186: HOME BIRTH STORY - A Pediatric Intensive Care Nurse, Myths of Home Birth and a Posterior Delivery with Elise Kuehner

How do you address the fears related to home birth when you work in a hospital? For Elise Kuehner, a self-proclaimed planner and researcher, she went down the rabbit hole of content to explore for herself and work through any disempowering thoughts. I could explain the rest, but honestly, she says it best in her email to us when we discussed sharing her birth story. So I’ll let her tell you: “I have felt for awhile that I should share my birth story not only for its outcome but also the process of choosing homebirth. I am a Pediatric Intensive Care nurse of 8 years and have felt comfortable in hospitals my entire life. When I graduated nursing school I was 22 and had seen multiple deaths within the first year of my career. There is something to be said about parents/families choosing natural death for their child and women choosing natural birth for their baby. I never realized how similar they are. I thought of the traumatic deaths I’ve experienced and all of them involved lots of medical intervention prolonging inevitable death. These are the ones that haunt me. Of all the deaths I’ve experienced, the ones that were gentle or natural were the most healing and peaceful. How amazing would it be to start life in the same manner? I wanted this for my future children. Of course there were several fears to address... the biggest was safety of homebirth. How would I turn off my “nurse brain” during labor? or even during pregnancy! What would I tell my coworkers? Or my mom who is also a nurse. I dug deep into books, I took myself on a solo date to see the premier of “Why Not Home”, I meditated, took a hypnobirthing-ish type class which was profoundly helpful. I found a midwife (Paula, in your latest episode) that was a straight shooter, no B.S. type. Lastly, I threw all my fears and experiences about life and death out the window and it was the best thing I could have done for me and my baby. My labor was 8.5 hours and I delivered a posterior baby with minimal pain. It was amazing.” Links: Sarah Buckley’s Hormonal Blueprint of Labor - https://sarahbuckley.com/articles/ Sarah Buckley’s Gentle Birth, Gentle Mothering - https://sarahbuckley.com/gentle-birth-gentle-mothering/ Why Not Home - https://www.whynothome.com/ Doing It At Home book on Amazon: https://amzn.to/3vJcPmU DIAH website: https://www.diahpodcast.com/ DIAH Facebook Group: https://bit.ly/3jKtIYv DIAH Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/doingitathome/ DIAH YouTube: https://bit.ly/3pzuzQC DIAH Store: https://yoursuccessfulhomebirth.com/ DIAH Merch: https://bit.ly/3qhwgAe Give Back to DIAH: https://bit.ly/3qgm4r9 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices