What’s assisted delivery actually like?

[Blahblahgingerbreadlady]

Can you feel forceps - do they give you pain relief? This is my biggest fear.

I had foreceps delivery 3 weeks ago and I’m pretty much recovered already. Luckily I have a really supportive partner who helped me by forcing me to be on pretty much bed rest for the first week.
i’d written in my birth plan that the only thing I didn’t want was foreceps - after an hour and half of pushing and baby not moving, I would have tried anything to deliver him safely.
it was a few pushes and foreceps then straight for emergency c section. He came out on the second push.
had a tear and episiotomy - pain from stitches was stinging but nothing I couldn’t manage with paracetamol and ibuprofen.
honestly it’s not as bad as you build it up in your head to be!

Sorry - straight for emergency c section if he wasn’t going to come out.

I had already had an epidural so to do forceps they just topped it up. It wasn't painful.

I didn't like the midwife I had at the pushing stage with my first child, she kept saying my pushing was ineffective, and kept telling me to lay on my back to push. I felt more comfortable on all fours and she kept insisting I laid on my back, but she said that she could see my pushing was most effective in that position. And tbf that was after she had helped me try a number of different positions. So she was probably right even if it wasn't most comfortable for me and that I didn't feel she was very empathetic.But I had a great student midwife there tho.

Second birth, midwife and student midwife were both fantastic and very encouraging to try lots of different positions again and didn't try to encourage me in to any particular position just suggested some. I think my favourite then was upright like leaning against the upright headrest part of the bed with my bum in the air!! But again after hours baby wouldn't budge. DC2 was a lot bigger than DC1 but not 'large for gestational age' by any means and DC1 was quite petite. Consultant couldn't identify any particular cause for neither of them coming out! I just worry it's to do with me and I just can't push effectively for whatever reason?! Which if so I should really have an elective for any future ones. But how would I know that? I had really strong pushing urges in both labours from awhile before I was fully dilated too.

I had an emcs for my first as labour hadn’t progressed. I had an episiotomy only for my second. It was a relief and I wish they’d done it half an hour earlier. The local anaesthetic worked and I didn’t feel anything.
it did feel wierd and painful when it was healing but no worse than the cs first time round. I didn’t want forceps though and thankfully didn’t need them

But what you’re forgetting is that these women will be very low risk and healthy to start with. Home birth isn’t encouraged for women who are high risk, older, very overweight and so on. So they’re less likely to need intervention anyway. It’s the same for second babies - women who have had a smooth first delivery are more likely to choose homebirth, and having had a smooth first delivery means a second is very likely.

You don't notice it at the time.

Recovery wise, my friend had a section the same day as I had forceps.

I was better than her for 48 hours then she overtook me and was back yo normal far sooner than me.

It really doesn't matter what happens. If baby needs to be out, they get it out.

I know your trying to be helpful but honestly - your last line. I hate that attitude and how normalised it is. It does actually matter. And birth trauma is very real and makes up a significant part of the population who clearly don’t matter, because they’re women.

Mine was planned to be a home birth. We’re less than 10 mins from the hospital. Hospital was a horrendous experience for me. (I accept that it may have been more risky given what was required to get DD out but I’d been trying to find out if I had inherited my mum’s misshapen pelvis for 8 months and nobody could tell me.

Totally irrelevant. You’re putting your comfort above being in the best place for your baby. Regardless of the risk percentage, you are taking that risk.

I think it’s a totally selfish act and a terrible way to start off motherhood by not putting your baby first 🤷‍♀️

I had an episiotomy and ventouse delivery with ds.
The country I live in seems to perform an episiotomy regardless of whether its needed or not (they didnt even ask me), so I had it hours before the dr eventually used the ventouse to deliver him. To be honest by the end of a 50 hour labour I couldn't have cared less how they got him out.
That being said, I was on my back for 15 long hours with a ctg monitor on so couldn't get up and move around and had a failed epidural all of which contributed to having to have an instrumental delivery in the end.
Recovery was long and pretty brutal, I was also stitched badly and had to have it re-done twice... ds will definitely always be an only child!

Medicalised birth is rarely best for women or babies.

In a hospital you are in the best place for you and your baby because all medical staff and equipment is there in case something does go wrong, no matter how small.

Forceps delivery with just gas and air for DS1. Episiotomy that healed very quickly. No follow up problems and DS2 they reopened the episiotomy and that was all. They were prepping me for a crash CS under GA when the doctor managed to haul DS1 out…much to everyone’s relief. He was back to back, short umbilical cord and came out face up.

I disagree, and I think statistics from the 1700s will back me up.

The spinal that they gave me before forceps was the best part of the whole birth experience. Couldn't feel any pain then, it was just weird seeing my legs up when I felt like they were flat. Everything else was awful apart from baby being delivered safe and well. I'd choose c section instead of induction next time.

But hospitals are stressful and stress isn’t conducive to smooth childbirth.

Homes/society now are fairly different to the 1700s. 🙄

No. Women who choose homebirth are not puting comfort before safety, stop being so ignorant. If you were actually to do any research on medicalised birth you’d understand why your reply was so ridiculous.

The second you step onto a labour ward you are on their watch. If you don’t progress fast enough for their liking and schedules = induction. Induction = more painful labour. More pain = medical pain relief and STRESS. Fear, unfamiliarity and stress all hinder progress of labour and disrupt the fine balance of a natural physiological birth. Epidural = failure to push. Failure to push = intervention. Intervention = trauma (physical and psychological)… how is this mess beneficial to mother and child?

Women and babies unfortunately die in hospital too so to make this sweeping statement about homebirth is highly uneducated.

It’s beneficial because before those interventions maternal and baby mortality was many, many times higher. There simply is no way of guaranteeing a safe, straightforward, mentally empowering birth. There just isn’t.

Childbirth is, however, the same. And more women and babies live with the intervention of doctors and hospitals. That’s just how it is.

Local anaesthetic, episiotomy and ventouse here. Strange feeling being cut, LA ran out before being stitched up. Ouch!

Before epidurals mortality rates were higher? Come on. You can’t make that correlation with pain relief.
Epidural is the epitome of ‘comfort over safety’ and has increased intervention rates in hospitals, without argument.

no one is saying you can guarantee a safe birth, i’d made that point in my last paragraph. But you can learn about physiological birth and increase your chances of a safe birth ten fold.

This has been an interesting read as I've recently been musing on what I'd do if I had a second. Like many others, I had forceps and episiotomy with spinal because I was prepped for EMCS if it didn't work. I took about 3 months to fully recover, I found my birth very difficult to come to terms with and until recently I was convinced I'd go ELCS for a second. However, 14 months on, I have no lasting consequences from the forceps (that I'm aware of!) while my friends who've had c sections have had various complications. This is anecdotal obviously and many people have different experiences. Sadly there's no way to guarantee an outcome. In your shoes OP, having had a c section before, I'd be tempted to stick with ELCS as there's some control in that and you know what to expect. I agree with you that I hate the healthy baby at all costs narrative; ofc a healthy baby is the priority but if it doesn't need to come at the expense of the mother's wellbeing then it absolutely shouldn't! You definitely shouldn't feel any guilt in choosing what's best for you.

More often than not the interventions are required to solved problems that the hospitals and doctors have caused themselves. They don’t see it because they hardly ever see physiological brith.

I was literally reading about this today. This book explains it very well.

https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/aw/d/064500250X/ref=tmm_pap_swatch_0?ie=UTF8&qid=1692825145&sr=8-1

We have really got the balance wrong in modern maternity care. Yes a very very very small number of women may need interventions to avoid a bad outcome but the number is nowhere near the number of women who currently have interventions. Harm is caused due to unnecessary interventions.