Don't worry!

It has been brought to my attention that there are a few family members that have been concerned about whether there will be a repeat of some of the scarier things that happened in my last labor and whether or not it's safe for me to be pregnant again. I'm guessing there are probably more who have wondered if I'm concerned at all and who maybe haven't seen all the bits and pieced of info I've posted on here or heard the whole story, so I'm going to copy/paste an email I recently sent off to a couple of people. You can read Aidan's birth story here if you met me after he was already with us:

"I spoke with my doctor extensively after Aidan was born, before trying to conceive Cora, and now during pregnancy about how things went last time and got some reassuring answers. My labor was long and tiring, but there weren't any dangerous complications. I asked for copies of all of my records to review myself so I could ask very specific questions and what I found and what my doctor confirmed was that my uterus was and is just fine. The bleeding was almost entirely from my vaginal tear. Aidan's cord was short - but it didn't cause any damage to my uterus, they were just uncertain at first about where the bleeding was coming from. I had an ultrasound and multiple examinations in the weeks after he was born to make sure there wasn't any damage done to my uterus and everything looks just fine.

My lab reports say that I lost about 700cc of blood. Women lose an average of 500cc of blood during vaginal birth, and 1000cc of blood during a cesarean section. Most women recover just fine from both without the need for a transfusion. My problem was not that I lost too much blood, but that my body didn't recover from it quickly. My doctor thinks that's because I was low on iron. That makes sense since I wasn't taking any iron supplementation and lots of women are affected by iron deficiency while pregnant. I never felt fatigued or had any of the other signs of anemia during my pregnancy so I wasn't worried about it. This time around I *am* taking iron supplementation to be safe, and I'm getting my iron checked periodically to make sure it's not too low. I also hired a birth coach (doula) to be in the room with me during delivery to help me find a position to labor in that will make tearing less likely to be severe.

One interesting thing that contributed to the unnecessary scariness of last time is that I have a tipped uterus - which doesn't cause any discomfort or problems at all - and my regular post-pardum bleeding sometimes pooled up in my uterus since it wasn't perfectly verticle and then came out all at once. That's what happened two weeks after Aidan was born when I went to the ER. I woke up one morning and went directly to the shower but the blood had been pooling all night so as soon as I stood up in the shower, it all came rushing out and gave us a scare. My blood tests showed up just fine at the hospital though and they didn't find anything wrong in my uterus - it was just normal post-pardum bleeding. So anyhow, now that I know more about what happened last time, I'm not worried at all that there's anything that we can anticipate to be worried about this time around."

I do still have a couple of questions for my doctor and want to be very thorough in making sure there's nothing I could be doing/do differently this time. We are planning/hoping for another unmedicated birth but have chosen the hospital rather than home this time around to make sure that what happened last time was as simple as iron deficiency anemia. Stay tuned for a post about our general birth philosophy when I get a chance to type it all out. :)