Birth Stories and Labor Advice from a Nurse: The Importance of Listening to Your Body

because I’m so freaking tired of all the comments is that baby okay is she okay forget the gender reveal is she okay she’s fine she’s 6 months old today she’s rolling around on the floor right now she’s perfectly healthy the reason why she was blue purple was because I had to push and my nurse was not letting me push I wasn’t at 10 cm yet so she was like no no no you’re not at 10 and my water hasn’t broken yet I’m like I don’t care the baby is coming out now get my doctor in here immediately so then they called my doctor and the second my doctor sat down gloved up face masked up pushed her out one push one push but then she was purple cause she couldn’t breathe because I was holding her in for like maybe five minutes and she was ready to breathe in oxygen so just listen to your body if you’re gonna give birth don’t listen to your nurses if it’s a push hi I’m Jen I’m a labor and delivery nurse and let’s talk about that so when we are about to push there’s a couple different things that can happen one of those things is called involuntary pushing okay that happens when it don’t matter if the pope says don’t push it’s happening cause you can’t stop it at all another thing that can happen is something called the urge to push okay I want you to think about you’re driving down the road and you feel like you gotta take a dump okay it’s coming it’s there but you know what you do and you you know it’s not time yet so you can kind of breathe through it some people never get the urge to push and that’s okay too sometimes our bodies get the urge to push when we are not completely dilated now I don’t know the context I don’t know how dilated she was before but if I have somebody who’s having the urge to push and they’re like 4cm you know what I tell him to do I say hey I know that you’re feeling like you got to but if we lean into that we could cause trouble it can cause your cervix to swell it can cause your cervix to tear so I know that you feel like you want to push but I want you to breathe through that it’s gonna feel like you’re missing the exit on the highway you wanna go that way but it’s gonna feel wrong but we’re gonna go straight and just like feeling like you need to take a dump while you’re driving down 220 you gonna breathe it on through until you get to the toilet which is 10 cm cause if we take that exit we’re gonna miss our destination you know what I’m saying and I don’t do that out of meanness I do that cause I care you know what I’m saying cause I don’t want you to be in that situation now if I have somebody who’s had babies before and they’re like 9 cm girl do what you gotta do you know what I’m saying but if they’d never had a baby before and they’re nine or eight or seven or six or something like that I I encourage them to breathe on through it till you get to the toilet you know so if she was able to hold that together until her doctor arrived it it makes me think that it may have been that really strong urge to push and her nurse was just trying to get her not to tear or swell her cervix not out of meanness now she goes into the explanation on why her baby was purple okay and she says that her baby was purple because she was forced to hold in her baby for five minutes and her baby was not getting oxygen because her baby was wanting to breathe air no no no no that is not how that works so when your baby is on the inside they are hooked up to an umbilical cord which is kinda like having a scuba tank underwater and as long as it is hooked up to the placenta on the inside and there’s not anything wrong with the cord or the placenta your baby is still getting oxygen even if you’re not pushing it so what causes our babies to want to breathe air on the outside is when their face hits air the trigeminal nerve in the face hits air it tells their body that they need to switch their circulation from indoor cat circulation to outdoor cat circulation so unless your baby’s whole head was out and the body was not delivered for five minutes your baby is not wanting to breathe air on the outside till it is till that happens now what can cause a baby to come out looking what we call stunned like that where the baby is very purple and not moving very much is a fast delivery when we’re pushing for a while and that baby has time to come down the turnpike they get squeezed through that area over time and what that squeeze does is it helps the fluid in their lungs to be expelled before they go try to take that big deep breath of air now if a baby come shooting out like a rocket real quick like they don’t have time for that to happen and so sometimes these babies have a lot of fluid still in their lungs so they don’t have enough room for that oxygen exchange whenever they go to take a breath which can cause a stunned baby where it looks like they’re not wanting to participate in life yet it doesn’t mean that anything is wrong or that you know there’s gonna be lifelong effects to this sometimes we need to suction their lungs sometimes they just need to be stimulated to cry it out and that’s okay I just did not want people thinking that if you have the urge to push that your baby is not getting oxygen because I could see people being very scared if they have that feeling at 4 cm and their nurses telling you hey don’t push that the baby is not gonna have oxygen anymore not the case congratulations on your baby I’m so glad that she is a healthy 6 month old baby now