What Can Turn Around a Hard Hospital Birth? Jennifer's Birth Story, Part II

In today's episode I finish my conversation with Jennifer, the Doula in Reno

She shares how she managed all the complications of her daughter's tenuous condition: 
* Born with RDS, a lung condition that has a high mortality rate

* How lessons learned from that experience shaped her willingness to go on to foster babies who came into the world with other compromising circumstances
 
and 

*How her experience in the hospital that first time led her into birth work. 

We pick up where we left off last episode. Jennifer is in the hospital after birth waiting to hear about the fate or her fragile newborn.

Transcript

Paulette  0:03  
Welcome to what you didn't expect in fertility, pregnancy and birth, how we think and feel about this enormous transition often lives in the gap between what we expected and what we actually experienced. This gap exists in part because of how we tend to talk about and portray these events on all kinds of media in a one dimensional way, everything was amazing, but it's more often the case that there are beautiful things that happen and at the same time, really challenging things that happen. This show shares true experiences, both the easy parts and the difficult parts, and how we managed what we didn't expect, the intense things that can happen in the course of this transition can impact how you see yourself, how you see your partner and how you parent. The better we understand what happened to us, the better we can manage all that follows. I'm your host, Paulette Kamenecka. I'm a writer and an economist and the mother of two girls, and I met many, many challenges in this process, none of which I expected in today's episode, I finished my conversation with Jennifer. She shares how she managed all the complications of her daughter's tenuous condition, born with rds, a lung condition that has a high mortality rate, how lessons learned from that experience shaped her willingness to go on to foster babies who came into the world with other compromising circumstances, and how her experience in the hospital that first time led her into birth work pick up where we left off last week, Jennifer's in the hospital after birth, waiting to hear about the fate of her fragile newborn.

Jennifer  1:38  
So I'm in the hallways. I'm in waiting rooms on day three, a nurse finds me, brings me to the nurses lounge, stands there while I take a shower, make sure I have clean clothes, brings me to the pump room. And I've been pumping, but I've never seen a breast pump in my life, right? So they're like, You need to go to the pump room and pump every two hours. I Okay, well, I'm doing it, but I don't know what I'm doing. So it brings me to the pump room. There's a lactation consultant, this nurse, again, another angel, right? And another person who really saw me in this situation where I was very, very lost and alone. And the lactation consultant sizes me, hooks me up to the pump, shows me how to hook it up and get it started correctly, turns the pump on, leans over to me and puts her hands on my knee and says, Tell me about your birth. And I just sobbed for 20 minutes because no one had asked me in three days how I was doing. I'm not sleeping. I'm wandering hallways. I'm waiting for my daughter to die.

Paulette  2:39  
I'm wondering about you as having gone through a 19 hour labor and delivery with no anesthetic, no one really around you to support you and your lack of a better term kind of a kid yourself, right? 20 is not, yeah,

Jennifer  2:52  
I was 21 when she was born. But yes, I mean, I don't think

Paulette  2:56  
I could, I don't think I could boil an egg at 21 so I can't imagine, I just can't imagine all the things that you have gone through in the last two days, and how how shot your nervous system is from all of that, and tonight you have to take on this other giant piece of information. I mean, I don't know how you're walking around, I don't know how you're upright, I don't know how you're using the pump machine every two hours. How are you functioning? Think you just

Jennifer  3:25  
do it, because it doesn't seem like there's like, what? What's plan B? You know what Plan B is? What going to the Ronald McDonald House, falling asleep, not pumping, not being there for my daughter. I didn't feel like, like there was only one course of action in my mind. So that,

Paulette  3:43  
to me, is interesting, because Plan B, which I have, I have pulled the report on plan B before, Plan B is falling apart. Plan B is freaking out. So actually, you have other options. And it's interesting to me that you don't feel like you have that in the moment, but you are picking this path. Maybe it didn't feel like it at the time, but you pick that path because there are other things that could happen that you have not picked. So let's just give that Jennifer a minute of Oh, thank

Unknown Speaker  4:07  
you grace

Paulette  4:08  
and applause for for picking that path. Right? Amazing. So you're you're crying with the nurse, which, thank God for her. I

Jennifer  4:15  
cried. I told her, right? I told her about my birth story, and then she shut the pump off at 20 minutes. She let me just, just vent, just share my story, and showed me how to bag everything up directly, and gave me a hug. And I felt like, like my breasts could move again. You know, I was at day three. I was getting engorged. I was very uncomfortable, physically. I just had a baby, and I bought this milk come in, so I learned about how to do the pump. And that was the night that my daughter turned the corner where the medication worked, and she was starting turn the corner positively, instead of turning the corner negatively. And the live teaching consultant did say, I want you to go get some sleep and have a glass of wine. You need to check out a little bit, yeah, like, You need to sleep and you go have a glass of wine and sleep. Don't worry about pumping. Don't worry about the mill. Don't worry about anything. Just, I was like, I can't have alcohol. I'm pumping for my daughter. She's like, don't worry. It's not that big of a deal, you need to go home and sleep now. Meantime, my husband, at the time, is military. The neonatologist actually called the Air Force. His department talked to his superior and said, This guy needs to fly here before his daughter dies. He'll never forgive himself in the future. So he shows up at day three. So somewhere in there. The next day, right around there, it was, after the lactation consultant and all of that. And I haven't seen him in three months, and he shows up and sees her, and he's there for about a week. I'm very grateful that he came. I'm grateful that he was there. He got to see her. He and I kind of got to connect. It was uncomfortable and odd. You feel almost like you don't know this person that you're having this child with. I went through the last three months of my pregnancy, a labor and delivery, and three days of my daughter dying by myself, yeah, and then he kind of shows up. And so that was that was also an emotional thing that was happening within that side note, I found out when she was three months old that he'd been having affairs and we divorced, but so that was part of why it was uncomfortable then, that I didn't understand thinking was all me going through this pregnancy and delivery and not seeing him, not realizing there was a lot more going on that I didn't realize was going on and had been for a while. Yeah, but it was a really odd situation. This

Paulette  6:40  
feels like too much. I'm telling you when I'm writing the story of your life, I'm editing that part out, because that feels like too much for one person to manage. It's a

Jennifer  6:48  
lot. It was a lot. So I held her for the first time at seven days. I tried to breastfeed it 11 days, but then we had to wait for three weeks. By the time she was a year old, I was a breastfeeding counselor, working birth work, because the people that had dropped into my life, metal professionals, lactation consultant, made it was a really hard situation that was overwhelmingly positive, and not just because my daughter survived, because through that whole process, as alone as I felt, I also felt incredibly supported in these with these certain people In these certain moments that were fairly pivotal in that labor delivery story for me. So by the time she was a year old, I was leaving my husband, and I was already in working in birth work because someone had made these people had made such a significant difference to me. And I thought, what if you could have an overwhelmingly positive experience? It's support. I mean that maybe that would be better. So that's that process, that story is what got me into birth work. I also knew a lot from that you can be in a very medicalized situation, in urgent, traumatic situation, medically and still have really positive things happen. You can go three weeks without breastfeeding a child and still latch them on. I breastfed her for a year and a half. Nothing defines the situation for you. And I think often we put ourselves in a box, or we let other people put us in a box, like, well, since this is happening, you need to do it this way. You're gonna have to formulate a fear you can't do things the way you wanted to, this really natural way. And I kind of went, I'm still doing it the way I want to, just in a way that looks a lot different. You know, bonding could have been different. It was different for me. And I know that through all that, it can be a really overwhelmingly positive situation. And so that really inspired me to win a birth work. I had a situation that was traumatic, that I feel like was really positive.

Paulette  8:42  
That's amazing. One thing I want to ask you about all the things that happened is, do we look back now and how do we feel about the doctor that said she's going to die within 72 hours? And I say that as someone who 100% appreciates medical support and doctors, and thinks that's a noble job and a really hard one. Do you feel like expectations were managed, or that person shouldn't have said that? Or what's your feeling around that experience? She was exceptional. She

Jennifer  9:13  
was the head neonatologist of the NICU. She was probably about 65 at the time, lovely woman. She wasn't brusque about it, so I'm translating this information quickly, but she sat down and took time with me and had a conversation. She was another person that was and look to be her. And have to give me this news, she knows what the odds are with my daughter, right? She knows where I'm at. She gave me a very honest expectation, and she was still warm and caring and really lovely. And so it wasn't just like, Hey, she's gonna die. She's the worst. She's the most. She really, her delivery was really exceptional, and she really, she sat down in my room, just on the stool. She wasn't in a hurry. She made eye contact. She really had a conversation. I can't imagine being on her and having to deliver this news to a brand new mom who's 21 who showed up 24 hours ago, thinking I was gonna like, 24 hours earlier, I was going to be on bed rest for another week and delivered a birth center, and here I am with a baby in the NICU is going to die. It was a pretty huge 24 hours. She was really great. I think that there is empathy and compassion with honesty. And I wouldn't have wanted her to tell me no, she might be okay. It'll probably work out in the end, like, Don't blow smoke, right? Yeah, yeah. Of course. I liked the information. I wanted to know. What does she have wrong with her? What is the situation? I mean, I learned a lot of medical terminology. I learned how to feed with an NG tube. I was trained with an NG tube, which helped me further in life that I didn't even realize. You know, with foster care and adoption, I I was medically trained because of this situation, so I could do gram scale weights. I could do breastfeeding weight. You know, where you where you weigh them. Breastfeed and weigh them after. I could use an Apgar machine. I was like, I ended up getting trained at 21 with my first baby. I'm doing all of these things with her, to her, for her, she was four pounds, four ounces. When she was born. She got down to three, six and when she left the hospital at her one month, at one almost exactly one month she left the hospital, she was four, four again. So I had this incredibly tiny, fragile baby who's had her head shaved everywhere from all the IVs they had to put in her head. You know, it was no little thing. She was connected to everywhere, and I got real comfortable and familiar with that I could change her, pick her up, move her around, fully ventilated, the whole thing. So, you know, again, tough situation that was overwhelmingly positive. I learned all these skills I wanted to be able to talk to the nurse and talk to the residents and talk to the doctor and understand what they were saying. And I really, I feel like, in some situations, I immersed myself in figuring out what they meant, and like, Wait, say that in a different way. Okay, now I understand it. Another interesting thing is, when she was, I think, 14, she was 14, I was a runner, and my kids would run with me. And I said to Bri, do you want to do a 5k with me? And she said, Yeah, I liked you a 5k and it was the American Lung Association. And I contacted the person that was in charge of this 5k through the American Lung Association. I just want you to know my daughter, who 14, is running her first 5k for you, and you are the organization that saved her life because they're them having the surfactant and the endosyn and the medications, and this is a lung disease. Their studies were really part of her success story in this situation. And this woman was like, Holy crap, we need to meet for lunch, so we go to lunch. And she says, to breathe. How do you feel about all this? And she said, Honestly, I have no memory of it, and my mom has never treated me differently, so I don't think that I have any barriers. So I'm just going to run this 5k and this woman was like, Holy crap. I've read your medical records, but I didn't treat my daughter differently. Yeah, she wanted to ride horses. She did. She want, you know, they told me she may have asthma, she may have trouble breathing forever. I'm like, why don't we just let her do things, and when a problem arises, if a problem arises, we'll address the problem. And she really didn't. Still at 32 if you X ray her lungs, it looks like she has pneumonia. She has scar tissue in her lungs. So even though she's grown and her lungs have grown, that scar tissue is always going to be there when she gets a cold, it settles in her chest. There were definitely things we had to be a little bit more aware of, but she had no idea. Being born with this lung disease should have limited her. I even went back to Dartmouth when she turned one, and they did a one year old update, success story type thing. And and even in that paperwork, it's like, you know, the mom should restrict all of these things and have a breathing apparatus in the house and running. I didn't do anything. I didn't treat her any differently than any of my other kids. I wasn't negligent about it. I was just like, if we need something, I'll do it. And if we don't, why am I making myself and everybody crazy and setting limitations on a child that we don't really know she has, and this she's never had limitations at all. She played hockey, she was president of the dance team through high school. She had no limitations at all. And I think some of that is the attitude of stop treating her like it's an emergency all the time. Treat her like there's nothing wrong, and if there's a situation, address the situation, but it's kind of like she isn't her lung disease. It's something that she has. So yeah, it was, I mean, overwhelmingly, it was a really positive situation, although through infertility and that really tough pregnancy and that delivery, I was like, and a divorce, I'm like, check please. I just want to do foster care. So when I met my my husband that I married and had most of my kids with, I told him, and he was a dentist. So I'm like, here are my medical records. I've seen three doctors since the delivery. They all say the same thing. They'd start me in IVF. You need to be comfortable with the fact that I'm not going to do anything to get pregnant, probably not going to get pregnant. Really want to do foster care and make a difference, and you have to be okay with that. Yeah, and he said, I'm okay with it. I got pregnant six more

Paulette  15:34  
times. Oh, my God, so I'm pregnant six more times. Good god, you're making it look easy. Didn't want any

Jennifer  15:41  
interference, including birth control, not for myself. Personally, we could have done vasectomy or condoms, but I was done with my body being disrupted. I had been on birth control for five years, almost. When I got off, it tried to get pregnant, so I wasn't interested in anything, and I also knew I had a high chance of miscarriage. Out of seven pregnancies, I lost three. My seventh one, I lost twins at 16 weeks, which resulted in a DNC and a hysterectomy. So my body never functioned well or correctly. I had very tough pregnancies. Every one of them, I was really sick for about the first half, but I did deliver four babies total. The next three were all home births. We lived in Alaska. The last two were water birds. I ended up biologically like living the story, the ideal story I could have had, right? I I did get pregnant. I did keep three more pregnancies and lose three more pregnancies. I had babies at home with midwives, and that started me in that direction where I wasn't just a breastfeeding counselor anymore. I was working with a midwifery practice in Alaska as an apprentice with the goal of becoming a midwife. So I did seven years off and on of birth work with them, but my goal was foster care. My goal wasn't to get pregnant. I didn't know if I could, and I think that that attitude from that doctor T to infertility, I didn't even realize where I get pregnant and be like, well, let's see, I lose it, and it wasn't as devastating for me that miscarriage, because I think it was almost an expectation. The last one was really hard. The first two were in between my first and second daughter, but they were in the first trimester. They weren't big and bad and awful. I didn't need a DNC, that sort of thing. And then I gave birth three times, and then I lost the final one. But my my goal through that. You know, my kids are really funny. We have 18 kids total, and my kids are great because they're like, mom picked me. She gave birth to you. You were a crap shoot. She didn't know what she was getting. So there's a very different dynamic among my kids in the language that we've used as they've grown up, that I chose the kids that we adopted and took in through foster care specifically. And I said no more than I said, Yes. And the surprises for me people like, Oh, you took on extras in foster care. I'm like, Nah, I gave birth to extras because that wasn't the plan. Yeah. I think a lot of it is mindset. I adopted six kids total, and had two more, one long term and one that aged out a foreign exchange student. And I have five step children now, so it's 18 kids total. Wow. I really think looking at everything as more of a positive situation than negative. I mean, definitely I could have looked at my experience and picked out every negative thing about it, and I chose to pick out every positive thing about it and really show that even in some traumatic, tough situations that served me really well with foster care too, just that attitude. And I adopted a drug baby. I adopted a baby that was six weeks premature that I had to use an NG tube and gram scale and all these skills that I learned with Bree the first round carried into my foster care experience and the type of kids I was really comfortable adopting, because I went through this situation with her with this lung disease. So yeah,

Paulette  19:16  
that that is an amazing story. So like, What's the age range? How old is the oldest and the youngest? Is anyone still at home? I

Jennifer  19:24  
have a 14 year old daughter at home. There's an eight year gap between her and the next one. So there were 17 kids between the ages. Right now they're between the ages of almost 22 and 37 so I actually adopted kids that were older. I adopted two that were older than Bree and one that was the same age. And, you know, they're born like a month apart, so through the experience, yeah, but from 20 almost 22 to 37 There are 17 kids. So we had 10 in high school at the same time. There's never been more than 12 at the house, in the house at one time, but 10 to 12 kids for years and years and years between 10 and 12 kids. So

Paulette  20:07  
My mind is blown. I don't even know how that happens. I don't know how that

Jennifer  20:13  
one at a time. I mean, really one at a time that happens. You know, it's not like one I was like, oh, at 19 or at 15, when he was like, you probably can't have kids. I, I was like, I think 18 is a nice round number, and that's what I should shoot. No, but

Paulette  20:27  
how do you manage that many kids at one time? How does that happen? You're you're not a parent. You're a super parent. I

Jennifer  20:34  
really think you get used to it kind of one at a time, because the situations arise and you decide whether or not to take it, and I think it's it's good that I have more logical, visual, organized type of thinking, instead of the warm, fuzzy, intuitive, my house would have been trashed. I still loved hugging and loving. I breastfed the three adopted babies that were the three that I adopted at birth. I breastfed them. I i i just think you kind of take the situation one at a time, and you know, I wasn't divorced a second time. So again, here's my creating my story that's screwing up my kids. I was divorced again, and I had eight kids at home at the time. We had had 10 together, and eight were at home when I divorced and I had full custody, and I had been a stay at home mom for most of that, I supported my ex husband in his dental business practice, but I had full custody and I kept doing foster care. I took on four more kids. It was a sibling group as a single mom. So when I met my husband that I've been with for 10 and a half years. Brianna, my 32 year old, 11 years ago, actually fixed me up with him. She said your picker is broken. And this friend of ours, this mutual friend of ours, we all worked together in the same office at the time, Lacey and I are going to fix you up on dates, and we're going to vet them, and if they're good enough to get past us, then you can go out on a date. It was actually very fun. And Dane's one of the people that I went on a date with, and he had, he had kids, and his wife had died. So I just think you take each situation and each child as it comes, and then I got to grow into being able to handle that. I also I chose this life, and I loved it, and when I when my life wasn't something that I loved, I had to decide to make a different choice. And, you know, in situations that sometimes meant divorce and doing it by myself, in in some situations, it was saying no to kids that might have been a good fit. So I think you have to set boundaries on yourself. Of you know, I chose my life and I loved it. When I didn't love it, I made a different choice. And what does that look like? I really loved it, though I really loved it. So I'm

Paulette  22:50  
not a religious person at all, but this feels like a calling. That's like how I would describe it.

Jennifer  22:56  
I am a Christian, and it definitely I think that was a huge crutch and support to me differently at different times, in different ways. But for sure, it's one of those things you're like, Well, yes, you have a calling to be able to do this now again, what I have, I have 33 years from that infertility appointment of retrospect, and you know, it's always if you could go back and tell your younger self, I don't think I would have changed many decisions, but I would have left myself notes. Yeah, I and I know specifically where I would go back to to start the notes, and I would have left myself notes that what that told me, like, Hey, this is coming, and this is a better way you could handle this situation, this it wouldn't have changed the divorce. It wouldn't have changed. It wouldn't have changed a lot of things, but it would have, I would have navigated them a little better, which is interesting to have that much retrospect. And it's not like, oh, there's all these things I would do differently. That's actually not the case, but I would have definitely given myself some guidance from hindsight, yeah, where I could have navigated better, for sure. And I think it would have been better for my kids if I had, you know, you just don't know what you don't know, and 100% Yeah, and that makes things challenging,

Paulette  24:20  
and your kids teach you a lot, both about the roles in yourself, so you have to learn from them.

Jennifer  24:29  
Yes, and I mean, I would have kept all of that. I wouldn't have done it. And that's a crazy thing. People are like, I would have gone back to 19 and taken the basketball scholarship. Right now, that's not actually where I would have gone, I would have still done the same exact thing all the way up. It would have just been me having the ability to navigate things better, but I wouldn't have changed anything. So that's a good thing that I feel that way. I don't feel like I screwed things up so badly, even with all of that, but that's a that's a thing that we don't get as parents, is the ability to take that time out, to figure out how we should best handle a situation we're presented with it and we have to react and respond often in that moment more urgently. Yeah, whether it's discipline or drug use, or whatever it is, and our reactions aren't always great, yeah, yeah, right, so, yeah, yeah, but it's been a fun ride.

Paulette  25:30  
It's amazing. It's an amazing story. I'm so grateful that you shared it with us, having people find you both your podcast and your doula work.

Jennifer  25:39  
Doula in reno.com is the website that's where everything is. My cell number's on there, my emails on there, a way to contact me, setting up a consult. The podcast has its own tab. So basically, you just go to doula in reno.com and you can find anything you ever wanted to know.

Paulette  25:57  
Awesome, great. Well, thank you so much for sharing your story. I really appreciate it. Thank you, Paulette, I appreciate Jennifer sharing her amazing story with us, from fertility to giving birth to a handful of children after that first one and fostering many, many more. Hers is an incredible story of overcoming, overcoming the challenges in her circumstance as they present overcoming the challenges in her circumstance as they presented themselves, and one of mindset. She experienced both beautiful and really difficult things, and she managed the difficulties and focused her attention and her energy on the beautiful things, trying to become a professional who helps people the way she was so tenderly helped during that first scary experience of pregnancy and birth. Thanks for listening. If you liked this episode, please share it with friends. We'll be back next week with another inspiring story, and coming in November, I'm launching a new show called Making Sense of pregnancy, in which I find and interview researchers doing cutting edge research, with the goal of changing pregnancy in the future.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai