shoulder dystocia. baby born blue. feeling scared. anyone been here?

[happybutscared]

Have namechanged for this as have never posted about anything quite so personal or scary before...

DS2 born on Friday. Induced at 40+10 due to high BP.

He got stuck, and was eventually delivered with the help of second midwife and team of doctors. But he was blue on birth.

The doctor at the time said not to worry. His heartrate had been monitired throughout the birth, and had been good. He needed oxygen, but his colour returned quickly (something about 6? "somethings" needed to re-start respiration). This reassured me, and I didn't think about it afterwards.

But DH has just said he is worried. DH isn't someone that worries about stuff. Isn't dramatic. But he says that he doesn't know how long it was between the head being delivered and the body being delivered (and consequent resuscitation)... and this is what matters.

I remember feeling the head was out. I remember being told to reeeeally push. I remember another midwife being there and maybe one more push. Then a shout of "shoulder"... doctors everywhere... DS born.... taken away and resuscitated.

I'm sure it was really quick. But now I'm in a bit of a dark place. How likely is he to have suffered brain damage? I know it's an unanswerable question, really. But I'm just in shock here.

Dunno what I'm asking really. Reassurance? Knowledge? Experience? Anyone?...

Shoulder dystocia with dc2. There was a delay of 6 minutes between the birth of his head and his body. He was very pale and needed resuscitation at birth, which was done with room air (he was bagged and masked). Most resuscitation in these circumstances is done with room air I think. He was absolutely fine and healthy afterwards.

Feeling for you - S/D can be very shocking. Would it help you to debrief the birth with a midwife do you think?

Hi there this exact same thing happened with ds1 who is now a happy healthy 6y old. He was stuck head out body in for 4 minutes, came out dark, dark navy blue with an apgar score of 1. They had to resusitate him which took 8 minutes. However his agar score came up pretty quickly after that and they said his oxygen saturation levels were good and came back up pretty well, this is the big indicator for brain damage apparently. They wanted to send him to special care as a precaution but it was full so he was in an incubator on the post natal ward for 5 days, had severe jaundice and wouldn't feed, it was a nightmare but, as I say, once we got him home was healthy happy baby from then on. Make sure they do all the tests and checkups but otherwise try not to worry too much! Our son was pretty much born dead but it all turned out fine thankfully. From reading up on shoulder dystocias for next birth ( which was fine am on third now ) it seems that because they turn into emergencies quite late on you get the cord compression and oxygen constriction near the end of the birth and as long as everything has been ok up til now although the babies go into severe shock it doesn't last long and they can recover quickly.

Apgar sorry! Just read the rest of the thread and that makes anese about the scores, ds1s were 1 1 5 9 so came up fairly quickly. His cord ph was lower but they seemed to think it was ok and used it as the decision not to push for a place in special care so it sounds like your little one recovered very quickly.

Worst thing long term for us was not for him but that in every subsequent pregnancy they class me as high risk and hassle me to have CSs etc