Posted by My OB said WHAT?!?.
Nov
21
Posted by My OB said WHAT?!?.
“You Probably Just Have A Dysfunctional Uterus.”
“You probably just have a dysfunctional uterus.” – Midwife to mother during labor, when the External Contraction Monitor was not picking up the contractions effectively.
There are 23 comments to this post.
first time mommy had this to say,
Nov 21, 2011 @ 10:23 am (Quote)
and you have a dysfunctional mouth.
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I teach at the college level and we use this really non-user friendly online program to post homework and other junk. This is like, if my students emailed me and complained that they couldn’t get it to work properly, and I replied, “Well, you must be stupid.”
Technology isn’t all it’s cracked up to be about 1/2 the time. The more labor saving (this might turn out to be a pun) devices you have, the longer things take.
So, Ms. Midwife, why don’t you just do an occasional check with the Doppler and leave Mom alone?
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I am the OP. The “medwife” who made this comment to me stripped my membranes at my 38 week appointment after failing to recognize that the things I was complaining of (extreme bladder pressure, limbs moving in the front/center of my stomach, hiccups in my butt, etc.) were all classic signs of an OP baby. At the time I didn’t know to educate myself about fetal positioning or the dangers of membrane stripping, especially at 38 weeks in a completely normal pregnancy. The next day, my membranes ruptured with no contractions. I believe that the stripping weakened my membranes. DS’s head was asynclitic in addition to being posterior, and couldnt easily rotate after my water broke. So, into the hospital for the classic cascade of interventions, you fill in the blanks. By the time she said this to me, I had been laboring on my back for 12 hours, strapped to the bed because they couldn’t get my pit-induced contractions to register on the monitors. The monitor would only show a weak peak with every contraction although I was in wrenching pain. Also for some reason my fundus wasn’t getting fully hard with each contraction which was further proof to her that my uterus wasn’t working properly. She never did figure out that he was posterior; the OB told me that when he was finally born by c-section after 24 hours of labor.
Fast forward 3 years, and I had a wonderful unmedicated hospital VBAC with birth center midwives (they have to deliver first time VBACs in the hospital, a different hospital for last time). They helped me make sure my baby was OA and I went into natural labor at 41+2. Active labor was only 10 hours start to finish, so clearly my uterus is perfectly functional after all. And guess what? My fundus still didn’t get hard, and the contraction monitor still didn’t work! Something about my body just doesn’t agree with contraction monitors. They ran a strip now and then to satisfy the backup OB, who never even entered my room. Luckily my midwives this time had the good sense to just ignore it completely and let my body work the way it was supposed to.
Moral of the story, get some good midwives, a great doula, and let your body do its thing.
NAK, sorry for typos.
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damn, monitor never worked for me either, but i managed to deliver just fine… #1 i think because the OB didnt feel like doing surgery so he was just going to make me lay there on my back until dinnerr before he did anything…. luckily my body was NOT dysfunctional and managed to get her out just fine.
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Lisa had this to say,
Nov 21, 2011 @ 11:13 am (Quote)
OP if you had had a good midwife the first time around, you probably wouldn’t have needed all those interventions. I home birthed a posterior, acynclitic baby with no problems. We had no clue he was going to be like that until he started crowning (this explained the back labor though). Good for you for getting a better birthing team the second time around.
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Stelvis Reply:
November 21st, 2011 at 11:22 am (Quote)
I agree, although he had been OP, I think, for months. Plenty of time to figure out his position and work on stuff to turn him, if only someone had told me.
I had back labor with my VBAC as well even though baby was OA. The midwives theorize that my uterus is tilted and perhaps unusually shaped, and so the focal point of my contractions is in the rear. My fundal placenta was oddly shaped as well, sort of pear-ish.
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Mama Wrench Reply:
November 21st, 2011 at 4:27 pm (Quote)
My baby was LOA, and my uterus was tilted, and I had back labor the whole time… but the monitor worked fine for me. I never actually felt my uterus harden from just feeling my belly (and I have zero abdominal fat to speak of — no extra padding). I guess “atypical” = dysfunctional? 
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sara r. had this to say,
Nov 21, 2011 @ 12:51 pm (Quote)
I was at a doula birth where the mom was told that the baby wasn’t descending because “her uterus was really tired”. I asked if maybe the baby’s position had anything to do with it (another OP baby) and the nurse gave me the dagger stare.
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I was in good labour for 6 hours start to finish. They spent 3 of those hours flipping me this way and that on the bed trying to catch my wriggly baby’s heartbeat for more than a few seconds at a time!
It’s not as bad as it sounds, I was induced with a premmie due to cholestasis, I was just lucky to not have an automatic c-section. I couldn’t have gotten off the bed because the contractions went from 0-100 when the water broke and without a birth center midwife (i risked out when I had to be induced) I wouldn’t have done much moving on my own anyway, plus it involved concerntrating on the outside world and I had drawn myself inside so deeply I barely remember what happened outside of myself until she began to crown (and kept popping back inside >_< and yet by the grace of God no one went and got a vaccum! However she sat, crowning, for like 20 minutes, and I experienced the ring of fire like 3 or 4 times! Oh she will never live it down when she's old enough for me to tell lol)
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Gemma had this to say,
Nov 21, 2011 @ 2:19 pm (Quote)
On my iPhone but Abba12 PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE don’t feed back a horror story to your daughter. Focus on the positives!!! One of the major issues we have as a society now is that as soon as you have that positive test the world thinks they can give you their own horror story.
These horror stories are undermining all women and their confidence in their own ability to birth baby’s.
Sorry, but my mother told me constantly how I’d ‘torn her in half’ and that ‘I was never the same again’ and it took me 3 births to finally believe in myself.
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Jade Reply:
November 21st, 2011 at 4:01 pm (Quote)
And along the same lines but ooposite, I am the oldest of 5 kids and i was never ever told anything bad. My mum homebirthed us, I saw it as normal, I saw it as part of “everyday” family life. I trusted in my body innately, it didn’t matter to me what horror stories other people told me, because I “knew” birth worked. When my first birth didn’t work out how it should (“good” hospital birth) I didn’t blame my body, I blamed the management, which, if there was blame to be laid, was the correct place to be laying it.
As I got older, and pregnant, we talked more about it, she didn’t sugar coat it, she didn’t tell me anything horrid either, she told it like it was, it hurts, it is hard work, usually everything is fine, trust yourself, you can do it. Her confidence in her body to birth babies, gave me mine.
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abba12 Reply:
November 21st, 2011 at 6:50 pm (Quote)
And on the other flipside my mother in law had ‘perfect’ babies, all 8 of them, perfect pregnancies and perfect births, perfect infancies and I expect I will soon hear about their perfect childhoods. She made me feel like my body was broken because I had dificulties in pregnancy and labour. Any issue I had was disregarded, she even told me cravings were a myth (for me, they’re most certainly not) and is upset that I wasn’t back to my prepregnancy weight within a few months like she was. Each. And. Every. Time. (I had hyperemesis, my metabolism is shot, I may never be back to my original weight again)
I know my mother in law is lying in many ways, she has her own issues to face, but nontheless it made me feel broken.
I certainly don’t intend to scare her, there are positives too, it was an amazing experience, and the way I felt as a woman, my instincts, were overwhelming. But I don’t want her to think her body is broken when she feels sick or sore or tired, or when the birth isn’t magical and perfect. I don’t want her to feel like she isn’t supposed to have babies if something goes wrong. I feel that way because of my MIL. I want to be real with her. I don’t want her to feel like a failure. The negatives are normal too. But they’re just as normal as the positives, which need to be spoken about just as much if not more.
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Jade Reply:
November 21st, 2011 at 7:31 pm (Quote)
yeah, that’s not good either. When I say, I wasn’t told anything bad, i mean over the top bad. my mum vomited all day every day throughout 1 of her pregnancies, she didn’t go back to pre preg weight, she needed to transfer to hospital with 1 birth. She did not have perfect pregnancies/labours or children, she had NORMAL pregnancies, births and children.
And I hear you on the HG killing your metabolism, pre babies I was 100lbs, didn’t amtter what I ate or how long I sat on my ass, I weighed 100lbs. Now I just look at food and gain weight, and if I don’t exercise all day every day I don’t lose any. needless to say, I weigh more than 100 now…much more…miore like 165
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Jessicakc Reply:
November 22nd, 2011 at 5:42 am (Quote)
We have to share the good and the bad, because we have to be ready to protect ourselves. I do agree however to accentuate the positive and be careful how we relay the negative.
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Chelsea Reply:
November 22nd, 2011 at 6:38 pm (Quote)
I don’t see how some good natured ribbing in the teenage years about “Sure you may not want your friends at school to see me drive you there but when you were being born…you didn’t want to leave my uterus! Crowned 3 times! You know you love me.”
My mom never told me anything about any of her pregnancies except that they were “natural” (not sure if she’s referring to no meds or just vaginal birth) and that she wasn’t offered any ultrasounds until my sister but still wasn’t able to find out gender.
She did once say that I had a traumatic birth and that’s probably why I was drawn to homebirth.
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This just proves to me that their are bad and good midwives and doctors. You need to find a good one that’s all. No more only in hospital births and only midwife birth arguments because it looks like either way you go you could easily get a crappy one.
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Because it’s never the equipment that isn’t working properly.
What a joke.
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