Why I Chose a Midwife Over an OBGYN Part 1

I get asked why I chose a midwife over an OBGYN all the time. For me, it was a no-brainer really. I could say it has everything to do with statistics and the health of myself and the baby but all of those things came to me later. From the beginning of this pregnancy I knew I wanted to have a natural birth, as far away from hospitals as possible, because I had terrible experiences with a "hospital" pregnancy. I'm going to break this up

When my husband got home from Iraq, he and I moved into an apartment with his brother in a small town outside Ft. Riley, KS. I hated it from the beginning. It was the dead of winter in Kansas and I had never been so cold in my life. I didn't go anywhere, ever. Things with my husband were tense. For some reason, we couldn't get along. And it was worst with his brother. We got into screaming matches. I cried daily. My husband would come into the bathroom to find my bawling in the shower, for NO reason. I wanted to go back home. I was miserable. Other weird things were going on as well. I was plagued with a stuffy nose that kept me up at night. Even that wouldn't be so bad if I didn't have to pee five or six times a night. I slept all day long.

At this time in my life, I was also in the Army, but the Reserve. My unit was about to deploy and I couldn't wait. It was everything I had been training for and I was excited to actually do my job. One weekend I started the drive to my unit, which was six hours away. They had put me up in a hotel room so I could drive in the night prior. That weekend we were filling out life insurance paperwork and updating our wills. It was all becoming very real. I was nervous. Well, scared to death, really, but it was exciting too. My husband had just come back from a six month deployment and my brother was at the beginning of a year long deployment. It didn't seem that bad. On the long drive I got to thinking it had been a while since my last period. I wasn't sure how long, who ever kept track of those things? When I was about half an hour away from my hotel room, I stopped at a familiar WalMart to pick up a box of pregnancy tests. I knew that once I took one, I would feel better. This was sort of a routine with me. About once a year I would actually pay attention to my body and take a test so that I would just know I wasn't pregnant.

I got to the hotel room and immediately pee'd on the stick. For some reason, I started to get nervous. In the next thirty seconds I told myself I was being ridiculous, there was no way I was pregnant. I had been told it would take a great amount of effort on my part if I ever wanted to have children and it may not even be possible. Being pregnant was not a possibility. I, of course, was pregnant. And it was the absolute worst thing that had ever happened to me.

To be continued...