I had a planned water birth at home two years ago, though I had to eventaully get out of the pool to deliver after 8 hours in labour. I had specifically asked not have the syntometrene injection to speed up the delivery of the placenta as I had wanted to do it all naturally. I had written this in my birth plan and my husband expressed this to the midwife when she suggested it. In that situation, I simply thought that she must know best. She was really lovely and I have no reason to doubt that what she did was for what seemed the best reasons. However, when she attempted to deliver the placenta, the cord snapped which caused me no problem there and then, but which meant that I had to transfer to hospital after a beautiful home birth. This was a most unpleasant and as I remember painful experience as various doctors tried to remove the placenta by hand (either I have a massive Mary or they had small hands...but there was still a lot of swearing involved)
Can anyone advise me as to why she might have given me the injection when I requested not to have it? We have discussed it and thought that she may have been coming to the end of her shift and wanted to complete the whole job without soemone else intervening, but that might just be daft.
We are due to have our second child hopefully at home and in water again in December and I really would like to avoid a repeat of that process as it did really spoil things. Is there anything I can do to avoid it happening again and why might the cord have snapped in the first place.?