I have been blogging at total health empowerment since 2013 a bit sporadically but tried to post every month. I talked about our story to get pregnancy through IVF with our little girl Jessica. Well we finally had her! She is precious, beautiful and a handful. I had a baby when I was 20 years old a boy named Zack and he was a very easy baby, easy going, easy to be with, laid back, social and pleasant, I could go on he has many amazing qualities. Jessica has been bit more challenging. From what I am told she is more the norm than my son was. I have had issues breastfeeding I didn’t have before, I did breastfeed Zack for 4 months and then didn’t make enough milk for him and had to feed him formula. I have had painful breastfeeding also. I’ll talk about these things in another blog later.

I wanted to share the story of how Jessica was born. If you have been following this blog or know the story or want to read the story you can download the ebook The Emotional Reset Diet that has our story of IVF at the beginning here (you will get weekly or biweekly emails here from me documenting our journey to raise Jessica which I sense will be quite eventful as it has been already just with IVF, pregnancy, and birth).

Jessica Hope Taffinder was born April 19, 2016 at 4:21 AM at Providence Little company of Mary Hospital. My husband Doug and I attended Bradley Birthing classes. They teach how to have a healthy pregnancy using The Brewer’s Diet, and teach many helpful physical exercises intended to help you be able to attain a natural childbirth. I experienced that kind of birth with my son and had an ideal birth at a Birthing Center, with no medical intervention pain relief or medical problems. Mind you I was twenty years old. Well I really wanted to do this again. I have been told that when you have your first baby fast usually the second one is a shorter birth. Well there are 24 years difference between my first and second baby so many people also said that having a baby with that many years difference is like having one for the first time again.

Because we needed to use IVF to get pregnant because of infertility issues on both sides, I figured that I would need help to get her out since we needed help getting her in.

At the beginning of our planning I was planning to have the baby at the hospital just birth at home as long as possible. Our Bradley teacher encouraged us to have a home birth since I had my son so quickly. She thought I might risk having the baby at home with the paramedics which she had seen happen before or have the baby in the car. I did want a natural childbirth so about halfway through the pregnancy we started planning for that. We interviewed 3 midwives and went with the one who had the most medical education, she had been a nurse in several medical settings and was actually a nurse practitioner which I found out later. I liked that she thought holistically but was always ready to have medical intervention when needed.

My lung collapsed in my sixth month of pregnancy and I was having tremendous trouble breathing pretty much for the rest of the pregnancy and she encouraged me not to be afraid of the medications of which I was trying very hard to use the least amount. She said use them when necessary. That was very helpful advice because Jessica reacted as badly as I did to the medications. The breathing medication would make my heart race and hands d shake. Jessica would move furiously. I knew she was having a similar reaction inside the womb. I felt so bad for her. I wanted to do the whole thing natural with no medications. So much for that.

I went into labor at 2AM with a contraction about every 15 minutes. I didn’t want to wake my husband so I used a heating pad for the pain until around 5am they started getting worse and I got into the bath tub. My husband didn’t even realize I was in labor until 6 am when the contractions were about 3-5 minutes apart. Looking back it seemed as if they were manageable at that point. I could breathe through them for the most part. They did get more and more intense and I was able to get into the bath tub set up in the kitchen. That seemed to help but about 11 am the contractions became excruciating painful. By 12 pm I was almost completely dilated at 9.5 cm. The nurse midwife told me to put my finger inside and try to feel the baby’s head. I could not feel the head at all. I was taking small sips of coconut water all day and felt like I had to pee but couldn’t. The nurse told me it would be better if I felt like I had to poo because that is the better position for the baby. Everyone kept telling me the baby was going to be here any minute. I started talking about the hospital a lot at this point and everyone said that if I left to go to the hospital that I would have the baby in the car. I kept pushing through the contractions that felt like pushing contractions. I was yelling out in pain more loudly than I liked at all. I did not yell at all with my son. The doula kept telling me to hold my breath and with all the breathing problems I had had through the pregnancy I didn’t feel like I could. At about 2pm my water broke and there was a good amount of meconium in it. I said isn’t that usually a reason to transfer to the hospital because the baby was in distress. I had seen home births where that had happened but they were convinced the baby would be there any minute. I kept pushing until 4:15 pm when I insisted on going to the hospital. I was exhausted and mostly in a tremendous amount of pain that was not getting any better with the progression of the baby coming. I could not feel her coming in spite of that fact that everyone said she was. I also did not experience that natural high that I did with my son, where because of natural endorphins that are excreted around the time of transition did not seem to come. I was 44 years old and hormones on many levels had been lowered, not just my estrogen and progesterone but I had been having trouble with my thyroid and adrenal glands for several years before even trying to get pregnant. I did a lot of work on my health before even starting the IVF process and even more during the 18 months it took to get pregnant. So I had thought that it would be the hormones where my body would have the most trouble in childbirth, I was right.

During the last month of pregnancy I started having flashes of a picture of me having to use Pitocin and then a C-section. Every time I would start to see that picture my husband and I would pray for it to go away. I had been concurrently seeing an OB during my entire pregnancy because I wanted a backup plan in case the home birth thing didn’t work out. I was so grateful I had been doing that. The OB was amazing, she was a holistic minded OB and had a low C-section rate so she tried everything before doing a C-section at 4 in the morning. I got the hospital around 5pm. After they had to do an entire bag of fluids in an IV drip they finally gave me an epidural around 7pm. I was extremely dehydrated and still in tons of pain. They started the Pitocin around 7pm. The pastor from our old church who was best man in our wedding came to see my husband during the labor to bring him some coffee. We hadn’t seen him in years. Since I was finally not in so much pain I asked him about his daughter’s birth and he said that his wife’s contractions were off the charts. Even though she had an epidural she was still able to have the baby naturally. My contractions would go to 30, 50 and sometimes up to 100 on the monitor and that was with the help of Pitocin. The contractions were not doing their job. My OB said I was having dysfunctional labor. The pain I was experiencing and the regularity of the contractions should have produced a baby a long time before this. I was at 10 cm for several hours and my OB let me push for 2 more hours and was all set with the vacuum to take Jessica out with the vaginal vacuum. I couldn’t even get her out that way.

I share all this because first I want to document this for my daughter and also because I was searching online for some help to get Jessica to sleep better. She was having a terrible time when we first got home from the hospital which is already getting better and she is only 6 weeks. It’s just a little more predictable, she is not sleeping through the night or anything. Kristen Burgess from www.naturalbirthandbabycare.com was talking about home birth to hospital and how just because some births end up needing to transfer to the hospital doesn’t mean they don’t work and I couldn’t agree more. I am so grateful I did everything I could to go natural. I am grateful my OB let me labor and push more at the hospital. I am grateful my OB wasn’t mad at us for not telling her we were even planning a home birth. I usually have trust issues with allopathic medical doctors and many doctors in general because my body does not seem to do things by the book and the way they think things should go so I don’t share too much with them. I keep many doctors on my health team because I am able to figure things out for myself utilizing many practitioners for many different things. I find I am usually better off working on my health with natural minded or functional medicine doctors who think a little more outside the box. I have many unusual things happen to me a lot with my health. In spite of all that my OB was amazing and understanding.

I know it was hard on my husband to take the time off from work, he took 6 weeks off to help me recover from surgery and acclimate to having a baby again. He was amazing too. He even got to clean out the garage which was desperately needing that for several years. Every difficult situation always has a silver lining at least that I what I believe and have found to be true in my own life.

I’ll be sharing more about our journey at this blog and posting short vlogs in email. I’d love to hear your pregnancy story especially if it was challenging and what you learned from that and how it all worked out.

Love Joan

Empowering you to take back your health

I have been blogging at total health empowerment since 2013 a bit sporadically but tried to post every month. I talked about our story to get pregnancy through IVF with our little girl Jessica. Well we finally had her! She is precious, beautiful and a handful. I had a baby when I was 20 years old a boy named Zack and he was a very easy baby, easy going, easy to be with, laid back, social and pleasant, I could go on he has many amazing qualities. Jessica has been bit more challenging. From what I am told she is more the norm than my son was. I have had issues breastfeeding I didn’t have before, I did breastfeed Zack for 4 months and then didn’t make enough milk for him and had to feed him formula. I have had painful breastfeeding also. I’ll talk about these things in another blog later.

I wanted to share the story of how Jessica was born. If you have been following this blog or know the story or want to read the story you can download the ebook The Emotional Reset Diet that has our story of IVF at the beginning here (you will get weekly or biweekly emails here from me documenting our journey to raise Jessica which I sense will be quite eventful as it has been already just with IVF, pregnancy, and birth).

Jessica Hope Taffinder was born April 19, 2016 at 4:21 AM at Providence Little company of Mary Hospital. My husband Doug and I attended Bradley Birthing classes. They teach how to have a healthy pregnancy using The Brewer’s Diet, and teach many helpful physical exercises intended to help you be able to attain a natural childbirth. I experienced that kind of birth with my son and had an ideal birth at a Birthing Center, with no medical intervention pain relief or medical problems. Mind you I was twenty years old. Well I really wanted to do this again. I have been told that when you have your first baby fast usually the second one is a shorter birth. Well there are 24 years difference between my first and second baby so many people also said that having a baby with that many years difference is like having one for the first time again.

Because we needed to use IVF to get pregnant because of infertility issues on both sides, I figured that I would need help to get her out since we needed help getting her in.

At the beginning of our planning I was planning to have the baby at the hospital just birth at home as long as possible. Our Bradley teacher encouraged us to have a home birth since I had my son so quickly. She thought I might risk having the baby at home with the paramedics which she had seen happen before or have the baby in the car. I did want a natural childbirth so about halfway through the pregnancy we started planning for that. We interviewed 3 midwives and went with the one who had the most medical education, she had been a nurse in several medical settings and was actually a nurse practitioner which I found out later. I liked that she thought holistically but was always ready to have medical intervention when needed.

My lung collapsed in my sixth month of pregnancy and I was having tremendous trouble breathing pretty much for the rest of the pregnancy and she encouraged me not to be afraid of the medications of which I was trying very hard to use the least amount. She said use them when necessary. That was very helpful advice because Jessica reacted as badly as I did to the medications. The breathing medication would make my heart race and hands d shake. Jessica would move furiously. I knew she was having a similar reaction inside the womb. I felt so bad for her. I wanted to do the whole thing natural with no medications. So much for that.

I went into labor at 2AM with a contraction about every 15 minutes. I didn’t want to wake my husband so I used a heating pad for the pain until around 5am they started getting worse and I got into the bath tub. My husband didn’t even realize I was in labor until 6 am when the contractions were about 3-5 minutes apart. Looking back it seemed as if they were manageable at that point. I could breathe through them for the most part. They did get more and more intense and I was able to get into the bath tub set up in the kitchen. That seemed to help but about 11 am the contractions became excruciating painful. By 12 pm I was almost completely dilated at 9.5 cm. The nurse midwife told me to put my finger inside and try to feel the baby’s head. I could not feel the head at all. I was taking small sips of coconut water all day and felt like I had to pee but couldn’t. The nurse told me it would be better if I felt like I had to poo because that is the better position for the baby. Everyone kept telling me the baby was going to be here any minute. I started talking about the hospital a lot at this point and everyone said that if I left to go to the hospital that I would have the baby in the car. I kept pushing through the contractions that felt like pushing contractions. I was yelling out in pain more loudly than I liked at all. I did not yell at all with my son. The doula kept telling me to hold my breath and with all the breathing problems I had had through the pregnancy I didn’t feel like I could. At about 2pm my water broke and there was a good amount of meconium in it. I said isn’t that usually a reason to transfer to the hospital because the baby was in distress. I had seen home births where that had happened but they were convinced the baby would be there any minute. I kept pushing until 4:15 pm when I insisted on going to the hospital. I was exhausted and mostly in a tremendous amount of pain that was not getting any better with the progression of the baby coming. I could not feel her coming in spite of that fact that everyone said she was. I also did not experience that natural high that I did with my son, where because of natural endorphins that are excreted around the time of transition did not seem to come. I was 44 years old and hormones on many levels had been lowered, not just my estrogen and progesterone but I had been having trouble with my thyroid and adrenal glands for several years before even trying to get pregnant. I did a lot of work on my health before even starting the IVF process and even more during the 18 months it took to get pregnant. So I had thought that it would be the hormones where my body would have the most trouble in childbirth, I was right.

During the last month of pregnancy I started having flashes of a picture of me having to use Pitocin and then a C-section. Every time I would start to see that picture my husband and I would pray for it to go away. I had been concurrently seeing an OB during my entire pregnancy because I wanted a backup plan in case the home birth thing didn’t work out. I was so grateful I had been doing that. The OB was amazing, she was a holistic minded OB and had a low C-section rate so she tried everything before doing a C-section at 4 in the morning. I got the hospital around 5pm. After they had to do an entire bag of fluids in an IV drip they finally gave me an epidural around 7pm. I was extremely dehydrated and still in tons of pain. They started the Pitocin around 7pm. The pastor from our old church who was best man in our wedding came to see my husband during the labor to bring him some coffee. We hadn’t seen him in years. Since I was finally not in so much pain I asked him about his daughter’s birth and he said that his wife’s contractions were off the charts. Even though she had an epidural she was still able to have the baby naturally. My contractions would go to 30, 50 and sometimes up to 100 on the monitor and that was with the help of Pitocin. The contractions were not doing their job. My OB said I was having dysfunctional labor. The pain I was experiencing and the regularity of the contractions should have produced a baby a long time before this. I was at 10 cm for several hours and my OB let me push for 2 more hours and was all set with the vacuum to take Jessica out with the vaginal vacuum. I couldn’t even get her out that way.

I share all this because first I want to document this for my daughter and also because I was searching online for some help to get Jessica to sleep better. She was having a terrible time when we first got home from the hospital which is already getting better and she is only 6 weeks. It’s just a little more predictable, she is not sleeping through the night or anything. Kristen Burgess from www.naturalbirthandbabycare.com was talking about home birth to hospital and how just because some births end up needing to transfer to the hospital doesn’t mean they don’t work and I couldn’t agree more. I am so grateful I did everything I could to go natural. I am grateful my OB let me labor and push more at the hospital. I am grateful my OB wasn’t mad at us for not telling her we were even planning a home birth. I usually have trust issues with allopathic medical doctors and many doctors in general because my body does not seem to do things by the book and the way they think things should go so I don’t share too much with them. I keep many doctors on my health team because I am able to figure things out for myself utilizing many practitioners for many different things. I find I am usually better off working on my health with natural minded or functional medicine doctors who think a little more outside the box. I have many unusual things happen to me a lot with my health. In spite of all that my OB was amazing and understanding.

I know it was hard on my husband to take the time off from work, he took 6 weeks off to help me recover from surgery and acclimate to having a baby again. He was amazing too. He even got to clean out the garage which was desperately needing that for several years. Every difficult situation always has a silver lining at least that I what I believe and have found to be true in my own life.

I’ll be sharing more about our journey at this blog and posting short vlogs in email. I’d love to hear your pregnancy story especially if it was challenging and what you learned from that and how it all worked out.

Love Joan

Empowering you to take back your health