the same position. I am not sure why, but that did happen.

With the planned C-section, I decided, “Okay, if I’m going to have a C-section, I want it to be the absolute most gentle, best family-centered C-section that I could possibly have. So I did advocate for myself quite a bit. I did have my choice of music playing and my husband had lavender oil that I was smelling. I was basically completely naked because I wanted my son to be on my chest as soon as he was born. They took him out pretty slowly because I wanted to try to have as much of a vaginal squeeze-type experience for him. We did delay cord clamping for about 90 seconds. They wrapped him in a warm towel during that and then put him on my chest so while they were sewing me up, he was on my chest the whole time which was great. I also did vaginal seeding with him and I had some expressed colostrum with me that I brought to the hospital that I used a little bit but he pretty much latched right when we were in the recovery room. My doula was able to come with me to the recovery room before I got to my main room. So all in all, a really great C-section.

It was still an incredibly devastating experience which I think mentally was very isolating for me because to everyone else, it looked like a great experience. I healed really well. I had instant skin-to-skin and breastfeeding was going well. On paper, it looked like everything was fine. It was a planned C-section so I had a good night’s sleep. We woke up, but I did miss all of the rushes of hormones. I missed the experience of giving birth vaginally which I desperately wanted.

So it really was not the experience that I was planning on. Everyone’s situation is different, but I think for a lot of people, a very common story is they didn’t really do a lot of research. They didn’t know. They just trusted their doctor. They walked into the hospital. There was a cascade of interventions, and then they ended up with an unplanned C-section. That’s unfortunately very common for me.

I was like, “I am at a birthing center. I have a doula. I know what I am doing.” So when I did have the C-section, it felt incredibly devastating. I don’t know how to describe it, but it just felt like I did all of the work, and also, what I think made it really difficult was that I wanted to deliver him vaginally breach. I wasn’t like, “Oh well, he is breech so that sucks. C-section is the safest route.”

That’s not how I felt. It may have been. There is no way to know. More than likely, it would have been fine to deliver him vaginally, so I just felt like I didn’t have that experience. So I very much wanted a VBAC. So much so that when the surgeon was sewing me up, one of the nurses was taking pictures of my uterus and I was like, “Do a double-layer closure.” Even as she was closing me up, she was like, “You are going to get your VBAC. Don’t worry. I’m doing great stitching. You’re going to be great.” Because everyone in the room, including my midwife who was actually in the room with me during the surgery, all knew how badly I wanted a vaginal birth.

So anyway, fast forward. I got pregnant when my son was two. We were team green this time because part of that was that I felt like it was no surprise to us with my first birth. I found out the gender and it was a planned C-section, and I felt that because I didn’t have any of the hormones of labor, I just kind of went in for brunch or something or just an appointment, and then all of a sudden they were like, “Your baby is here,” and I wasn’t feeling anything.

I did want some element of surprise, so I thought, “Okay. Even if I don’t get my VBAC and I have to do another C-section, at least I will have the element of surprise of finding out the gender.” In hindsight, my birth was plenty exciting and I did not need to find out the gender of my child.

Moving forward, my pregnancy was totally fine. I had the same midwives and the same doulas, and I didn’t get to really use them in labor the first time. They are great. I really like them. And from this pregnancy, some things that I was doing differently: I was very concerned about the positioning of the baby. I was seeing a Webster-certified chiropractor even before I was pregnant. She was doing (inaudible) and dry needling on my C-section scar, and really just making sure that I was in the best alignment and had the most space possible to have this baby get into the best position. Certainly, I don’t want a breech baby, but even if the baby is head down, I wanted the baby in an optimal position for the easiest labor which ended up working. That worked really well for me.

One other thing that I actually haven’t mentioned when talking about this birth is that I was born with hip dysplasia and dislocated hips when I was born. It was discovered late, so I was put in a cast and then a brace, and then when I was in my twenties, I had something called a Periacetabular osteotomy which was a pretty intense surgery on my hips. So also, in the back of my mind, there is some asymmetry in my hips and I wasn’t sure of the way my pelvis would move and flex during labor. So that was another reason why I really wanted chiropractic work during it.

I also was doing Spinning Babies religiously. It’s something that my doula mentioned the first time and I was like, “Yay. Okay, cool.” I didn’t really do it too much. I was wearing heels all of the time. This time, I was very careful with all of the Spinning Babies stuff, never leaning back, and getting into the right position. So anyway, all of that is to say the pregnancy went super well and smoothly.

I had a C-section with my son when I was 39 weeks and 1 day. Obviously, this was during the pandemic and I wasn’t seeing a lot of people during the pregnancy. My husband‘s cousin was getting married in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. We hadn’t seen our family in a long time, so I thought, “Let’s go out and go to the wedding. It’s fine.” I live in Westchester, New York, so it’s about a 3-3 1/2 hour drive from our house. The hospital where I was planning on having a VBAC with the midwives was in Connecticut, so from the wedding to the hospital is about fourish hours away.

I thought, “First of all, I am only 37 1/2 weeks at the time of this wedding. The chances of me going into labor– it’s possible, but it’s not likely. I’m not super far along.” Especially since I was only 39+1 with my son and there were no real signs of labor. So I drove out to the wedding. I figured, “Okay. If I happen to go into labor on this one day, I will just be in early labor. We will just drive back and we will go to the hospital, or I will go home, labor at home for a little bit, call the doula, and then we will head over to the hospital when things are progressing.

It seemed like a very reasonable plan because who has a baby in less than three or four hours for their first-time labor? That just seems like yes it’s possible, but again, I was just trying to look at the statistics as well. How long is first-time labor? I’m thinking, “Okay, somewhere in the realm of 16-24 hours. Something in that kind of range.”

Anyway, so we went to the wedding. It was great and super fun. We left. There was a hotel where we were where the wedding was, so we went back to the hotel probably around 11-ish at night and we were in bed in our hotel room at 11:30, so it was close to midnight. I maybe had fallen asleep for a minute. I felt like I had to pee which happens when you’re pregnant, but I had just peed at 11:30 so I’m like, “How is it that I have to pee again?” But whatever. I stood up to go pee and I just felt all of this warm liquid rush out of me.

My first thought, like a lot of people's first thought is, “Am I peeing?” But it wasn’t stopping so then I felt like, “Okay. This might be my water.” I went to the bathroom, changed, tried to go back to bed and the water was still leaking. At that point, I was like, “Okay. My water has broken. This is definitely a thing.” The liquid was clear. I was GBS negative. There was no odor. Everything was good. Obviously at that point, no one had checked how dilated I was or anything, so I was not concerned about any kind of infection. Obviously, I was pretty much at term and I had good prenatal care with no concerns. There was no kind of panicking.

So I woke up my husband around midnight. He was just sleeping for a second and I was like, “Hey, my water broke. I’m not really concerned. I’m not really having any kind of contractions. If contractions start, let’s pack it up and head back, but this could be a day or two before contractions even begin and then once that happens, it could be another 16 to 24 hours.” So correct me if I’m wrong, but that seems like how it is when the water breaks and you are not going into labor immediately.

Meagan: It happened with me, three for three.

Emily: Yeah.

Meagan: Every single time. I mean, with the third, I didn’t really go into labor for over 24 hours.

Emily: Yeah. That’s kind of what I thought. Obviously, sometimes your water breaks and you’re in labor, but I was thinking, “Okay. If my water breaks and then I am in labor, will just leave.”

Meagan: Right.

Emily: And then also, I’m in the middle-of-nowhere Pennsylvania. I’m not going to go find an Amish midwife and run into her house or run to a random hospital where they know nothing about me other than I had a previous C-section and just be like, “I am not in labor, but my water broke.” That just seems insane.

Meagan: I know. Yeah. A lot of the times, it’s better to just chill and hang out and monitor your symptoms.

Emily: Yeah and wait for labor to start.

Meagan: For things to start, yeah.

Emily: Granted, hindsight is 20/20. I should have just left, but I figured, “Okay. If this is going to be–” My water broke and I said, “Okay. Here we go. Contractions haven’t started, but I have to get ready. I have to get my head in the game. This is going to be an adventure and I need to save my energy. I need to eat something. I need to try to sleep and just relax because this is going to be a wild ride. This is not the time for me to be awake and freaking out and all that.”

So I told my husband basically all of that and I said, “Let’s just try to get some sleep and we will wake up at 5:00 or 6:00 a.m.. We will just try to get a couple of hours and then we will drive early in the morning. There won’t be any traffic and we will just head back when we are close or when it is a reasonable time in the morning like 7:00 or 8:00 a.m.. I can let our doula and our midwife know what’s up and they can come in the morning if I am not in labor to see the midwives or whatever they want to do.

My husband is half asleep and he was like, “Okay. I mean, I guess that sounds good. If the fluid was clear, let’s just try to get some sleep.” All of the midwives and doulas that I have spoken to have been like, “Yes. That sounds very reasonable.” All of the general public is– you know my story went viral. I’ve had some comments here and there of people being like, “Why didn’t you immediately scream and run into a hospital?” I just don’t think that would have been the right decision for me. So anyways, I tried to go back to sleep but I couldn’t understandably.

Meagan: Well, when your mind knows what’s happening, you are like, “I can’t go to sleep.”

Emily: Yeah. So I was trying to fall asleep but I kept leaking fluid. It wouldn’t stop and I didn’t have diapers or anything with me, so the fluid is just leaking, and leaking, and leaking. I’m actually texting with one of my friends who has had two home births and she knows how badly I wanted this. She was like, “Girl, you need to pack up your stuff and get out of there. What are you doing? You are going to have this baby in the car.” I am like, “No. I am fine. It’s fine.” I have all of these text messages of our conversation now with her. It is hilarious.

Meagan: So funny, yeah.

Emily: But again, I was just like, “I’m fine.” I also really understood the pain-fear cycle and I just was so committed to being “chill”-- I’m putting that in quotes– during labor and just being focused, and staying positive, and breathing, and not letting fear sneak in. I feel like that almost pushed me so much that I was in denial a little bit about what was going on.

So anyway at some point, I think it was probably around 2:30 a.m.,, I am up and down every two seconds. My poor hotel room was covered in amniotic fluid. I went to the bathroom and there was the bloody show. I am like, “Okay. Here we go.” Still, no contractions but things are picking up. At some point, I am pooping a lot, TMI, and I am like, “Okay. Here we go. Another sign. We are getting ready.”

Meagan: Yeah. Your body is preparing to begin labor.

Emily: Yes and I was like, “All of these signs are good.” 3:00 a.m. hit, so this is three hours after my water broke and contractions hit. They hit hard, and fast, and heavy and it completely took my breath away. I woke up my husband and I said, “Hey, contractions started. We should go.”

I had maybe two or three contractions at that point and he was like, “Okay. I am going to run to the drugstore. I will pick up some adult diapers because you are still leaking or whatever just to protect the car,” which again, in hindsight, is very funny. So he goes to get the adult diapers and I do have a thought in my mind. I remember panicking for a second and thinking in my mind, “Don’t leave. Don’t leave me.” But I was just like, “Okay.”

He left and he was like, “You pack up the room,” and I was like, “Okay. I looked over at my make-up, because we had just gone to a wedding, so I had my bra, and my dress, and my fake eyelashes, and my makeup and clothes are everywhere. It was a disaster. Meanwhile, these contractions are coming every four minutes, every three minutes and they are lasting a minute or more.

Meagan: And strong.

Emily: And strong. I am completely bent over on the bed having to breathe and I remember that one of the thoughts I was having was, “Oh my gosh. Is this early labor? If this is early labor, I can’t do this.” I was like, “No.” I shooed that thought away. I was like, “Nope. We are doing this. It’s happening, so get on board. We are doing this.”

At on point as I am throwing everything into my suitcase, I stumble into the bathroom because I was jumping out of my skin and I felt like I needed some relief, and so I turned on the tub. I was like, “Oh, I will just get in the shower or the tub for a minute just for a second,” and then the other side of my brain was like, “Emily, you cannot take a bath. Get your crap and go. You don’t have time for a luxurious bath in this hotel. You have to get going.” So I had those two sides of my brain chatting with each other the whole time.

I will say one of the things that I found incredibly helpful– I mentioned a Webster certified chiropractor and having a very supportive team. I had my midwife, my doula and really educated myself so I didn’t have fear. Not necessarily in advocating for myself which of course, education is good for that, but also, I feel like the more you know about birth, the more normalized it is. I think if you don’t know anything about it, there is a certain level of fear of the unknown. I was very much in that world. A lot of my friends have had home births so I’m kind of in the universe, so birth did seem very normal to me. I don’t know if normal is the right word, but borderline uneventful. It is a very natural process most of the time.

Meagan: Right.

Emily: Where things most of the time go well. So that was kind of my mindset but the other thing I think that is incredibly important that I would like to mention is that I was using the Gentle Birth App for meditations during my pregnancy. I really doubled down on it the last couple of weeks. I was doing meditations and then about a week before this wedding, I downloaded their contraction timer which just came out. It was a new app.

It was the same woman talking through the meditations, but it is with a contraction timer so you press the button when a contraction starts and it’s a woman’s voice. I couldn’t tell you what she said now, but it was all sorts of calming, wonderful things, and you turn it off and you rate the contraction. I forget how they label it, but it’s mild, medium and I forget. Intense might be the wrong word but it is three different levels. I just kept rating them as the lowest level because I was like, “It’s fine. This is fine. We are good. Everything is good,” and I kept rating them as mild even though I am completely doubled over. I am having to breathe through them and can’t talk.

So my husband comes back. We are in the car at 4:00 a.m.. So at this point, it was an hour from when my contractions started. My water broke at midnight. So I was in labor for an hour at that point. We get in in the car. I am texting my sister-in-law.

The other huge part of this– I feel like, with a lot of the headlines of my birth story, it’s hard. I want to share my story because I feel like I had such a wonderful, and powerful, and empowering experience. I want to hopefully help people, and educate people, and make people feel confident that they can do this, but with sharing something so personal, you do put a target on your back and there are some other comments from people about different things. I had to deal with people just reading a headline and not knowing any of the details of why did I make the decisions I made.

I was at this wedding. I was supposed to drive my sister-in-law back in the morning. There was a brunch in the morning for everyone and we were supposed to drive her back to New York with us. So in my mind, I felt like, “Well, this baby isn’t coming for a day or two at least. I don’t want to abandon my sister-in-law in Amish country. I will wait a couple of hours and then maybe we will wake her up at 5:00 or 6:00 a.m. and then we go.” That seemed very reasonable to me. So as I am doubled over, I’m trying to get into my husband‘s car. I have a Jeep that is bigger. He has a Honda Accord which is pretty roomy, but not roomy enough for labor. I don’t know what car would be roomy enough for labor.

But I was texting her and I was like, “Hey. Contractions started,” or something. “Everything is fine,” and then later, at 4:00 a.m. when I was in the car, I said something like, “This is getting really intense. We have to go. Sorry.” And then a half an hour later, I think she saw the text message. She starts calling me. She starts calling my husband. She was texting us and she was like, “What’s going on? Are you guys okay? What’s going on?” I couldn’t text back or answer and my husband just kept ignoring the call.

This whole time, I am using the contraction timer not so much to time the contractions, but more for the meditation that went along with it. I was in the car in the front seat for a little bit, and then at some point, I moved to the backseat. But I ended up laboring in the car. We were driving for an hour and 45 minutes. That is the other part of the story that I think—

Meagan: That sounds miserable.

Emily: It was miserable. Yes. It’s so funny because when I listen to these podcasts with any kind of birth story and people talk about how, “I had to go into the car to get to the hospital.” They say that the first intervention is moving spaces when you are laboring and they are like, “That car ride was the worst.” I am like, “Oh yeah? How about almost 2 hours of it?” I mean, not that it’s a competition of whose labor sucks, but it’s very different– spoiler alert– having a baby in the car versus laboring in the car for hours.

So anyway, I was in the front seat for a little bit. At some point, I was like, “I have to get out. Pull over. Pull over.” I sat up for a little bit and went to the backseat but this whole time, I was listening to the app. Also, I am not sponsored at all. This is just for a reference.

I was just breathing and I was really focusing on everything that I learned. I was relaxing my jaw. I was doing low moans, nothing high-pitched. I was doing lip trills, like horse lips, when things were getting more intense. For some reason actually, keeping my eyes opened was better for me. At the time I felt like, “Oh, let me close my eyes and go inward,” but that almost made it more intense for me, so keeping my eyes open was helpful.

However, I will say that at one point, I think it was probably right before transition or during transition, it was incredibly intense. I had those two sides of my brain talking. It was so intense and still, I was never screaming. I was never really loud. In my husband's defense, it just seemed like I was hanging out in the backseat just going, “Ohhhh,” for two hours. So I remember that it got really intense and one side of my brain was saying, “Okay. Your options are, you can open the door and throw yourself into traffic or you can just ride these waves and this is just what it is.” And I just thought, “Okay. This is just what it is. Obviously, I am not throwing myself into traffic, so I just have to breathe. I just have to breathe. I don’t have to do anything. My body is doing it for me. I just have to breathe. This isn’t going to last forever.”

I think that at one point I said out loud to my husband, “Remind me that there is a baby at the end of this,” because I was so in it. I couldn’t even really remember that I was in labor and there was a baby. It was just a tornado that was happening. Also sorry, the story is jumping around, but again in hindsight, I was having prodromal labor for about a week or two before this night.

Meagan: So plug-in, sometimes a history of prolonged prodromal labor can result in a precipitous birth. I’m going to throw that out there.

Emily: Ah, good to know.

Meagan: When our doula clients have prodromal labor for weeks or even for a week, it is like, “Okay. When things seem to turn, we need to be on full alert.”

Julie: That was how mine was.

Emily: That is so interesting.

Julie: By the time I realized it was real and by the time things actually shifted, it was less than three hours before she was born. My prodromal labor was 22 days. It was awful.

Meagan: Anyway, keep going. So you had prodromal labor–

Emily: I was having prodromal labor and again, I was in denial. At one point, I actually took a Pepto-Bismol. That’s how strong of denial I was in. However, at one point it was happening so much, especially at night. The waves were coming every 15 minutes. I could time it, like set my watch to it, and then they were coming consistently every 10 minutes. I was having a contraction about every 10 minutes but it was only lasting 30-45 seconds. That was happening not every single night but every couple of nights for two weeks before this. I just kept ignoring it because it just felt like period cramps.

Meagan: Kind of stagnant and never really progressed in a forward motion.

Emily: Yeah. It was never at a point where I was like, “Here we go.”

Meagan: “Here we go,” yeah.

Emily: It was kind of just like Braxton Hicks but more intense.

Meagan: I don’t know though. Even when things are seeming, “Here we go,” you didn’t respond like, “Here we go.”

Emily: No.

Meagan: I totally get what you are saying, but I am just joking. You have a really strong pain tolerance or discomfort tolerance.

Emily: Yes. Even in the throes of labor, again in my defense, I still thought I was in early labor because labor started at 3:00 a.m., and here I am and it is 5:00 a.m. in the car.

Meagan: Right, yeah.

Emily: That baby isn’t coming out of me now. That is insane. Of course, you hear of stories like that on podcasts once in a while. You are like, “Well, that is a crazy story. Obviously, statistically that will not happen to me. I’m going to have the normal, long labor that stalls that I need to do curb walking for. That is going to be me because that is the majority or at least that is what it the majority seems like. I did not think I was going to have a precipitous birth. Again, sorry. I am ruining this whole story but I am sure if there is a title on this episode, people already know.

Meagan: I don’t think you are ruining it at all.

Emily: Thank you. Long story short, there was another point. Oh and it’s contraction timer, but you also get it saved in your phone so I actually have a printout and a saved PDF of all of my contractions, and the times of them, and how long they were, and how I rated them. I was timing my contractions up until five minutes before my daughter was born, so that is how much of in denial I was that I was still timing my contractions when I’m literally pushing.

Meagan: Still thinking it’s early, yes.

Emily: Yes, yes. I texted my doula at some point because I knew that she kept her phone off and that if we needed her to answer in the middle of the night, we call her from this other number. But in general, she kept her phone off so I figured, “Okay. I will text her and if she happened to be up, she will see it.” I just let her know what was happening. She called us and I couldn’t talk at that point but my husband was talking to her. At that point, it was maybe 5:00 a.m., 5:15 a.m., maybe two hours into labor and we were still somewhere out of Pennsylvania or maybe somewhere in New Jersey. We were chatting. Well, I wasn’t chatting but he was chatting, “Okay, maybe we will meet at the house. Maybe we will meet at the hospital. Maybe we should meet at the house and pick up the bag, and labor a little bit there and see how we feel.”

That’s where my mind was. I thought we had time to get from where we were in New Jersey all the way back to Westchester, New York, labor and hang out, grab my bag, maybe eat something, and then go to the hospital and labor there. So that’s where I was.

Meagan: I keep giggling, but that’s where you were. That’s where your mind was. You believed that’s where you were.

Emily: Yes.

Meagan: As a doula, that’s like, “Pedal to the metal! Let’s have a line of cops to follow. Let’s get there.”

Emily: Yes and in hindsight, looking at my contraction timer, it was every three minutes or less for like a minute, a minute and a half long the whole time. At one point, I was rating the contractions moderately which were at a middle zone when they were incredibly intense. I was like, “Oh. These are a little stronger,” during the time, but I wasn’t going to throw myself into traffic. At one point, I think it was 5:15 AM. I have the exact timeline because of that PDF from the timer, but somewhere around there I was like, “I have to get out. I have to get out of the car and pull over.”

So my husband pulled over and I stood up as soon as I stood up, it felt so nice to just stand and move because remember, I’m in the back of a Honda Accord with a gigantic toddler car seat next to me Also, my toddler was with my parents in New York. He was not in the car. But it was a huge, empty car seat, so I really did not have a luxurious amount of room. Also, mentioning the position that I was in– so I was behind the driver's side. I had my right leg on the floor. My left leg up on the seat. I don’t know how you would describe the position, and then I had my left arm holding the dry cleaning bar. So I was holding myself up and I was consciously thinking, “Get off your tailbone. Get off your tailbone. Let your pelvis open. You need flexibility here. Don’t sit on anything.”

So I was up on my side, my right hip whole time. At some point, my thinking brain was turning on and I was like, “Okay, why don’t you lean over the car seat, and get on all fours, and lean your arms over the car seat so your hips can really open up,” but every time I tried to move it all, I just couldn’t. It was too much. It was too intense. I was basically just frozen and stuck in that position the entire time. So around 5:15, I get up out of the car. I’m moving around. I put my wrist on the top of the car and I had to remember that being a very nice moment because the car was cold. I was sweating and disgusting and it felt so nice to have the cool car on my wrists.

I will also say at that point, I took off my adult diaper just instinctually. I think I just needed to take it off and I was pushing. This is, I don’t know, like 5:20-5:30, something in there. I felt myself pushing and I felt like, “Oh my gosh. Why are you pushing if you are in early labor? And even if it is not early labor, there is no way you are at a 10.” So I just thought, “No Emily. You cannot push. Stop pushing.” I just thought that maybe it was so intense that my body was just tightening up because it was so much and I just need to relaxed. I felt like the answer was just to relax and don’t push. Relax. Breathe through it, so I was just relaxing my jaw by doing lip trills and low moans as I’m trying to push and just relax through it.

Which again, in hindsight, just opened me up more. I was concerned about whether I was going to be pushing too early and be swollen. I was thinking like, “Oh my gosh. I’m going to get to the hospital and I’m going to be so swollen,” because I would have been pushing before 10 centimeters, and they were going to try to give me Benadryl, and I was going to be going backward in dilation and I was like, “Okay. I have to not push. Don’t push. Don’t push.” But of course, my body was just pushing for me at that point. I had no control over pushing or not pushing or anything. All I was doing was breathing and in heavy denial at that point.

My husband didn’t realize that I was pushing either. So that point, I willed myself to get back into the backseat because I thought like, “Okay. Things are really ramping up in this early labor. I have to get back to my house and/or the hospital with my midwives, and my support team, and my doula, and everyone. Also for reference, we did call the midwives at some point. I think it was around when we got back in the car. I didn’t want to call in the middle of the night. I didn’t want to wake them up. I just figured, “Okay. We will call them when we are close to Connecticut. When we are close to the hospital, we will give them a heads up and say, ‘Hey. We are an hour away’ or ‘Hey, we are 45 minutes away. Just want to let you know.’” That seemed very reasonable to me. It didn’t really make sense in my mind to call them in the middle of the night to be like, “Hi. We are four hours away.” I don’t really know what they would have told me.

So again in hindsight, with my water broke, I should have called them and they probably would have said, “Hey, because you are so far away, you should leave now.” But at the time I didn’t wanna wake them up. So I just figured, “I’ve got this. It’s fine. I will call them when something is happening.”

Meagan: When something is happening.

Emily: Yes. So anyway, I am in the backseat and I am, in hindsight, definitely pushing and all of a sudden– this is a little before 5:45 a.m.. So I got into the car at 3:00 a.m. and this is a little less than two hours and 45 minutes after labor started and about an hour and 45 minutes in the car. I suddenly just say, “Pull over. Pull over.” My husband was like, “There’s nowhere to pull over. We are on the highway. There’s no shoulder. I will pull over at the next exit.” I reached down and I said, “There is a head,” because I felt the top of a baby's head. He was like, “Okay.”

So he just immediately pulled over, or he was trying to pull over, and then a couple of seconds later, her entire body just shot out of me. I caught her and I was holding her onto my chest. I just said, “There is a baby!” My husband looked in the rearview mirror and I am just holding this squishy, little baby. It just happened incredibly fast. It went from, “Pull over,” “There is a head,” “There is a baby,” in less than a minute. I mean really, my body was pushing for me. I was not doing anything.

Meagan: True fetal ejection.

Emily: Yes. I knew that it was a thing, so it was really cool to feel it and to get into it. Also, I am laboring at night so it was a dark environment. I was by myself. I felt as comfortable as you can in a car and I was watching the sunrise, so that was kind of nice.

Just to jump back, one of the things when I was saying I was going to throw myself into traffic, not to scare anyone, it’s not that bad. It’s very doable. But at the time, I had that momentary transition, looking back, of that “I can’t do it” moment, but I did rally pretty quickly until like, “No. You have to. You don’t have a choice.”

I do remember looking at the GPS on the screen because where I was leaning over, I could see the screen. It said I had two more hours or some ridiculous number like that and I remember thinking, “No. No, no, no. I can’t. There cannot be two more hours of this. I absolutely cannot do this for two more hours. There’s no way.” And then I thought, “Okay.” Again denial, I was like, “I’m going to pretend like I didn’t see that,” and then I just looked out the window and watched the sunrise. I was like, “That GPS doesn’t exist.” I kind of had my eyes like those magic eye books. I don’t know their name. Do you know what I’m talking about?

Meagan: Yeah I do, but I don’t remember the name of them either. Like iSpy but not.

Emily: Yeah. Not iSpy, but the magnifying glass where you put—

Meagan: Yeah, not iSpy but that is coming to my mind.

Emily: You put your nose to the page, and you slowly move it, and your eyes kind of fuzz, and then you see a different image? I was doing that with my eyeballs with the screen. I was like, “Nope. Can’t see that screen two hours ahead.” So anyway, I caught my daughter and eventually my husband pulled over. I mean, I did it but it was crazy. I remember thinking, “Oh my god. What even happened?” I don’t even know what I was thinking. It was like, “What even just happened? That was insane.”

So I think we called 911 because after the fact with the birth story, Inside Edition was one of the news outlets that reached out. They were able to obtain the 911 audio, so we actually have that.

Meagan: That’s awesome.

Emily: I am happy to send it your way. But we have the 911 audio and you just hear me in the background saying, “Hi. Hi baby. Hi baby. Can you cry for me? Can you cry? Hi,” and I am trying to get her to cry because she wasn’t. So I am rubbing her back and I somehow had the wherewithal to grab a towel from the hotel room and wrap her. She was skin-to-skin with me but I put a towel over her over us. I am rubbing her and trying to get her to cry, and it probably took a minute or two minutes for her to cry. She was breathing. Her body was moving. I could see her lungs expanding, but it took a little while for her to cry.

One of the things that happened that I didn’t– I am careful with where I share this because the birth was so wonderful and I have such fond, wonderful memories of it so I don’t want to add any kind of fear into the story. However, I do want to be authentic and truthful about it so one thing that actually did happen was when she was born– and I don’t know when this happened in the process– but I am holding her and I look to see the gender of the baby.

At some point, I looked and I said that it was a girl, but who cares? Because at that point it was, “What even just happened?” But I looked down and the umbilical cord had snapped. So on her, there were maybe three inches and then the rest of the umbilical cord was somewhere inside of me.

Meagan: Attached to the placenta still?

Emily: Yes.

Meagan: Okay, yeah. But still. It still snapped and was not clamped.

Emily: Not clamped but it wasn’t bleeding.

Meagan: Bleeding out, yeah.

Emily: It instantly clotted on both sides so I wasn’t hemorrhaging at all. That was something I was checking. I looked down. “Am I losing blood? Am I good?” And I actually didn’t. I barely lost any blood.

Meagan: Great. That’s good.

Emily: So I was fine. She was breathing. I’m not a doctor, but she was breathing. She was pinking up. She started crying. The umbilical cord wasn’t bleeding but that is– I was a little in shock but looking back, that isn’t ideal for sure. And unfortunately, the 911 operator, although very sweet, had no idea what to say or do which is what I felt at the moment but then afterward I was like, “I don’t know. Maybe I was just out of it,” but then now that I have the 911 audio, I was listening back and I had no idea what was happening.

He was literally like, “Oh. Okay. Well, I guess you already had the baby so congratulations. I guess you did that part. Let me get my sheet. Why does my sheet say to do? Okay. Can you clamp the cord?” And I am like, “The cord snapped.” He was like, “Okay. I don’t know.” You just hear me saying, “Is someone coming? Is someone coming to get us?” I know. It was wild. And basically a minute into that incompetent conversation, my husband was like, “Okay. We’re going to call our midwives now.” He was like, “Okay. Congratulations. Help is on the way.” Because we’re not gonna hang out on the phone with someone who literally has no idea what he was talking about, although very sweet.

Meagan: Yeah. Yeah.

Emily: So we called the midwives but someone was going to call us back. I don’t know. I think it went to an answering service and I’m not really sure what happened there, but we called our doula and she was like, “Okay. Crank up the heat. Get the blanket. Warm her up.” You know, giving us all these directions. I think we gave her a heart attack for sure because we talked to her twenty minutes before then and we were like, “Maybe we will meet at the house and eat a meal together.” And then we were like, “Hi. The baby is born.” And she was like, “What? What is happening?” So yeah. That is basically the story but she is all good. My daughter is all good. She was fine. I was fine.

Meagan: You were okay?

Emily: Yep. I was doing great. She breastfed like a champ. We rode in the ambulance together and she was on my chest the whole time. Me and the ambulance workers– I was taking selfies with them and they were taking videos for me. I birthed my placenta in the ambulance and I have a video of that. One of the female EMS workers was like, “Yay!” So it was really chill. They wanted to give me an IV in the ambulance and I said, “Why? I am done.” They were like, “Well, the hospital wants it.”

Meagan: Yeah.

Emily: I just said, “Yeah.” I declined that part and they were like, “Okay.” So I didn’t get one. We just went to the hospital and I left 24 hours later and went home.

Meagan: Oh my gosh. That’s amazing. What a rush. Totally not expected and like you said, not out of the ordinary in a lot of things. You were like, “Yeah I’m taking my time,” and then boom bang bam, you have a baby. That is so awesome and so exciting. So exciting. I can’t imagine being in that position but I am sure it would be quite the whirlwind.

Emily: Yeah, and then looking back, I think it was about 15 minutes of pushing maybe?

Meagan: Wow, yikes.

Emily: Her whole body flew out and actually surprisingly, I didn’t tear at all.

Meagan: That’s awesome. So awesome. Well, congratulations again. I know everyone has probably said, “Congratulations.”

Emily: Thank you.

Meagan: That’s so awesome. So awesome to have you on the podcast and excited for the world to continue to hear your story.

Emily: Thank you. I’m super passionate about birth and all of that stuff. So if anyone ever wants to reach out to me, they are more than welcome to.

Closing

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