Educating DH re. birth so he can understand & support birth plan

[Miffster]

Hi

I'm 26 weeks with DC1, and have a meeting with a midwife later this week to go through birth plan. DH is attending the meeting, as he'll be my birth partner and has q's of his own.

I didn't know much about labour and birth before I got pregnant & read up on it all - there's a lot to learn, some of it fairly medical/technical, then there's the pro and con arguments for all sorts of things such as natural vs. managed 3rd stage, etc. And I'm still learning - they don't teach you much at school!

DH has not done any reading about labour and birth, is a bit scared of it all, doesn't know much about it (other than 'scary hairy woman in school sex education video they made me watch at school which was horrible') and he hasn't time to do a lot of reading up due to mad workload.

I am worried that he won't really properly understand what is being discussed in the birth plan meeting and the mw will have to spend a lot of time explaining it all to him.

We're booked for 2 full days of NCT course, but not til week 35/36.

Thing is, I'm still trying to decide
a) whether or not to have a home birth
b) whether or not to transfer to a different hospital to the one I am booked in at.

A big concern with current hospital is that it is 5.3 miles away - a long way in heavy London Christmas traffic in a HB emergency. the one I want to transfer to is 2.3 miles away.

But transferring hospitals means transferring to a completely new midwife care team and being booked in all over again, getting new agreement for a home birth etc. And that must be done soon - in the next 3 weeks really - hence urgency of birth plan meeting now.

How can I quickly get DH up to speed on the issues likely to be covered in a birth plan meeting? Any downloadable pamphlets/glossaries/websites he can visit/you tube films or generally helpful explanatory and educational tools he can check out?

Thanks

I would think the midwife would be the perfect person to explain everything to him.

Go through your birth plan with him at home? Quickest way IMO, especially as many of the choices are personal choices.

I don't know of any websites or anything. If you can't find any good digestable bits of information for him, maybe just go through the main points of concern for you and what will affect your decisions.
It's unfortunate that you won't be having your antenatal classes for so long as I found them very useful and it was a good way of my OH learning about everything. The midwife who took the class was much clearer about things than I could have been. There will be certain things about the labour that you won't need to go into too much detail about until later on anyway, so just stick to the most pressing decisions for now.

I felt like this with my DH then resigned myself to the fact that he'd learn when he had to and not me making him understand stuff. I'm 34+4 and we've just been for our first antenatal class. He's much more informed. Our hospital is 35 miles away and with the traffic takes over an hour. I'm just going to grit my teeth over it as its so much better than the one 20 miles away.

Thanks very much for the responses.
I think the problem is I don't feel ready to make a specific birth plan yet - because I still do not know if I am having a home birth or a birthing centre birth.

There are still too many decisions to make and I don't yet have all the info I need.

The birthing centre at the hospital I am not booked at, Whittington looks great - but what if I have to wait hours to use it because all the waterpool rooms are full?

The Homerton (where I am currently booked) has a birthing centre - but it is 5+ miles away. I have not yet been able to visit the labour ward/birthing centre etc and I don't know what it is like or how many women will be there wanting waterbirths in December.

Both hospitals have reputation for having grotty, noisy postnatal wards where it's almost impossible to get any rest, or privacy, and I am dreading having to spend any time in either of them after having a baby. The Homerton reputation postnatally is worse than the Whitingtont. I am also distressed about DH being sent away from me after having Dc1.

The best option for me hoping for a waterbirth and having DH about post-birth is to have DC1 at home - but I am worried about transfer time to hospital if I stay booked in with the Homerton midwife team.

It's very hard to know if I will be able to manage labour at home as I have not had a baby before.

Hopefully the midwife will be able to answer my/DH's questions and provide DH and I with reasurrance about transferring to Homerton by ambulance in an emergency.

If it will take 40+ mins for an ambulance to get to me and then get me to Homerton hospital, then I do not feel safe having a HB with the Homerton community midwife team.

In which case, I will take a deep breathand ask to transfer my care to Whittington midwife team, and ask them either for a HB or to use their birthing centre with pool, assuming it is likely that I will be able to go straight in and not wait to use it if I turn up 3cm+ dilated.

Not being able to guess the future is quite hard, isn't it? Having a baby is scary and unpredicatable - trying to make birth plans is very hard in the circs!

It's driving me a bit mad tbh.

I'm not sure but if they had to do an emergency transfer to hospital and if it was for "proper" emergency type reason like heartbeat dipping or something then wouldn't they just take you to the nearest hospital with sirens regardless of your plan? If it's "just" something like failute to progress then they can be a bit more relaxed I guess?

My homebirth ended in transfer to hospital due to failure to progress (after 4 hours pushing, turned out he was a brow presentation and turned sideways) but there was only really one option as to where to go.

I think this is something your midwife can tell you i.e. if this happens, where would I be taken etc.

I have to say I am slightly dubious about some community midwives given my experience of homebirth. I'm considering maybe getting a private midwife for no. 2 if I don't get some really good answers about the level of experience on home births in the team. I think I was probaby unlucky though but our experience was quite traumatic.

I agree that it is best for you and your dh to talk to the midwife together. You don't actually need to have everything set in stone months ahead, even if it feels that way.

If you are want a waterbirth, and are prepared to have a homebirth in order to achieve that, then it seems that your concerns are around the "transfer to hospital" time. Where have you got your estimate of 40 minutes from?

In my (admittedly limited) experience, many of the decisions made during labour, especially in terms of escalation, come one after another, rather than being a result of everything being hunky-dorey followed by a last minute surprise.

For a homebirth you need to be happy with the midwife team that you have, and that they have the expertise to know when to call in an ambulance. Given that you have a medical expert with you at this point, I'm rather surprised that the fastest time they would quote you would be 40 minutes.

DHs, however much they want to be involved, often do not quite get involved early enough for us. My DH was the same. Skimmed my birth book and talked about finding out more, but never did.

My advice, work out what you want. Unless DH has a violent opposition to it, for example many men are very uncomfortable (at least initially) about a HB, this birth is about you and the baby and most DH just want what is best for you and the baby.

Talk through your birth plan (or ideas/concerns, wherever you've got to) with him before seeing the MW. There are a couple of points which may matter to him directly, eg cutting the cord, him telling you the sex of the baby etc, otherwise, i would be amazed if he has a view on, say, a physiological vs managed 3rd stage - even if he read all the materials available in the world!

It seems to me that the big concerns you have about a HB is the potential transfer time (fair enough) and that is far better answered by your MW than DH.

Sorry, long post, but just wanted to respond.

It is very early for you to have a birth plan meeting. You DO NOT need to decide at 26 weeks how you are delivering the placenta or who is cutting the cord. The only decision you need to make now is where to have your baby and the midwife will help you decide. Your DH may have a gut feeling but ultimately you are both going to have to listen to what the midwife is saying, ask your questions and then discuss it for a couple of days. You may find that if you want to transfer hospitals you can't have a homebirth (you will be in the catchment area for one hospital or another and only the community midwives from your catchment area hospital will be able to attend you in a homebirth - but the midwife will explain that). Your antenatal classes will give you lots of wonderful easily digestible info about the nitty gritty of placentas and breastfeeding which will help prepare your DH and enable you to write a proper birth plan.

Thanks again everyone, you have really helped and correctly identified the real source of the worry for me, which is how to have the kind of birth I think would work best for me, baby and DH, but with minimal risk. All the stuff about placentas and Vit K injections etc can indeed wait, now I think about it.

Have been told I won't meet the HB MW team until 36 weeks. It's a shame that you don't get any continuity of care and get to know a bit about the person who will be delivering the baby but times have changed I guess.

40 min transfer time is my own pessimistic estimate looking at an ambulance getting the call-out to my flat and then travelling 5.3 miles from my flat to Homerton in heavy traffic in December. I might be very wrong though and they might end up taking me to th enearest hospital if there was a proper emergency anyway.

Just as I typed this response,
a new MW just called me and said the mw I was going to see on Fri is off sick for all of September and so I can come next Friday instead. That means I will have had no mw appointments from week 16 to week 27, because I missed 20 weeks one due to being on holiday & then mw was on holiday herself after that until now. And now she's off til October.

Am thinking, I can't really see the point of carrying on with the Homerton mw care team, out of some kind of loyalty having been placed with them arbitrarily by my GP 6 months ago.

I've only had 2 appts with them so far and the hospital they work at is miles away from my home and an unknown quantity with a grim post natal rep. They can offer me a HB - not to be sniffed at - but I'm too worried about a HB transfer timings to feel safe with the HB option and I won't meet the HB team til really late in the day which doesn;t really make me feel very safe either.

Sod it. Am going to make an exploratory referral appt with the Whittington mw team and if I can't have a HB with them, I'll have to think about giving up on a HB and going to their birthing centre instead. At least I've already visited it and met the Consultant mw so have more confidence/knowledge than I do with the Homerton.

DH will be pleased: he went on the Whittington tour and thought the birth centre looked really homely and reasurring and un-hospital-like(I'm very frightened of hospitals and tend to go into panic mode easily in them) - but with emergency care on hand if needed.

Just hope that we can get into the Whittington birth centre water pool when I need it...and that I don't have to hang around afterwards in the postnatal ward.

I wish everything was less complicated! Thanks again, you have helped lots.

Sounds good to me, If you can't get decent antenatal care, then that's a reason to transfer MW teams when that option is available, even without the hospital stuff.

I would find out how many pools the MLU has and whether they also have baths available. You just can't guarantee that a pool will be available unless you're going for a homebirth, so would need to be happy to make do with other options (e.g. bath for labouring in) or to do without.

Do ask about transfer times - blue-light ambulances can get places pretty darn quick!

It is quite unusual to have an every minute counts emergency at a home birth. More likely is that the mw will decide that you should be transferred at the very early stages of things deviating from the normal.
I would say from your concerns about safety that you are not completely comfortable with a home birth and therefore won't labour effectively at home, better to accept your fears and book for a hospital birth.
Please, don't over think or over plan. Your husband cannot be truly prepared (and neither can you) for what will happen during labour, birth or parenthood. Anyone who says different is misguided, it is simply something that will unfold at the time regardless of your wishes, desires or reading list.
Risk is a very personal thing, and cannot be eliminated from life, let alone childbirth. You have hit the nail on the head, it is scary stepping into the unknown but my god, what fantastic preparation for being a parent. Believe it or not, the decisions are harder and scarier once they are born! What a headfuck, but you'll cope brilliantly, like we all do!