E44 – Aimee Sing – Caesarean Placental Abruption & Home Birth HBAC – Cared & Supported
Facebook Email Twitter LinkedIn Messenger 🌀Want to find a real depth into the value of continuity of care? This episode is with Aimee Sing, the current editor of Birthings magazine, an e-magazine released by Homebirth Access Sydney. Aimee takes us through a very informative journey, from miscarriage with bleeding episodes and working through trusting her body, having a placental abruption and a home birth transfer to caesarean, to then having a home birth after caesarean with her second baby. If you really want to understand the deep processes in the fertility and pregnancy journey then this episode is for you! Aimee is a beautiful story teller, and shares her journey in a way that outlines the importance of continuity of care. Her experiences are shared with the utmost respect to each individual birth and the gifts that the family received. This is a real, in depth story fueled with love through which you can tell Aimee is spreading the importance of continuity of care! Learn more about the important work Homebirth Access Sydney is doing by supporting homebirth families and increasing awareness to better our access to this service in Australia. https://homebirthsydney.org.au This story below is written by the hand of Aimee… Our baby boy’s birth story really starts with his big sisters birth. After researching and planning a homebirth and finding our perfect birth team we were so excited about meeting our first baby! My pregnancy was really asymptomatic, I felt well and happy but I had some minor and some major episodes of bleeding due to a subchorionic hematoma (SCH). Still, we kept planning our homebirth and counting down the weeks before we would meet our baby. At 36+4 weeks I woke to a gush which, once I checked, I realised was actually bright red blood! I rang my midwife and said I was bleeding a lot and thought I was having a placental abruption to which she advised we head to the hospital and she’d meet us there. Our birth plans were tipped on their head and I ended up ha ving an emergency caesarean section to deliver our baby girl, Willow, safely. While for many women a homebirth caesarean (HBC) can be traumatic, for me I was really blessed in that I was upset and mourning the birth experience I had so hoped and planned fo r, but I had no trauma related to the birth at all…the hospital stay afterwards on the other hand was horrendous and I vowed never to expose myself to that sort of treatment again if I could prevent it ! In the months and years following my HBC I continued to research everything I could about placental abruption. I had many tests to try to figure out why I’d had the placental abruption, but there was no reason discovered . While this was a blessing it was also really hard as I had no reason to ‘blame’ and acc ordingly nothing to ‘fix’ to prevent it in future . The only small bit of information that I felt might explain the placental abruption was that a lack of protein (malnutrition) can result in one, and I’d gone entirely off meat and didn’t substitute it for anything throughout my pregnancy, so I started to up my protein intake for a subsequent pregnancy. I researched everything I could about vaginal birth after caesarean (VBAC) and home VBAC (HBAC) , and I searched for anyone who had birthed a baby at home af ter a prior abruption , but to no avail. I watched HBAC videos and read their stories, I spoke to my midwife and women in my community and online and eventually I decided that, provided we were blessed with another pregnancy, I would be trying for a HBAC ne xt time. It took my husband and I 18 months to really decide that we would try for another baby (I was terrified of losing a baby,