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What is a doula? Umm, I don't know
What is a doula?
I have no idea.
I've heard of the word. I thought it was sort of like a midwife.
I think it's a person.
I just learned about the word doula in the nursing program and it seems like most males
aren't familiar with the term.
Doula, they're to provide the mother with support
and to make her feel comfortable and safe.
She doesn't make decisions medically
but is kind of there for the mother.
Doula comes from Greek I believe and it means female slave.
I think that the benefit of having a doula
is kind of like
traveling with a friend in a foreign country. A friend who's already been there.
Birth isn't an everyday experience for a lot of people.
You have the benefit of having somebody who knows what's normal and
knows what to expect, to reassure you,
help you navigate that new experience.
For my first child, I did not use a doula.
I did sort of use a doula, but not really.
I had my cousin there who's a nurse.
She was sort of our doula. She helped us make decisions,
when we weren't sure what we wanted to do. She was there for extra emotional support.
The second time around, I wasn't going to use anybody,
but I knew I was going to be trying for a VBAC,
which I was a little bit nervous about and towards the end of my pregnancy
I thought it might be nice to have a doula around and I heard that
the presence of a doula
makes you more likely to have a successful VBAC.
So I did have a doula
for my second child
and it was a great experience.
I was not successful at having a VBAC but it was still helpful to have the doula there.
So a doula can help
couples decide when to go to a hospital
depending, giving them some perspective on where they sense the woman is at.
and how I do that is how close the contractions are
how she is acting
and like responsive she is to me.
So one of the things that the doula
did for us that was especially helpful was to let us know during early labor
that it wasn't important to rush to the hospital and that we probably had
a good amount of time to to stay at home.
Because otherwise we would have been in the hospital for
an additional
twenty-four hours at least which is not what anybody wants to be sitting around
in the hospital when you could be
at home and walking in your neighborhood.
For our first child, we had a doula, Trudy,
and she was with us from the
start to finish and that start to finish was three days long.
and in the end, we had an unplanned C-section.
They even allowed Trudy to come into the
operating room with us.
A doula can still be there to support a woman even if
medical intervention is needed, but,
the roll of advocacy and roll of being
really in there with hands on support
has to be kind of
move away to let the medical professionals assess what needs to happen with mom and baby.
For me, it is a wonderful opportunity
to have an additional person to help and be in the room to help bring this baby in.
I think often, it takes a huge team to deliver babies and it takes a huge team to deliver babies naturally.
It's nice to have
that extra set of hands that know what they're doing in the hospital,
and for the third one it actually
turned out real well because
I misdiagnosed,
Laura had some symptoms that
she was actually in transition and I didn't really pick up on that and as soon as the doula came over, she said,
"She's having the baby now."
Had she not come, we would had the baby at home.
The most important thing I think a doula provides is emotional assistance, but also strength.
I had back labor
and she really assisted
in relieving my pain.
They're also good a good advocate for you, so if you want something,
your birth to go a certain way
They'll be there. They know the nurses, they know the doctors, they'll say
"no, this person really really wants to do this, or this person doesn't want to
have a separate."
A lot of men say, "oh my wife doesn't need a doula because I'm going to be there and I'm going to take care of it and the family's got it covered."
Then they actually get to the birth and the dad totally freaks out.
He gets squeamish and nervous and that's ok.That's more than ok if you''re having a kid to be nervous about it.
It doesn't mean you love your wife any less or you're
going to be bad at being a dad,
or any of those things. That's just how you're reacting to something you're also going though.
So that's where a doula really comes in handy,
It takes a lot of pressure off the dad. He feels like he can leave the room and take a nap, or eat
or drink water and he needs to do that because he needs to be healthy after they have the kid.
Using a doula? Yeah, I didn't
really consider it. We didn't know much about it.
We were very naive and
blase about the whole thing and reinforced by the fact that we really trusted our doctor and we
kept being told that
everything was going great. For this birth, it would have been nice
to have someone there
who we had known
beforehand because our doctor didn't deliver us. We didn't know any of the medical staff that was there.
Even in the eight hours we were there, we changed over nurses a couple of times and doctors once.
Everyone was great and it turned out really, really well but it would have been nice to have
someone who knew what they were doing and who'd been through it before who we knew.
Who could just reassure me because I was terrified. I didn't know what to expect.
The doctor kept telling me "oh, it's about to get really bad."
We really felt like
we got talked into the epidural.
Doulas are great for husbands.
Really what it does is it takes away that guess work of is this ok? Is this normal?
Because you have somebody just
having the background patter that's reassuring everybody that this looks great and
that's a sign this is happening and this is a sign that's happening and we're on course.
If a dad knows that we're on course, he's going to be right there providing
all of the emotional support and connection
that his partner needs.
The hard labor was only 10-20 minutes,
pushing, I pushed like twice. It was really quick.
Because it went so smooth, is what
makes us have second thoughts afterwords that maybe it wasn't necessary. No, I don't think it was necessary.
If it had been a long hard labor, we wouldn't be questioning it now. I'm happy with the outcome,
obviously, I wouldn't change that,
but if I could go back, I wouldn't
have gotten the epidural because I think it made my recovery 100 times worse.
A lot of women who have doulas have a very low c-section rate, have a very successful breast feeding rate,
so if you're looking at it from
a financial point of view which my husband would want to know,
what's the dollar bottom-line, is that you're going to get better outcomes overall for both mom and baby.
as well
as less injury, less illness, so i think there's a financial benefit
that can not even be measured by
the use of a doula and the services that are provided.
I'm very interested in becoming a doula.
I think the work that they do is amazing,
again I wished I had had
somebody in there
to tell me I was doing well
and my body was doing exactly what it was supposed to do and I didn't need
anything else.