When Your Birthing Plan Falls Apart

“This is your son.”

The orderly rolled my bed into the hospital’s NICU and I groggily stared over at the tiny bird-like creature lying in an incubator. His three and a half pounds was composed solely of skin and bones. The ventilator was breathing for him, his tiny body dotted with tubes and wires–and I looked at him and wondered, “Are you really mine?”

I’d gone from pregnant to not pregnant in what felt like mere minutes, and I was struggling to wrap my head around the sudden change.

My twin boys had made their surprise entrance into the world an hour earlier. After feeling a reduction in movements, I’d hauled my thirty-one week belly into the hospital with full expectations of being politely told to, “Go home.” But when the medical staff started flying in and out of the room faster than I could count, I knew that something was really wrong. The doctors left my husband standing in the hallway as they wheeled me into the operating room, and a nurse whisked up a sheet to block the view of my tummy. An anesthesiologist patted my hand comfortingly as a mask was pressed tightly against my face, and then the world went dark.

This was not the way I’d envisioned my delivery.

As a high risk pregnancy, I had decided on a “flexible” birthing plan. I wanted a natural delivery but if we needed a C-section, so be it. But when the day of the boys’ delivery arrived with a flurry of complications, nothing went according to any sort of plan.

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