Abigail’s first pregnancy turned into a life-threatening birth experience with undetected gestational diabetes and a traumatic ICU stay. On top of that, she unexpectedly had to move homes just two weeks postpartum. Abigail quickly developed intense postpartum depression and struggled to make sense of what happened to her.
She was sure she would never have kids again, but after therapy and healing, she and her husband found themselves wanting another baby three years later. Abigail became pregnant right away, and she knew this time would be different. This time, things would be better.
From the meticulous monitoring to the candid conversations, Abigail felt heard and supported throughout her entire pregnancy. Her gestational diabetes was detected and very controlled. While a scheduled C-section seemed to be a logical choice, she knew her heart wanted a VBAC. She was able to go into spontaneous labor and pushed her baby girl out in just 13 minutes!
How to VBAC: The Ultimate Prep Course for Parents
Full Transcript under Episode Details
Meagan: Welcome to the show, everybody. We have our friend, Abigail, from California with us today. She is a 27-year-old stay-at-home mom with a 4-year-old daughter and a 7-month-old son. She experienced a very unfortunate, traumatic experience with her first which really left her not really sure that she wanted any more kids. She’s going to dive more into her wild experience, but she had a COVID pregnancy. She had a lot of different stresses through the pregnancy, especially at the beginning– gestational diabetes, preeclampsia, and so many things with her first that really taught her a lot, and had a wild birth experience.
Then the second time, she ended up getting gestational diabetes again, but did a lot of different things to improve her outcome like hiring a doula, getting a supportive provider, and all of that. We are going to turn the time over to her in just one moment, but I do want to quickly in place of the review share a couple of tips for gestational diabetes.
If you guys have not heard about it so far, check out Real Food for Gestational Diabetes by Lily Nichols. It is absolutely incredible. It is less than 200 pages long. It is a fantastic read and filled with a lot of really great information and studies. She also talks about prenatals, so I wanted to remind everybody that we have a partnership with Needed who we just love and adore. We do have a promo code for 20% off. You can get your 20% off by using code VBAC20. Definitely check that out.
Then we are going to be including a lot of things in our blog today like third-trimester ultrasounds, sizes of baby, and gestational diabetes so make sure to dive into the show notes later and check out what we’ve got.
Okay, my darling. I’m so excited for you to share your stories today. I feel like there’s part of your story that I want to point out too before you get going, and that is that sometimes you can plan the most ideal birth scenario, and I’m not going to talk about what this scenario is, but a lot of people are like, “Do this. Do this. Do this.” Sometimes you plan it, and then your care falls short or something happens and plans change.
If you guys are listening, I just want you to dive in. As you are listening to Abigail share her stories, listen to how sometimes things change and what she did, and then what she did differently to have a different experience. Okay, Abigail.
Abigail: Hello. First of all, I just want to say that I’m really happy to be here today. Thank you for having me today.
Meagan: Me too.
Abigail: Yeah, I guess let’s just dive right in.
Meagan: Yeah.
Abigail: First thing is I am a stay-at-home mom, so my mom is out in the living room with my babies right now, and at this point, my son is 7-months-old, and we are having a really good time over here. I just want to start by saying that.
Basically to start with my story, I got pregnant for the first time in January of 2020. Everybody knows what else happened in 2020. I was, I think, about 12 or 13 weeks pregnant when everything completely shifted. Everything started to shut down. There was a chance that I was going to get laid off of work which I did end up getting laid off of work about a week later. It was not a fun time.
My husband and I had an apartment. We lived in a place we had just moved to. We had been there for about 3 years. We had a roommate, and everything was totally fine. Everybody worked full-time. I was working out regularly. We had a pretty chill life. Go to the farmer’s market on the weekend. I was really excited when I found out I was pregnant. I was like, “Okay, yeah. We are going to bring a baby into this. Let’s do it. I love what we’re doing.”
So again, everything completely shut down and shifted. Our roommate decided he wanted his own space, so he gave us a 30-day notice. We were stuck in a situation where they were raising our rent because our lease was up. We would have had to re-sign. It would have cost us more and everything, so we were looking at having to move because our roommate was moving out.
It was all not a very fun time, so we decided to move back to where we were from, rent a room from a family member, and stay with them for the time being. They had a little bit of extra space for us. We thought it would be totally fine and everything.
We moved when I was about 20 weeks pregnant. Up until that point, I had regular OB care at a regular office. I had done all of the blood work and everything and the ultrasounds and the anatomy scan and everything up until 20 weeks.
When we moved, I decided, “Okay, I think I want to have the baby at home, especially now since the pandemic.” I don’t know that I really wanted to go to the hospital, but I wasn’t sure that I wanted to do that to begin with. I grew up in a community where home birth was pretty normal. My mom had my younger brother at home. Several of my friends were born at home and their siblings when we were younger. It was a pretty normal thing to me.
I reached out to a team of midwives. I talked to them, and got everything set up. I started doing appointments with them. They were coming over to my house fairly frequently. It was pretty nice doing the regular blood pressure checks and the urine samples with the little sticks, and all of that stuff.
When it came time for the gestational diabetes testing, I was like, “Okay, is this something I have to do?” I didn’t have my insurance set up at that point or anything because we had just moved so we would have to pay out of pocket for it. I would have to go sit in some lab or office some place. Again, during COVID, while I was pregnant, I was like, “I don’t know. If I don’t have to do it, I don’t want to. If I have to, I will. What are we doing here?” They were like, “Well, you’re low-risk. These are the risk factors. If you don’t want to do it, you don’t have to. You just have to sign this form.”
I was like, “Okay, cool. I’ll sign the form. Seems easy enough.” I totally skipped the gestational diabetes testing. That was on me, but it wasn’t on me at the same time because I don’t feel like I was given proper informed consent.
There was a team of three midwives plus a student, so a total of four that I was seeing. One of the midwives ended up getting switched out at about that point, so it ended up being the student, the same original two, and then one newer one. Everybody was really nice. They were coming over and checking on me and doing all of the things that I thought they were supposed to be doing.
I was not weighing myself. We did not have a scale. Again, they didn’t tell me that it is important to make sure that you’re not gaining too much weight at a time or anything like that.
What happened was, I started gaining a lot of weight, but I didn’t really realize just how much weight I was actually gaining. I was like, “Oh, I’m pregnant.” I quit going to the gym. I can’t even hardly do anything. It’s hot out. It’s summertime. I was pregnant from January to September, so the bigger I got, the hotter it got.
I didn’t do much, so I was like, “Whatever. I’ve gained some weight. It’s not a big deal.” I was a pretty small person to start with. Just for reference, I’m 4’8”, and I was 95 pounds when I got pregnant initially, so really small.
It started becoming concerning because toward the end of my pregnancy, and toward I guess not even the end, the beginning of my third trimester, I started getting really swollen. Like, really swollen. My feet and my legs up to my knees– not just my feet, but my calves and everything were pretty swollen. Toward the end of my pregnancy, I had swelling up to my thighs. I’m being told this is normal. I’m 23. I’ve never been pregnant before. I don’t have any support groups or anything going because it’s COVID. Nobody wants to talk to anybody or do anything.
It was a little frustrating for me because they were like, “Just put your feet up. Soak your feet.” If I soaked my feet, they got more swollen. I was not taking proper care of myself either. I went from exercising and eating right and doing all of the things that you are supposed to do to sitting at home and eating a lot of fast food and not walking. I was not having a great time mentally either. We were living some place I didn’t want to be living. It was all of it.
I didn’t think too much of it. Again, I’m like, “Well, I’m being told this is normal. I’m gaining some weight. It’s fine.” At one point, one of my urine tests that they did came back positive for glucose, and they were like, “Well, what did you eat for breakfast?” When I told them, I was like, “I had some waffles. I had some orange juice,” and whatever else I had, they were like, “Oh, you just had some orange juice before you got here. That’s f
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