Today, we continue our fertility journey series. In this and next week's episode, birth and fertility doula Alison Wehr begins sharing stories of her two babies’ IVF conception and birth stories. Just need to give another trigger alert that this first story includes some stories of loss in the process of trying to conceive. If you listened to Episode 47, you heard a birth story that happened on the heels of Hurricane Sandy. Alison’s first baby’s birth that she’ll share today occurred immediately before the same hurricane hit. Alison’s first birth story is one of an efficient first labor and unmedicated vaginal birth in a hospital setting. The labor was seemingly caused by her OB sweeping her membranes around 38 weeks and begins the day she and her husband had tickets to attend the Broadway play Glengarry, Glen Ross starring Al Pacino. She also shares how Hurricane Sandy hit the day after they came home and how the blackout the hurricane caused created some interesting memories.

Episode Topics:

INFERTILE AF podcast episode — more details on her TTC journey
Miscarriage w/ husband in the midst of separating
Miscarriage at 8 weeks w/ 2nd husband, another miscarriage
Sent to repro endocrinologist, had to wait 6 months - didn’t find anything
Couldn’t find any issues with either one
Insurance required 3 IUIs before trying IVF
Had to switch doctors due to insurance change
Genetic testing of embryos
3rd IVF stuck
Repro immunologist to check for autoimmune issues - more medications
Pregnant with twins -- 12 or 13 weeks had spotting -- miscarried one baby, genetic abnormalities were shown on testing, amnio recommended but they opted out
Not being able to celebrate and prepare for birth until 24 weeks
Decided she wanted to have a homebirth, but husband not on board
Proceeding with hospital birth
Deciding she didn’t want to be pregnant anymore because she didn’t trust her body starting around 35 weeks - red raspberry leaf tea, activity, dates, etc.
OB sweeps membranes at 38 weeks 1 day w/o requesting consent
Go to Broadway play during early labor
Go home, lots of nesting, getting email ready, bath, hands and kness in bathroom on tile apartment, sitting on toilet, vocalizing, not wanting to be touched
Moving to bed, water breaks
Transfer to hospital in active labor
She needs to pee, surprised she could get off
Shifting to pushing, lots of people come in room
Zoey born with just a few pushes
Minor injury to Zoe’s back due to internal fetal scalp electrode
Challenges getting home in cab
Placenta encapsulation (Jen Mayer - Baby Caravan)
Blackout a few days after the birth

Resources:

Sponsor links:

*Disclosure: Links on this page to products are affiliate links; I will receive a small commission on any products you purchase at no additional cost to you.

Interview Transcript

Lisa: Welcome Allison.

[00:00:01] Alison: Hi, thanks, Lisa. Thanks for having me.

[00:00:03] Lisa: So would you please just give us a little bit of background on yourself professionally as well as personally? And when I say personally, maybe a little bit about where you are in your parenting journey, how many little ones you have, and maybe a little bit about your recent move, too.

[00:00:18] Alison: All right. So, my name's Alison Wehr. I have two kids. Zoe is seven and Kenny is six. And I am a birth and postpartum doula, lactation counselor and fertility doula. I've been working as a doula in New York City since 2016. And in January 2020, just a few months ago, my husband and I and the kids moved to Costa Rica. So we live here now.

[00:00:52] Lisa: And I love that adventurous spirit.

[00:00:54] Alison: Seems like this year has been an adventure for everyone, but yes, it was it was an adventure.

[00:01:02] Lisa: It just seems so fortuitous that you beat the pandemic to the punch. You're like, "No, I'm going to escape and go to someplace prettier, someplace more peaceful before all of this craziness hits."

[00:01:12] Alison: My gosh, if we had only known that this was going to happen, right? We had planned for years and just happened to pick January 2020. And when we got here, the world changed.

[00:01:22] Lisa: Wild.

[00:01:23] Alison: Wild.

[00:01:25] Lisa: So we talked previously about, you know, how we wanted today to look. And you shared with me that you were on another podcast called INFERTILE AF. And it was such a wonderful episode.

[00:01:37] I will be sure to link to that in the show notes, but she shares all the very detailed journey in terms of trying to conceive her two babies and what that all looked like. So please check that out if you're interested in all the details, it's such a great interview. So today instead, so that we're not repeating things, we're gonna focus really on the details of your birth stories and a little bit of backgrounds kind of summary of how you got there. But mostly focusing on the birth stories. And then I would love to talk about how you got into doula work and what a fertility doula is. Because I don't know that many people are familiar -- I feel like it's a newer profession. It's not something that's been around for a long time, but as people are experiencing that whole journey, it's such a valuable thing to have support, emotional support, logistical, all that stuff.

[00:02:26] Do you want to start off by talking about your first fertility journey and then going into your first birth story?

[00:02:33] Alison: Yeah. I had my first miscarriage when I was around 28 years old. It was at the end of my first marriage. I got pregnant right as we were breaking up and I had a miscarriage at about 14 weeks. And at the time we had not been planning to have children. It was an accident, but at the time I really hadn't put my mind around what it was going to look like for me, whether I was going to have children or whether we were going to start a family, and it was at the end of the marriage.

[00:03:03] So it was kind of just like, "Oh, well, we're not going to worry about that now. We'll focus on things later." When I met my current husband, so I was, I don't know, I'm going to guess 34 -- so several years later, we met. We hit it off right away. You know, when, you know, you know. It's like, this guy makes me want to have children. We're going to have babies.

[00:03:24] So the first thing I do is go to my OB and just talk to him about the previous miscarriage, to see if there were any reasons that he thought that I might have trouble getting pregnant. I'd had a ruptured ovarian cyst at some point after that, too, and wanted to make sure that everything was going to be okay. He gave me two thumbs up, he was like, you know, "Give it a go, start trying to get pregnant."

[00:03:50] So we got pregnant within like the first two or three months of trying. It worked right away. We had a miscarriage at eight weeks. We got pregnant a couple months later, had another miscarriage around eight weeks. We lived in Atlanta, Georgia at the time and we found out my husband was going to be changing jobs. It was going to be taking us to New York City. After that last miscarriage, our doctor referred us to a reproductive endocrinologist, which is a specialist that deals with recurrent miscarriages or any other reasons that you might need assistance in getting pregnant. So with that referral, we decided to wait until we got to New York City. Because we knew it was probably going to be a longer relationship and we wanted just to kind of be there, be settled. We made an appointment, it took us six months to get in. Luckily, my husband's insurance covered fertility treatments. That's a problem a lot of people have is they're very expensive and not all insurance policies cover them. But he worked at a tech company and a lot of the tech companies can be competitive with benefits because they want to attract, you know, the best employees. So he had a really good benefits package that allowed us to seek out fertility treatment and have it covered by insurance.

[00:05:05] We went, and what they do first is they really just test you for any genetic issues. They check your anatomy to make sure, you know, your fallopian tubes are open. That you're ovulating, that your uterus doesn't have any growths, fibroids or anything that could be hindering your pregnancy.

[00:05:21]They found nothing with us. They also checked Ken out and they found nothing with him. Sperm count was good, motility. All of the things that they checked worked. We both got A pluses, but, you know, I had three miscarriages at this point to show for it. And this was back in 2010, is that right? Maybe 2009. And at that time, our insurance company required that we do three intra- uterine inseminations before we could move on to IVF. So we went ahead and started that process and went through three IUI's and, did not have a pregnancy, not even a blip, just nothing, nothing worked.

[00:06:06] We found out around that time that Ken's company was changing insurance policies. And unfortunately the doctor we had been seeing was no longer going to be covered under the insurance policy. We had to change doctors if we wanted to continue to use our insurance, but the benefit was that it started our insurance over from scratch.

[00:06:25] Lisa: Yay!

[00:06:26] Alison: Right. So we got to double dip. And our doctor recommended another doctor, also in New York City, that took our insurance. And the doctor that we were leaving recommended that we go straight to IVF now that we had finished the IUI's that we had to do for insurance coverage, and also recommended genetic testing of the embryos, just to see if it was a genetic problem that we were having that was just undetectable in the blood work that they did coming out of the gate.

[00:06:58] So we did that. We moved to a new doctor. For my first IVF cycle I had, I don't know, like 15, 20 embryos fertilize. And we did genetic testing on them and only three came back as normal. So they transferred two and we froze one. Spoiler: that's Kenny. He was in that first batch.

[00:07:22] I did not get a pregnancy out of the first IVF. Or the second. With genetically tested embryos, we had two again and no pregnancy. And then for the third IVF, our reproductive endocrinologist recommended, we see a reproductive immunologist to look for any underlying auto-immune disorders that could be causing my body to either reject or attack the pregnancy.

[00:07:47] We went through the testing for that and they found some things that they felt needed to be treated. And I did a whole bunch more medication, daily shots and a monthly infusion. I had to do it twice before the embryo transfer. And then every month, if the pregnancy worked. So they transfer, we got two genetically normal embryos again, which seemed to be, like, every time -- two are normal.

[00:08:13]So we transferred those then and I was pregnant with twins. Things were going pretty good. I was getting to see my reproductive endocrinologist and also my reproductive immunologist. So I was getting ultrasounds, you know, at two different doctors. You know, I was so anxious with pregnancy at this point, from all of the miscarriages that I had had in the past, that it was just every step of the way -- anytime I could see that little heartbeat, I just wanted to, you know, "Just let me see the baby." If I could have sat there and just had an ultrasound machine to look inside all the time, I would have.

[00:08:45] About 12, 12 or 13 weeks in I started having some spotting and went into the doctor's office and they could not find a heartbeat for one of the babies.

[00:08:58]It was right around the time that I was going to need to do the NT scan -- the nuchal translucency scan that they did with the blood work to judge risk for a number of chromosomal abnormalities that can happen. We knew that we only had one baby left inside and we knew we lost one. They wanted to do the test anyways. And we went through with the testing and the results came back that there was a high risk for some genetic abnormality. And, gosh, on top of finding out that we lost one baby, and then we have the genetic abnormality test coming back positive.

[00:09:39] Lisa: That's a lot.

[00:09:40] Alison: Oh wow. It was, it was so much. And if you remember, we had transferred genetically normal embryos. The way they test the embryos is they take one little cell out of the embryos when they're teeny, teeny tiny. When they're only like eight cells, they take one and they test it.

[00:09:58]But those tests are pretty accurate. So we talked with our, our OB and our reproductive endocrinologist about what our options were at that point. And they all recommended the CVS testing, followed by an amniocentesis. And this was like one of the hardest, hardest times for Ken and I, because we'd been through all of this, trauma, already. And now here we are having to have a discussion over whether or not we were going to risk miscarriage to have a CVS or an amnio. And we had to sit down and talk about what our feelings were if we did have a genetically abnormal pregnancy.

[00:10:40]Finding out if that test was positive -- was that going to affect whether we continue the pregnancy or not? And, you know, people have to think about these things every day, and this is not an easy conversation and you come into it with what you feel that she don't know if your partner, you know, feels the same. These are just not things that come up over wine.

[00:11:02] Lisa: It's complicated enough emotionally, even just for one person. And then to add that dynamic that you're referring to, I just can't even imagine.

[00:11:12] Alison: It was really, really tough. We agreed that we both wanted to continue the pregnancy, which in our mind ruled out CVS or amniocentesis, just because there was risk of miscarriage with those. As small as it was, it was still a risk. So we decided not to move forward with those tests.

[00:11:33]So back in 2012, the noninvasive pregnancy testing, which is the blood test -- some people know it as Maternity 21 -- those types of blood tests were not legal in New York state yet. But it was legal in New Jersey. I called a hospital in New Jersey and I drove over to New Jersey to have the test done, just to give myself as much information as I could about what was going on. And the test came back negative for any have normal genetic markers.

[00:12:03] So then I felt, "Okay," you know, "Maybe...maybe everything's fine." So I just decided to go with that. "That's my test. We're just going to, like, push through."

[00:12:13] I just, I really tried to stay as still as possible. I didn't move a lot. I laid on my sofa. I watched a lot of television. I was so scared. You know, with the other miscarriages that I had, I blamed little things that I had done that -- you know, knowing now and knowing then that they probably had little to do with why I had the miscarriage, you know -- I worked too much, or I lifted something that was heavy. Or I had five glasses of wine before I knew I was pregnant. And I decided "I'm not going to do anything that I will ever be able to say, "I messed it up this time." That meant, like, ice cream and Netflix. So that's what I did, I laid on the sofa.

[00:13:01] Lisa: Sounds fun.

[00:13:03] Alison: You know, we didn't really think about birth choices, though, until after I was 24 weeks. We had kind of marked 24 weeks as viability day. Babies can live safely outside of the womb past 24 weeks. So that was kind of like the goal is like, "We make it 24 weeks and we're good to go." And I didn't think anything about birth at all until 24 weeks. And then it was like, "We're going to have a baby! And I haven't done anything!"

[00:13:38] You know, we had an OB, which we were referred to by our reproductive endocrinologist, because she was two floors down in the office building. I needed a pap smear before I could start the IVF treatment. And she was like, "That's fine. Just go downstairs, get a pap smear, came back up." And that's how I chose my OB. You know, it, it was like, we didn't have any kind of discussion on what my plans for birth -- I mean, I didn't even know at that point. But after 24 weeks, one of my friends recommended "The Business of Being Born." I feel like so many birth stories start off with "The Business of Being Born." "That's Ricki Lake!"

[00:14:14] Lisa: Yeah, right?

[00:14:16] Alison: Anyway, she recommended the documentary and I was in that collecting information phase. So I watched the documentary and I was like, "Oh my gosh. This is, this is a lot. This is -- you know, I want to have a homebirth! " You know, we had been through so much, so much medical intervention in getting pregnant, you know. This pregnancy wasn't even created in my own body, right? We didn't even get to have sex to get pregnant. I felt like so many things had been taken away, that I really wanted to make the birth as much about my body as I could.

[00:15:04] And I told my husband, I'm like, "Hey, we're having a home birth." And he's like, "Whoa, whoa, whoa." You know, he was a little nervous, which I understand. It's really hard being the partner and watching the person you love go through all of the medical procedures and miscarriages, and there's not much they can do but be supportive. You know, he would tell me over and over again, "I wish I could take it away. I wish I could -- let's do this to my body instead." There were plenty of days I would have been like, "Here. It's your turn, you do it." But it wasn't possible.

[00:15:47] And it was just torture for him to watch. So, you know, I wanted to make sure that we worked together to make it a birthing plan we both felt comfortable with. We ended up staying with my OB and planning a hospital birth.

[00:16:06]I was pretty convinced that I could -- that I was going to be able to do what I wanted to anyways, even though when I brought up home birth to my OB, she -- her first remark was, "Gross! It's gonna be so messy. Who's going to clean up all that stuff?"

[00:16:22] So she was not supportive about that at all, but, you know, as the pregnancy went on, I was trying to kind of clarify what I wanted from a hospital birth. And if I was going to be able to get that, and I decided that I wanted to try to have an unmedicated hospital birth. Because of a couple of things. I have a huge medical phobia of doctors, doctors and hospitals. I had surgery when I was very young and it was a traumatic experience and I have PTSD from those experiences, but I can't control it. In my mind. I'm like, this is something I should be able to control, but no, I get really, really anxious. And I was scared to have an epidural during labor, because to me that meant that I wouldn't be able to get up and move. Once I committed to that epidural, then I was going to be stuck wherever I was, and that scared me. It took away my -- like, the fight or flight. It took away the "flight" part. It just wasn't on the table. Not that I was actually going to run out of the hospital in labor, but... if I felt unsafe, I wanted to be able to go.

[00:17:39] So we didn't really talk about that that much. Because when I told her I wanted to have an unmedicated birth, she told me, "Yeah, yeah, yeah. I'll see you there. You'll be asking for the epidural. Ha ha." Okay. Lady, whatever. We're just going to do this.

[00:17:53]Starting about 35 weeks, I started getting very anxious to have the baby come because I didn't have a lot of trust in my body. And it felt like the baby would be safer outside of my body.

[00:18:11] Because, you know, in my mind it was my body's fault that the other babies didn't make it, right? So I started, you know, doing some things like, well, I mean, you can drink red raspberry leaf tea, all through your labor, but I was like doubling up. I was doing a lot of walking. Anything that I could just figure out on my own from the internet. I was trying to kind of get things started.

[00:18:39] And I went into a regular appointment, my 38-week appointment. My doctor was well aware of my anxieties. We talked about it every time, you know, I was there and I was like, "I'm ready. You know, I'm 38 weeks now. This is full term, you know, we can be ready." And she was like, "Well, let's do a cervical exam and see where you are." She did a cervical exam and swept my membranes. It was a surprise. I would definitely have said, "Please sweep my membranes," if I had known that would be a choice, but it wasn't. It was, it was a surprise.

[00:19:17] Lisa: So when you say a surprise...

[00:19:18] Alison: She did not tell me that she was going to do it before she did it.

[00:19:22] Lisa: And how did you find out that that was done? Just because it was more painful than a regular cervical check?

[00:19:27] Alison: We talked about it afterwards, I was like, "What just happened?" " I swept your membranes. Let's see if that gets labor started."

[00:19:34] Lisa: So common -- in our city anyway -- with care providers.

[00:19:38] Alison: It really is. And you know, there are a lot of scenarios where you, you might not want that done, but anytime asking for consent before you perform a medical procedure is important.

[00:19:48] Lisa: Absolutely.

[00:19:49] Alison: There's a lot of trust in that relationship between an OB and a patient. And even if, even though it was something that I would have consented to, it changed the way that I felt about my safety with that provider, right?

[00:20:03] Lisa: Yeah. Because you weren't given any choice.

[00:20:05] Alison: Right. So yes, I was 38 weeks and one day. She stripped my membranes in the afternoon. We had tickets to "Glengarry Glen Ross" on Broadway with Al Pacino.

[00:20:17] I was having contractions, like as soon as I left the doctor's office, had a little spotting. And, you know, my husband was at work. I texted him that exciting text. So it's like, "Something's happening!" He's like, "Are we still going to the show?" I'm like, "Of course, we're going to the show. We have tickets. We always go to the show for which we have tickets. Nothing will keep us from the show."

[00:20:40] Lisa: Diehard theatergoers.

[00:20:42] Alison: Right. So we went to the show. And the contractions didn't really start getting strong until like, after the intermission. So the last half of the show, I don't remember any of it. We were in like the back row, so I could kind of stand up a little bit, you know, and nobody cared.

[00:21:03] Lisa: Yay.

[00:21:04] Alison: I was squeezing my husband's hand for every contraction, just to let him know that there was one there. You know, I'm just like, "Oh, there's another one. Oh, there's another one." Just kind of in like a fun, "Oh, there's something happening," kind of way.

[00:21:19] Lisa: And does he remember anything from the show?

[00:21:22] Alison: No.

[00:21:23] Lisa: I wouldn't think he would either

[00:21:24] Alison: We don't remember anything. We were... there were more exciting things happening in my body during the show.

[00:21:32] Lisa: Much more important things going on.

[00:21:33] Alison: Right. We got on the subway and went home and Ken took his picture of me in the subway. It's so blurry, but I'm like smiling, like laughing, you know, I was just being nervous but we don't have hardly any pictures of our labor. It's something I regret. I wish I could go back and take pictures of things that happened.

[00:21:55] But we got home, and as soon as we got home from the show I was, like, nesting, and my nesting task that I just had to do -- you know how this happens, like, it's just like "This one thing that I have to get done before the baby comes" -- I had an email draft that I had written where Ken would just have to plug in the weight and the time.

[00:22:15] And I wanted to make sure everybody's email address was in the email that needed to be notified right away, whose feelings wouldn't get hurt. I was obsessed with getting that email done and Ken went to bed. I was like, "You go to bed, I'm going to sit here and make sure this email is right."

[00:22:35] I did that. And I just kind of walked around the apartment for a while and I'm just piddling. Putting laundry away, making sure that dishes were clean. At some point after midnight the contractions started getting pretty, pretty strong and I was really enjoying being alone. For some reason, like you never know how you're going to labor. Right. All the things that I learned in my childbirth ed class, you know, we had this tennis ball that I was sure I was going to want him to rub on my back. And I didn't want anybody to touch me when I was actually in labor. You just never know, but I was enjoying kind of being alone. So I labored all through the night by myself. Just like leaning over the sofa. I finally went into the bathroom and sat on the toilet for a while. Because that feels so good.

[00:23:26] Lisa: Oh yeah.

[00:23:27] Alison: Oh yeah.

[00:23:28] Lisa: Love the toilet.

[00:23:30] Alison: Yeah. And I got in the bath for a little bit, and hands and knees on the bathroom floor. Something about that cold tile. I labored through most of the night and it was about maybe like, five in the morning or 5:30, maybe, Ken got up to come check on me. He could kind of hear me by that point. We lived in a small New York City apartment. There was like no place to hide, but I guess he could hear me kind of moaning and moving around. Once he got up, I went and laid in the bed. Because I thought, you know, "Oh, I've been just walking around. Let me try laying in the bed."

[00:24:08] And soon as my head hit the pillow, my water broke. So my head hit the pillow and I like jumped up, you know, two feet on the ground so I didn't get my mattress wet.

[00:24:20] Lisa: I know. Right. You're like, "Why couldn't that happen on the tile floor in the bathroom?"

[00:24:24] Alison: I was in there for hours! We had taken a childbirth ed class at the local yoga studio, and that was pretty much all that we knew about laboring was what we learned in the class. And our doctor had told us, you know, you need to start heading to the hospital when you're five-one-one. When the contractions are five minutes apart and they're lasting for a minute or longer, and that lasts over an hour.

[00:24:53] So we were there. My water had broken and we were past five-one-one. It was really time to go. I had been secretly hoping my whole pregnancy that I would somehow have a taxi baby.

[00:25:06] Lisa: I don't think I can say I've ever met anyone who said they wanted a taxi baby. I love that.

[00:25:14] Alison: I wanted to have that baby in the taxi. It would be the best-case scenario because I would be close to the hospital, in case there was something wrong. I could actually have the baby in the car with nobody else there. And I could just be by myself. Or with Ken and the taxi driver. Which -- I'm sure they would have really loved that. But anyway...

[00:25:36] So we got to the hospital and it was a teaching hospital in New York City, pretty big teaching hospital. And we got there about six o'clock in the morning. And, you know, of course I'm, I'm like really in labor at this point. I'm not that verbal anymore. I have like these like just like short periods of complete lucidity, and then it goes away. You know, so I can like fill out a form in like two minutes, and then I'm just gone through the contraction. And then I come back. But I went in, we got checked into triage. They gave me a load of paperwork to fill out for some reason. I hate it when they do that.

[00:26:17] Lisa: I know. Right? Yeah, really?

[00:26:19] Alison: Yeah. I'd already registered in the system. But yeah, the head nurse gave me a cup. She told me to pee in the cup. My water had broken. I was in active labor. I went in the bathroom and... I guess I peed in the cup, but you know, I held up the cup and it's just like...

[00:26:37] Lisa: Who knows what's pee and what's fluid....?

[00:26:41] Alison: Oh, my gosh. It was covered, it was just dripping and I just handed it to her. "Here you go!" She goes, "Oh, I guess your water did break." I was like, "Yeah, it totally...it did."

[00:26:53]But we stayed in triage longer than I would have liked. I don't remember exactly how long, but I do remember jumping up on my hands and knees on the small little bed that they have in the triage room to try to get through the contractions.

[00:27:08]They decided to take us to a room because I had proved I was in active labor. So we got moved to the labor and delivery room

[00:27:17] Lisa: I love the way you phrased that: "I proved to them I was in active labor."

[00:27:22] Alison: For sure. So I remember stopping in the hallway on the way to the room. And you know how in hospital hallways, they have these bars that kind of go down the hallway in case somebody needs to hold on.

[00:27:36] Lisa: Yeah. Like a handrail kind of thing.

[00:27:37] Alison: Yeah. It's the handrail. But I stopped and grabbed the bar and just squatted down on the ground. And I was like, "This is amazing." I had like three contractions there in the hall. I couldn't even get to the room, but hanging on that bar was...life. That's the only place I wanted to be was in the hallway on that bar, which was not allowed. But now I know.

[00:28:01] We got to our room and, I don't remember if they checked -- I mean, they must have when I was in triage -- but I don't remember, you know, what my dilation was or anything. I don't remember any of that. I remember getting to the room, my husband and I, and there was a nurse, an older nurse that came in and she sat at a computer in the same room with us.

[00:28:26] The rooms at this hospital are huge by New York standards. And she was behind me kind of at a station. And you know, when you're in labor, you're not really aware of your surroundings. So my version of the story is she sat back there and typed like the whole time and didn't say anything to us, which at the time I kept feeling like, "Isn't she supposed to do something?" But now, as a doula, I'm like, "Oh, she was just an angel, because she was sitting in there just holding space for us, and being there if we needed something.

[00:29:09] All I wanted to do was to stand up and lean over the bed and put my hands on the bed and just rock back and forth. And I did that for hours. I didn't want to move. I didn't want to do anything. I just wanted to be there leaning over. Laying down didn't feel good and nothing else felt good. I just wanted to be right there. Some things that I remember that happened during the laboring part was I asked my husband to help me with my hair. Because my hair was all in my face, and I just wanted it out. And so he tied my hair in a rubber band, like right. I'm doing it with my hand. I know you can't see it on a podcast, but it was like a unicorn horn. Which didn't help with the hair in my face thing. It was still hanging there. That ponytail. I remember just being like -- I couldn't give any direction, you know, I just had to like, live with it until I could come back to earth.

[00:30:04] But I remember that. And I remember telling my husband that I had to go pee. And I said, "Ken, I've got to go pee." And Ken looked at the nurse and he was like, "She's gotta pee!" And the nurse was like, "Well, go pee." And we're like, "What? I can go pee?" You know, I had something on my finger, you know, the pulse oximeter , and I had the fetal rate heart monitor on and I had a blood pressure cuff. And I had no idea that I could actually walk to the bathroom, just unplug and go. We were both like, "We can go pee!"

[00:30:46] Lisa: There's no reason you should have known that you weren't a doula yet, right?

[00:30:49] Alison: Right. My husband and I were talking about this the other day. He was just like, "You know, we just didn't know you could do anything." And I think a lot of people enter a hospital like that, "What can I do?" Well, it turns out you can do whatever you want.

[00:31:05] Lisa: Better to ask forgiveness than permission. Just do it. And they'll tell you if they have a problem with it.

[00:31:09] Alison: That's the best advice because you can. You can do anything.

[00:31:15]So, anyway, we went to the bathroom, I remember going to the bathroom and there was another bar in the bathroom. One just like the one in the hallway. And I was like, "Oh my God!" I hung on that bar and had some contractions. It felt so good.

[00:31:28] At some point during the labor, the nurses felt that -- or maybe the doctors, I'm not really sure. I did not see my provider the whole time I was there, or anybody from their office. But somebody decided that the heart rate monitors were slipping because I was moving too much.

[00:31:47] They decided to use an internal heart rate monitor, which is a device that they put in the baby's head so they can monitor the heart rate directly from the baby instead of trying to go through the stomach. Those heart rate monitors that kind of fit around the waist are not great. They slide around. Pregnant people are not very still. Unless they have an epidural.

[00:32:09] Lisa: Right, right.

[00:32:10] Alison: So if somebody is out there and wants to make some really great technology... I know they have some wireless ones now. Anyway, they put in the heart the internal heart rate monitor.

[00:32:20] Lisa: And that's continuous from that point forward. Right.

[00:32:23] Alison: Right. So from that point forward, I had the heart rate monitor on her body and I was allowed to continue laboring. At some point -- it's like amnesia, right? It's just like you go to another planet. I remember the nurse suddenly saying, "Are you pushing?" She just kind of jumped up and said, "Are you pushing?" To me, what I was doing was not pushing Now that I'm a doula, I know that noise. It's a very, very special noise. It's like the low kind of "unhhh" right at the end of kind of a moan, and you get that "unhhh." So I was actually pushing, I just didn't really know that that's what was happening. So, you know, of course this is like my memory of the event. I know I keep saying that, but in my mind, what happened next was it turned into like that scene from E.T. when everybody comes in with their hazmat suits on and they turn on the bright lights.

[00:33:21] Lisa: Yes.

[00:33:21] Alison: So I had been laboring quietly in my dark room all alone. And then all of a sudden, you know, 20 people came in. They wanted me to get on the bed on my back. The doctor who was in front of me had on, like the full face mask, everything. You know, I don't know how many people were actually in there and Ken couldn't remember either, but it felt like a lot, might've been three but it felt like 20.

[00:33:50]That's when the directed pushing started. "Hold your breath. Alright. Count to 10." You know, "One, two..." So I pushed out Zoe as hard and fast as I could. Because it felt like an emergency.

[00:34:06] Lisa: Because so many people came in? Or why did it feel like an emergency to you?

[00:34:09] Alison: Because they were yelling. Everybody was like, "Let's go, let's get the baby out!" It felt urgent. So Zoe came! Zoe came pretty quickly. I didn't push very long. She was five pounds, seven ounces. Tiny little thing. You know I was 38 weeks plus two at that point. So she was full-term, she's just a little, little thing.

[00:34:36]Unfortunately when Zoe came out the internal heart rate monitor that was attached to her head cut her back. Cut her on her back on the way out. So she had a gash on her back that was about -- I don't know -- four or five inches long, which was a real bummer. Ken and I were both really upset about that. We didn't want the internal heart rate monitor.

[00:34:59] Lisa: Oh goodness.

[00:35:00] Alison: I had a small superficial tear, which is probably from the heart rate monitor as well. But other than that, once Zoe came out and they gave her the thumbs up, you know, everybody left and we were alone again, which was great.

[00:35:16] Lisa: Did they have to take the baby across the room?

[00:35:18] Alison: They kept her close, where I could see her the whole time.

[00:35:21] Lisa: Okay. Yeah, because with the internal monitor, usually peds has to come check them out. And especially if there was a wound on her back...

[00:35:29] Alison: The pediatrician was in there when she was born and she did not need stitches and they gave her the thumbs up.

[00:35:37] But one of the things that I was really worried about was them taking the baby away from me. Both Ken and I were hypervigilant that that was not going to happen. So she was with me the whole rest of the time, which was great. They moved us to a postpartum room after a couple of hours. And when we were on the way to the postpartum room, the hospital staff that were -- they put you on a stretcher at that point. They don't want you walking around, but they were talking about a hurricane that was heading to New York City. And that was the first I remember hearing about it.

[00:36:15] It's like, "There's a hurricane heading to New York City? Really?" Unusual. So this was -- Zoe was born on a Thursday. So we stayed one night in the hospital. We got out on Friday. It was the strangest thing, leaving the hospital with a brand new baby. Because you feel like somebody is going to like stop you.

[00:36:38] Lisa: It's daunting. Right? "Are you sure you trust us with this little baby?"

[00:36:44] Alison: There was no test. They just let us out. I remember walking past the security guard, like,"Okay. Let's see what happens!" We were taking a taxi home from the hospital. I remember getting outside of the hospital and either the taxi line was a little further than I expected it to be, or my husband saw one that was a little further and was like, "Come on! Let's go get it."

[00:37:07] You know? So we ran up the block, about half a block. I remember being very frustrated that I had to run.

[00:37:15] Lisa: I would think so.

[00:37:17] Alison: With a baby. Anyway, we got a cab. We lived in the West Village at the time and we were taking a taxi back to our home. We got on Seventh Avenue and would need to cross over to Sixth Avenue and they had closed down the street for filming for -- I wish I'd taken a picture of the sign so I knew exactly what it was, but it was a filming of a show or movie or something. So we ended up having to walk two blocks to the apartment.

[00:37:49] Lisa: Are you kidding me?

[00:37:51] Alison: We got out and walked to her apartment. Got home, we got all settled in and we were so glad to be home. You know, by that time we had heard more about the hurricane, it was like -- spoiler alert, it was Hurricane Sandy.

[00:38:07] Lisa: Oh my goodness. Wow.

[00:38:09] Alison: Yeah. Heading towards New York. So we were home on Friday. Hurricane didn't hit until Monday, so we had a few days. We didn't expect anything from Hurricane Sandy, really. We'd had another hurricane, earlier in the year, and nothing had really happened. So we were like, "Okay, we're just not going to be really worried about this."

[00:38:30] One of my friends had had a home birth, and she recommended that I get my placenta encapsulated. So that was the other thing after Zoe was born, we were like, "Don't take the baby, and give us the placenta!"

[00:38:43] The person that was going to encapsulate our placenta, she had called and said, "You know, I'd better come on Sunday because we just don't know what to expect about the hurricane." I was like, "That sounds great." She came over on Sunday. It was Jen from Baby Caravan.

[00:38:59] Lisa: How fun! Jen Mayer, right?

[00:39:03] Alison: Yeah, Jen Mayer. She came over and I was at home. Ken had run to the grocery store because he knew somebody else was going to be there. I remember her being in the house and she was preparing my placenta and I was in my bedroom with the baby. And I remember just like being so happy she was there and like really wanting to ask her if she could stay. Just like, "Can you stay? Can you be my postpartum doula?"

[00:39:31] You know, because I did not hire a doula -- a birth doula or a postpartum doula. I just, I really didn't know how much I would need one. And I really didn't understand a lot about what they did that was special. Now I know that it's really amazing, right? But I just remember that feeling of just seeing her in my kitchen, like, "Oh my gosh, I'm trying to be cool. But I really want her to stay."

[00:39:59] Lisa: I'm locking the door now. You're not leaving. Sorry !

[00:40:05] Alison: She had a calming presence. I felt comfortable. Everything just felt safer when she was there. So we decided to have people over on Sunday night to meet the baby, because I don't know why. We figured it was easier to have everybody as a group, you know, than one at a time.

[00:40:25] And now, you know, I tell my clients all the time, "Don't feel like you have to do that. You can do this a week from now, two weeks from now, a month from now." But it was a lot. There's a picture Ken took of me trying to breastfeed Zoe under one of those muslin blankets sitting on the floor in my living room surrounded by friends. Most of which were childless.

[00:40:54] I still have that picture of me, just, like, breastfeeding at the very beginning, especially with your first baby. It's tough. Really tough. Trying to do it with a blanket on your head. It's not...

[00:41:06] Lisa: Yeah, I know. Right. I know. I was a lot more modest back then. Not in labor, but in breastfeeding I was. And now I'm like, "Why? Why would I feel like I always had to cover up?"

[00:41:15] Alison: Exactly. You know, by the time the second one came along, I was just naked all the time. Anyway. So, you know, Monday morning the hurricane hit. We were in the West Village and we lost power. And did not have power for five days while we waited for everything to kind of come back and Ken and I remember it as this like wonderful experience.

[00:41:45] Because it was just like the whole world stopped and it was just us and our little baby. When you've got a newborn time kind of stops anyway. So you go to sleep when it's dark, you know, you wake up when it's light. The apartment that we lived in, we had this like rickety deck. It was on the roof, with a grill, like a propane grill. So we were able to cook the stuff from our freezer. I filled up my freezer, by the way. We made friends come over to make freezer meals. Because for some reason, I thought I was going to starve when Seamless Web works great in New York City. But that was my nesting thing, "We gotta make everything for the freezer!"

[00:42:32] So we had to eat as much of that as we could before it thawed, but we just stayed at home. We played Scrabble, we cooked and we just sat around.

[00:42:44] Lisa: It sounds a little similar to pandemic times, doesn't it? A return to simplicity.

[00:42:48] Alison: Right? The biggest downside was that, you know, we couldn't charge our cell phones. So we didn't have any way to contact, you know, my parents who were terrified. They live in Georgia.

[00:43:02] Lisa: Oh yeah.

[00:43:03] Alison: So far away. And even friends that wanted to come check on us, couldn't call and we found out that our door buzzer doesn't work if there's not power. Right. So we didn't have any way to hear if there were people actually there. We actually, we saw some friends of ours stood out in front of our apartment, for, I don't even know how long. And I saw them outside of the window. We were on the third floor. Like, "Oh my gosh! There are our friends." And we were able to go down and let them in. But we were on Sixth Avenue, like right by Washington Square. So, the only thing open was the bodega. City bodegas...they all stay open through anything. The bodega was opened by candlelight. There was a Spanish restaurant in our building, that was Seamus Mullen's restaurant called Tertulia. And he opened one night during the power outage, because he had a freezer full of food, too, that was, you know, not gonna make it. He opened and we took three day old or however old Zoe to the first restaurant experience to Tertulia. But he was so nice to do that. It was just the people in the neighborhood came in and we ate by candlelight, whatever he could make. He had a wood-burning pizza oven. So that was like a really cool experience, but I was a first-time parent and I was scared.

[00:44:32] I was breastfeeding. Like, "Is she getting enough?" I was just so worried about her. We had our first pediatrician visit, you know, three days after we got home and the pediatrician's office was in Chelsea on 25th street. And we didn't know if our appointment was still be on; they had lost power.

[00:44:59] We didn't have a cell phone or any way to find out really. So we decided just to go, we just decided to go. And the subways weren't running and there weren't any taxis coming down to where we were. We walked from like about West Eighth Street to 25th. And the power had come on at 24th Street.

[00:45:22] And my pediatrician was on 25th Street. So we got there; right at 24th Street, there was a bodega there and they had extension cords all out on the sidewalk where people were plugging in their cell phones.

[00:45:38]We were able to get to the pediatrician she gave us the two thumbs up. You know, that's all I wanted was just like somebody to say, "You're doing it!"

[00:45:46] Lisa: Yay.

[00:45:48] Alison: But yeah, it was such an unusual experience. The biggest downside besides us not having our cell phones, was I didn't have hot water for a shower.

[00:45:57] Lisa: Oh. Those showers are important, right? In those early days, especially.

[00:46:04] Alison: That was messed up. [Having to take those showers for 5 days.] Cold showers?

[00:46:11] Lisa: No thanks. Some people like them, but...

[00:46:14] Alison: Yes, when it's hot maybe.