Lily’s VBAC birth story episode is finally here!!!
You know and love her just like we do. She not only manages the social media content here at The VBAC Link but also spends so much time connecting with you personally. She has the biggest heart for VBAC and champions all types of empowered birth.
Lily walks us through her experiences with ectopic pregnancy, loss, her traumatic Cesarean, and how she persisted through a 66-hour long labor without an epidural to achieve her hospital water birth VBAC.
If you followed her pregnancy journey, you saw that Lily was incredibly proactive during her pregnancy. She built the strongest team of birth and body workers. She was specific in her desires, yet remained open-minded. This served her so well in labor and made all the difference during her birth!
Needed Website
How to VBAC: The Ultimate Prep Course for Parents
Full Transcript under Episode Details
Meagan: Hello, everybody. You guys, today is a very exciting day. We have recently had two of our VBAC Link team members have their babies. Paige was one with the first Maternal Assisted Cesarean in Korea, and today is the second with Lily. Oh my gosh. If you guys have been on our social media, you have seen our cute Lily. She is just so amazing. She's so fun. She's in the DMs on Instagram literally every day chatting with you. I just absolutely adore her. She's so incredible. Lily is a born and raised Colorado-- I don't even know how to actually say this. Lily is a born and raised Coloradoan.
I think that is how you say it.
She's from Colorado, living in northern Colorado with her husband, son, and daughter. She is a kinesiologist who works in community health and a dual-certified fitness instructor passionate about movement and wellness. After an unexpected Cesarean two and a half years ago, Lily found The VBAC Link and began planning her VBAC and is excited to share her story today.
I cannot wait for you to hear it. This was actually the first time that I got to hear it in its entirety. It's just amazing, and I'm excited for you to hear it. Like I mentioned, Lily is also our social media assistant at The VBAC Link and is truly honored to empower and hold space for all the Women of Strength in our community. You guys, she is absolutely amazing. We love her so, so, so, so much.
We do have a review that we're going to share, and then we are going to turn the time over to our sweet Lily to share her stories. This review is by Savannah, and it says, "Started listening to The VBAC Link Podcast around 16 weeks pregnant and continued throughout my pregnancy. It was so good and encouraging for me as a mama who was preparing for a VBAC. It helped me gain confidence, and helped me know what to look for and watch out for in my providers. Hearing other stories was so encouraging and helped me gain so much knowledge. I had my hospital VBAC unmedicated with an 8-pound, 15-ounce baby and I know the knowledge I gained from this podcast played a huge role in being able to advocate for myself and get a better birth outcome."
Congratulations, Savannah. We're going to talk a little bit about this today as well with Lily on the podcast how sometimes the thought of going to the hospital is scary because of stories you've heard or things you've heard. But VBAC can happen in the hospital, and it can be beautiful, and it is beautiful. I think it always dials back to me to finding the best provider for you, finding the best location that feels right for you, building your team, and doing what is best for you in the end. So I really am so excited one minute after the intro to turn the time over to Lily.
Okay, Ms. Lily, I really am so excited because I was even texting you the day you were in labor. I don't really know all the details, but I've seen your incredible pictures. Oh my goodness, your pictures are so incredible, and I've heard a little bit from you so I really can't wait. So let's talk. Let's talk about these births.
Lily: Okay. Yeah. So every Cesarean story is what starts us off, so I will go with that. But I'm going to try to be fast because I feel like my birth was really long. I have a lot more to say about my VBAC, but I always try to really honor our story in that before we had our beautiful, amazing rainbow baby boy, we also experienced a miscarriage and an ectopic pregnancy prior to having our son. I lost my right fallopian tube. I always like to be the encourager that you can get pregnant naturally with one fallopian tube. It turns out fallopian tubes are not fixed body parts, so when we got pregnant with our son, I ovulated from the side I didn't have a fallopian tube on, and my other tube was able to come over and grab the egg and sense the ovulation which feels so miraculous.
Meagan: So incredible, so incredible. I love that message that you're dropping for our community because I think if someone was in that situation as you know, it could feel very defeating and uncertain.
Lily: Yeah, it feels really scary. I remember thinking, "I'm at less than 50% fertility if I've lost one tube," but that's not true. Statistically, it's really pretty equal to people with both fallopian tubes, which is kind of neat.
Meagan: Yeah.
Lily: After that, I started acupuncture. My sweet friend, Montana, we had been friends for years and she's always been like, "You should come see me." She specializes in women's health and fertility and loss and all the things. I started acupuncture then, and I say that now cause it has continued. I always say I'll never not be a patient of hers ever again because she's the best.
I started to do that, and then we got pregnant. we found out we were pregnant on the last day of week of prayer at our church, which was really incredible and just felt like such a tangible miracle. We chose to go with a birth center for our care. We did that because I had a lot of hospital trauma. I just didn't think that a hospital was a safe place for me to have my baby. I'm a big believer that we should birth wherever feels the safest. We went for birth center care and had a great experience at our birth center.
We loved our midwives and were really excited for birth. I think I hear so many times as women tell their VBAC stories that often we feel underprepared going into our first birth, and it leads to a cascade. I think I was the birthiest nerd of all. I felt like I was really prepared going into birth. I was excited for it. I had a lot of birth education. I had been a birth podcast listener forever and ever. I just felt really empowered in birth and all the things I was doing, chiropractic care and acupuncture and all the stuff.
We did get to 41 weeks, and at my 41-week appointment, my midwives gave me a 3-page-long induction protocol because in our state, we have to transfer at 42 weeks. So it was their, "This is the last-ditch effort when you are 41--", and I can't remember how many days, "we want you to do this big thing." It was a daily schedule. "You're going to wake up and you're going to go for a drive on a bumpy road, and you're going to eat this, and you're going to do this."
It was really overwhelming.
Meagan: Yeah.
Lily: Well, the night before we were supposed to do that protocol, the doula who was on-call at the center was texting me and was like, "Hey, how are you feeling?" I was like, "I don't know. I feel really nervous to do this big long thing." She suggested that I journal out all of my fears about birth and see if that did anything. I journaled all my fears, and I burned it in our kitchen sink.
As I walked up the stairs, I had my first contraction. I'm also a huge believer that our emotions play such a huge role in our labors. So I was really stoked that my labor started and all the things. That's the same doula that we had for our next birth too, which is really cool.
So yeah, I labored all of that night. It was Friday that I went into labor, that evening. Saturday, I labored. My midwives came and checked in eventually. My doula did come over, did some stuff with me, hung out and helped me labor, did some homeopathy, some emotional release work, and all the good stuff. But my labor was really, really long.
So by Sunday, my midwives were like, "Hey, you are super exhausted. We want you to take a Benadryl and try to take a nap." I am a girly who does not take a lot of medicine. So this Benadryl knocked me on my booty. I had six really awful contractions trying to take a nap. After I got back up from the nap, I got back on the toilet which is where I was loving to labor. I stood up because I was like, "Okay, I think maybe things are starting. I'm finally getting a pattern. Maybe I can finally go to the birth center." I stood up, and I checked the pad I was wearing. There was a copious amount of meconium. Not water, but meconium which is scary, you know? I knew right then that I was going to have to transferred. It was thick. It was poop.
Meagan: Yeah, yeah.
Lily: There was no water stained. It was just meconium. And so I called my midwife, and in her sweet midwife voice, I said, "Do I have to transfer?" And she goes, "It's definitely a conversation we have to have." I was like, "Okay. So, yes."
She explained that because of the way the meconium came out, she now thought my son was breech because his butt was right up against my cervix, and it just came right out. Soo she came over. Actually, she wasn't even on call. She happened to live in our neighborhood. She came over and checked me and all the things, and she's like, "Yep, this feels really different than a few hours ago. He's definitely breech. We do have to transfer."
And so as we're transferring, in my mind, I know that we're probably going to have a Cesarean. My midwives were really great in that they called ahead and they were like, "Hey, we called ahead. No one's willing to do a vaginal breech delivery, or at least they're not trained in it."
But my midwives were also really encouraging th
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